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Can the ‘Subaltern’ Ride? A Reply to O'Hanlon and Washbrook

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Gyan Prakash
Gyan Prakash
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

The problem with Prakash, O'Hanlon and Washbrook conclude, is that he tries to ride two horses at once—one Marxist, the other poststructuralist deconstructionist. ‘But one of these may not be a horse that brooks inconstant riders. …’ So, they say we must choose only one to ride on, not both because the two, in their view, have opposing trajectories. One advances historical understanding and progressive change, the other denies history and perpetuates a retrogressive status quo. Posed in this manner, the choices involve more than a dispute over which paradigm provides a better understanding of the histories of the third world and India. At stake is the writing of history as political practice, and the only safe bet, from their point of view, is Marxism (of their kind), not the endless deferral and nihilism of deconstruction and postmodernism. Having set up this opposition, O'Hanlon and Washbrook's either/or logic has no place for the productive tension that the combination of Marxist and deconstructive approaches generates. They are uncomfortable with those recent writings that employ Marxist categories to analyze patterns of inequalities and exploitation while also using deconstructive approaches to contend that Marxism is part of the history that institutionalized capitalist dominance—approaches which argue that although Marxism can rightfully claim that it historicizes the emergence of capitalism as a world force, it cannot disavow its history as a nineteenth-century European discourse that universalized the mode-of-production narrative.

Type
CSSH Discussion
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , January 1992 , pp. 168 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1992

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References

I am grateful to the following who commented on previous drafts of this essay: Homi Bhabha, Natalie Z. Davis, Nick Dirks, Tony Grafton, Bill Jordan, Peter Mandler, Mark Mazower. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Bob Tignor, Jyotsna Uppal, and Dror Wahrman.

1 “After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34:1 (01 1992).Google Scholar Page numbers for all subsequent references appear within parentheses in the text.

2 “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October, 34 (Fall 1985), 126.Google Scholar

3 Bhabha, Homi, “The Other Question …,” Screen, 24:6 (1983). 18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 23–25.

5 “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” 126.

6 An example of hasty reading of this sort occurs when they accuse Ranajit Guha of “referring to the (undifferentiated) Indian nation as ‘us’ “(p. 148). In fact, phrases such as “our own” in the text refers to Indian historiography. See his “Dominance Without Hegemony and its Historiography,” Subaltern Studies VI, Guha, Ranajit, ed. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).Google Scholar For examples: “On our own part, we present our views on the structure of domination in colonial India and historiography's relation to it as a critique of our own approach to the Indian past and our own performance in writing about it not to an undifferentiated Indian nation” (p. 306); or “This [Guha's essay], we hope, may assist in the self-criticism of our own historiography—the historiography of a colonized people” (p. 307). An “undifferentiated nation”? Their reading that Ashis Nandy generalises the experience of “Bengali literati to that of the whole nation” (p. 147) is similarly hasty for Nandy is quite clear that he is speaking about intellectuals; he never claims that India as a whole experienced colonialism in the same way.

7 Of Grammatology, Spivak, ayatri Chakravorty, trans. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 243.Google Scholar See also pages 216–45, 270–80.

8 ibid., 270.

9 Margins of Philosophy, Bass, Alan, trans. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 213.Google Scholar

10 “The Making of Americans, the Teaching of English, and the Future of Cultural Studies,” New Literary History, 21:4 (1990), 28.Google Scholar

11 “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” Cultural Critique, 7 (Fall 1987), 119–56.Google Scholar

12 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and Interpretation of Culture, Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See, in particular, pages 299–307.

13 For a similar argument about the colonized woman caught between indigenous patriarchy and the politics of archival production, see also Spivak's, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” History and Theory, 24:3 (1985), 247–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

1 For a study of the process of this covering over in the context of unfree laborers, see my Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).Google ScholarDirks's, NicholasThe Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987),Google Scholar similarly, traces the marks of a relationship between caste and power in the process that hollowed out the political space in a south Indian kingdom and filled it with colonial power.

15 This view is elaborated by Washbrook in his “Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c. 1720–1860,” Modern Asian Studies, 22:1 (1988), 57–96.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., 76.

17 For examples of this historiography, see Seal, Anil, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968),CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Washbrook, D.A., The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a recent critique, see Guha, “Dominance Without Hegemony.”

18 On the Eurocentrism of History, see Young, Robert, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), particularly pp. 2–12.Google Scholar

19 Spivak, , “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry, 12:1 (1985), 253.Google Scholar

20 Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978).Google ScholarPubMed

21 “The Other Question,” 23–26.

22 Ibid., 24.

23 See Robert Young, White Mythologies. 129–36.

24 For an argument demonstrating how nationalist thought in India shared the thematic of Orientalism, see Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World—A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986).Google Scholar

25 “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, 146 (1984), 53–92.Google Scholar Following Jameson, O'Hanlon and Washbrook conflate postmodern culture and poststructuralist theory, unlike Andreas Huyssen to whom they also mistakenly attribute this conflation. See Huyssen, , After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 206–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 “The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt” (The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971–1986, vol. 2 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988], 111).Google Scholar

27 Ibid.

28 “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies, 22:1 (1988), 212.Google Scholar This essay makes a very different reading from the present O'Hanlon and Washbrook essay on virtually every issue.

29 This view runs right through their critique. See pp. 150–1, particularly, where they state that a Foucauldian perspective disallows the notion of agency.