Debate Over Indian History

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Subaltern Studies and Its Critics: Debates over Indian HistoryA Subaltern Studies Reader 1986-1995 by Ranajit Guha; Nationalism, Terrorism,Communalism: Essays in Modern Indian History by Peter Heehs; Writing Social History bySumit Sarkar; The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity and Secularization byAchin VanaikReview by: Vinay LalHistory and Theory, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Feb., 2001), pp. 135-148Published by: Wiley-Blackwell for Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2678074 .

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History and Theory 40 (February 2001), 135-148 ( Wesleyan University 2001 ISSN: 0018-2656

SUBALTERNSTUDIES AND ITS CRITICS:

DEBATES OVER INDIAN HISTORY

A SUBALTERNSTUDIES READER 1986-1995. Edited by Ranajit Guha. Minne-

apolis:Universityof MinnesotaPress, 1997. Pp. xxii, 303.

NATIONALISM,TERRORISM,COMMUNALISM:ESSAYS IN MODERN INDIAN HISTORY.By Peter Heehs. Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1998. Pp. x, 174.

WRITING SOCIAL HISTORY. By Sumit Sarkar.Delhi: Oxford University Press,

1997; Oxford IndiaPaperback,1998. Pp. x, 390.

THE FURIES OF INDIAN COMMUNALISM:RELIGION, MODERNITYAND SECULAR-

IZATION.By AchinVanaik.London:Verso, 1997. Pp. 374.

Indianhistory has apparentlynever had it so good. By the middle partof thenineteenthcentury,the Hegelian proposition that India was a land singularly

bereftof historyhad attaineda widespreadconsensus amongBritishcommenta-

tors on India. Macaulayand James Mill were entirely convinced that Indians

were incapableof writinghistory,anda hundredyears laterEdwardThompson,

the fatherof the late E. P.Thompson,pennedthe remark,with the supremecon-

fidence thatit was a self-evidenttruth, hat"Indiansarenot historians,andthey

rarelyshow anycriticalability.Even theirmostuseful books ... exasperatewith

their repetitionsand diffuseness."Assured that Indians were unlikely ever to

become adeptat thehistoricalcraft,Thompsonaddedforgood measure hatthey

were"not ikely to displaceouraccountof ourconnectionwith India."'Less than

twenty years ago, only a handfulof Indianhistorians,most of them scholarsof

ancientIndia,had a reputation xtendingbeyondtheir own country,andmuchof

theirenergy,when they were not engagedin more arcaneresearch,was expend-

ed in writingtextbooks for use in Indianschools. Today,by contrast,Indianhis-

torians havehogged

thelimelight; they occupy positions at leadinguniversitiesin India,the UnitedStates,and Britain.

In the late 1970s, RanajitGuha,thenknownonly for a studyof the ideologi-

cal aspectsof thepermanent ettlementof landrevenue n colonialBengal,2gath-

ereda numberof youngerhistoriansaroundhim, and theinitial fruitsof theircol-

lective laborappearedas two volumes, publishedin quick succession, with the

enticingtitle of SubalternStudies:Writingson SouthAsian Historyand Society

(Oxford, 1982 and 1983). In retrospect, he success of this endeavor ten vol-

1. Edward Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1926), 27-

28.

2. RanajitGuha,A Rule of Property or Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of PermanentSettlement

(Paris:Mouton andCo., 1963; reprinted., Delhi: OrientLongman, 1981).



136 VINAY LAL

umes of SubalternStudieshave appearedso far, the first six underGuha'sedi-

torship-might appearratherremarkable, onsideringthat Guha offered, in his

programmatic ote, the prosaiccritiquethat the studyof Indianhistory hadbeen

strangledby "elitism,"bothof the "colonialist"and "bourgeois-nationalist"ari-ety, and thathenceforthhistory would have to engage with the "politicsof the

people."3Doubtless, some monographshad been writtenon peasantrebellions,

but the real question, Guha suggested, is how far various subalterngroups,

whetherwomen, peasants,outcastes, the working-class,tribals,the downtrod-

den, or othermarginalizedpeople who had been relegatedto the peripheryof

Indiansociety,had been able to make historyand constitutetheirpolitics as an

"autonomous ealm."If it shouldseem somethingof a mysterywhy the histori-

ans of the "SubalternSchool"were to acquiresuch a following, one mightcon-

sider their recourse to the somewhatexotic idea of the "subaltern," word that

even an informedreaderwould reasonablyassociatewith the military.As read-

ers were to surmise,subalternhistory promisedmorethan"history rom below":

the very idea of the "subaltern"had been capturedfrom Gramsci, and the

"SubalternSchool" historianswould also build upon the semiological analyses

of Jakobsonand Barthes,the post-structuralism f Foucault,and the critiqueof

Enlightenment pistemologiesassociatedwithDerrida,Lyotard,and others.For

Indianswho might have been distressedthat the theoreticaltrajectorieswhich

were finding a receptiveaudience in the Westernacademywere somehowpass-

ing them by, subalternhistory must have seemed a godsend, offering not only

new insights into Indianhistory,but a bridge to critical reformulationsof the

Europeanpast and the intellectualtraditionsof the West. Moreover,as Guha's

trenchantanalysisof colonial documentswas to show, the enterpriseof finding

documentsthat authenticatedhe experienceof subalternsand claimed to com-

plete the historicalrecord,such that subalternsmightno longer complainof notbeing adequatelyrepresented,was not deemed to be of paramountmportance;

indeed, Guhasoughtto establishhow insurgencymightbe read from the gaps,

fissures,interstices,and rhetoricalstrategiesthatmarkeddominantdiscourse.In

thismanner, ubalternhistorywas clearlyto be distinguished roma hostof other

phenomena o which it is sometimeslinked by innocent andconservativeacade-

mics, such as multiculturalism nd ethnic history.

