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Cultural Critique 68—Winter 2008—Copyright 2008 Regents of the University of Minnesota

(NOT) AT HOME IN (HINDU) INDIASHAHID AMIN, DIPESH CHAKRABARTY, AND THE CRITIQUE OF HISTORY

Qadri Ismail

INTRODUCTION

The second sentence of Gayatri Spivak’s most famous, most misun-

derstood—and, okay, okay, notoriously dif Wcult to read—essay has

not received much critical attention. Yet it raises an important ques-

tion, especially for the leftist, about the relation between theory, for

want of a better word, and politics. “Whatever power these medita-

tions command,” she writes, “may have been earned by a politically

interested refusal to push to the limit the founding presuppositions of my desires, as far as they are within my grasp.”1 A particularly dense

formulation in an essay replete with them, its elements need disag-

gregating—or unpacking, as a frequent Xying academic might put it.

The Wrst, and perhaps easiest, observation concerns the statement that

her desires—to be precise, their “founding presuppositions,” but let’s

stay with desires—are not completely within her grasp. The invoca-

tion, obviously, is the subject of psychoanalysis. The next concerns the

statement that she will not push to the limit the founding presuppo-

sitions of these desires. But what are these unnamed presuppositions,

the ground, in a sense, from which she speaks? The critique of the sov-

ereign, autonomous, self-conscious enlightenment subject; or, to use

a much-abused term, a certain strand of poststructuralism. She will,

that is, refuse, perhaps even resist, being consistently or rigorously

poststructuralist. This might sound shocking coming from a scholar

whose work, at its best, is exemplary in its rigor (“at its best” becauseoften, too often, Spivak resorts to anecdotes—truth claims in narrative

form, unveriWable by deWnition—to establish some of her positions).

What is at stake in the refusal? Is there a lesson here for the leftist?

Why does the essay begin, necessarily, with such a position/ing?



For, as Spivak puts it, politically interested reasons: her political

convictions overdetermine her theoretical ones. To grasp this politics—

or, better, this tension between theoretical rigor and the commitment

to politics, which always brings strategic/tactical considerations into

play—one has to move to a much later moment in the text, where Spi-

vak refuses to disavow

[r]eporting on, or better still, participating in, antisexist work among

women of color or women in class oppression in the First World or the

Third World. [It] is undeniably on the agenda. We should also welcome

all the information retrieval in these silenced areas that is taking place

in anthropology, political science, history, and sociology. Yet the assump-tion and construction of a consciousness or subject sustains such work

and will, in the long run, cohere with the work of imperialist subject-

constitution, mingling epistemic violence with the advancement of

learning.2

Her theoretical convictions suggest that what is blandly called “infor-

mation retrieval”—it sounds less innocent if called the production of

disciplinary truth claims—will reinscribe and reinforce the sovereign,

self-conscious subject, now also termed, and damningly from a post-colonialist, imperialist. (Those familiar with the essay will realize why

the adjective becomes necessary by its end.) Nevertheless, her poli-

tics, the commitment to feminism—more precisely, the opposition to

sexism—makes it impossible to dismiss feminist social science. The

political or strategic necessity for knowledge overdetermines both

the critique of the subject and the critique of knowledge, even though

Spivak knows, as it were, that the desire for knowledge—always a

desire for mastery (of the object by the subject)—is, at best, suspect;

and, at worst, coincides with the epistemological strand of imperial-

ism. So, while suspect, to be handled with caution, history and the

other social sciences are also necessary; not just unavoidable, but nec-

essary; to abuse the literary critical term, pharmakonic.

In a later essay, on Subaltern Studies, Spivak strengthens her cri-

tique of the discipline.3 It contains the celebrated sound bite defend-

ing the work of the collective as “strategic essentialism”—but only,with the qualiWer most of her hasty readers have missed, “in a scrupu-

lously visible political interest.”4 (Even though, as Madhava Prasad

reminds us, this is a political resolution of a theoretical problem and

so is unsatisfactory.)5 Impossible without the subject, history now is

(NOT) AT HOME IN (HINDU) INDIA 211



work with poststructuralism or, more particularly, what might be

called the French critique of history? And with postcoloniality, the

critique or putting into question of Eurocentrism?

As everybody knows—though most ignore—the discipline

emerged with, helped produce, and was produced by modernity.8 His-

tory is enabled by its cardinal categories, subject and past being per-

haps the most indispensable. For as it could be phrased, and only

somewhat facetiously, once upon a time there was no past, in a very

precise sense: it is a particular conceptualization and organization of

time—also a concept—produced by the discipline. In making the

modern distinction between that time and another deemed the pre-sent, different from but produced by the past, history also distin-

guished itself from chronicle, a narrative that simply ends, as Hayden

White reminds us, in a present without closure or separation from a

past.9 As for the modern subject, it could be understood as consti-

tuted by the tight or intimate interweaving of two strands: in its self-

conception, it is rational, sovereign, autonomous, etc; however, as the

new social movements brought forcefully to our attention, it also has

a political strand—is white, male, heterosexual, etc. Now, calls can

always be made, and in this instance have, for a change in the politics

of history, for making the object subject, for writing the histories of

(new) subjects that the discipline refused to recognize as subjects for,

as they say, centuries (Chakrabarty’s demand). History from below,

whether feminist, queer, or subalternist, treats groups hitherto objec-

tiWed by the discipline as subjects. Fernand Braudel famously pro-

duced even the Mediterranean as subject. But this is a political shift,not an epistemological break. If the argument against the discipline—

what is being called the French critique—is not just that the subject of

history, or even its object, is profoundly marked by its colonialist and/

or elitist and/or patriarchal career but that its categories, epistemo-

logical assumptions and preconceptions—including subject and past—

its unreXexive reliance on (realist) narrative, its desire to make truth

claims and so on have been subject, as it were, to persuasive critique,we should ask: can we continue to desire “information”—a coding

that effectively represses the very questions raised by the French cri-

tique?10 Despite the inXuence of poststructuralism—no longer as fash-

ionable as it once was—the dominant strand within the contemporary




Western episteme, whether in its academic or quotidian incarnation,

thinks with, Wnds indispensable, terms like “subject,” “agency,” “cau-

sation,” and other concepts bequeathed by the Enlightenment. But

can we, to put the matter as simply as possible, carry on like this? Can

we pretend that no critique has been advanced, if not established, of

the discipline? Can we settle, as historians like Joyce Appleby—and,

as will be argued here, Chakrabarty—desire, for merely reforming

the discipline? Isn’t Appleby’s claim that the critique of objectivity is

valid, but history must nevertheless try to be as objective as it possi-

bly can—continue to produce something it knows to be invalid—since

its task, if not duty, is not just the production of knowledge but of good democratic subjects, patently ludicrous?11

The French critique, after which one cannot understand history

as an innocent or disinterested account (information) of the past, has

treated the cardinal categories of the discipline to a careful, rigorous,

and systematic evaluation. After it, and in an interventionary post-

colonial spirit, history can be conceptualized as a discipline that autho-

rizes the production of knowledge (truth claims), usually emplotted

in narrative form, by a (rational, autonomous, sovereign) subject inthe present, of an object termed the past, in which events are caused

by and/or happen to (other) subjects. The it inerary of this particular

discipline, like others, is deeply accompliced or interwoven with colo-

nialism and cannot be traced back, in any rigorous sense, before the

politico-epistemological moment that has taken the name modernity.

If such a formulation is persuasive, the discipline cannot be a pro-

ductive accomplice of postcoloniality, which I understand, deploying

the terms of Partha Chatterjee, as putting into question the thematic

of Eurocentrism, not just its problematic. (To do only the latter would

be anticolonial, not postcolonial.)12 Working from this position—from

the French critique, from a reading of Subaltern Studies, most particu-

larly of Chatterjee and Spivak—means calling into question the produc-

tion of disciplinary knowledge, makes postcoloniality an accomplice

of poststructuralism, prompts one to ask: can postcoloniality throw

its lot with history, desire information, seek mastery? Can it evenproduce information, rigorously? Provincializing Europe and Event,

Metaphor, Memory address the same concerns; indeed, they prompted,

provoked them. Reading Amin and Chakrabarty, then, will enable an

intervention in the still-unsettled debate over history.

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SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE MUSLIM:

CHAKRABARTY’S IDENTITY POLITICS

One of the sadder failures of that all too brief but nevertheless inspir-

ing and sometimes brilliant moment in postcolonial studies, Subaltern

Studies, is that Dipesh Chakrabarty’s commitment to the politics of

identity prevented a following through with rigor of the consequences

of his own insight.13 He located a critical problem with history, could

have posed some truly dif Wcult questions to the discipline; instead,

he settled for reform. He could have pushed postcolonial studies in

new and important directions; instead, he effectively, if unconsciously,reined it in, aligning it with U.S. identity politics. His ubiquitously

cited Provincializing Europe is a dif Wcult text to read: a series of arti-

cles presented as a book without the coherence one expects from a

book. Its central claim is that Europe, understood as a “hyperreal”

and not a geographic entity, is effectively the subject of all histories,

including those of the (real, geographic) non-European world, that

European categories are seen as adequate, when patently not, to the

task of describing non-Europe.14 The signiWcance of this claim—sim-ply put, that it erases difference—cannot be stressed too much, for the

critique of history and for postcoloniality; both should consider it,

work to make it, routine. (Though it is not an unfamiliar one to post-

coloniality, either; Spivak, for instance, has written persuasively and

at length of “epistemic violence,” a more productive concept.)15 This

essay, however, must depart from Chakrabarty’s position when it

claims to have located the real, the authentic, to have discovered hid-

den histories not destroyed by Eurocentrism that can now be narra-

tivized on “their own” terms, those of the subjects/agents of those

histories—even if the task may be dif Wcult. In my case at least, this

claim dimmed the initial excitement of encountering the principal

argument of Provincializing Europe when it appeared in article form.

