Engaging with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Arguments in Provincializing Europe
PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE:
POSTCOLONIAL THOUGHT AND HISTORICAL DIFFERENCE
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Princeton University Press: 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey, USA, 08540-5237
Paperback, $27.95 / £19.95
Reviewed by KHAN YASIR
While pursuing M. Phil in Political Science from Delhi University, I had to review Philip Oldenburg’s book India, Pakistan, and Democracy: solving the puzzle of divergent paths for the research method paper. In the book, despite recognising that Indian democracy has been “localised, routinised and creolised” (Yogendra Yadav) and “vernacularised” (Michelutti) the greatest problem the author faced was to deal with the question: is India a democracy or not? He finally left the question literally unanswered by arguing that even if we consider that India is not truly a democracy, it is ‘more democratic’ than Pakistan and we should explore the puzzle why it is so.
On the same pedestal sometimes India is described as quasi-federal, pseudo-secular or incompletely transited to capitalism and modernity; Indian peasant’s struggle in the period of 18th and 19th centuries was described as “prepolitical” (Hobsbawm). All these are nothing but efforts to explain different realities through the same theoretical tools. It did not occur to Oldenburg that instead of being “more democratic” (than Pakistan) or “less democratic” (than the UK or US); India is perhaps “differently democratic”.
This recognition would imply that the term ‘democracy’ as understood in the west is not ‘nuanced enough’ to explain the political realities of India. As Immanuel Wallerstein, in his paper “Eurocentrism and its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science”, points out, “Social science emerged in response to European problems, at a point in history when Europe dominated the whole world-system. It was virtually inevitable that its choice of subject matter, its theorizing, its methodology, and its epistemology all reflected the constraints of the crucible within which it was born.”
This problem of incongruity of ‘western’ theoretical tools in ‘third world’, or at least their inadequacy in explaining third-world realities, is identified by Dipesh Chakrabarty. He laments, “The everyday paradox of third-world social science is that we find these [western] theories, in spite of their inherent ignorance of “us,” eminently useful in understanding our societies.” He also argues that today the prevailing language of social science obliterates the plural ways of being human that are contained in different orientations to the world.
Even if Samuel P. Huntington’s farfetched theory of clash of civilisations is not to be believed in totality, there is no denying the fact that in a given period of history; one civilisation, compared to others, progresses and guides the rest of civilisations till the time of its decline and until its authority is challenged and replaced by another one. This authority could be military, could be academic and could be a combination of both. Not going into history of such civilisational domination, one agrees that the academic world is influenced and taken forward by European civilisation and mode of inquiry since the renaissance. European mode of inquiry has influenced all modes of inquiries throughout the world tremendously and colonialism has institutionalised this effect on the colonies. This intellectual dominance of Europe provoked post-colonial scholarship. Post-colonial scholarship is thus an attempt to engage with this intellectual legacy of colonialism in erstwhile colonies. Dipesh Chakrabarty, as a well-known post-colonial scholar, is very vocal against this intellectual subjugation of the third world. His work especially, his book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, is a teasing question mark on ditto (and absurd) application of western theories on the east.
Sometimes, this intellectual imposition of the west is also explained away as natural. This intellectual legacy, despite proving to be beneficial in one or another respect for the colonised societies in terms of intellectual development, over the years has become a kind of baggage. The realities in third world countries are different but in order to explain these different realities same European concepts and theories are invoked with a certain degree of devotion. Chakrabarty could be summed up in one line as: There is a need to conceive these different realities, differently.
Can this baggage of colonialism be jettisoned? Post-colonial-revenge kind of scholarship answers this question in the affirmative. Wallerstein notes that decolonisation of Asia and Africa has, besides politics of world-system, also affected world of knowledge and one such effect is growing attacks on what he calls Eurocentrism of Social Sciences. This attack, he argues, is fundamentally justified, however he also notes,
“…we must take a careful look at what constitutes Eurocentrism, for, as we shall see, it is a hydra-headed monster and has many avatars. It will not be easy to slaughter the dragon swiftly. Indeed, if we are not careful, in the guise of trying to fight it, we may in fact criticize Eurocentrism using Eurocentric premises and thereby reinforce its hold on the community of scholars.”
Chakrabarty’s approach is more sensible in this regard. For him blind rejection of European thought is uncalled for. Even Provincializing Europe both begins and ends by acknowledging the indispensability of European thought, which for Chakrabarty is ‘a gift to us all’. If European theory, as he emphasise, is indispensable then what we need is not to reject but develop it according to our own realities.
Provincializing Europe is basically a critique of historicism. Historicism, in simple word, is a history with some kind of linear pattern, unidirectional and teleological. Most popular historicist notion is “first in the west and then elsewhere”. For example, Marx was being historicist when he argued that industrially more developed countries show to the less developed countries the image of its own future. According to Chakrabarty, the most drastic effect of this historicism on colonies was the fact that due to colonialism’s intellectual dominance the once alive intellectual traditions like Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, etc. are now only of historical interests, they are no longer looked forward for critical evaluation of contemporary realities, even realities of those areas where these traditions originally belong to. A modern day scholar will not invoke these traditions for critical thought but instead would feel proud in indulging in a dialogue with ghosts of Weber and Marx and even ancient Greeks because these Greek philosophers are presumed to be predecessors of modern European thought.
