Wesleyan University

Review: Subaltern Studies and Its Critics: Debates over Indian History
Author(s): Vinay Lal
Reviewed work(s):
A Subaltern Studies Reader 1986-1995 by Ranajit Guha
Nationalism, Terrorism, Communalism: Essays in Modern Indian History by Peter Heehs
Writing Social History by Sumit Sarkar
The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity and Secularization by Achin
Vanaik
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Feb., 2001), pp. 135-148
Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan University
Stable 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

SUBALTERNSTUDIESAND ITS CRITICS:

DEBATESOVER INDIAN HISTORY

A SUBALTERN STUDIES READER 1986-1995. Edited by Ranajit Guha. Minne-

apolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1997. Pp. xxii, 303.
NATIONALISM,TERRORISM,COMMUNALISM:ESSAYS IN MODERN INDIAN HISTORY.
By Peter Heehs. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. x, 174.
WRITING SOCIAL HISTORY. By Sumit Sarkar.Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1997; Oxford India Paperback,1998. Pp. x, 390.
THE FURIES OF INDIAN COMMUNALISM:RELIGION, MODERNITY AND SECULAR-
IZATION.By Achin Vanaik.London:Verso, 1997. Pp. 374.

Indian history has apparentlynever had it so good. By the middle part of the
nineteenth century, the Hegelian proposition that India was a land singularly
bereft of historyhad attaineda widespreadconsensus among British commenta-
tors on India. Macaulay and James Mill were entirely convinced that Indians
were incapableof writinghistory,and a hundredyears later EdwardThompson,
the fatherof the late E. P. Thompson,penned the remark,with the supremecon-
fidence that it was a self-evident truth,that "Indiansare not historians,and they
rarelyshow any critical ability.Even theirmost useful books ... exasperatewith
their repetitions and diffuseness." Assured that Indians were unlikely ever to
become adeptat the historicalcraft,Thompsonaddedfor good measurethatthey
were "notlikely to displace our accountof our connectionwith India."'Less than
twenty years ago, only a handful of Indianhistorians,most of them scholars of
ancientIndia,had a reputationextendingbeyond theirown country,and much of
their energy, when they were not engaged in more arcaneresearch,was expend-
ed in writing textbooks for use in Indianschools. Today,by contrast,Indianhis-
torianshave hogged the limelight; they occupy positions at leading universities
in India, the United States, and Britain.
In the late 1970s, RanajitGuha, then known only for a study of the ideologi-
cal aspectsof the permanentsettlementof landrevenuein colonial Bengal,2gath-
ered a numberof youngerhistoriansaroundhim, and the initial fruitsof theircol-
lective labor appearedas two volumes, published in quick succession, with the
enticing title of SubalternStudies: Writingson SouthAsian History and Society
(Oxford, 1982 and 1983). In retrospect,the 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 Propertyfor Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of PermanentSettlement
(Paris:Mouton and Co., 1963; reprinted., Delhi: OrientLongman, 1981).
136 VINAY LAL

