Powerful Critique of Postcolonial Theory

Achin Vanaik

sure, capitalism is shaping postcolonial modernity. But postcolonial capitalism dem ands postcolonial categories if it is to be properly understood. Why Are These Three Thinkers Singled Out?

his is not a book that adds to the admiring literature on post colonial theory. On the contrary, it is a severe critique of such theorisation and of three thinkers, all Indian and all originating from the earlier stable of subaltern history writing Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatte rjee. But what do we mean by post colo niality or postcolonial theory? Why these three thinkers? Postcoloniality The necessary point of reference for postcoloniality is the colonial or colo nialism. The essence of British colonial occupation which made it different from previous incursions/invasions into the subcontinent was the fact of exploitation for the benefit of an external geographical centre or metropolis. It is this economic reality, reinforced by necessary politicaland cultural-ideological mechanisms and arrangements that distinguishes British colonial rule from previous incur sions resulting in domesti cated or indi genised structures of rule, for example, the Mughals. But postcolonialitys reference to the colonial (despite its emphasis on the local) is not with the specificity of British rule but refers to the much looser category of the West; and not to economic exploi tation as to western cultural and epis temic domination the colonisation of the mind via the imposition/socialisation of domestic and Indian elites through Enlightenment-derived aspi rations and values. The problem that largely motivates postcolonial theorising is of epistemic violence when there should be epis temic parity between western/European and indigenous tho ught frames. But how is postcoloniality to be des cribed? Like Marxism it could be seen as an assemblage of theories and concepts,

book review
Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital by Vivek Chibber (New Delhi: Navayana Publishing), 2013; pp 306, Rs 450 (paperback).

a research agenda if you like, but a much looser and vaguer one. Unlike Marxist approaches which aim to be methodo logically holist, postcolonial the o rising is methodologically plural and eclectic. In this it is like Weberian/neo-Weberian historical sociological approaches but renounces the latters totalising ambition of explaining how the parts come together to make up the whole on a world scale; as well as its Enlightenment-related premises concerning rationality and social evolutionary processes. Postcolonial studies, according to Chibber, is a shared orientation intellec tually, with various theories assembled together; more a common style with common references and motifs such as hybridity, Difference with a capital D, subaltern split, fragments, Eurocen trism, authenticity, and so on. Yet again, in the view of another critic, the key contentions of postcolonial stu dies is that when aspects of western modernity intrude into non-European societies they stabilise themselves in a newer, hybrid form which is neither a copy of the original western/European form nor a straightforward corruption or de generation of it. Moreover, this newer stabilised form has no evolutionary content that can push this society onto the path followed by the West/ Europe in its past (Kaiwar 2009: 211). Insofar as postcolonial theory sees itself as a new kind of radical critique it seeks to go beyond the infirmities of a Marxism ineradicably tainted by being Eurocentric in so many of its concepts and substantive propositions. To be

