| Indian historiography has been a powerful instrument in the hands of British colonial rulers and the forces of Hindutva to build a wall of separation between Hindus and Muslims. |
| While writings on Indian history by Indian historians or pseudo-theologists are part of a great intellectual battle in politics, the subaltern historians, whose writings have been presented in Dube's edited volume, have nothing to do with any major or even minor disputes raised by the Sangh Parivar's historians. |
| The subaltern historians, from Ranajit Guha to Partha Chatterjee et al., question the whole project of "modernity, the idea of rationality and social progress along with the idea of state and nation because these are evils bequeathed to the colonies by European Enlightenment". |
| Dube maintains that "out of the analysis of anti-colonial movements and counter-colonial initiatives of subordinate groups""and of the relationship of these endeavours with middle-class nationalism""there have emerged wider theoretical critiques of state, nation, and modernity in colonial and contemporary India". |
| Since the nation and state have been handed over as a hegemonic project of modern (i.e. European) history, not only does their "singularity" have to be interrogated but "histories from below" have to be brought to the centre stage of colonial and post-colonial Indian history. |
| This is the project of subaltern historians, who claim to have brought "histories from below" to erase the false history of "middle-class nationalism"""the staple diet of the elite historians of India. |
| The edited volume has contributions from 14 scholars, mostly non-resident Indian historians, who have written on "Colony and Empire", "Nation and Community", and "Margins of Modernity". |
| Every contributor builds his story on the basis of thin evidence and the overall effort is to project and construct a theoretical framework for the critique of the project of modernity as understood by these contributors. |
| Ranajit Guha's "Not at Home in Empire" is based on a memoir of "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer" and highlights the issue of isolation and anxiety in Empire. |
| Every contributor follows Guha by picking on one event to construct an edifice of knowledge to demonstrate the so-called "essence" of Empire and every movement connected with the anti-colonial struggle from below. |
| Risley's ethnological report on the 1901 Census of India and his detailed information on castes, tribes et al. make Nicholas B Dirks conclude in "The Ethnographic State": "But in retrospect one might argue that things become worse, in the short and long run, when the colonial state converted itself from an extractive state to an ethnographic state in the late nineteenth century." |
| This is an astonishing statement because both the "extraction" and "anthropological" projects of a fragmented India were interrelated projects of the colonisers. |
| Kaviraj and Chatterjee concentrate on the much- researched and much-written-about Bankimchandra's "The laughter and darkness in the world of Kamalakanta". Both hero and anti-hero, Kamalakanta makes Kaviraj assert that in Bankim's writings, the question of British colonial administration was broadened, at the best points, "into a question of modernity in general". |
| The authors then embark on an intellectual trip to the effect that "modernity brings in an identical change in India". Since the Nation is "con-federal", Partha Chatterjee is on his hobby horse of castigating the State: "The modern state, embedded as it is within the universal narrative of capital, cannot recognise within its jurisdiction any form of community except the single, determinate, demographically enumerable form of nation. It must therefore subjugate, if necessary by the use of state violence, all such aspirations of community identity." |
| In that case, what about the post-American invasion of Iraq and Iraqi society without an Iraqi State? The whole intellectual project of these subaltern scholars is to bring all kinds of evidence to castigate Nation and State without looking at the reality of an American imperialist state that is still threatening all Nation-States of the Third World. |
| The subalternists have no answers to any relevant questions: How can American imperialism be opposed? Who is threatening the freedoms of decolonised countries? Is the freedom of a country worth defending from the Imperialist state? |
| This is the reason that all subaltern scholars, including Shahid Amin""whose writings on Gandhi and Chauri Chaura have been included in Dube's edited volume""fail to understand the real meaning of Gandhi. Gandhi was the social philosopher of power against imperialism and for freedom from colonial rule. If India is not free from the British exploiters, freedom for communities that the subalterns claim to champion would be a pipe-dream. |
| It is good that Dube has brought these authors in one volume so that the reader will get enlightened by the shallowness of these celebrities who have no answers to basic questions of struggle for Independence against colonialism and defence from American imperialism, which is a threat to every free country. |
| Worse, the subaltern history as shown by Dube's edited volume can pose no challenge to pseudo-Hindutva historiography. The failure of these writers lies in their inherent fallacy that Nation and State are "dirty words" and to substantiate this project, they have collected very thin evidence. |
| POSTCOLONIAL PASSAGES: Contemporary History- Writing on India |
| Saurabh Dube (Ed.) Oxford University Press: 2004 Pages: 275, Price: Rs 650 |
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