Historicism, according to Chakrabarty, is developed world’s saying “not yet” to third world countries. However, this point’s relevance I would question today, especially in those third world countries where democracy has taken a deep root after decolonisation like India. When Mill eulogised liberty and self-rule and argued that Indians, Africans and in short rude nations are not fit for self-rule, we can say Chakrabarty was right in pointing out that Mill consigned these nations to the ‘imaginary waiting room of history’ where we were all headed for the same destination but some people were to arrive earlier than others. That was what historicist consciousness was: a recommendation to the colonised to wait. This is simply not the case today. Insistence on ‘now’ as against ‘not yet’ was a basic feature of every independence struggle and this ‘now’ has been legitimised even after decolonisation as a matter of theory. However, if practical realities are concerned, Chakrabarty seems fairly right if we look to the overturns in West Asia today. By bringing this ‘not yet’ idea of historicism in opposition to the insistence on ‘now’ by popular movements, Chakrabarty argues that this insistence on ‘now’ characterises all popular movements towards democracy.
But Chakrabarty stops at pinpointing the defects of historicist kind of understanding of a society. What is the alternative way of theorisation? In other words, what is the alternative to historicism? I am not satisfied with the answers that Chakrabarty provides or perhaps those philosophical points are beyond my comprehension. He is against conceiving a singular future; he even argues that present too is not one. He distinguishes between future that “will be” and futures that “already are”. He argues for alternative location of reason and a dialogue between two contradictory points of view. But is that a sufficient scheme of theorisation?
I also noticed that he has just described how European concepts fall short of describing the third world realities. He has not provided with conceptual alternatives as, for example, Partha Chatterjee has done by coining the term political society as against civil society. In my view, conceptual alternatives were necessary in order to fully establish the claim that third-world realities can better be explained by theories that pay due attention to the contexts whose life-worlds they are supposed to explain.
In my view, Chakrabarty has also underemphasised that colonial baggage is very complex because of its interaction and engagement with realities of the colonies. Notions of liberty, equality, democracy, secularism, citizenship, nationalism were ‘vernacularised’ after every such engagement. To sift out what is our own and what is not is therefore a useless task, if not impossible. The European intellectual heritage, as he also recognises, is global. And it has also positively influenced, especially Indian scholarship, if we look in terms of critiques of caste, oppression of women, lack of rights for lower and subaltern classes in India, etc. It is perhaps recognition of this fact that when we notice, we find that even the Constitution of India tellingly begins by repeating certain universal enlightenment themes which for example are also celebrated in the American constitution.
The stated purpose of the book is to explore the capacities and limitations of certain European social and political categories in conceptualising political modernity in the context of non-European life-worlds. In demonstrating this, Chakrabarty turns to historical details of particular life-worlds he has known intimately. In the book he deals with examples of Bengal to prove his points.
I was particularly enthralled by Chakrabarty’s argument for different Europes. For example, Europe was described as the site of the first occurrence of capitalism, modernity, or Enlightenment. These “events” in turn are all explained mainly with respect to “events” within the geographical confines of Europe however fuzzy its exact boundaries may have been. Chakrabarty disputes this point and argues that different post-colonial scholars have spoken of different Europes as according to their own geographies of colonialism.
I also appreciate Chakrabarty for the fact that he is conscious of his biases. He provides in detail the Indian and Bengali intellectual backgrounds where he comes from. Not only his own biases, but he also recognises the possibility of a reverse kind of historicism.
To sum up, in Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty’s primary task is not to prove that ‘European history’ is not the ‘universal human history’, a notion that according to him has already been proved. The author’s task is not even to take a post-colonial revenge, and in this sense he is not a nativist. He throughout the book, besides problematising European history as master narrative, also problematises the notion of Indians ‘representing’ themselves in history. He also warns of local and indigenous historicist versions of history. A fact that is not paid heed to by many post-colonial scholars. And I appreciate him a great deal for this.
The politics of historicism is the central theme with which he is concerned. He argues against “secular, empty and homogenous times of history” and complains that much written history is deeply historicist. Historical time, for him, should not be mistaken for a measure of cultural distance. His basic task in this book, after recognising the indispensability of the European thought to represent non-European modernity, is to problematise and struggle with problems that this indispensability invariably creates. And in his attempt Chakrabarty appears to be fairly successful.
The reading of the book was an insightful experience for me. I immediately connected it with the ‘unsolved puzzle’ in my mind since the moment I started reading Oldenburg as I have mentioned in the beginning. Chakrabarty’s understanding has also widened my horizon as far as my outlook towards some of the ‘givens’ in the contemporary politics is concerned. For example, now the division of the world between ‘developed’, ‘developing’ and ‘under-developed’ countries seems to me an utterly absurd and historicist understanding that not only diminishes the uniqueness of a particular country but also bars innovative thinking and a different course of action. Chakrabarty’s beautiful phrase ‘imaginary waiting room of history’ helps me better understand and explain the illogicality of positions like Egypt, Syria, Algeria and Libya are not fit for democracy; or Iran is not fit to be a nuclear power; or India is not fit for a permanent membership of Security Council. His argument regarding ‘different Europes’ nudges me to think about ‘different easts’, and even about ‘different Indias’!