A little more than five years after the appearance of the first volume of

SubalternStudies,the entireenterprisehad acquiredenoughof a following that

an anthology,which culled articles from the first five volumes,was to appear or

the Americanmarket. Introducedby Edward Said, and co-edited by Guha and

GayatriChakravorty pivak,Selected SubalternStudiesbrought he work of the

historiansof colonial India,which could scarcelybe describedas having gener-

ated widespreadinterest until then, to the attention of postcolonial theorists,

"colonialdiscourse"analysts,and those interested n the literatureandhistoryof

colonized societies. Thus the blurb to A SubalternStudiesReader, the volume

3. RanajitGuha,"On Some Aspects of theHistoriography f ColonialIndia,"reprintedn Selected

SubalternStudies,ed. RanajitGuha andGayatriChakravorty pivak (New York:OxfordUniversity

Press, 1988), 37-43.



SUBALTERNSTUDIES AND ITS CRITICS 137

presentlyunderreview, whichis an anthologyof selections from latervolumesof

Subaltern Studies as well as other publications,states that the "most famous

members"of the collective-Spivak and ParthaChatterjeeare mentionedby

name-"were instrumentaln establishing he discipline best known as postcolo-

nial studies." Indeed, it is for the consumption of the burgeoningpostcolonial

academic ndustry hat this volume appears o have been devised, rather han for

the use of historiansthemselves, since Ranajit Guha,in his introduction o the

anthology, makes no attempt even to suggest what differentiates Subaltern

Studies from other trajectoriesthat partakeof "history from below." Since

SubalternStudies now bearsthe dualimprimatur f authorityand radicaldissent,

the history that Guha furnishesof the collective is written n a heroic mode, and

located,somewhatdisingenuously,when we considerthe intellectualgenealogies

of membersof the collective, in humble and even trying origins (xiv). Subaltern

Studies, as Guha himself states, arose out of the disillusionments of the three

decadesfollowing independence: he hopes of the young, which relieduponthe

nation-state or theirfulfillment,had dissipated n the wake of the nationalemer-

gency invoked by Indira Gandhiin 1975, and the suppressionof the Naxalite

movement, which for all its faults and embraceof violence sought to place con-

siderationsof justice andequity at the centerof political action.CertainlyGuhacouldhave offereda more substantiveaccountof therelationbetween the advent

of a new school of history,Indianhistoriography, nd Indianpolitics.

Guha states that the collection is "representative" f the "intellectualrange

spannedby the project,"but no attempt s made to explain,muchless defend,the

selection. What is "representative," nyhow?And "representative"or whom?

Since the volume, like its predecessor, s clearlyintendedfor theAmericanmar-

ket, and particularly or those with no intrinsic interest in Indianhistory,one

might be forgiven for presumingthat the selections veer towards those which

establishconnections between Indianhistoryandthe critiquesof modernityand

its masternarratives,but on closer examination he majorityof the selectionsare

shown to be detailedreadingsof Indianhistory.The selectionsmightbe described

as demonstrations f subalternhistory;but ParthaChatterjee's ssay on middle-

class Bengali women is not so easily accommodatedunder this rubric,while

Dipesh Chakrabarty'smportantand widely discussedessay on "Postcoloniality

andthe Artifice of History"considershow, even at its most reflective,the narra-

tive of historyis tethered o the nation-state,with "Europe" emaining he "sov-

ereign, theoreticalsubjectof all histories, includingthe ones we call 'Indian,'

'Chinese,' 'Kenyan,'and so on" (263). Doubtless Guha'sReader,which carries

articles romnearlyall membersof the originalcollective, canalsoreasonablybe

construedas taking up the storyfirstenumeratedn the earlieranthology,but this

intent s seriously compromisedby anerasureof the collective's own politics.No

narrativeof SubalternStudies could possibly be completewithoutan account of

the partialdismemberment f the collective, the cogent critiquesto which it hasbeen subjectedfrom diverse intellectual circles in India,andthe decomposition

of SubalternStudies into widely divergentstreams.



138 VINAYLAL

Nowhere in his introductiondoes Guha mention Sumit Sarkar,a founding

member of the collective and one of its most prolific and original voices, and

now one of the most vociferouscritics of SubalternStudies's enchantmentwith

postcolonial heory and postmodernism.Ever concernedwith the silences of elit-ist discourse, Guha would do well to ponderon the ominous mannerin which

Sumit Sarkarhas been excised fromthe memory of the collective, thoughSarkar

is, of course, well equipped o speak for himself. In WritingSocial History, a col-

lection of nine essays on Indianhistory and historiography,Sarkar urtherelab-

orateson his critique,the contours of which he set out in an articlein 1994,4 of

subalternhistory and, more broadly,historicalstudies in the Saidian mold. His

preface to the present collection sets the tone for the entire work, deploring the

"shift from social history to forms of cultural studies largely abstracted rom

'material'contexts, and the accompanying displacementof Marxism, whether

orthodox or revisionist, by a variety of postmodernistic(and postcolonial)

moods" (vii). ThoughSarkarholds no brieffor Orientalist cholarship,he argues

insistently and vigorously that historical worksinfluencedby Derrida,Foucault,

andparticularlyEdwardSaid, have inducedtheir own forms of homogenization

(viii, 17). He says of colonial educational policy, for instance, that it was not

"quitethe monolith. . .

that is sometimes assumednowadays"(249), and simi-larly disputes the assumption,which he claims informs the work of his former

colleagues in the collective, that Indianhistoriography ince the nineteenthcen-

turyhas invariablybeen nothingmorethan the historyof the nation-state 20).