(a) These Indian thinkers writing about India and in theorising about Subaltern Studies have been crucial, indeed founda tional, to the whole genre as it has emerged today worldwide. (b) Chibber very clearly states that he wishes to focus on historical sociological studies within the broader rubric of post colonial studies and therefore on these three who have done just such empiri cally grounded theoretical work. (c) All these three drifted from working within Marxism to moving out of it and therefore justifying to a greater or lesser degree the necessity of doing so. There is in their work a challenge to those like Chibber and others who con tinue to work within a Marxist frame work and believe it is right to do so even as one also thinks through, across and besides it. This is a challenge that needs to be confronted and assessed. Of course, while Marxisms spread was through working class movements and political parties and its entry into academia was very late and marginal, the trajectory of post colonial studies is the reverse. Six Themes One of the great strengths of this book is the remarkable clarity with which Chibber lays out both the key themes of the three and his own arguments rebut ting their various claims. Where there are ambiguities he makes the most char itable interpretations of what is meant so as to make the opposing cases as strong as possible. In short, Chibber tries to attack opposing claims by interpreting them in a manner whereby they are at their strongest and most coherent, and by doing so, his own case can become that much more persuasive. While the work of Guha was both prior to, and in a sense foundational for Chakrabarty and Chatterjee, the latter two also take off from there to explore
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certain themes in greater depth. But there are, according to Chibber, six basic themes that can be said to constitute the heart of their work taken as a collective enterprise. (i) In the non-west the bourgeoisie both in the national movement for Independ ence and after, failed to establish its hegemony, or if you like, to be able to speak for the nation in the way that in the West/Europe it succeeded in doing. (ii) So in the colonial world, capitals universalising drive failed. To explain this failure we need non-Marxist, nonwestern categories of analysis. (iii) Since the colonial and postcolonial bourgeoisies accommodated pre-capitalist ruling classes, both bourgeois and nonbourgeois power relations will be repro duced thereby tracing a different process of modernity a modernity without modernisation from the Marxist/ European/western type resulting in a bourgeois dominance without hege mony in the phrase made famous by Guhas text of that name. (iv) Thus there is a split, a chasm between the worlds of the elites and the subalterns at various levels including that of Subaltern thought, feeling, idiom/ values anchored not in individual ration ality or class interests but in other com munities of belonging such as religion, ethnicity, race, tribe, etc, each having their respective community consciousness. (v) Nationalist and Marxist accounts of the Independence struggle and of postIndependence trajectories and of the nature of the postcolonial, say Indian, state are irredeemably flawed. (vi) Western concepts and histories are incapable of grasping non-western reali ties. Subalterns here are psychologically motivated not by interests but by prebourgeois community values. There is not one kind of modernity but alternative, plural, multiple modernities with nonEuropean societies containing all kinds of fragments resisting incorporation into the arrogant and universalising approach of the Enlightenment- inspired western narrative in which Marxism is an obvious culprit. Distilled from the above then are the three key claims of Difference between west and non-west, namely (a) in the
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nature of the bourgeoisie; (b) in the nature of power relations; (c) in the political psychology of actors. Differing on Difference The point Chibber makes is that no one can or should deny the reality of difference. But these differences are not of the kind claimed by postcolonial theory and Subalternists. (a) There is a misrepresentation of the histories of how bourgeois rule emerged and consolidated in the West, i e, of what is meant by the supposed success of the western bourgeoisie as contrasted with the failure of its counterparts in the postcolonial world. Logically enough, there is also a profound misrepresenta tion and misunderstanding, therefore, of what is meant by the universalising drive of capitalism. Guha (followed by Chakrabarty and Chatterjee) in talking of such a univer salising drive assumes that this exists. According to them, this capitalist drive only succeeds when there is both, eco nomic hegemony of the capitalist class (which presumably led to a cross-class alliance, including subalterns, in success ful bourgeois revolutions, e g, England in 1640 and France in 1789), and a con sequent rapid stabilisation of political liberalism through institutions for secur ing secularism, contractualism, formal equality, modern citizenship, liberal values, etc. Not only is this a deeply flawed history of the role of the bourgeoisie in those events which was not the principal agent in those upheavals, but also of what those bourgeois revolutions accompli shed or did not accomplish. The bourgeoisies of the west were never the principal agent in stabilising a liberal demo cracy whose crucial elements such as universal suffrage, certain rights of asso ciation, etc, came about over a very prolonged period, above all through class strug gles and pressures by the lower orders. Far from the bourgeoisie hegemonising the subalterns in England (1640s) and France (1789) the subalterns forced their concerns on to these elite projects. Neither the English nor the French Rev olutions (which Guha and his acolytes take as paradigmatic) played out the

way they believe. A whole literature now exists including on the Marxist left that insists to talk of bourgeois revolu tions for consequential reasons. That is, these events helped in clearing or con solidating the road for capitalist deve lopment and not because the bourgeoisie itself was the principal agent let alone the hegemonic force as understood by the Subalterns. Within the Marxist tradition there is an intense debate between political Marxists and others over the very use fulness or validity of the notion of bour geois revolution; but in neither case is any solace provided to the arguments of Guha and those following him.1 Disturb ingly, all this literature was and is avail able at the time when Guha, Chakrabarty and Chatterjee have been doing their work; and in making their criticisms of Marxist approaches this should have been seriously engaged with. Dominance without hegemony is not a valid claim of differentiation between bourgeois behaviour in the east and west although it does retain a useful, even arresting, framework for discussing the specificities of the Indian experience. Some of Guhas early work remains more impressive than of those who followed him. (b) As for capitalisms universalising drive, this is economic and carries no other political-cultural burden of liber alism of the kind attributed to it by these postcolonial theorists. Chibber correctly points out that this drive aims to subordi nate economic agents to the market and all kinds of political and cultural orders can be compatible with its drive to expand and deepen market depen dence and commodi fication. Insofar as Chakrabarty thinks hegemony must mean capitalistically transformed power relations, by which he means replacement of older personal forms of dependence by impersonal and