There, the dif Wculty, if not the impossibility, of writing history after

Europe led to Chakrabarty calling his position characterized by the

“politics of despair.” But he retracts this in the book, without tell-ing us why. Presumably, though, because he found nirvana: he now

claims to have discovered a way to write a radically different history,

one that would actually subvert the discipline. However, the history

Chakrabarty calls for keeps postcoloniality within the thematic of




Eurocentrism betrays its most subversive potential. He sacriWces rigor

and his own insight about the work of Eurocentrism to the shelter,

comfort, and certainty—to the home—promised by identity politics.

As John Mowitt argues, such politics are limited, “a liberalism con-

tent to sacriWce emancipation to recognition . . . utterly unwilling to

think through the anxiety that attends its organizing concept.”16

Take, for instance, the following in Provincializing Europe’s

acknowledgments, a statement that never ceases to amaze me: “My

dear friend Ahmed Kamal, a historian of the University of Dhaka,

Bangladesh, has been my teacher of the social history of Bengali Mus-

lims. Without his kind and critical interest in my work, I would have been even less aware of the inescapable Hinduness of my imagination”

(xi). Chakrabarty doesn’t explain how imaginations could be consid-

ered religious or cultural in texture, so one aspect of that statement

is a little dif Wcult to decipher. Still it is clearly an absolute formula-

tion: his imagination is inescapably Hindu, something unavoidable,

an unchangeable fact of (at least his) life. But why draw attention to

a statement that, after all, it is not to be found in the main body of the

text? The sentiment, actually, doesn’t just serve as an acknowledg-ment of thanks dissociated from what is to come; it reinforces one of

Chakrabarty’s cardinal positions in the book proper: his avowed fail-

ure to address the Muslim question. “I am . . . very sadly aware of the

historical gap between Hindu and Muslim Bengalis, which this book

cannot but reproduce . . . I have not been able to transcend that his-

torical limitation, for this forgetting of the Muslim was deeply em-

bedded in the education and upbringing I received in independent

India” (21). A historical foundation is now claimed for Chakrabarty’s

Hindu imagination. Effectively, this denies agency; the fault is not in

his self but in his stars: due to India’s history, its education system

and, notably enough, his parents—though I suppose he might well

have been brought up by servants, an extended family, or some com-

bination thereof—he, a self-identiWed Bengali Hindu, not only cannot

write about Muslims but will “forget” them.17 If this contention sounds

plausible to any reader, consider its theoretical ground: only the “self,”or subject, however deWned, can comprehend the group or identity

by which that subject is interpellated. Colloquially: it’s a Hindu thing,

you don’t understand. Theoretically, this position would make it im-

possible for the self to address the other, or the converse, women to

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address men, blacks whites, queers straights, carnivores the misbe-

gotten ways of vegetarians, and so on. But, Chakrabarty might reply,

he was only making a particular statement about Hindus and Mus-

lims in independent India, perhaps even one particular to just him-

self, not a theoretical one regarding coming to terms with the other.

(Though literary critics might recall here that the imagination has been

consistently theorized as enabling precisely this.)18 In that case, it

sounds suspiciously like a bad alibi. That is to say, Chakrabarty can-

not be bothered attending to the Muslim question in Provincializing

Europe so he provides himself a defense in advance, cunningly antic-

ipating a potential critique (like that made here). The move is an alibi because,Wrst, as implied above, its theoretical ground is dubious. Sec-

ond, Chakrabarty wrote about Bengali Muslims extensively, intelli-

gently, and with great sympathy in his earlier book, Rethinking Working

Class History. What kind of an imagination did he possess then if not

a Hindu one? If it wasn’t Hindu at that writing, did it change subse-

quently? How could this change be explained? How does one theorize

imaginary change? Or did Chakrabarty only realize that his imagina-

tion was inescapably Hindu after meeting Ahmed Kamal, after writ-ing the Wrst book? Though not made, this would be a conceivable

explanation—except for the fact that, just seven pages later, he speaks

of his “Australian self” and that much of Provincializing Europe is de-

voted to lengthy discussions of Marx and Heidegger. Again, though,

these statements need not be read as contradicting the one about his

imagination: his Australian self may well have had a Hindu imagina-

tion; and Marx and Heidegger could very well have been Hindus—at

least in previous births. Or, maybe, some theorists don’t have or need

imaginations. But you are beginning to get the point, I hope, about

identity overdetermining, undermining rigor.

Let us consider another, perhaps more signiWcant example, one

pivotal to Chakrabarty’s argument. Citing Marx, he distinguishes

between two kinds of history, which he somewhat unimaginatively

calls “history1” and “history2.” History1 “is the universal and neces-

sary history we associate with capital. It forms the backbone of theusual narratives of transition to the capitalist mode of production”

(63). “History2s are . . . not pasts separate from capital; they inhere in

capital and yet interrupt and punctuate the run of capital’s own logic”

(64); they allow for “the politics of human belonging and diversity”




(67). History1, then, is about modernity, universality, and is thought

in the singular; history2, both modern and not quite, is about diver-

sity and thought in the plural. The point is simple: the reach of capi-

tal may be universal, but it has been unable to eradicate difference,

which can be identiWed without going outside capital. A common-

sense understanding of history, both 1 and 2, grounds this position.

History1 “forms the backbone of . . . narratives.” Chakrabarty distin-

guishes, in other words, between history—the real event, that which

happened—and its narrativization. The event itself gives form, shape,

order, structure to the narrative rather than, as argued by the French

critique, the converse. In other words, language or writing or narra-tive is not constitutive of history, which happens outside language.

Chakrabarty, that is, operates within the referential illusion (Barthes).

History2, as noted above, is about “pasts” (plural). The past, here, is

understood in the most conventional of terms, as a period of time dis-

tinct from the present in which events happened; it is not seen as a

concept, an organization of time. For, after all, the question could be

posed seriously: when does the past end and the present begin? Chak-

rabarty, that is to say, happily inhabits even the most conventional categoriesof his discipline. There is, the reader must begin to suspect, nothing

very radical going on here. That, of course, doesn’t make him unrig-

orous. However, these are the opening sentences of the text:

“Provincializing Europe is not a book about the region of the world we call

‘Europe.’ That Europe . . . has already been provincialized by history

itself. Historians have long acknowledged that the so-called ‘European

age’ in modern history began to yield place to other regional and globalconWgurations toward the middle of the twentieth century.” (3; empha-

sis added)

The region Europe has been provincialized by something Chakra-

barty calls “history itself.” This is true because historians—the same

bastards who cannot acknowledge the subaltern as subject—have

acknowledged this. But is “history itself” history1, the logic of capi-

tal, or history2, the logic of difference (that inheres in capital)? WasEurope provincialized by capital, or difference, or both? He does not

say. Could “history itself” be something quite different from 1 and 2,

a combination of the two, perhaps? Is there, in other words, a history3

unconsciously inhabiting this text, a category that is not theorized but

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invisibly punctuates the text from time to time, like the “historical

gap” between Hindus and Muslims? Was that particular gap caused

by capital, or difference, or what?

The reader isn’t told; but hopefully the point about rigor is becom-

ing clear. Indeed, it will be reinforced later by the argument that the

careful reader could even detect the possibility of a history4, again

untheorized, in this text. Before that, let us consider Event, Metaphor,

Memory’s cortical position, its most important theoretical thrust, the

sound bite that has made it an academic bestseller and the Bhagavad-

Gita, as it were, of identity politics: the “project” of “provincializing”

(Europe). We know it doesn’t concern the geographical Europe, whichhistory itself has dealt with, but rather a “project of alliance between

the dominant metropolitan histories and the subaltern peripheral

pasts.” This alliance seeks to provincialize “the Europe that modern

imperialism and (third world) nationalism have, by their collaborative

venture and violence, made universal. Philosophically, this project must

ground itself in a radical critique and transcendence of liberalism”

(42). And further down the same page: “The project of provincializ-

ing ‘Europe’ refers to a history that does not yet exist.” ProvincializingEurope is about opposing imperialism and nationalism and tran-

scending liberalism; it sounds like putting into question the thematic

of Eurocentrism. So far, one might say, so good. But the project seeks

to achieve this essentially by writing history. This is not to say that

Chakrabarty, despite accepting most of its categories and the acknowl-

edgment of historians when convenient, doesn’t have any critique of

the discipline. He does, if only of the criteria by which it acknowl-

edges or authorizes subjects. Chakrabarty admits that the discipline,

once elitist and exclusivist, has changed. It has come to accommodate

new subjects—women, minorities, etc. However, it only does so as far

as their stories can be told in rational terms. The (nonrational) subal-

tern, in contrast, presents it with a serious, insurmountable problem.

Chakrabarty’s example is the Santal hool or rebellion of 1855. He

doesn’t produce himself as a Santal but, presumably, they share with

him that same Hindu imagination, so he can write of them. His cri-tique: the discipline cannot narrativize the “Santal leaders’ own un-

derstanding” (104) of their action and motivation.19 They found “God

. . . as the main instigator of the rebellion.” Nevertheless, since god is

not an agent that history can acknowledge, the Santal sentiment has




to be “anthropologized,” written in the voice of reason, “before itWnds

a place in the historian’s narrative” (105).20 In other words, the record

admits the possibility of a history2, of narrating the Santal story in

terms other than that of Europe, of establishing the Wnal truth of things.