Though Sarkar describes the two long essays on the nineteenth-century

Bengali social reformerIswar ChandraVidyasagarand his contemporary, he

mystic Sri Ramakrishna, s constitutingthe "core"of his book (viii), the other

essays, particularlyhe polemics againstlate subalternhistoryand the postmod-

ernturn,furnisha much betterclue to Sarkar'sown ideological dispositionsandthe theoreticalunderpinning f his recent work.It is only the slightest exaggera-

tionto suggestthat for Sarkar,he trajectoryof historicalreasoningonce took us

from Ranke to Marx, and from Marx it has now moved to Said, though this

marks a regressionrather hanprogression,especially since Said's mantrasare

said to have been uncriticallyadoptedby his followers (37). A newerpositivism

has replaced the older dogmas: where for Ranke the "fact"was everything,

Sarkar uggests thatfor the postmodernists deology alone is of consequence.If

Rankeanhistorywas little morethanpoliticalhistory,Sarkar inds the tendency,

in the writingsof ParthaChatterjee,Gyan Pandey,and Dipesh Chakrabarty,o

characterizeBengali (and more broadlyIndian) history writing as state-centric

similarlyreductionist. ndeed,Sarkarobservesthat Indianhistorianshad "a fair-

ly remarkableand precocious interestin social and cultural history"at a time

when the Rankean disposition had made such interests disreputablein the

Westernacademy (24, 31, 38). Most of all, Sarkar inds the Saidian-inspiredhis-

tories to be in agreementwith the earlierhistories in the Rankean or imperial

4. Sumit Sarkar,"OrientalismRevisited: Saidian Frameworks n the Writingof Modern Indian

History,"OxfordLiteraryReview 16 (1994), 205-224.



SUBALTERNSTUDIESAND ITS CRITICS 139

mold in their insistence on the decisive rupturecreated by colonial rule: where

imperialhistories were prone to view colonialism as having broughtcivilization

to the natives and so fundamentallyalteredthe old order,postcolonialdiscourse

characterizes olonialism as the impositionof a Westernpower-knowledgenexusupon a society that knew little of exploitation and oppression (105). According

to Sarkar, mperialandpostcolonial histories are equally beholden to the opposi-

tions of East and West, spiritualand material,and the like (95-97).

To understandwhat kind of history Sarkar inds salutary,progressive,and a

credit to the historian, one can do no better than turn to his two essays on the

"Decline of the Subaltern" ndE. P.Thompson. Sarkar'saccount of the birthof

SubalternStudies, in which he played a not inconsiderable ole, stressesthe fact

thatthe membersof thecollective, while criticalof "orthodoxMarxist heoryand

practice," till retaineda socialist and Marxistoutlook (83). The histories of var-

ious subalterngroups, and their modes of resistance, were central to the early

work of the collective, but by the late 1980s, as the work of Foucaultand Said

started o become hegemonic, and the Soviet Union showedsigns of fragmenta-

tion, Marxismcame increasingly underassault and was dismissed not only as

irrelevantbut as a species of Eurocentrism."Radical, eft-wing histories"were

replacedby "cultural tudiesand critiquesof colonial discourse"; esistance wasconstruedas being ineffective against the totalizing power of the colonial state;

the colonized subjects were seen as capable of producing only "derivativedis-

courses";and the "dialecticalsearchfor contradictionswithinstructures,"which

Sarkardescribes as centralto Marxistanalysis,was abjured or a "unitaryvision

of the modernbureaucratic tate as the sole source of oppression"(5, 84, 90).

Sarkarargues that E. P. Thompson,mindful of the difficulties in conventional

Marxistanalyses of "class,"hadarrivedat such seemingly paradoxical ormula-

tions as "class struggle without class"; and similarly SubalternStudies hadeschewed a rigid economistic class analysis, signified to some extent by its

deployment of the term "subaltern."Yet, Sarkarcontends, a shift occurredin

SubalternStudies,which he attributes o the influence of ParthaChatterjee and

Ashis Nandy outside the collective), from "subaltern"o "community,"uch that

"late SubalternStudies" came to embody little more than a "vague nostalgia"

which identified he authenticwiththe indigenous,and located both"in thepasts

of anever-recedingcommunity,or a presentthat can consist of fragmentsalone"

(108, cf. also 42, 91, 98-101).

Whathampers rue historicalwork, which is attentiveto "context" ather han

the "fragmentary,"s the postmodernist's fetish for the "fragment"and the

nativist's hankeringfor an idealized past (45).5 Thus one of Sarkar'sfavorite

wordsof abuse, though he is scarcely singular n this respect, is "romantic":n

essence, Sarkarviews Nandy,his formercolleagues in the collective, and a great

manyothers who have purportedly allen for the view thatprecolonialcommu-

5. Sarkar's re, with respect to the postmodernistemphasison "fragments," alls on GyanendraPandey, "In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today,"

Representations,no. 37 (Winter 1992), 27-55, as well as ParthaChatteijee, The Nation and Its

Fragments:Colonialand Post-ColonialHistories (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994).



140 VINAYLAL

nities knew nothing of power relations,certainly nothingof communalconflict,

binarythinking,and the kind of witch hunts thatcharacterizeEuropeanhistory,

as guilty of romanticizing he past (for example, 60, 220, 251). Valorizationsof

"indigenouscommunityvalues" are, Sarkar asserts, inattentiveto precolonialhierarchiesand forms of oppression,andto the historiesof subordinated roups,

suchas women, the lowercastes, and peasants 43). Againstall this"culturalism"

Sarkaropposes the work of E. P. Thompson,noting that "manyof the moves

awayfrom 'Thompsonian' ocial historyhave been simplisticand retrogressive"

(51). Thompson'swritings come across in Sarkar'sessay as exemplarydemon-

strationsof the power of historical analysis:cultureis "neverabstracted rom

materialconditions,or from relationshipsof power"(54), and the contrastwith

Saidis establishedby consideringhow Thompson, or instancein his analysisofthe idea of the "ruleof law,"was able to show the manner n which it was simul-

taneouslyaninstrument f therulingclass andopento "occasionalappropriation

by subordinated roups" 59).