umes of SubalternStudies have appearedso far, the first six under Guha's edi-
torship-might appearratherremarkable,considering that Guha offered, in his
programmaticnote, the prosaic critiquethat the study of Indianhistoryhad been
strangledby "elitism,"both of the "colonialist"and "bourgeois-nationalist" vari-
ety, and that henceforthhistory would have to engage with the "politics of the
people."3Doubtless, some monographshad been written on peasant rebellions,
but the real question, Guha suggested, is how far various subaltern groups,
whether women, peasants, outcastes, the working-class, tribals, the downtrod-
den, or other marginalizedpeople who had been relegated to the peripheryof
Indian society, had been able to make history and constitute their politics as an
"autonomousrealm."If it should seem something of a mystery why the histori-
ans of the "SubalternSchool" were to acquiresuch a following, one might con-
sider their recourse to the somewhat exotic idea of the "subaltern,"a word that
even an informedreaderwould reasonablyassociate with the military.As read-
ers were to surmise,subalternhistorypromisedmore than"historyfrom below":
the very idea of the "subaltern"had been captured from Gramsci, and the
"SubalternSchool" historianswould also build upon the semiological analyses
of Jakobsonand Barthes,the post-structuralismof Foucault, and the critiqueof
Enlightenmentepistemologies associated with Derrida,Lyotard,and others. For
Indians who might have been distressed that the theoretical trajectorieswhich
were finding a receptive audience in the Westernacademy were somehow pass-
ing them by, subalternhistory must have seemed a godsend, offering not only
new insights into Indian history, but a bridge to critical reformulationsof the
Europeanpast and the intellectual traditionsof the West. Moreover, as Guha's
trenchantanalysis of colonial documents was to show, the enterpriseof finding
documentsthat authenticatedthe experience of subalternsand claimed to com-
plete the historicalrecord, such that subalternsmight no longer complain of not
being adequatelyrepresented,was not deemed to be of paramountimportance;
indeed, Guha sought to establish how insurgencymight be read from the gaps,
fissures,interstices,and rhetoricalstrategiesthat markeddominantdiscourse. In
this manner,subalternhistorywas clearly to be distinguishedfrom a host of other
phenomenato which it is sometimes linked by innocentand conservativeacade-
mics, such as multiculturalismand ethnic history.
A little more than five years after the appearanceof the first volume of
SubalternStudies, the entire enterprisehad acquiredenough of a following that
an anthology,which culled articlesfrom the firstfive volumes, was to appearfor
the American market.Introducedby Edward Said, and co-edited by Guha and
GayatriChakravortySpivak, Selected SubalternStudies broughtthe work of the
historiansof colonial India, which could scarcely be describedas having gener-
ated widespread interest until then, to the attention of postcolonial theorists,
"colonialdiscourse"analysts,and those interestedin the literatureand history of
colonized societies. Thus the blurb to A SubalternStudies Reader, the volume
3. RanajitGuha,"OnSome Aspects of the Historiographyof Colonial India,"reprintedin Selected
SubalternStudies, ed. RanajitGuha and GayatriChakravortySpivak (New York:Oxford University
Press, 1988), 37-43.
 SUBALTERNSTUDIES AND ITS CRITICS 137
presentlyunderreview, which is an anthologyof selections from latervolumes of
Subaltern Studies as well as other publications, states that the "most famous
members"of the collective-Spivak and Partha Chatterjeeare mentioned by
name-"were instrumentalin establishingthe discipline best known as postcolo-
nial studies."Indeed, it is for the consumption of the burgeoningpostcolonial
academicindustrythat this volume appearsto have been devised, ratherthan for
the use of historiansthemselves, since RanajitGuha, in his introductionto the
anthology, makes no attempt even to suggest what differentiates Subaltern
Studies from other trajectories that partake of "history from below." Since
SubalternStudies now bearsthe dual imprimaturof authorityand radicaldissent,
the history that Guha furnishesof the collective is writtenin 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 disillusionmentsof the three
decades following independence:the hopes of the young, which relied upon the
nation-statefor theirfulfillment,had dissipatedin the wake of the nationalemer-
gency invoked by Indira Gandhi in 1975, and the suppressionof the Naxalite
movement, which for all its faults and embraceof violence sought to place con-
siderationsof justice and equity at the center of political action. CertainlyGuha
could have offered a more substantiveaccountof the relationbetween the advent
of a new school of history,Indianhistoriography,and Indianpolitics.
Guha states that the collection is "representative"of the "intellectualrange
spannedby the project,"but no attemptis made to explain, much less defend, the
selection. What is "representative,"anyhow? And "representative"for whom?
Since the volume, like its predecessor,is clearly intendedfor the Americanmar-
ket, and particularlyfor those with no intrinsic interest in Indian history, one
might be forgiven for presuming that the selections veer towards those which
establish connectionsbetween Indianhistory and the critiquesof modernityand
its masternarratives,but on closer examinationthe majorityof the selections are
shown to be detailedreadingsof Indianhistory.The selections might be described
as demonstrationsof subalternhistory;but ParthaChatterjee'sessay on middle-
class Bengali women is not so easily accommodatedunder this rubric, while
Dipesh Chakrabarty'simportantand widely discussed essay on "Postcoloniality
and the Artifice of History"considershow, even at its most reflective, the narra-
tive of history is tetheredto the nation-state,with "Europe"remainingthe "sov-
ereign, theoreticalsubject of all histories, including the ones we call 'Indian,'
'Chinese,' 'Kenyan,'and so on" (263). Doubtless Guha's Reader, which carries
articlesfrom nearlyall membersof the originalcollective, can also reasonablybe
construedas takingup the story firstenumeratedin the earlieranthology,but this
intentis seriouslycompromisedby an erasureof the collective's own politics. No
narrativeof SubalternStudies could possibly be complete without an account of
the partialdismembermentof the collective, the cogent critiquesto which it has
been subjectedfrom diverse intellectualcircles in India, and the decomposition
of SubalternStudies into widely divergentstreams.
138 VINAY LAL