But despite the evidence the discipline will—must—“convert” this

into history1.21 Thus Chakrabarty’s persuasive and crucially impor-

tant argument, mentioned above, that “ ‘Europe’ . . . [is] the sovereign,

theoretical subject of all histories,” because even histories of the other

are written through and with European categories, something the

founder of Subaltern Studies doesn’t avoid either. But Provincializing

Europe will not stop at critique. Rather, it will take the next step. LikeFoucault with madness, history2, when it comes, will make the sub-

altern speak, forces history to give up a seat at the table, thus Chak-

rabarty’s claim that his is a more radical, more “subversive” work in

relation to the discipline than any possible minority history. Provin-

cializing Europe is the project of writing non-European history, or his-

tories of the nonmodern/subaltern, in subaltern terms. This constitutes

the entirety of Chakrabarty’s critique of the discipline. The French may have

taken apart every single category the discipline is grounded upon, butChakrabarty is unmoved by that (perhaps because historians haven’t

acknowledged this). If history can be conceptualized as a discipline

that authorizes the production of truth claims, usually in narrative

form, about an object termed the past in which events are caused by

and/or happen to subjects, all Chakrabarty demands from the disci-

pline is that it make room for one more subject, for the narrativizing

of the story of the nonrational other in the other’s “own” terms. Non-

rational here means a subject who denies her agency, who produces

herself as the agent of god. However, this same Santal, in Chakrabarty’s

account, is self-conscious, actually understands her subjectivity—as

without agency. In other words, in one crucial element the Santal is

not very different from the Enlightenment subject, the subject Spivak

termed imperialist. And she would yet, in the name of postcolonial-

ity, subvert the discipline?

Provincializing Europe also insists on “return[ing] the gaze” (29),making “a gesture of inversion” (34). Where Europe sees “‘lack’ and ‘in-

adequacy’” amongst the Indian peasantry, this new history will “read

‘plenitude’ and ‘creativity’” (35). Consistent with Chakrabarty’s em-

piricism, reading is synonymous with looking, the gaze. Contradicting

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his earlier formulation, signifying instead his profound commitment

to the politics of identity, Chakrabarty cannot see that in Chatterjean

terms he thinks like any nationalist—and let us not forget that nation-

alism is a form of identity politics—within the thematic of Eurocen-

trism. To Chatterjee, (anticolonial) nationalism accepts the thematic

of Eurocentrism, the distinction between West and East/rest. It just

rejects the problematic: asserts that the East is as good as the West.

One way of characterizing this position is to put it precisely in Chak-

rabarty’s phrases, to say that it is about returning the gaze or making

a gesture of inversion. Which is why, I submit, there is nothing par-

ticularly radical, let alone subversive, in making this move—not inthe current politico-epistemological moment, after anticolonial nation-

alism and poststructuralism, certainly not for postcoloniality. It is actu-

ally a pedestrian and derivative move, especially when one remembers

that in the Indian context Nehru looked back—in both senses—

decades ago. Indeed, all of this lies implicit in the very notion of

“provincializing.” For what does it mean to provincialize an object,

any object? It implies a decentering, but not of the deconstructive kind:

to take something large—or, in this instance, dominant—and make itsmall/er—or no longer dominant—but equal to everything else; and

in so doing, make the object (non-Europe) subject just as in any other

type of history from below. An instance of liberalism, structurally

speaking, in its classic and original articulation, it reproduces one of

the foundational premises of liberalism, that all subjects are equal. In

any case, Chakrabarty’s position, despite his occasional protestations

to the contrary, is explicitly committed to some of the fundamental

promises of the liberal project:

Concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, equal-

ity before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private,

the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice,

rationality and so on all bear the burden of European thought and history.

One simply cannot think of political modernity without these concepts

that . . . entail an unavoidable—and in a sense indispensable—universal

and secular vision of the human. . . .

I too write from within this inheritance. Postcolonial scholarship is

committed, almost by deWnition, to engaging the universals . . . that

were forged in eighteenth-century Europe and that underlie the human

sciences . . . Fanon’s struggle to hold on to the Enlightenment idea of the

human—even when he knew that European imperialism had reduced




that idea to the Wgure of the settler-colonial white man—is now itself a

part of the global heritage of postcolonial thinkers.22 The struggle ensues

because there is no easy way of dispensing with these universals in the

condition of political modernity. Without them there would be no socialscience that addresses issues of modern social justice. (4–5)

All the concepts cited in the Wrst statement are from liberalism, as a

reading of John Stuart Mill alone will show. To argue that they cannot

be dispensed with since they are necessary for social justice is an

acceptable position. But to hold on page 4 that the project of provin-

cializing EuropeWnds liberal concepts indispensable and then, on page

42, that one hopes to transcend liberalism is to be incomprehensible,impervious to rigor, just plain confused, possessed of a short mem-

ory—or all of the above.

Now to the possibility, mentioned before, of a history4 inhabiting

the argument. It occurs in the chapter, which Chakrabarty calls a his-

tory, of adda: “a social practice . . . from the city of Calcutta in the Wrst

half of the twentieth century,” where he examines a series of published

texts—despite which he ignores the possibility that language, writ-

ing, may have a constitutive role in the production of his object. These

texts give him direct and transparent access to adda, a practice, he

states, that was largely male and completely middle class; the chap-

ter, a “historical study of . . . [the] struggle to be at home in moder-

nity.” Adda is “translated . . . as ‘a place’ for ‘careless talk with boon

companions’ or ‘the chats of intimate friends’” (180). Is this history a

1 or a 2? After all, if there are only two kinds of history—even if we

have spotted the possibility of a third—Chakrabarty should know(what he is writing). Irritatingly enough, he does not say. Indeed, and

incredibly, even though the notion of history2 is central to the entire

project of provincializing Europe, it is discussed in just one chapter

(plus the epilogue) and disappears from the rest of the book. But the

text provides its own signs. Since the history of adda is about a “strug-

gle” to make oneself “at home in modernity,” this suggests that it

couldn’t be an instance of history1 where the transition to modernity

is seamless. The following passage reinforces the possibility that it ishistory2:

That there should be a tension between the ideals of the adda and those of

the modern civil society is understandable. They are mutually antithetical

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organizations of time and place. Civil society, in its ideal construction,

builds into the very idea of human activity the telos of a result. . . . Con-

versations in an adda, on the other hand, are by deWnition opposed to the

idea of achieving any deWnite outcome. (204)

This argument is predicated upon the opposition between adda, de-

scribed as a social practice, and civil society, which is not a verb but

a noun, raising again the question of rigor. But, to Chakrabarty, the

distinction is an instance of difference of an event that enables the

“politics of human belonging and diversity” (180). So adda sounds

very much like an instance of history2, the beginnings, perhaps, of

that history yet to be written. If that is the case, why doesn’t Chak-rabarty make it clear? First because as already noted, history2, at least

in its Santal incarnation, requires writing the history of a subject on

its own terms. Chakrabarty, however, interprets adda on his terms,

not on those of the participants. According to the texts he cites, its

participants don’t understand themselves as struggling to Wnd a home

in modernity; it depicts them as understanding themselves as chat-

ting with boon companions or some such thing. After stating this,

Chakrabarty proceeds to interpret this practice as actually about homeWnding—giving the term “homemaker” a new sense the OED might

want to explore—blithely forgetting that just three chapters earlier

he had accused Guha of exactly the same thing, imposing interpreta-

tion on his object or, as Spivak might put it, seeking mastery. Like

Guha’s, then, this is a profoundly ethnographic enterprise. Second,

because he has already implied that the Santal rebellion could be an

instance of history2, given that their story is not reducible to the logic

of reason. Whereas the topics of conversation at addas included, accord-

ing to one writer, “patriotism, wrestling, sports, England, Germany,

Switzerland” (189); according to another, “Mohunbagan [a soccer club],

spiritual truths, the funeral ceremony of the old man Adhar in the

neighborhood, the new crocodile at the Alipore [zoo]—no subject is

left undiscussed” (191); and to a third: “Apure adda . . . has no . . . hard

and fast agenda. . . . There is no certainty as to what topic an adda will

start with one day. . . . Suppose this moment the conversation is abouta supernova beyond the solar system, the next moment the discus-

sion could be about Plekhanov’s The Role of the Individual in History”

(192). Being highbrow, the Tagores didn’t discuss Switzerland or soc-

cer clubs or even supernovas but “Matthew Arnold, Browning, Keats,




Shelley and others” (195). Whatever else one may say about the con-

tent of these conversations—which sound quite modern/rational to

me—it would take a truly intrepid mind to consider them homolo-

gous to the statements of the Santal rebels.