Doubtless,some of Sarkar's riticismsare not withoutmerit,buthe is scarcely

the firsthistorianor critic to have remarked n the unease of culturalstudies,par-

ticularlyin its Americanvariant,with considerationsof class and yet broader

questionsof politicaleconomy.The observation hat muchof ParthaChatterjee's

work endsup becominga set of reflectionson various "great"men, thus harking

back to nineteenth-century oliticalhistories, s one from whichotherIndianhis-

torianshave also derivedmuch satisfaction.6Sarkaradvertsto matters hat have

been debatedendlessly in the Americanacademy,and on occasion one gets the

distinct mpression hathe simplytransplantshese debatesonto theIndianscene.

As I shall suggest later,Sarkareschews what could have been a far more sub-

stantivecritiqueof lateSubalternStudiesandcolonial discourseanalysisfor some

largelyhackneyedobservationsmade familiarby the "culturewars"and, to use

his own words, a rather"romantic" nd "nostalgic"homage to Marxism.In so

doing, he points the way to his own blind spots. Thus he describeshimself as

"troubled" y E. P.Thompson'srelative silence on matterspertaining o gender,

butThompson's nexcusable ndifference o Britain'sempire n virtuallyall of his

writing,all the while that he was devotinghimself to studies of subordinated le-

mentsin Britishsociety, is shruggedoff with the remark hat "Hobsbawmapart,

the greatmastersof British Marxianhistoriography ave admittedlywritten ittle

on Empire" 65). Apparently he offense becomes less a matterof concern whenotherMarxisthistorians an be describedas guiltyin a similarvein. Sarkarmakes

no attempt, houghhe could have takena lesson or two fromGauriViswanathan's

explorationof the samelacuna n the workof RaymondWilliams,' to understand

whatThompson'sindifferenceto considerationsof imperialismmight mean for

anyassessmentof his work.8Likewise,he constantlyderidesthe argumentwhich

6. See, for example, RamachandraGuha, "Subalternand BhadralokStudies," Economic and

Political Weekly 0 (19 August 1995), 2056-2058.

7. GauriViswanathan,"RaymondWilliamsandBritishColonialism,"YaleJournal of Criticism4,

no. 2 (1991), 47-66.

8. A similar shortcoming s encountered n the anthologyedited by Harvey J. Kaye and Keith

McClelland,E. P. Thonmpson:riticalPerspectives(Philadelphia:TempleUniversity Press, 1990).




points to Thompson's and Marxism'sEurocentrism,but makes no attemptto

engagewith it, presumablyon the grounds hatMarxismnow constitutes heuni-

versal legacy of humankind.Marx's contemporarieswere indifferent to India,

when they were not contemptuousof it, but Marxwent far beyondthem in hisassessment of India's "idyllic village communities" as having "restrained he

humanmind within the smallestcompass"9: e had a theoryof history, ronclad n

his view, which accounted for India's deplorablestate. Thus Marx opined that

"whatevermay have been the crimesof England"-why "whatever," s if there

was anydoubt of the atrocitiesperpetrated y theBritish?-"she was the uncon-

scious tool of historyin bringingaboutthatrevolution"which was destinedto

overthrow he "solid foundation"of Indiandespotism.'0Sarkar'suniversalisms,

strikingly,are invariably derived from the modern West, and one has the

inescapable eeling thathe thinks of England'swork in India as yet unfinished.

ThatMarxisthistorieshave been entirelycomplicitwith the agendas of develop-

ment andmodernization,which havehadnone-too-happy onsequencesformost

Indians, s an issue that Sarkar ails to address,unforgivablyso consideringhis

professed nterest n the emancipationof the subaltern lasses.

Historianswho were always inclinedto view SubalternStudies as a pompous

anddressed-upversionof "history rombelow" will delightin Sarkar'sobserva-tion thatE. P.Thompsonclearly suffices as the exemplarof conscientious histo-

ry.Sarkar s scarcelyrequired o be an astuteobserverof theAmericanacademy,

butconsideringthe intensely polemicalnatureof manyof his observations, t is

surprising hathe seems to be unawarehow farmanyhistorianswere eagerthat

an Indianschool of history should not be allowed to take center stage in con-

temporaryhistoricalstudies."ThoughSarkarderidesthe subalternhistorians or

theirreadyembraceof postmodernandpostcolonialfashions,it is a considerable

ironythat his own brandof critiquehas now become almost de rigueurfor his-torians who wish to see themselves as grounded n somethingmore thanwhat

one historianof premodern ndia,RichardEaton,describes as the "amorphous,

obscurantist" ield of "cultural tudies."'2Sarkar'sbook mightappear o convey

the impression hathe is the "LoneRanger"of modernIndianhistory,butin fact

he is joined by manyAmerican historiansof India-Robert Frykenberg,Lynn

Zastoupil,EugeneIrschik,andDane Kennedy,amongothersl3-who character-

ize Said's intellectualframeworkas totalizing, supposedlywithout the aware-

9. KarlMarx,"The BritishRule in India," n Karl Marxand FriedrichEngels, TheFirst Indian

Warof Independence1857-1859 (Moscow:ForeignLanguagesPublishingHouse, 1958), 20.

10. Ibid.

11. It is instructive hattheAmericanHistoricalReview,whichnot incorrectlycan be describedas

the flagshipof the professionin the UnitedStates,devoted the greaterpartof one of its recentissues

(December1994) to subaltern tudies and its increasing nfluence,for examplein the LatinAmerican

andAfricanfields.

