Of course, one could question this elastic understanding of the 'pre-modern' in Indian academia, stretching expansively over four millennia, but it also indicated the sheer fuzziness of categories and our intellectual laziness in engaging with our past. It is as if 'modernity' is a 200-year-old gift to us from the colonial apparatus. |
There is no way we can solve the problem of what it is that we consider 'pre-modern', without being able to 'complicate' our idea of the 'modern' itself. For example, instead of clutching on to the teleological Western idea of one defining moment of 'modernity', it is time we explored the idea of the many moments of modernity. Even Geeta Kapur, in her superbly argued When Was Modernism (Tulika, 2002), says, "We have to introduce from the vantage point of the periphery, the transgressions of uncategorised practice" (emphasis mine).
Academic categories define our cognitive frames in damagingly limiting ways, as we are rendered incapable of referring to a range of historical events, which do not find their way into mainstream narratives. There is so much happening in the multiplicity of our regions, languages and the 'vernacular' that do not figure in our theoretical premises, that we find ourselves in no position to handle the vexed relationship between the 'academic' and the 'vernacular' even of the past century or be able to articulate a critique of the 'colonial' in any useful way, other than using clinchers.
This certainly affects our articulation of the 'modern'. Do we not have to explain, for example, how it was not as if European 'colonisers' simply walked in to take over a passive subcontinent? Do we not also have to study how the subcontinent was actively 'ready' for such an intervention? What E P Thompson calls the mutual 'ripening of time' in his study of the non-Judaic, non-linear ideas of time?
In contemporary cultural studies, the onus for having engaged with the question of modernity goes to Raymond Williams and his significant intervention, in 1989, with The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, where he says in as many words that, "If we have to break out of the non-historical fixity of post-modernism, we must search out and counter-pose an alternate tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margins of the century..."
This is quite applicable to the Indian context. Our social sciences are historically constrained by English being its sole academic language and by a longstanding gap between our pedagogical and research imaginations. Our knowledge systems lack a site of the 'commons', in an environmental sense. Our disciplines need an imagination of the commons, of the 'wide margins,' where knowledge appears as open to different uses by different people.
Our social sciences might have failed us here by not conversing across disciplinary boundaries to produce a general theorisation of the idea of the many modernities, instead of repeating the pathetic fallacy of a 4,000-year-old 'pre-Modern' and a 200-year-old 'Modern'.
History as discipline must, therefore, reconfigure its relationship to the archive, given that traces of reality no longer seem available as contained in its 'proper' place, like in the records-room. These now exist disaggregated across many moments of the popular media, what would earlier be considered ephemera without ordering and classification. Even more important is to listen to unspoken stories from the margins.
Of course, while re-examining the notion of the 'archive', we need to take care not to blindly valorise moments that deliver specific information, uncritically integrating them in our academic discourse. For example, on another occasion, I had to face sentimentalist polemic for suggesting that workers at Kolar Gold mines should take its closure and their own displacement as a positive thing, which might enable unions to re-interrogate the meaning of that highly polluting work that left some 80 per cent workers with TB and other respiratory diseases? That it enabled workers now to reinvest their skills in other ways.
It is a 'betrayal,' I was told, to think like this because, for the workers, the mines were their 'mother,' their 'anna-daata,' and even imagining their being deprived of this debilitating job was a blasphemy. My counter to the 'eternalising logic' attached to jobs was to ask if it could be extended to, say, urban sewage workers who are required to dive into the muck to clear the clogged drains of civilisation? Since it does provide jobs to some, they themselves are not averse to epistemological re-figurations of the sewer as 'Ganga' and speak in terms of 'holy dips'. But can this become an argument for eternalising the job? Is it not legitimate to imagine less inhuman, less caste-determined and more technological, design-efficient solution?
A critical counterpoise between the academic and the vernacular could be a way of thinking through the current questions that face our social sciences. Instead of allowing the vernacular to end up as the 'other' of the disciplinary, we need to sharpen our comprehension of this area more so that our articulation of the 'pre-Modern' will make some 'political' sense in our times.