So, then, is the adda an instance of history4? While it sounds like

a hybrid of 1—that part of it that is modern—and 2—a part of a part

of it that isn’t—my honest response is that I do not know. Neither is it

easy toWgure out how it Wts with the project of provincializing Europe,

which, to repeat Chakrabarty’s own formulation, is a “project of alli-

ance between the dominant metropolitan histories and the subaltern

peripheral pasts” (42). The participants in adda, by Chakrabarty’saccount, are middle class; by deWnition, this would make them non-

subaltern.23 So, how does this chapter contribute to his project? Or

disrupt history? Again, I do not know. A rigorous effort would make

all this evident to its reader. However, it was also stated that Chak-

rabarty’s commitment to the politics of identity prevented him from

being rigorous. That can be seen in the argument about adda, too. Its

“perceived gradual disappearance from the urban life of Calcutta

over the last three or four decades . . . has produced an impressive

amount of mourning and nostalgia. It is as if with the slow death of

adda will die the identity of being a Bengali” (181). Undoubtedly, iden-

tity is crucially at stake here. (And one should perhaps note in passing

that the understanding of adda as gendered and classed has disap-

peared by now; the middle-class male stands here in metonymic re-

lation to Bengali identity.) Impressive means, among other things,

inspiring, remarkable, and moving; it is in part given this inspiringand remarkable quantum of mourning and nostalgia for adda that

Chakrabarty—who doesn’t so much mourn its passing as feel nostal-

gia for it—is himself moved to write. Nostalgia, states the OED, is a

“form of melancholia caused by prolonged absence from one’s home

or country; severe home-sickness.”24 Chakrabarty defends such recent

Bengali nostalgia for adda: “I am not interested in reading this nostal-

gia as an error of some kind. . . . I have no way of determining in whatproportions the archives of the nostalgia for adda that this essay doc-

uments are mixed with my own desire—as an immigrant in Australia

or the United States—to be at home in a Calcutta of a once-upon-a-

time. . . . It helps me to be at home somewhere else” (182). Now the

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burden of psychoanalysis is precisely that it promises to help deter-

mine such unconscious desire; but then this narrateme is sympto-

matic of Chakrabarty’s anxiety (Mowitt): he is “utterly unwilling” to

interrogate his nostalgia but simply demands that it be recognized,

valued, if not celebrated, which makes it, of course, an exemplary in-

stantiation of identity politics, which desires, metaphorically, to make

its subject feel at home.

Among the many OED entries for home are the following: “the

Wxed residence of a family,” “one’s proper abode,” “the place of one’s

dwelling or nurturing,” “a place where one Wnds refuge, rest, or sat-

isfaction,” “one’s native land.” One way of reading the project of provincializing Europe, then, is to conclude that it seeks security: to

Wnd or create a shelter, a safe, comforting, hospitable, and nurturing

space, a proper place, one that is Wxed, stable, permanent—in the sense

of being always available—within an inhospitable and destabilizing

Western modernity—for the subject from the geographic non-West; it

is to conclude that Chakrabarty writes (history) to Wnd such refuge,

to be inside such a safe place, and at least some of the time to keep

Western modernity at bay.25 “Provincializing Europe” may imply a

decentering but only at the service of a recentering, the search for,

location, and habitation of another home. Recognition, not emanci-

pation, is the demand of this project. Home, of course, is more than

just a secure space; it is also, as we know, one that you share with

others who share your subjectivity, others “like” you, other “selves”

who understand you, speak your language, share your concerns—in-

cluding, presumably, religion—and, in this speciWc instance, do adda.Home, to take a set of terms from Jean-Luc Nancy, could be understood

as a space of “common being,” which Nancy opposes to “being-in-

common.”26 The former is structured around homogeneity, or homoge-

nous community; the latter, heterogeneity or, better yet, singularity.27

Giving us once again an instance of incoherence but of a more com-

plicated kind this time: desiring heterogeneity, Chakrabarty would

critique modenity/history1 for its universalism, but what he seeks inits place (at least some, if not most, of the time) is only an alternative

homogeneity, a place of identity; a more radical alternative would

have been to seek a heterogeneity that was itself heterogeneous (sin-

gularity). However, given his commitment to (Bengali) identity, to




being at home in Calcutta-in-the-West, Chakrabarty cannot make that

move.

Desiring to be at home, of course, coincides exactly, if metaphor-

ically, with the problematic of anticolonial nationalism. One way of

reading its project, its promise, is that it seeks to take the national, liv-

ing in a space that used to be his own but has since been usurped by

the colonizer, back home again—and so cure the national’s nostalgia

for the lost space. This, to state the obvious, is thinking within the

thematic of Eurocentrism. But we should not forget that while the

nostalgic seems to be the dominant current reaction of postcolonial

studies—to its detriment, its loss of critical energy—to Eurocentrism,that wasn’t always the case: Edward Said worked consistently with a

notion of exile, the implications of which are yet to be adequately

explored; Homi Bhabha’s choice of alternative was the hybrid; being

deconstructive, Spivak doesn’t offer an alternative. Still, while I am

no nationalist, if Chakrabarty writes, in part, to get over or beyond

homesickness, I will, as they say in these United States, be happy for

him—especially since this strategy appears to be successful. What

makes the argument incoherent is the presentation of history2 (or is

it history4?) as a solution to a theoretical problem facing postcolo-

niality and a radically subversive critique of history when all it seeks

is a home for (yet) another subject. Chakrabarty isn’t a nationalist—

whether Indian, Hindu, or Bengali—in any simple or straightforward

sense, but he formulates his critique of Eurocentrism within its the-

matic. So doing cannot enable either a solution to any theoretical prob-

lem facing postcoloniality or a subversive or even radical critique of history. Sadly enough, he appears to know this, despite his own argu-

ments to the contrary. These are the concluding words of the book:

“Provincializing Europe can never be a project of shunning European

thought. For at the end of European imperialism, European thought is

a gift to us all. We can talk of provincializing it only in an anticolonial

spirit of gratitude” (255). Anti-, not post-colonial. If postcoloniality

is understood as the questioning of the very basis of Eurocentrism,which is not synonymous with shunning European thought, then

Chakrabarty’s project cannot be taken as a contribution to that cri-

tique. It criticizes Eurocentrism but only in order to seek its reform

in an anticolonial spirit like Nehru’s.

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THE SEEMING HISTORIAN: AMIN’S INABILITY TO EMPLOT

Shahid Amin’s Event, Metaphor, Memory is a study of “one dramatic

occurrence—the anti-police ‘riot’ of 4 February 1922 in a small mar-

ket town in north India” (Amin, 1). Amin, it would appear, has no

doubt about what “actually” happened on that date. Indeed, he repeats

the above statement, with only slightly greater detail, without the con-

tentious term “riot,” a few pages later: “On 4 February 1922 a crowd

of peasants burnt a police station at Chauri Chaura in Uttar Pradesh,

killing twenty-three policemen” (9), that being the “event” of the title.

Chauri Chaura emerges as a problem for (subalternist) history becauseit was understood differently by different perspectives “outside,”

discourses that did not adequately take the local into account when

narrativizing the event. Or, in his terms, “the event, with all its dis-

tinctiveness and speciWcity and multiple peculiarities, was written

out as it was recounted” (9). To Indian nationalism, the “ ‘true’ signi-

Wcance of Chauri Chaura . . . lay outside the time and place of its

occurrence” (9). That is to say, Indian nationalism produced a meta-

phor—which could be understood as a relation of substitution—of the event: its signiWcance was deemed to lie not in what the partici-

pants in the riot, its agents, might have thought or said about their

acts and motivation but in Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s inter-

pretation of it. To Gandhi, and subsequently to Indian nationalist

history, Chauri Chaura signiWed the failure of ahimsa, something wors-

ened by the attack being carried out in his name by Congress volun-

teers. Gandhian nationalism, in other words, replaced or substituted

a possible local explanation of the event with a national one. As did,

not incidentally, colonialism—in its case, deploying another metaphor,

substituting for a possible sociopolitical explanation of the event a

judicial one. Perhaps holding with Althusser that “the ‘actors’ of his-

tory are [not] the authors of its texts,” Amin desired, in true subaltern-

ist fashion, to restore the signiWcance of the local in terms of place

and agency, to Wgure out the truth of things. He wanted to generate

“a different narrative of Chauri Chaura and Indian nationalism” (5);tell the story, as Chakrabarty might urge, on the peasants’ own terms;

replace the metaphors with the event itself, in its integrity, as under-

stood by its agents and remembered by the villagers. His chosen

method for reaching the local so many decades later was to locate a




different archive from the nationalist and colonialist: do good histori-

cal Weldwork, visit the area and ask the people how it was remembered

(memory). Thus far, there seems to be nothing particularly radical

about this project. Any social historian would—nay, should—approve.

But Amin also articulates a problem history usually represses and

is reluctant to address on the rare occasions it doesn’t:

The empirical content of the riot—the physical occurrence and the light

it sheds on the structure and process of peasant politics—cannot be de-

duced entirely independently of the pronouncements of the Judge and

the discourse of Gandhi, the Father of the Nation. The desire to discover

in oral history an entirely different source from the archival offers a faintpromise. But for me it was not a question of counterposing local remem-

brance against authorized accounts: the process by which historians

gain access to pasts is richly problematic, as is the relationship between

memory and record, and the possibilities of arriving at a more nuanced

narrative, a thicker description, seem enhanced by putting the problems

on display. (4)

The difference between this endeavor and Chakrabarty’s is beginning

to emerge. Peasants, as Amin phrases it, “do not write. They are writ-ten about” (1). (Or, as Spivak might interject, the subaltern cannot

speak. But then, the boys of Subaltern Studies—even those who’ve

learned the most from her—are not in the habit of citing her.) The his-

torian, therefore, does not have transparent access to their thoughts,

which would always be overdetermined—by, for instance, judicial

discourse (colonialism), as is the case here. Chakrabarty, too, actually

has access to the statements of the Santals, the agents of his history2

whom the discipline cannot recognize as subjects, only through the

judicial record (and that, too, from Guha’s account of it), but he is pre-

pared to take an overdetermined account as true, as giving him access

to the authentic voice and transparent thought of the subaltern. (Yet

another instance, one might add, of his politics overdetermining rigor.)