12. RichardEaton, "(Re)imag(in)ingOtherness:A Postmortemfor the Postmodern in India,"

Journalof WorldHistory 11 (Spring2000), 60.

13. Robert E. Frykenberg, History and Belief: The Foundations of Historical Understanding(GrandRapids, Michigan:William B. EerdmansPublishingCo., 1996), 287-303; Dane Kennedy,

"ImperialHistory andPost-Colonial Theory,"Journal of Imperialand CommonwealthHistory 24

(1996), 355-356; LynnZastoupil,John StuartMill and India (Stanford:StanfordUniversity Press,



142 VINAY LAL

ness, whichby contrastSarkaralwaysfindspresent n E. P.Thompson,that con-

trol and dominationwere never absolute, and that everywhere communities

offered resistance to regimes of power by strategicand imaginativeinterpreta-

tions of local traditionsandcustoms(58).Certainly, udging from Achin Vanaik's TheFuries of Indian Communalism,

Sarkarhas found a numberof soulmates who are disenchantedwith the post-

modemandspecificallypostcolonialturnof late SubalternStudies.Vanaik'scan-

vas extends beyondrecent Indianhistoryandscholarly writingson religionand

communalism o an examinationof the political contexts behind the resurgence

of militantHinduism.The concluding chapter, or instance,describesthe "com-

munalizationof the Indianpolity"(296-360), which Vanaikattributeso the dis-

appearanceof the "Nehruvian consensus" (301), the decline of the centrist

Congress party,and the inabilityof anysecularpoliticalformation o fill the vac-

uum. JawaharlalNehru embracedthe four principlesof "socialism,democracy,

secularism,and non-alignment," ll of which suffereda precipitousdeclinein the

last two decades;in a longerlist of "specific internalreasons"for the demise of

the Nehruvianconsensus,Vanaikmentions a greatmanyotherpoliticalandeco-

nomic developments,such as the growth of an indigenous industrialelite that

looked for greatercollaborationwith foreign capital,the rise of a "criminalizedlumpenized business class linked to the black economy," the advent of an

increasinglyconsumeristmiddle class, the emergenceof regionalpolitical for-

mations, and so on (301-302). It is striking, though there shall be occasion to

reflect furtheron this, thatnothingof "culture"or "religion"-such as an intel-

lectual and culturaldisenchantmentwith secularism,or a widely held view that

the effects of developmenthave notonly been vastlyuneven,but havebeen such

as to put into seriousjeopardya diverse arrayof local culturaltraditionsfinds

a place in Vanaik'sanalysis,and thatultimatelyVanaik'sunderstanding f mod-ernIndianhistoryremainsthat of the conventionalpoliticalscientistwho knows

little of politics beyond political parties,electoral alignments,vote banks, and

center-staterelations.True,elsewhere in the book Vanaikstraysinto apparently

morecomplexquestions,andanentirechapter s devotedto the questionof how

far, if at all, "Hindu communalism"can be viewed as a species of fascism.

Vanaik s right in pointingto the immense historicaland theoreticaldifficulties

in accommodatingmilitantHinduismunder the rubricof fascism, but no one

otherthanorthodoxIndianMarxists ever attachedmuchcredence to fascism as

an explanatoryparadigm or Indiancommunalism.Thuswhat is really an inter-

1994); andEugeneIrschik, Dialogue and Histori: ConstructingSouthIndia, 1795-1895 (Berkeley:

Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1994). This brief andby no meanscomplete list obviously excludes

the so-calledCambridge chool historiansof Indiaand theirsupporters.The pointhere is to establish

how even Americanhistoriansof India,who in a mannerof speaking mightbe viewed as observing

a certainneutralitybetween the two opposed paradigmsof the Cambridgeand SubalternSchools,

have in recentyears joined in the assault on Said. Theircritiques,however,do not have the sophisti-

cation of AijazAhmad'sobservationson Said: "Orientalism ndAfter:AmbivalenceandCosmpolitanLocation in the Work of EdwardSaid,"Economicand Political Weekly37, no. 30 (25 July 1992),

Sectionon PoliticalEconomy, 98-116, reprintedn In Theoty:Nations, Classes, Literatures London:

Verso, 1992).




nal, quaint, and strikingly rrelevantdebate in Indian Marxistcircles is elevated

to a subject of immense importance.

As with Sarkar,one cannot doubt Vanaik'sprofoundattachmento the idea of

secularism,or the sinceritywith which he defendsthe Indian attempt o forge a

secularstatein the two to threedecadesfollowing independence.Whilehis attack

on Hindu communalism s entirely audable,Vanaikhas no patiencefor the view

that not every critiqueof Hindu communalismmust emanate rom the standpoint

of secularism.Since his readingsof historyare much less nuancedthan those of

Sarkar,his intolerance or critiquesof secularism s all the more extreme,andhe

adopts the elementaryview that those who critique secularismare by default

friendsof communalism.Thus,in his accountAshis Nandyand many of the his-

toriansof late SubalternStudies are explicitly equatedwith those who have a

"crude onstructof Hindutva," houghhe concedesthat he "arguments f the pro-

ponentsof anti-secularismand anti-modernismare often highly sophisticated"

(12). Thepersuasivenessof their ideasis enhanced,Vanaikarguesalongthe lines

of Sarkar, in a milieumarkedby thedecline of Marxist ntellectual nfluence, he

rise of post-modernist hinking and the currentdilemmas of liberal modernism"

