We would like to Ihank Ajay Skaria, Crispin Bates, Saurabh Dube. David Ludden, Fred Reid, and Burt Stein for their reading and comments on this paper.

¹ Prakash, Gyan, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32:2 (04 1990), 383—408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² Ibid., 390.

³ Ibid., 397.

⁴ Ibid., 399.

⁵ Ibid., 398.

⁶ Ibid., 401.

⁷ Ibid., 404.

⁸ Ibid., 406.

⁹ Ibid., 400.

¹⁰ Ibid., 404–5.

¹¹ Ibid., 405.

¹² Searle, John. “The Word Turned Upside Down,” New York Review of Books (27 10 1983), 78.Google Scholar A good introduction to this debate is in Habermas, Jurgen, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 194–9.Google Scholar Ajay Skaria kindly provided this reference.

¹³ Prakash's notion of what constitutes Marxist history is problematic, for neither of the two examples which he provides fall easily into the category. The first, concerning Bengali histories of the Bengali renaissance would seem most influenced by Bengali nationalist ideology, as it is not clear why Bengal's failure to generate a secular rationalist culture and a bourgeois social order prior to the development of industrial capitalism is a problem for Marxism. The second, concerning usage of Andre Gunder Frank's concept of underdevelopment, also ill fits the category, for the concept derives from neo-Smithian rather than Marxist economic theory: see Brenner, R., “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review, 104:4 (1977), 25–92.Google Scholar

¹⁴ See, for example, Aston, T.H. and Philpin, C.H.E., eds., The Brenner Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985);CrossRefGoogle Scholar T. J. Byres and Harbans Mukhia, eds., “Feudalism and Non-European Societies,” Journal of Peasant Studies (Special Issue), 12:2, 3 (01, 04 1985).Google Scholar

¹⁵ For these arguments in Bayly, see The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad 1880–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975);Google ScholarRulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar and Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).Google Scholar For a general guide to recent research in this field, see Washbrook, D.A., “Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c. 1720–1860,” Modern Asian Studies, 22:1 (1988), 57–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁶ These arguments are developed in Bayly, C.A., Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and The World 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories,” 398.

¹⁸ Ibem.

¹⁹ See, for example, Cohn's, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” in Guha, R., ed., Subaltern Studies IV (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 279–80.Google Scholar

²⁰ See especially Nandy, Ashis, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

²¹ Guha, Ranajit, Subaltern Studies I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 7.Google Scholar

²² Guha's latest contribution to Subaltern Studies, “Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography,” distinguishes between a British and a precolonial Indian form of political authority, the latter organized around principles of Brahmanic and kingly authority. He concludes by describing his argument as “a critique of our own approach to the Indian past and our own performance in writing about it,” designed to “assist in the self-criticism of our own historiography— the historiography of a colonized people” (Guha's, emphasis; Subaltern Studies IV [Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989], 306–7Google Scholar).

²³ In this case, the royal and dominant Kallar caste in Pudukottai. See Dirks, Nicholas B., The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

²⁴ Searle, “The World Turned Upside Down,” 7 8 – 9.

²⁵ Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 125;Google ScholarJameson, Fredric, “Marxism and Postmodernism,” New Left Review, no. 176 (1989), 34–9Google Scholar

²⁶ Jameson, Fredric, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 146 (1984), 57.Google Scholar

²⁷ Jameson, “Marxism and Postmodernism,” 34.

²⁸ Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories,” 406.

²⁹ On the issue of sati in India, for example, compare Nandy, Ashis, At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), 1–31,Google Scholar with Jain, Sharada, Misra, Nirja, and Shrivastava, Kavita, “Deorala Episode: Women's Protest in Rajasthan,” Economic and Political Weekly, nos. 7, 11 (1987), 1891–4.Google Scholar See also the very interesting discussion of Nandy's position on the Roop Kanwar case in Mani, Lata, “Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception,” Inscriptions, no. 5 (1989), 15–16.Google Scholar

³⁰ Said, Edward, The World, The Text and The Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 245.Google Scholar

³¹ The wider and deeply conservative implications of post-Nietzschean projects for emancipation outside any framework of instrumental reason are discussed in Habermas's, Jurgen classic article, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique, 22 (Winter 1981).Google Scholar

³² Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories,” 402–3.

³³ This question of how we might conceptualise the presence of the subaltern is discussed further and with different emphases in O'Hanlon, R., “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies, 22:1 (1988), 218.Google Scholar

³⁴ For these arguments in Jameson and Huyssen, see Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” especially pp. 64–71; and Huyssen, Andreas, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 1988).Google Scholar

³⁵ Riley, Denise, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘Women' in History (London: Macmillan, 1988), 112–4.Google Scholar

³⁶ Hutcheon, Linda, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 39CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 167–8.

³⁷ JanMohamed, Abdul R. and Lloyd, David, “Introduction: Minority Discourse—What is Be Done?,” Cultural Critique, Fall (1987), 12.Google Scholar

³⁷ Ibid., 15.

³⁹ Ibid., 16.

⁴⁰ Said, Edward, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” in Barker, Francis et al. , eds., Literature, Politics and Theory (London: Methuen, 1986), 223.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Ibid., 229.

⁴² Said, The World. 29.

⁴³ Ibid., 30.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 222.

⁴⁵ Said, , Orientalism (London: Peregrine Books, 1985), 23.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ See the interview with Said in Salusinszky, Imre, Criticism in Society (London: Methuen. 1987), 137.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” 228.

⁴⁸ Ibem.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 229.

⁵⁰ This short article appeared in the Observer newspaper (26 February 1989, 14).

⁵¹ Useful introductions to this literature are Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism; and Kellner, D., ed., Postmodernism, Jameson, Critique (Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1989).Google Scholar

⁵² Clifford, James and Marcus, George E., eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986);Google ScholarClifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

⁵³ Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 271.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 263.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 214. For a good summary of the arguments about culture as collectively constituted, see Keesing, Roger M., “Anthropology as Interpretative Quest,” Current Anthropology, 28:2 (04 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁶ Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 17.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 274.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 41.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 51.

⁶⁰ Ibem.

⁶¹ Ibid., 49.

⁶² Ibid., 51.

⁶³ Ibid., 52.

⁶⁴ Historians have documented this process across a range of fields. See, for example, Mani, L., “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” Cultural Critique, Fall (1987);CrossRefGoogle ScholarWashbrook, D., “Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies, 15:3 1981;CrossRefGoogle ScholarO'Hanlon, R., “Cultures of Rule, Communities of Resistance: Gender, Discourse and Tradition in Recent South Asian Historiographies,” Social Analysis, no. 25 (09 1989);Google Scholar C. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, 136–68; Dirks, N., “The Invention of Caste: Civil Society in Colonial India,” Social Analysis, no. 5 (09 1989);Google ScholarCarroll, Lucy, “Law, Custom and Statutary Social Reform: The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 20:4 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶⁵ Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 49.

⁶⁶ Scholte, Bob, “The Literary Turn in Contemporary Anthropology,” Critique of Anthropology, 7:1, 38.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Geertz, Clifford, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 144.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Ibid., 140.

⁶⁹ Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 212; Said, The World. 3–5.

⁷⁰ Rabinow, Paul, “Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology,” in Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, 258.Google Scholar