Amin has no such illusions. Indeed, he is even dubious, the careful

reader would have noticed, of the notion of the empirical; he does not

Wnd it to be entirely outside the discursive. Amin, then, might present

himself as a plain and simple historian, but his text is clearly in-

formed by a desire to be more than just another narrative history, is

within the intertext of the French critique. He knows “the process by

which historians gain access to pasts is richly problematic” (4), and

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he desires to write into the narrative itself the “problems”—Wnding

reliable archives and sources, sorting and sifting through evidence,

facing questions surrounding translation, and so on—associated with

writing history. These problems are usually addressed only in the

prefaces of such texts and, contained there, are disappeared from the

narrative itself, which produces itself seamlessly within the terms of

the referential illusion;28 Amin, in contrast, will make them part of the

very process of writing.

Event, Metaphor, Memory, divided into Wve parts, is a very care-

fully structured book in which arguments made in one chapter are

not forgotten by the next. The Wrst part narrates the event and its im-mediate aftermath and also contains a brief prehistory of the event/

place so as not to present it as a spontaneous eruption from nowhere.

The record, it would seem, enables this without raising any problems

for Amin. The second part contains more and different context, descrip-

tions of the villages—Chaura, Bhopa, Mundera, and Dumri—most

involved in and affected by the event: their size, socioeconomic con-

ditions, population, caste, and religious composition, extent of partic-

ipation in the Congress resistance, et cetera: the objects, in a word, of the most conventional disciplinary history. So much so that the reader

could not be faulted for wondering, at this stage, if Amin actually is

going to produce such a history, despite earlier signs to the contrary,

and even in this section, where he cites as sources some of his peas-

ant informants, rather than a more disciplinary archive (something to

which Amin’s distinction between event and metaphor should have

alerted the reader). Indeed, this suspicion is reinforced by Amin being

quite clear, again in conformist historical fashion, about the proximate

cause of the event: “The famous apocalyptic clash with the police had

its roots in . . . [the] effort by local [Gandhian] volunteers to stop trade

in . . . [liquor] and to enforce a just price for meat and Wsh in the

nearby Mundera bazaar” (15). This section is also replete with what

Barthes terms “narrative luxury” or excessive and “futile” detail29 like,

for instance, the story of a peasant tenant being beaten by a landlord’s

enforcer, which doesn’t add anything substantial to the argument butsigniWes to the reader that Amin is in command of the archive. The third

part discusses the treatment of the event by Indian nationalism. The

“tragedy of Chauri Chaura . . . roused . . . [Gandhi] thoroughly” (49),

so much so that, in response, he called off, despite strong opposition




from much of the Congress leadership, the organized and successful

countrywide resistance campaign and called upon the participants in

the riot to surrender to the authorities. “The dead weight of collective

guilt,” concludes Amin, “had fallen on an entire population—of Gor-

akhpur [district] in particular and the nation more generally” (18).

Even though Gandhi admitted that mistreatment of Congress volun-

teers by the Chauri Chaura police provoked the rioting, nothing justi-

Wed the resort to violence by those acting in his name.

Unsurprisingly, Gandhi doesn’t emerge as a positive Wgure in

Amin’s account:

Summing up the experiences of his triumphant train tours of 1920 Gandhi

wrote: “The Congress is an organization for the mob . . . Though orga-

nized by thoughtful men and women . . . our demonstrations are

undoubtedly mob-demonstrations” . . . And then he [Gandhi] added: “a

few intelligent, sincere, local workers are needed and the whole nation

can be organized to act intelligently, and democracy can be evolved out

of mobocracy.” (13)

Presented in this narrateme is Gandhi’s elitism or vanguardism and

even contempt for the masses he presumed to represent metonymi-cally (in a relationship of continuity): they must be trained, disciplined,

evolved into something else—a higher, more intelligent, thoughtful, and

sincere form of being—by a few volunteers, a vanguard, before being

permitted to resist or demonstrate against the British. One of colonial-

ism’s best-known opponents deploys an anthropological trope against

“his own.” But then, being nationalist, Gandhi cannot but think within

the thematic of Eurocentrism. So, consistent with that strand in Sub-

altern Studies that has produced a critique of Gandhi—exempliWed by

Guha’s essay, which he cites—Amin presents Gandhian nationalism,

despite our image of it today, quite literally in the form of Gandhi

in a loin-cloth, as an elitist phenomenon.30 It may have needed to

produce the masses, denied the franchise, in their thousands to dem-

onstrate to British colonialism that the Congress was indeed repre-

sentative of the bulk if not the whole of the Indian nation, but it was

Wrm in its conviction that these same masses had to be led or, in Guha’s

term, disciplined, rather than spoken to, worked with, or abided by.

Amin desires to relate their story in keeping with this latter subal-

ternist spirit, since he discovers in the historical/nationalist record,

or metaphor, that “nationalist prose would memorialize the event by

QADRI ISMAIL230



place and policemen killed. Forever a lesson to be learnt, the ‘riot’

could no longer be accorded a narrative past” (46), prehistory, or local

meaning. The national cannot completely ignore the local; the Con-

gress account admits its volunteers were provoked by the police. But

to Amin, Gandhian nationalism ultimately “writes out” the event as

(locally signiWcant) event and replaces it with a pedagogic and disci-

plinary object.31

Having written something like a narrative past or local context in

parts one and two, and a critique of its metaphorization by Indian

nationalism in part three, Amin examines the other metaphor, the

colonial/judicial record, in part four. Before reading this section, it isimportant to note that Event, Metaphor, Memory’s narrative moves

in a certain deWnite direction from its Wrst part to its last, its stress

assuredly increasing, with the text self-consciously emplotted, for

each section is longer than the one before it. The Wrst four parts are

12, 22, 26, and 48 pages long, respectively; the Wfth, 86. This is men-

tioned not to compete, on their terrain, with accountants, statisticians,

or, even worse, social scientists but to emphasize that part Wve is

given almost as much time as the rest of the narrative combined. Theconcern and emphasis of the text, not surprisingly, falls here where

the question of an alternative, subaltern account of Chauri Chaura

and the problems associated with writing one—in particular and gen-

eral—are addressed, displayed, staged. The Wrst three parts of Event,

Metaphor, Memory, then, could be understood as that which must be

(re)recorded for almost instrumental purposes: they perform a narra-

tive function on their own but are mostly presented as “context” (parts

one and two) and a critique of the nationalist metaphorization of the

event (part three), without which the last two sections cannot be com-

prehended. The Wrst three parts are necessary but mostly in order to

take the text elsewhere, to its main concern, which is the attempt to

write subaltern history on its “own” terms, in the subaltern’s own

voice, toward the understanding of subaltern historical actors as agents

not only of events but maybe even of texts; of producing the subaltern

as author. Amin, that is, may yet produce an unconventionally con-ventional history, as he sometimes appears to promise. Like Chak-

rabarty, we may end up discovering that the subaltern, after all, is a

speaking subject, that the diligent subalternist can discover her voice,

locate the real.




Part four pivots around the judicial need for a peculiarly British

colonial object, “a witness for the prosecution . . . an ‘Approver,’ as he

was (and still is) called on the subcontinent” (72), an eyewitness to

and participant in a criminal event. In return for his testimony, which

would help convict the majority of his comrades, he would be par-

doned. An approver, in Amin’s account, is an unusual and perilous

subject-position: the witness in question had to confess to being a

participant, and not just any participant but someone close enough to

the center of events to both know them intimately and to have been

deeply implicated. If not, his testimony would not be persuasive or

incriminate enough others; if he confessed to too much, as one poten-tial approver apparently did in this case, he could either lack credi-

bility or be deemed too guilty to deserve pardon; if he confessed too

little, as did another, he was unacceptable. Since the guilty faced a

death sentence, the colonial judiciary found enough cardinal partici-

pants willing to confess. However, they only needed one, and selected

Mir Shikari, a “cultivator and hideseller,” a Congress volunteer and

one of its leaders in Chauri Chaura. From Amin’s perspective, “a very

large portion of what we now know about the momentous event atChauri Chaura is a consequence of Approver Shikari’s prodigious

outpouring in the trial court” (75). This presents Amin the historian

with a serious problem. He terms Shikari’s testimony “transactional”:

produced, quite literally, in exchange for his life. Under these circum-

stances, Amin wonders, can the conscientious historian accept it as

true? Shikari is undoubtedly a subaltern, but is he speaking here—in

the Spivakian sense? Do subject-position and voice, as it were, coin-

cide? That is to say, is his testimony to be understood as delivered by

Shikari qua subaltern, or Shikari qua approver-pleading-for-his-life?

To Amin, who reads this testimony, in the strict sense, it’s the latter:

“In . . . Mir Shikari . . . the historian Wnally has access to the actual

words of a leading actor. But the presence of the Wrst person singular

is . . . inadequate guarantee of the speaker’s nearness to his own speech”

(117). Since Shikari was responding to questions posed to him by the

police and judiciary, his statement cannot be extricated from the judi-cial discourse in which he is represented. He has no autonomy, no

effective agency, no voice or capacity to speak as subaltern-resistor.

This, of course, is in stark contrast to Chakrabarty’s position: despite

the Santals’ statements being available only through the judicial record,

QADRI ISMAIL232



and in Guha’s representation at that, Chakrabarty nevertheless claims

to have direct access to the real, the subaltern mind. A responsible his-

torian would have at least addressed the possibility that, by claiming

god as the agent of their rebellion, they sought to escape punishment.

In so doing himself, Amin identiWes serious problems with generat-

ing an alternative account of Chauri Chaura—or any event—from the

judicial/colonial and nationalist record.