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formal power relations of a new kind, he is simply mistaken. It is true that in capitalism impersonal pressures and forms of compulsion become more important. But more direct and personal forms of domination do not disappear but surface in the labour process itself and vary from factory to factory. Chibber counters Chakrabartys claims based on the formers work among West Bengals jute workers. Aside from the formal sub sumption of labour to capital that also takes place as capital enters a non-capi talist domain, insofar as traditional forms of hierarchical domination and obeisance can be harnessed to ensure greater work effort in the labour proc ess, capitalists will be more than happy to resort to them. While on the worker side, insofar as kinship or ethnic connec tions can provide greater security of job or welfare, workers will cling to them and seek to reproduce such links in the face of the uncertainty and insecurity of wage labour under capitalism. In ad vanced capitalist countries Chibber points out that debt peonage extended well into the 20th century. The inescapably uneven and combined character of capitalist development always means new juxtapositions, rearticulations and combinations of the old and new at all levels technological, cultural, political, ideological, sociolo gical, moral and therefore of power relations. In one of the best parts of the book, Chibber dissects and effectively demol ishes the claim that capitalist expansion necessarily homogenises and that hetero geneity or hybridity necessarily refutes the claim about capita lisms totalising dynamic. Indeed as Perry A nderson has also pointed out all modernity is nec essarily hybrid because there is always simultaneity of different and alterna tive social, economic, cultural, political realities and of future trajectories.2 Chakrabarty, in particular, talks of a History 2 which is always local and blocks the History 1 of capital. History 2 is a catch-all term to describe diverse ways of being rooted in particular cul tures. However, as Chibber puts it, capi talism can coexist with a variety of cultural complexes but it also imposes limits to the trajectories taken by eastern

societies. Capitalism (i) dissolves certain relations of differences; (ii) reproduces existing social differences and heteroge neities; (iii) creates new differences and heterogeneities; and (iv) is indifferent to certain heterogeneities. One can go further than where Chibber does. Hybridity must not be understood as static but dynamic. In which case where do the dynamising propulsions/elements come from? Hybri dity Postcolonialists tend to veer close to nativism and ahistorical cultural essences even as they insist that they are not nativists or essentialist. Does not hybri dity, they might say, imply non-essentialism! But the elements of History 2 by their very nature are more static than those brought about by a capitalist modernity. After all, the rate, depth and scope of change in modernity (of History 1) is incomparably greater than in all the centuries before its advent. This hybri dity is also being reproduced dynamically and those elements responsible for this dyna mism will owe much more to capitalism and capitalist related infusions than to the more static/enduring mechanisms of the pre-capitalist past. What this suggests is that Chibber is on the mark in pointing out that the limits to History 1 that which threatens periodically to destablise it and prevent its easy reproduction are more to be found in History 1 itself than in History 2. But it is also the case that the future and changing trajectories of hybrid moder nities also owes more to History 1 and the biography of capital. (c) What, finally, of the claims about the distinctive political psychology of sub alterns in the non-west put forward parti cularly by Chakrabarty and Chatterjee? In a careful dissection of their work Chibber points out that contra to their views, one cannot counterpose commu nity consciousness (stressing values such as collective honour/loyalty/obligations/ duties) to interest-based individual ratio nality whether related to personal or familial interests, when they are actually coextensive. Indeed, he cites the empiri cal work of Chakrabarty and Chatterjee themselves precisely to reject their own conclusions! A crucial point he makes is

that once we accept, as we must, that there are cross-cultural common basic needs then even as these are always mediated via particular cultural contexts, these needs can and do exert at times a powerful cross-cultural drive or what can be called a universalising drive here the inescapable concern for individual and familial physical well-being. This concern is then the source for interestbased rationality which far from being a form of bourgeois or western mentality is truly universal across time and space as actual and potential motivators of action. Elsewhere, though not in this book, Chibber has elaborated that two crucial forms of this universalism is the human drive for autonomy (and there fore willingness to struggle against oppre ssion) and the human drive for redu cing toil (which is what makes knowledge and technology sticky down wards and in the longer run cumulative). As for the claims often made by both indigenists and many a postcolonialist about a certain retained authenticity of the subaltern despite his or her contact with the world of capital, this is a mis reading of reality. Those sympathetic to Chibbers critique can point out that as capitalist modernisation, howsoever in complete, persists, it makes any social order so much more complex that the lived experience of the individual (i e, the truth of that experience) is less and less able to adequately comprehend the very space in which that life is lived. This is what creates the problem of authenticity and initiates a quite new search for personal meaning. To think that the lived experience of the past somehow retains that same and older, more static, taken-for-granted sense of meaning in these newer more hybrid times is itself a huge mistake. And what is the source of this personal destabili sation if not the incredible flux created by capitalist modernity across all cultu res into which it intrudes and expands! Drawing Conclusions What then are some of the conclusions that can be drawn from Chibbers study? (i) There is, in much of postcolonial the orising, a strong tendency towards an unbalanced culturalism. In some cases,
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it takes the form of believing that culture goes all the way down, or if you like, the claim that culture is our nature, and therefore different cultures create through socialisation different natures and men talities and so no universalising dis course nor the themes emerging from an Enlightenment inspired universalism, can properly make sense of the non-western world at least. The point of course is, as many Marxists and non-Marxists have pointed out, that culture is of our nature. It is only against a shared background of common reference that we can meaning fully talk of difference. Sharing the same species-based bodily dependency for a long period after birth we cannot survive without nurture the term that connects nature and culture and which is of course always culturally constituted. But our human similarities of common mini mal rationality/needs/ instincts em otions/ capacities provide eno ugh resources for cross-cultural learning and behaviour, i e, a weak but real foundation for work ing together to fight common oppres sions in a universalist project.3 (ii) Certain Enlightenment categories of thought such as those of reason, science,