(12), and insistentlyVanaikrefers to the pernicious nfluenceof "post-modernist

and anti-modernist trandsof thinking" for example, 4, 17, 107).Much of the immense debate on what "postmodernism"s is lost on Vanaik,

nor does he recognize thatthe more astutecritics speak of postmodernismsn the

plural.Nowhere in the book does he show any understanding f postmodernism,

beyond observations aboutpostmodernism'scritiqueof Enlightenmentnotions

of rationalityand its decenteringof masternarratives,but this is not surprising

considering that he fails even to recognize the distinction between poststruc-

turalism-which furnishes epistemologies to contest the received ideas about

representation,objectivity,and the subjects of history-and postmodernism-

which makesontologicalclaims about the radically changednatureof realityin

the modern world. Vanaik'slumping together of "postmodernist"with "anti-

modernist"strandsof thinking betokens a failure both of imaginationand the

analytical faculty: thus Gandhi, Nandy, ParthaChatterjee,Edward Said, and

present-dayHindutva deologues, whose predecessors oathedGandhiand, in a

manner of speaking, engineeredhis assassination,are all described as molded

from the sameclay.To be logically consistent,Vanaikshouldhave addedto that

list of villains the large number of secular, modernizingIndians of the middle

class who, in common with rank Hindu communalists, secretly rejoiced in

Gandhi's assassination. The old man had doubtless done some good, but his

relentless critique of modern civilization, industrialization,and technicism,

indeed the nation-state system, was an impediment to India's progress and

advancementas a nation-state.

A similar kind of instrumentalismnforms Vanaik'sunderstanding f history,

or how else canwe understandhis descriptionof Chinaas anexampleof a coun-try that underwent a "successful socialist revolution" (31)? If China's literacy

rateis betterthan thatof India,and a greaternumberof its peoplehave been lift-



144 VINAYLAL

ed out of destitution,as indeed they have, then we have the criteria or success.

Never mind thatin the "GreatLeap Forward,"not less thantwenty-fivemillion

people were sacrificed n the name of China's modernizationanddevelopment,

and that the reductionof China'spopulationgrowthratehas come at theexpense

of the female child. In the name of progress,as Marxhimself assuredus, some

atrocitiescan be tolerated: o long as a certain heoryof history s held upas invi-

olable, particularhistories are of little consequence.

The limitationsof Vanaik'scritique of SubalternStudies and other strandsof

recent Indian critical writing become even more apparentupon a closer exami-

nation of a few specific arguments hat firstemerge in chapter hreeandreceive

theirdeveloped treatmentn chapter our,which accountsfor nearlya thirdof the

book and sustainsa relentless assaulton Vanaik's ntellectualadversaries.Vanaik

dismisses out of hand notions of Indian "civilization"or even Indian"culture";

accordingto him, one can speak only of civilizations in India (131), or of a cul-

tural space or zone in India (135). From there he proceedsto the argument hat

there neverwas any real "composite culture" n India, and thus to the rejection

of the idea thatthere was a substantial ynthesis of IslamandHinduism,or that

the Indianpast can be describedas syncretic,pluralistic,andtolerant.On theone

hand, he argues that if at all there was a "cultural ynthesis," t was at the levelof elites (136); on the otherhand, the mere existence of variousreligions side by

side is representedas akin to the pluralism of plant life, since pluralism n this

instancecan scarcely be viewed as a form of tolerance 114). (Had Vanaikknown

more of biology, he might have understoodthat within an ecosystem not all

plantsfareequally well: the banyan tree does not let anythingelse grow under-

neath it, and many plants crowd out other species. Thus the observation that

"plant ife is plural" s not wholly intelligible.) Indeed, like all the othergood

things of life, "pluralism"and "tolerance"are construed as specifically Euro-

pean-and moreparticularlyEnlightenment-virtues, since they emerged"after

the rise of individualism and individualrights"(113). It is no secret that all

Europeannarrativeswere agreed,until the recentcritiquesof colonial discourse

began to emerge, that the individual in India never existed as such; indeed, the

individual n Indiais still presumednot to exist. But all the attendantproblems

of following this argument o its logical conclusionareignoredby Vanaik;nor is

it any less a problemthat the same EnlightenmentEuropewhich Vanaikdeems

to be the lodestar of humanhistory originatedthe most pernicioustheories of

racialsuperiority,he civilizing mission, and so on. Vanaik'sanswer to the "anti-

modernists"s thateven the categories they presumeto resurrect romthe hoary

Indianpast,such as pluralismandtolerance,were in fact bornin modernity,and

thatconsequentlytheir critiquesof modernityare mere posturings.To believe

otherwise,he says aproposof the workof ParthaChatterjee,s to "slide into cul-

turalismandthrough t towardseven greatersympathy or indigenism" 187).

Vanaikcontends that Hinduismgenerateda "mystiqueof tolerance"; urther,it is this mystificationwhich allows Ashis Nandy, ParthaChatterjee,and some

other influentialantimodernists o critiquethe received version of secularism,




which calls for the separationof religion and state, by incorrectlypostulatingan

Indianvariantof secularism hat rests upon the idea of religious tolerance (145).

He supposes that one can point to the obvious intolerance mplied by the caste

system to infer that a similar intoleranceexisted in the religious domain (146),which amountsto saying, in the moderncontext, that a racist must perforcebe a

sexist and areligious bigot. Much of the purported istoricalsegment of Vanaik's

book proceeds on the basis of inference: thus, the extremely long, varied, and

complicated history, extending to several hundred years, of Hinduism's reach

outwardsto SoutheastAsia is dismissed with the observation that "there s no

way, for example, that Hinduismcould have spread o SoutheastAsia to become

as influentialas it did for centurieswithout such conversion" 147). Not a single

piece of evidence is furnishedby way of substantiating his claim; ina book with

seventyto eighty pages of notes,Vanaikcannotsparea single citationin defense

of this claim. Since Vanaikknows thatreligions often gain adherentsby conver-

sion, and that Islam did so in India, he presumes that this must be true for

Hinduism. Again, he avers that "Brahminismand many a 'Hindu sect' have

engaged in conversion" (147), but this declaration s likewise issued as a fiat.