Going over this record meticulously, Amin reveals how it is em-

plotted into a coherent narrative from the approver’s testimony. The

latter is “segmented” and “episodic.” It has to be: the witness has to

pause from time to time, break his story, in order to detail the partic-ular acts of particular accused so that he can provide enough infor-

mation or evidence to convict them.32 This, however, is unsatisfactory

to judicial discourse, which needs a more straightforward account.

So, it will produce a “connected” or more self-consciously emplotted

narrative, in order to construct “meaningful totalities.” The consequent

text is even more useless to the historian seeking a “true” account of

Chauri Chaura: “Judicial discourse seeks to establish by certain well

established procedures the only true narrative of past events. A prod-uct of Reason, it Wxes a single, deWnitive, veriWable, and proven mean-

ing to the ‘case,’ and this meaning must hold” (Amin 1995, 94) for,

otherwise, punishment becomes impossible. Though judicial discourse

seeks to establish the truth of things, Amin cannot accept it as true for

a variety of reasons, including its overdetermination by colonialism’s

need to depoliticize and criminalize the event and dependence on an

approver’s testimony to an “enormous degree.” This prompts the cen-

tral question disturbing this text: “what is a true account of a riot like

Chauri Chaura, where an estimated 6000 people were involved, 1000

suspects listed, and 225 put on trial?” (95). Amin is ostensibly writing

only about Chauri Chaura, but the consequence of this argument for

the writing and critique of history, as such, is clear: What constitutes

a true account of any past event? How does one decide? Is, if you like,

information retrieval really possible? To a postcolonial Indian histo-

rian, should the nationalist interpretation be more persuasive by deW-

nition? Can the subalternist—whose project is predicated on a critique

of nationalism—accept this position? The answers to all these ques-

tions only appear in the next section where Amin describes his visits

to the locality, performance of Weldwork, and attempt to generate that




alternative, “independent,” subaltern account. At the beginning of

Event, Metaphor, Memory, he staged himself as not expecting to pro-

duce an account of Chauri Chaura “autonomous” of colonialism and

nationalism. That would have been an absurd ambition. Still, he had

hoped to write “an independent narrative that does not have crime for

its title.” But, he concludes:

My attempt is not quite successful. This is not because the facts of the

case are incontrovertible: the same characters can, after all, be made to

play several different parts. The dif Wculty of my effort to generate an

entirely alternate narrative of the event, I might even say its failure, illus-

trates, rather, the hegemonic power of judicial and nationalist discourse.The subalterns make their own memories, but they do not make them

just as they please. The gallows and the prison ensure that, decades

later, judicial pronouncements remain to be heard even in the familial

recall of an event. And so it is with Chauri Chaura. Peasant narratives

that I collected were inescapably tainted or vitiated or colored in vary-

ing degrees by the hegemonic master narratives. (118; emphasis added)

Even though the “facts” could be reinterpreted—which follows from

the empirical being understood as not outside the discursive—the localcannot simply be extracted from the colonial and the national. The cri-

tique here is ultimately of the very notion of the archive, of evidence—

and so of truth, for no source, no text could be considered pure or

untainted. The archive, by deWnition, takes its objects out of context and

situates them in another; no text, then, could give the historian—any

historian—transparent access to the event—any event. (So it is surpris-

ing that Amin doesn’t interrogate himself, wonder how his questions

and the discipline he is / they are produced by might have affected the

answers he received from his informants, not to mention how his ques-

tions might have shaped their emplotment of the narratives he then

(re)emplotted.) The particular argument, or example, concerns Chauri

Chaura, a riot in colonial India; however, it would be the most naive

reader who would not begin to wonder, at this point in the text, whether

Amin is not simply critiquing, if implicitly, his own earlier work and

the information-retrieval strand—the dominant and most inX

uentialstrand—of Subaltern Studies and, going further, staking out a position

about history as such inspired, if implicitly, by the French critique.

After admitting—“staging” is starting to sound like the better

term—his “failure,” Amin details those problems, the “hurdles”

QADRI ISMAIL234



presented by writing (oral) history. During his time in the Weld, he con-

centrated on interviewing relatives of the rioters of 1922. He doesn’t

say why; presumably, they would be closer to the event, cathect it

more than other villagers—and thus help fulWll his desire. However,

after much effort he was able to produce not the single coherent

account he intended and desired but no less than four narratives, char-

acterized as follows: “stories by local youths; accounts from Mundera

bazaar; the narratives of distant localities; and the remembrance of

lost times among surviving family members of those who partici-

pated in the riot” (123). All four stories are different. The (male) local

youth—Amin’s chief source is the cousin of one of the accused—emplotted Chauri Chaura as the heroic story of Congress volunteers,

who were terriWc wrestlers and therefore able to conWdently attack

the police. (The wrestlers include, in today’s memory, a famous dacoit

“who is simply absent” from the court records of 1922.) That is to say,

Gandhian ahimsa is not an element, central or even marginal, of their

story, emplotted as an instance of nationalist success with the destruc-

tion of the police station. The informant in the Mundera bazaar

account is the grandson of the 1922 manager. Here, the signiWcanceof the day lies in the memory of the grandfather having saved the

bazaar—where the liquor, Wsh, and meat shops picketed by the Con-

gress volunteers were located—from harm by the sheer force of his

personality; he redirected the large and rowdy crowd, which in this

account went to the bazaar Wrst, before the police station. (In Shikari’s

testimony, the volunteers had planned to demonstrate outside the

police station and only then move to the bazaar to picket the shops.

But, of course, they never reached the bazaar.) Amin also interviewed

people in Madanpur, a village somewhat distant from Chauri Chaura,

where the event is dated to the 1930s during the salt march; here the

“agents involved . . . are other people altogether”: carters from their

own village who chanced to be in Chauri Chaura and bravely led the

attack against the police station. Though no story coincides exactly

with another, they rhyme; they are all emplotted, by Amin, as about

local heroism—individual in the Madanpur account, collective in theother two, which are both narrated as occasions of nationalist triumph,

not failure as in the Gandhian interpretation.

Predictably enough, the most narrative time is granted to the in-

terviews with the two remaining survivors from February 1922: Sita




Ahir, the son of a policeman killed in the riot, and Naujadi, the widow

of one of the rioters, Rameshar Pasi (who served eight years in prison).

It isn’t necessary here to read the accounts in detail, but some obser-

vations about Amin’s treatment of them are in order. Sita, for instance,

told him that “‘nineteen died at the thana [police station]; nineteen

[rioters] were hanged’” (145). To the historian, this “Xawed equation

. . . establishes a symmetry between the extent of the crime and the

degree of punishment,” since the number of policemen killed was

actually twenty-three. Naujadi told him, contrary to anything in the

record, that the wife of the of Wcer-in-charge of the police station

pleaded with her husband not to confront the volunteers, to let themmake their protest and leave, but, unnerved by the crowd’s hostility,

he ordered his constables to Wre and provoked the riot. Amin doesn’t

cite these statements and many others to contest the accuracy of sub-

altern memory: “Incongruence with known facts has not been con-

strued as a lapse in memory, but rather as a necessary element in the

stitching together of the story of Chauri Chaura” (198). Crucially, to

him—and this is a very radical move—every story he “collected” is

valid “as an account of ‘Chauri Chaura’” (197); not true—just as validas that of Gandhi or the judge. This may sound relativist, except that

Amin is calling into question the very notion of historical Wdelity, not

producing many alternative truths. He, the historian, stitches these

stories—the textual metaphor is no coincidence—keeps their seams

visible, doesn’t pass them as transparent representations of the real.

So, he concludes:

In Dumri the end of the event is remembered for its immediate result, notfor its national consequences. Repression, punishment, survival—these

are the themes with which Naujadi, Sita, and others close their accounts

of Chauri Chaura. They do not locate its signiWcance in the grief it caused

the Mahatma and the break it put on the Wght against the British. (161)

Finally, it might appear, here is an authentic local narrative. The peas-

ants did not locate the signiWcance of the event in anything Gandhi

had to say about it but identiW

ed their own meaning, in terms thatrelated it to their own lives. The local is actually separate, can be sep-

arated, from the national; the real can be identiWed. Spivak is wrong!

Chakrabarty, right! Amin has demonstrated that the subaltern has

spoken! Memory routs metaphor! Social history triumphs! But . . .

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Amin has already cautioned the reader that he has tailored these sto-

ries, that the local account/s cannot be extricated from the national

(or colonial). He tells us exactly why when offering an explanation for

“the apparent lack of hostility towards Shikari” (141), the approver in

village memory. For it is unexpected, is it not, that the man whose tes-

timony was responsible for sending nineteen villagers to the gallows

and many others to prison was not viliWed by the people in and around

Chauri Chaura, including several who actually knew him? Amin states

that, “in the absence of evidence,” he can only speculate:

Shikari would have been regarded as the betrayer of a cause, and of per-

sons connected to it, only if the event had been considered a political act

in the village in the aftermath of the riot. But nationalist condemnation

and judicial punishment had foreclosed this possibility. Disavowed by

Gandhi and the nationalists locally, the Dumri people may well have come

to accept their men as the notorious criminals of Chauri Chaura. (141)

Like Amin, we will never know. But this is as persuasive a reading of

that sentiment as can be expected: that the national could be under-

stood as having the weight to profoundly inXuence the local, howeversubaltern it may be; that one cannot access the voice or consciousness

of the subaltern transparently, untouched by the discourses of colo-

nialism and nationalism—or, for that matter, by the disciplines, in this

case history and anthropology, that make Amin possible; that to hold

otherwise is to be incredibly naive.