progress and so on, modestly and critically understood, endure and are universally valid. (iii) Marxist dynamics dealing with how in contemporary times humans interact with nature and with each other to provide and reproduce the means of subsistence is cross-cultural and not Eurocentric regardless of the geographical origins of Marxist thought. (iv) Postcoloniality claims to be a radical critique but by either obscuring or denying the basic properties of capita lism actually promotes a conservative outlook and a reversed Orientalism. In its emphasis on multiple, alternative, plural moder nities, postcoloniality helps foreclose thinking about, and fighting for, a tran scending of current modernities whose common feature is precisely capitalism in its uneven and combined process of development. Rejecting the totalising (not homogenising) dynamic of capitalism means underestimating its power and reach. This underestimation is a strate gically-politically debilitating one. Given various oppressions, postcolonial theo rising ends up, implicitly if not explicitly, advocating piecemeal struggle against

these oppressions as the best we can hope for in the construction of our particular modernity. Or as one critic of postcoloniality has sardonically put it (Kaiwar 2009: 229),
We are all modern in different ways and will continue being so. There are only two op tions; be modern in a European (universal) way or in a myriad of provincial (alternative/ hybrid) guises.

(v) It is not Chibbers case that there are no local histories or History 2, nor that these histories are not important. But it is to insist that in our times, least of all should they be counterposed to, rather than encased within, a uni versal history. Even if not explicitly spelled out in this way by Chibber, what follows from this is that one should not talk of alternative modernities to mean alternative capitalisms. If all that is meant by talking of multiple or plural or alternative modernities is that differ ent societies will follow different trajec tories of capitalist development unless capitalism itself is overthrown, through a process that begins in one place and hopefully extends all over the globe, then such terminology may not constitute a

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problem. But this is not generally the meaning ascribed to the notions of multi ple, plural or alternative modernities. The theore tical-conceptual ambitions behind such terminology are generally far more ambitious even if, as this study has shown, they are deeply flawed. In conclusion, this overview can only give a flavour of the depth and rigour of this book which deserves to be read and reread. There is no doubt, that in this work key theorists of the subaltern and of postcolonial theory have found their most formidable interlocutor, one who has lucidly defended both the relevance of Marxism as radical critique and of certain Enlightenment universals. It

will be interesting to see whether and how these thinkers and others in the post coloniality mould will respond.
Achin Vanaik (achin.vanaik@gmail.com) was formerly with the Department of Political Science, Delhi University.

etween a semi-aristocratic ruling order, a b semi-industrialised capitalist economy, and a semi-emergentlabour movement. As a char acterisation of colonial and postcolonial India this would hardly be out of place. 3 See Eagleton (2003), esp Chapter 5 on Truth, Virtue and Objectivity.

References
Anderson, Perry (1988): Modernity and Revolution in C Nelson and L Grossberg (ed.), Marxism and Interpretations of Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press). (1992): The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution, English Questions (London: Verso). Davidson, Neil (2010): How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions, Haymarket Books. Eagleton, Terry (2003): After Theory (New York: Basic Books). Kaiwar, Vasant (2009): Hybrid and Alternative Modernities in S Mazumdar, V Kaiwar and T Labica, From Orientalism to Postcolonialism (Oxford, UK: Routledge).

Notes
1 Chibber is closer to the school of Political Marxism initiated by Robert Brenner and among others, Ellen Meiksins Wood. In contrast, there is the recent work of Davidson (2010). Perry Andersons (1992) short essay The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution remains of interest in this context. 2 See Anderson (1988: 317-38, especially 326). Modernity exists where there is a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present, and a still unpredictable political f uture. Again, modernity is at the junction

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