Vanaiksays of Hindus that "thewill to convert existed" butthey wereprevented

from doing so by"Hindu

social arrangements": ow he donsthe mantle

of omni-science, while pretendingthat the possible relationshipbetween these social

arrangementsand the absence of conversion would be merely a sociological

rather han religious phenomenon.One suspects that many Hindus would point

to Vanaik'seagernessto out-Muslimthe Muslimandso deflateargumentsabout

the exceptionalismof Islamas a characteristic estureof the tolerantHindu!

To state that Vanaik'sbook is disappointing s an understatement.Curiously,

and ominously,Vanaikends up embracingnearly every argument oundin com-

munalisthistories.Thus,in his view the historyof Indiacan only be writtenas ahistoryof the dominationof religionover otherspheresof life, and as the history

of the separationof religions.Vanaikasks for the strictseparationof churchand

state,andso does the communalist n his own fashion:recall the oft-voiced alle-

gation by Hindutvavadis hat secularistsin India have seldom been better than

"pseudo-secularists,"ndthat secularists ike Vanaikdo notchampiona common

civil code for every Indian.The communalist,while professingto be dismissive

of Westernculture, s sworn to modernity,as is the Indiansecularist, houghthis

is often done so with the predictableprovisothatmodernityhas its own trajecto-

ry in India(12). Vanaik'sattitude owardsWesternsocial science is, in the fash-

ion of the communalist,at once cavalier and reverential:Durkheim,Charles

Taylor,Weber,and Giddens areall paradedn turn,as thoughthey were modern-

day Ganeshas who had to be invoked before the intellectual exercise could be

launched,but whenevidence is really requiredVanaik's ommandof historymost

obviouslyfails him.'4Vanaik'sobviousbelief in theefficacyof Western ocial sci-

14. Ganesh is the God of Learning,as well as the harbingerof auspiciousness;he is also invoked

at the commencementof culturalandacademicenterprises.He is often shown in popularprintsas a

learnedscribe,with a book andpen in one of his hands.



146 VINAYLAL

ence has more thana touchof comedy:if physicalanthropology an finda safe

refuge in India,there is no reason to supposethat he is not that perfect specimen

about whom Macaulayhad expressed greathope in 1835, when he asked for a

class of Indianswho would be English in taste, intellect, and feeling, indeed ineverythingbut blood.'5

Setting out to demolishwhathe calls the "Mythof Cultural ntegration" 89),

Vanaikbetrays what mightbe describedas one of the centraldifficulties of the

Marxistcritiqueof late SubalternStudies, namely-as shall presentlybe seen-

its inability to contendwith myth,and its positivistendorsementof a sharpdis-

tinctionbetween "history"and "myth."Peter Heehs, in his short collection of

essays entitledNationalism, Terrorism,Communalism,s moresensitive to these

considerations, hough unfortunatelymuch the greaterpartof his book is a futile

exercise in attemptingto establish that the attainmentof Indianindependence

was as much an achievement of the "revolutionary"movement as it was of

Gandhiannonviolence. The first four essays offer little more thana connected

narrativeof the activities of AurobindoGhose [laterSriAurobindo]and his fel-

low Bengali "extremists,""terrorists," r self-proclaimedrevolutionaries n the

firsttwo to threedecades of thetwentiethcentury.Heehs claims thatfartoo much

attentionhas been lavishedon what he erroneouslydescribes as Gandhian"pas-sive resistance," hat the revolutionarieshave not been given theirdue, andthat

Bengali terrorists,despite some acquaintancewith terroristandanarchistmove-

ments in Europe, were essentially home-grownproducts.He considerablyexag-

gerates the neglect from which these "terrorists" urportedly uffer,and cannot

be unaware hata large hagiographic iteraturehas developed around he figures

who presentedarmed resistanceto British rule in India. Once in a while Heehs

offersanempiricalfindingof considerablevalue, suchas his observation hatthe

revolutionariesmade inflatedassessmentsaboutthe membership n their secretorganizations 23), or that the revolutionarygroupswere singularlyunsuccessful

in their attempts to assassinateEuropeanofficials (30), but he neither pursues

these observationsnor finds any irony in the fact thatmost of the bomb-throw-

ers moreoftenhurtthemselves, usuallywhile puttingtogetherbombsfromman-

uals, thanthe Britishofficials whom they so much loathed.Theirpatriotism,as

Gandhihimself conceded, was scarcely in question,but they knew little of the

ways of warfareor guerrillaactivity,and a gun in the hand of a Bengali was as

much of ananomalyas vegetarianismmightbe in the life of aTexancattleranch-

er. Indianrevolutionaryactivitywas somethingof a sadlycomical affair,a paro-

dy of masculinizingnationalism.Heehs foregoes the more pertinentquestions:

for instance, why accept the designation of "revolutionaries" or rebels who

clearly acceptedthe Europeannarrativeof Bengali effeminacyandattempted o

create a mystiqueof hyper-masculinityaroundthemselves?What, exactly, was

so transformativen the thoughtor practicesof Indian"terrorists"?

15. ThomasBabingtonMacaulay,"Minuteon IndianEducation" 1835], in Selected Writings, d.

withintroduction y JohnCliveandThomasPinney (Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress, 1972), 249.