So, how does all this relate to the French critique? Amin clearly

works with several of the cardinal categories of his discipline—fact,

evidence, archive, past, and so on. He deploys anthropological notions

like caste without interrogating them. He uses the term “Weldwork”

without seeming to be aware of its colonialist career. (There are, if it

is still necessary to point this out, many social histories of geography’s

Europe, but no one has ever done “Weldwork” there.) On the other

hand, and despite his belief in fact, he questions the notion of truth

(not, of course, the same things). And, of most signiWcance to my read-

ing, he fails to deliver on the promise that is the ostensible telos of Event, Metaphor, Memory, which one is now compelled to read as its

enabling Wction: to produce an alternative, subaltern narrative of

Chauri Chaura. He fails, that is, to retrieve information, write history,

a failure that is self-consciously staged: the book’s emplotment and




narrative structure leads, we can now say inevitably, to its Wfth and

most important part. Amin had enough material—evidence, if you

like—to write a conventional social history of Chauri Chaura if he

wanted to. He could have vacuumed his informants’ stories of every

trace of the national, repressed the singular or “improbable” accounts

not in the record, like those about the carters of Madanpur, and pro-

duced local, subaltern truth. However, as Amin knows, writing subal-

tern history could only be done, paradoxically enough, by representing

the subaltern (in the sense of metaphor or substitute). For if he had,

like any other historian, written—to use his term—like the judge,

deemed one story or interpretation the most persuasive, convincingand therefore emplotted it as the true account, this would have re-

pressed, denied value to, the others. The necessity to place the prob-

lems of writing history, all his informants’ stories, on display arises

from Amin’s refusal to anthropologize them. It is analogous to saying

history cannot narrate synchronic diversity, cannot emplot the story

of more than one central subject in one text, and remain coherent.

Amin discovers, narrates, four—he could, no doubt, have found oth-

ers—and he refuses to privilege or further subalternize any of them by excluding the inconvenient detail and emplotting the four as one.

He refuses, that is, to be judgmental, to homogenize; he respects the

speciWcity, the heterogeneity, the singularity of these accounts. This is

not only a profoundly ethical stance to take; it also constitutes a gen-

uinely subversive, nonrelativist critique of (writing) history. For, to

Amin, unlike Chakrabarty, it is impossible to write history, to produce

information or truth claims, without being judgmental or complici-

tous with judicial discourse, the law, without repressing difference,

even if one desires to celebrate it.

That these are, indeed, the stakes involved in Event, Metaphor, Mem-

ory is only made evident at its conclusion. So the text must be read as

staging—putting on display, in Amin’s term—its failure to narrativize

Chauri Chaura. Event, Metaphor, Memory, to phrase it differently, is as

fruitfully read as a story about writing history with Shahid Amin, the

historian, as its cardinal actant or central subject, as it could—andmust—be read as a history with Chauri Chaura as its object. But I

shouldn’t anticipate my argument; we need to discuss the stakes Wrst.

Amin emphasizes, only a few pages from the end, after narrating the

local stories, that: “I am not suggesting that what we now have on

QADRI ISMAIL238



record is the deWnitive voice and consciousness of the actors as it

played itself out in early 1922. I simply note that the problems of cap-

turing 1922 through interviews in 1990 are considerable, as are the

pitfalls of a pragmatic reliance on contemporary evidence” (195). The

Wrst statement situates this text Wrmly, if implicitly, within the cri-

tique of the self-conscious Enlightenment subject; unlike Chakrabarty,

Amin doesn’t produce himself as having access to the consciousness

of the subaltern. The second statement reinforces this by arguing that

contemporary (i.e., 1922) texts do not provide such access either, an

argument Amin has already made. Those who hold otherwise are

merely being pragmatic; they are producing—stitching—narrative his-tory, truth claims, because it is possible (but only by repressing differ-

ence). In so doing Amin also situates his text within what I have been

calling the French critique of history. He characterizes his Wnal prod-

uct in these terms: “My effort has been to arrive at an unmeshed,

intertwined, and imbricated set of narratives from every available

source” (195). That is to say, he was only able to produce a set of sto-

ries, not the truth about Chauri Chaura.

Put differently, it is not a theoretical stance, or dispute with, buta profound and almost purist Wdelity to the protocols of his disci-

pline, to methodological rigor, that both disables Amin from writing

(a) history (of Chauri Chaura) and enables him to narrate the story of

this failure as a story, which is also a history, of the failure to write his-

tory. Staged as inductive, as not proceeding from a priori assump-

tions but from an intimacy with the archive, including the Weld, the

critique is emplotted as becoming evident only after the trained his-

torian realizes the impossibility of information retrieval, of writing

history without making truth claims (favoring some accounts at the

cost of others; without, that is, repressing difference), and then stages

this impossibility as a failure, narrating it from the beginning (the

decision to produce a history) to the end (the realization of its impos-

sibility). So Amin self-consciously tells us a “story.” The importance

of that term—which is not synonymous with “Wction”—to his text

cannot be stressed too much: indeed, he consistently refers to Event, Metaphor, Memory as a story, his story.33 His conclusion—the stakes—

is inevitable, even predictable: “Writing history in this fashion leads

one to constantly ask whether the really complex questions about

the production of historical narratives have been answered, or indeed




adequately posed” (196). Amin doesn’t provide an explicit answer him-

self; by this stage in the text, he doesn’t have to.

CODA

Event, Metaphor, Memory’s epilogue cites a postindependence rewrit-

ing of the original British colonial memorial to the policemen killed

at Chauri Chaura:

A close look at the names of the policemen killed . . . reveals that the

Muslim names are written in Urdu and the Hindu names in Hindi! . . .The names in Urdu are engraved, the lettering in Hindi is simply papered

over. Clearly, the colonial government, which associated Hindi with

subversive nationalism and found Urdu less threatening, had originally

engraved all the names in Urdu. . . . An inXuential postcolonial Wgure

must have then ordered the plastering over of the Urdu-writing for the

Hindu names! But the Hindu names were not re-engraved in Devana-

gari . . . perhaps because of budgetary constraints, for a shoddier painted

inscription in Hindi. This monument to the policemen killed in Chauri

Chaura is testimony to the ways of the majoritarian nationalist discoursein India even today. All the policemen killed by nationalist peasants

now belong to “India’s past.” But the essential difference—Hindu and

Muslim—surfaces surreptitiously through this notorious process of

nationalist erasure and reinscription. (199)

Amin doesn’t investigate the process that resulted in the reinscription.

He simply proceeds to read the text. But why does Event, Metaphor,

Memory end with a citation of this monument given that the Hindu-

Muslim question is not raised in the book? (Amin mentions, almost

in passing, the lack of antagonism between Hindu and Muslim vil-

lagers during the anticolonial agitation, when Muslim Congress vol-

unteers even gave up eating meat, as a gesture of solidarity with their

Hindu comrades.) Is Amin, a Muslim after all—not in an essentialist

sense, but he is interpellated as such; even if he doesn’t seem to have

a Muslim imagination, he has a Muslim name—compelled to make a

gesture? Does the minority question raise itself differently at, say, themoment after Babri Masjid? Is there a nexus between Event, Metaphor,

Memory’s epilogue and its plot, the impossibility of writing history?

Recalling Chakrabarty helps: he wrote history to feel at home (in

Western modernity). Without being able to tell a (true) story, not one

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about his personal past but one that he feels produced him—let us

call it Bengali culture—he cannot feel at home. (He also desired to

disrupt the discipline, but that argument, I trust, has lost credibility.)

Read after Amin, it is possible to argue that Chakrabarty, indeed, is the

effective subject of Provincializing Europe, a book best read as autobi-

ographical, a narrative about homemaking. Read after Chakrabarty,

it could be argued that Amin can’t write history for another reason:

Shahid Amin, the historian/subject of Event, Metaphor, Memory, cannot

feel at home in post–Babri Masjid India. Hindu/Indian nationalism

reminds him—not every day but at moments like this, when encoun-

tering the reinscribed monument—that he is Muslim, minor.Historians from sociological—or census-categorized—minorities,

claiming a metonymic relation to “their” groups, often produce—pass

may be a better word—narratives of such collectivized subjects as the

representative story of their group; these texts get called minority

histories. Amin, obviously, does not value or cathect such stories or

such (identity) politics. His commitment to the singular makes that

impossible. Rather, implicit in Event, Metaphor, Memory is a radical cri-

tique of the relation between the minor(ity) and (Indian nationalist)history. Turning to an exemplary instance of such history, Jawaharlal

Nehru’s The Discovery of India, would help establish this: the cost, in a

sense, of information retrieval, of letting (identity) politics overde-

termine one’s theoretical convictions. Early in his narrative, Nehru

wonders what makes India a unity in the face of such self-evident

diversity:

The diversity of India is tremendous; it is obvious; it lies on the surfaceand anybody can see it. It concerns itself with physical appearances as

well as with certain mental habits and traits. There is little in common,

to outward seeming, between the Pathan of the North-West and the Tamil

in the far south. Their racial stocks are not the same, though there may be

common strands running through them; they differ in face and Wgure,

food and clothing, and, of course, language.34

The immense diversity of India—literally superWcial—is immediately

apparent to any observer, not just the Indian. In the face of such het-erogeneity, how does the nationalist (leader) produce commonality,

unity, a homogeneous object? Nehru cannot respond with an essential-

ist answer, for Indians, to him, do not have in common, or share, the

usual elements—language, culture, et cetera—deemed characteristic




of a nation. This question has consistently posed an acute problem

for all anticolonial nationalist thought. Fanon, facing an Africa in which

every country was ethnically diverse, (in)famously called for the erad-

ication of heterogeneity as a precondition for national unity and de-

colonization.35 Like the Fanonian, the Nehruvian resolution of this

problem may not be convincing, may seem ethically suspect in our

moment, but is symptomatic nevertheless: “I think that at almost any

time in recorded history an Indian would have felt more or less at home

in any part of India.”36 Nehru is uncertain of this formulation; some

Indian nationals, implicitly, would inhabit the country more securely,

others less. Even to him, this isn’t a convincing resolution of the anti-colonial nationalist problem. Still, the conceptual ground of the reso-

lution is of critical interest; being a national is about being at home,

literally and metaphorically; it is about feeling secure, in your proper

place, with others like you. (If the reader of this essay had any doubts

about Chakrabarty’s profound complicity with the thematic of nation-

alism, they should, I hope, get whited out now.)

However, in Nehru’s account, the minor does not inhabit home as

strongly, securely, unproblematically as the major. He characterizes thehistorical genesis and development of Indian culture in the following

narrateme:

The Wrst great cultural synthesis and fusion took place between the in-

coming Aryans and the Dravidians . . . Out of this . . . grew the Indian

races and the basic Indian culture . . . In the ages that followed there

came many other races: Iranians, Greeks, Parthians, Bactrians, Scythi-

ans, Huns, Turks (before Islam), early Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians;

they came, made a difference, and were absorbed. India was, according

to Dodwell, “inWnitely absorbent like the ocean.” It is odd to think of

India, with her caste system and exclusiveness, having this astonishing

inclusive capacity to absorb foreign races and cultures. Perhaps it was

due to this that she retained her vitality and rejuvenated herself from time

to time. The Muslims, when they came, were also powerfully affected

by her.37

The imperative of this narrateme is to establish a principle of Indiancommonality despite the lack of self-evident homogeneity. In seeking

to produce a self, though, it must also—as psychoanalysis has taught

us—inescapably produce an other. To Nehru, the base, the very ground

of Indian culture grew out of the fusion, the melding of the Aryan and

QADRI ISMAIL242



Dravidian. SigniWcantly, the Aryans are described as “incoming,” im-

plying they are not quite native, India not their original home. Still,

by locating the beginning of Indianness in “recorded history,” they

can be narratively fused with the Dravidian and both distinguished

from the other, later “foreign races and groups.” The Aryans may not

be original to India, but they are not foreign, either; they found/ed

Indian culture. The other groups merely contributed to its develop-

ment; these outsiders were “absorbed” by India, fused into the Aryan-

Dravidian synthesis—everyone except the Muslims. The other groups,

ten in all, are listed one after another, continuously, without inter-

ruption. Then discontinuity, a pause in the narrative for a celebrationof India’s astonishing inclusiveness; three and a half whole sentences

intervene between the listing and the Muslim being named, added to

the list. And that, too, with a difference; unlike the rest, the Muslim

presence in Indian is qualiWed: “the Muslims, when they came” implies,

clearly, that the Muslim is singled out by this text, seen as different,

othered. For not only did the Muslim not contribute to the roots of

Indian culture, it is a latecomer to it, arriving after even the Bactrian

and the Scythian; most crucially, the Muslim wasn’t absorbed by India, just “powerfully affected.” The Muslim, in this account, refused to

become fully Indian, insisted on retaining difference, did not play by

the same rules as the rest (and so, presumably, laid the ground for

eventually demanding Pakistan). Nehru could have conceived of the

Muslim in different terms, like, for instance, the Muslim League was

asking him to when it insisted that the Muslims weren’t a minority

(to be conceived through the logic of arithmetic or quantity) but a

nation (e/quality). This, however, was incomprehensible to Nehru, to

whom two nations could not inhabit one country, to whom the Mus-

lims were self-evidently a minority, being fewer in number than the

Hindus. What he couldn’t see, and what is easier to notice in our

politico-epistemological moment, is that the Muslim League is better

understood as demanding equality, refusing to be minoritized, treated

as minor, lesser, of slighter signiWcance. That is how the statement “we

are a nation, too,” like the Hindus, is best read. The League wasn’tnecessarily claiming that the Muslims were a nation in a positivist

sense; they just wanted to be acknowledged as equal to the Hindus,

to be allowed the same adjective or category and, therefore, status.38

But the League made this argument using the only terms available to




it, those provided by nationalism, which led to a legitimate if disas-

trous misunderstanding of its position by Nehru. To further compli-

cate matters, Nehru faced another interlocutor: in The Discovery of India

he didn’t only address Indians but, more importantly, British colo-

nialism, which insisted that Indians weren’t homogeneous. The task

facing Nehru was to produce homogeneity, overriding difference,

both in the present and in the past. For as every student of national-

ism knows, any nation/alism, to legitimize itself, must produce its

nationals as sharing something not only now but then. If Nehru had

produced Indian homogeneity as a thing of the present alone, it would

have been deemed recent and therefore artiWcial, at best of uncertainprovenance. A narrative of homogeneity through time is necessary to

reinforce the claim to homogeneity in the present. When he turns

to the past, though, Nehru had no alternative but to tell a story that

minoritizes the Muslim. Working in tandem, the structural logic of

nationalism and the record of history—the information available—pre-

sented him with no other choice. Nehru wasn’t a communalist, but

that narrateme produces the Muslim as playing an insigniWcant role

not just in the Indian present but in the Indian past. It shares the samethematic as the move Amin identiWes in the reinscription of the mon-

ument, which refuses to see unmarked Indians in India’s past since

there are none in its present. Given such an authoritative narrative,

which grounds Indian nationalism, can the reader be surprised that

Shahid Amin cannot feel quite at home in (Indian) history? Unlike

Chakrabarty or Nehru, he cannot write history so as to feel at home.

Indeed, unlike Spivak, Amin’s theory and politics coincide: while writ-

ing (Indian) history, he writes himself out of history.

Notes

The informed reader will recognize the reference in the title to the wit and wis-

dom of Ranajit Guha. My thanks to Premesh Lalu and two anonymous readers for

comments on an earlier draft.

1. Spivak 1988, 271.

2. Spivak 1988, 295.

3. Spivak 1985. The dates of publication are confusing, but “Deconstructing

Historiography” refers to “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as written.

4. Spivak 1985, 342.

5. See Prasad 1997.

QADRI ISMAIL244



6. Spivak 1985, 345.

7. Chakrabarty 2000 and Amin 1995.

8. See especially Foucault 1973 and de Certeau 1988.

9. White 1981.10. The cardinal texts of this critique are Althusser 1997, Barthes 1986,

de Certeau 1988, Foucault 1973, Griemas 1990, Rancière 1994, White 1981. It was

arguably inaugurated by Nietzsche’s remarkable essay (1995). Nietzsche and White,

of course, are not French—at least, not in the essentialist sense.

11. Appleby, et al. 1995.

12. See Chatterjee 1993. I address this question at length in Ismail 2005.

13. It might be useful to clarify here that I understand postcoloniality as a

concept and postcolonial studies as a Weld constituted (at least) by all the work

claiming that name. Subaltern Studies is an element—easily the most signiWcantafter Said—of that Weld.

14. Geography here, like “history itself,” refers not to a discipline but a

material reality.

15. See, for instance, Spivak 1988, 280–83.

16. Mowitt 2005, xxviii.

17. It might be useful to recall here that the psychoanalytic term for forget-

ting is repression.

18. See, for instance, Shelley 2002.

19. It bears pointing out here that this statement works within the logic of

the self-conscious Enlightenment subject, in command of language and motiva-

tion, who understands why she acts, even though Chakrabarty’s claim is that the

Santal, as subject, is incomprehensible to and outside of Enlightenment reason.

20. It should, actually, be dif Wcult for a trained historian to maintain that rea-

son and God are incompatible. Hegel, after all, termed his history a “theodicy.”

21. Chakrabarty’s example is Guha 1983.

22. The reference is to the conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth; for an alter-

native reading of it, see Ismail 2005.

23. For the deWnition, see Guha 1994.

24. Ironically enough, the OED records the Wrst case of this condition among

James Cook’s sailors in the PaciWc. Which just might make nostalgia the exem-

plary colonial disease.

25. To avoid any confusion, it should perhaps be made clear here that I do

not draw the distinction, common in cultural studies, between space (abstract)

and place (concrete).

26. Nancy 1991.

27. The simplest way to understand singularity is as a relation between two

(or more) entities that are not identical, but rhyme.

28. On the function of prefaces in histories, see Barthes 1986.

29. Ibid.

30. The essay “Discipline and Mobilize” is reproduced in Guha 1997.

31. Amin also points out in this section that later postcolonial nationalist




narrativizations of Chauri Chaura justify the violence of the rioters as provoked

by the police.

32. Genette 1980 might inform Amin here, though, that all narrative works

like this; it must “pause”—to Genette, a technical term—occasionally to provideinformation about character, background, setting, and so on.

33. Additionally, Shikari is called “the chief-storyteller” (100). In contrast,

the colonial and nationalist accounts are termed “authoritative” discourses.

34. Nehru 1985, 61.

35. Decolonization, wrote Fanon, “uniWes . . . people by the radical decision

to remove from it its heterogeneity” (Fanon 1963, 46).

36. Nehru 1985, 62. The statement may seem too convenient for my argu-

ment, but I did not make it up!

37. Nehru 1985, 73. And, no, I don’t know what a Bactrian is, either. TheScythians, I believe, invented the scythe.

38. The classic statement here is Muhammad Iqbal’s 1930 presidential address

to the League, where he termed India “a continent of human groups” (9).

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