SUBALTERNSTUDIESAND ITS CRITICS 147

However, as various scatteredremarksand the last two chaptersof the book

suggest, Heehs is attuned to developments in Indianhistory, the debates sur-

roundingSubalternStudies, and the politics of Indian historiography.His tone,

unlike that of Sarkar and Vanaik, is never polemical, and the careless readermight overlook his softly stated but nevertheless firm critique of Sumit Sarkar,

whose work he equateswith that of colonial administrators.As Heehs avers, the

views of IndianMarxist academics show a remarkable onvergencewith those

held by colonial writers,who were similarlyunited in theircondemnationof "the

mixture of religion and politics" they found in such Indian nationalists as

BipinchandraPal, Aurobindo,and laterGandhi 104). There is a widespreadand

largely unexamined presumption, Heehs remarks, that "religious nationalism

leads to communalism"(105). He takes the argument one step furtherstill:

Sarkar,Vanaik, and other secular Indian intellectuals indubitably have an

immensedifficulty n accepting religiousfaith as a valid category of knowledge.

Heehs could have noted that this problemis encountered n SubalternStudies

from the very outset,but SubalternStudiesdoes not bear the burdenof his cri-

tique of left-wing writingin India.

Though Heehs's workdoes not take us very far in developing an explicit cri-

tiqueof SubalternStudies,thereare intimationsof a critiquethatwould take usbeyond the Marxist orthodoxies of SarkarandVanaik.On the questionof cate-

gories of knowledge, one wonders why the historians and scholars of the

Subaltern Studies collective, whether in the early 1980s or at the present

moment,still evidently view India as the place that furnishesthe raw data,and

Europeas the site of "theory"?They are atease withthe theoretical ormulations

of Althusser, Derrida, Lyotard, Barthes, Jakobson,and Foucault, but the day

when they mightderive some of the philosophicalunderpinningsor theirargu-

ments from Indianlogic or the literatureof the puranasseems extraordinarilyremote.They have deployedFoucaultin much of theirwork,andthough queer

studies has now marked ts arrival n Indianstudies,'6 t is doubtful n the extreme

thatany Indianhistorian,whetherof the SubalternSchool or any otherpersua-

sion, would thinkof using a Gandhianpolitics of the body,or the complex his-

tory of Indian eunuchs,'7 to interpretFoucault's History of Sexuality. India

remains,regrettably,he empty field on which the fertile Europeanmind sets to

do its work.This limitation is common to Sarkarand his former friends in the

SubalternStudiescollective.

Heehs offers the useful suggestionthat the debate on communalismhas been

dominatedby "rivalhistoricalschools"and thatfarmoreinsightwouldbe gained

if the historianswere attentive o the work of culturalpsychologists, anthropolo-

gists, andother social scientists (124, 134). But it is his observationson "histo-

ry"and"myth"which alert us to one of SubalternStudies'greatestfailings.As

he rightfullyremarks,"mythandhistoryareoften consideredantitheticalmodes

16. See, for example,PaolaBacchetta,"Whenthe (Hindu)NationExiles Its Queers,"Social Text,no. 61 (Winter1999), 141-166.

17. Vinay Lal, "Not This, Not That: The Hijras of India and the CulturalPolitics of Sexuality,"

Social Text,no. 61 (Winter 1999), 119-140.



148 VINAYLAL

of explanation,"and "myth" o most historiansmeans little else except what is

evidentlyfalse (142). The separationof myth and history was alreadypresent n

an incipient form in Thucydides and classical Greek thought, but it is the

Enlightenmentwhich not only pushed the distinctionbetween mythos and logos

to its extreme, but which construed history as the factual (and hence "true")

account of the past of a people, or more specifically those people who could beconceived as the proper subjects of a proper nation-state.Myth had to be ban-

ished from the account of "what really happened"; t was. History came to be

tethered o thenation-state,andas the nation-statebecame theonly form of polit-

ical community which people could imagine for themselves, the ascendancy of

history as one of the preeminentdiscourses of modernitywas assured.

The points, if they had to be encapsulatedprovocatively as cryptic formula-

tions, are quite simply the following: Indiadid at one point makea civilization-

al choice of forsakingdiscoursesof history,and it has lived comfortablywith thatchoice until very recently. All attempts, whether inspired by nationalism,

Marxism, or the desire to argue that Indian modernity s predicatedon different

trajectories,o furnish India with historical narrativesof its own kind arepoint-

ers to the increasingencroachmentof history uponthe fundamentaland deliber-

ate ahistoricityof the Indiansensibility,as well as to the secularandmoderniz-

ing Indian's unease with those peripheral-but numericallypreponderant-sec-

torsof Indiansociety who resolutely fail, indeedrefuse,to speakin the language

of history.History,which has ever satisfied ts advocateswith thecliched thought

that it banishes that amnesia which would otherwise be the source of oppression,

is itself predicatedon two forms of amnesia.As I have argued,history set itself

the mandateof railroadingpeople into acceptanceof the nation-stateas the ful-

fillmentof humandestiny,as the natural, nevitable,andmost desirable formof

political collectivity. Doubtless, the nation-statehas come in for more than its

shareof incisive criticismby Subalternhistoriansandothers,butno pastorpres-

ent member of the collective has dared to resurrect he civilizational discoursesby means of which alone the worldviews of Indianscan be comprehendedand

respected as "subalternist" iscourses.Second, history has, so to speak,occlud-

ed its own history,madeus unawarethat it was at one pointfatheredandmoth-

eredby myth, andthatmyth remains, especially in large partsof the world that

are not yet overdeveloped,one of the numerousmodalitiesby means of which

thepast is often accessed,anda future s imaginedwhich is not merelythepres-

ent of the West. Subalternhistory,whetherof the Marxist,postcolonial,or post-

modernvariety,has not even begun to broach these questions,andperhapsthatis the direction owardswhich it should move if it reallywantsto claim the man-

tle evoked by its name.

VINAY LAL

Universityof California,LosAngeles

Documents

Debate Over Indian History