Nowhere in his introductiondoes Guha mention Sumit Sarkar,a founding

memberof the collective and one of its most prolific and original voices, and
now one of the most vociferous critics of SubalternStudies's enchantmentwith
postcolonialtheoryand postmodernism.Ever concernedwith the silences of elit-
ist discourse, Guha would do well to ponder on the ominous mannerin which
Sumit Sarkarhas been excised from the memoryof the collective, though Sarkar
is, of course, well equippedto speakfor himself. In WritingSocial History, a col-
lection of nine essays on Indianhistory and historiography,Sarkarfurtherelab-
orates on his critique,the contoursof which he set out in an article in 1994,4 of
subalternhistory and, more broadly,historical studies in the Saidian mold. His
preface to the presentcollection sets the tone for the entire work, deploringthe
"shift from social history to forms of cultural studies largely abstractedfrom
'material'contexts, and the accompanying displacement of Marxism, whether
orthodox or revisionist, by a variety of postmodernistic (and postcolonial)
moods"(vii). Though Sarkarholds no brief for Orientalistscholarship,he argues
insistently and vigorously that historicalworks influencedby Derrida,Foucault,
and particularlyEdwardSaid, have induced their own forms of homogenization
(viii, 17). He says of colonial educational policy, for instance, that it was not
"quitethe monolith . . . that is sometimes assumed nowadays"(249), and simi-
larly disputes the assumption,which he claims informs the work of his former
colleagues in the collective, that Indianhistoriographysince the nineteenthcen-
tury has invariablybeen nothing more than the history of the nation-state(20).
Though Sarkar describes the two long essays on the nineteenth-century
Bengali social reformerIswar ChandraVidyasagarand his contemporary,the
mystic Sri Ramakrishna,as constitutingthe "core"of his book (viii), the other
essays, particularlythe polemics against late subalternhistory and the postmod-
ern turn,furnisha much betterclue to Sarkar'sown ideological dispositions and
the theoreticalunderpinningof his recent work. It is only the slightest exaggera-
tion to suggest thatfor Sarkar,the trajectoryof historicalreasoningonce took us
from Ranke to Marx, and from Marx it has now moved to Said, though this
marks a regression ratherthan progression,especially since Said's mantrasare
said to have been uncriticallyadoptedby his followers (37). A newer positivism
has replaced the older dogmas: where for Ranke the "fact" was everything,
Sarkarsuggests that for the postmodernistsideology alone is of consequence. If
Rankeanhistory was little more than political history,Sarkarfinds the tendency,
in the writings of ParthaChatterjee,Gyan Pandey, and Dipesh Chakrabarty,to
characterizeBengali (and more broadly Indian) history writing as state-centric
similarlyreductionist.Indeed, Sarkarobserves thatIndianhistorianshad "a fair-
ly remarkableand precocious interest in social and cultural history" at a time
when the Rankean disposition had made such interests disreputable in the
Westernacademy (24, 31, 38). Most of all, Sarkarfinds the Saidian-inspiredhis-
tories to be in agreementwith the earlier histories in the Rankeanor imperial

4. Sumit Sarkar,"OrientalismRevisited: Saidian Frameworksin the Writing of 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,postcolonial discourse
characterizescolonialism as the impositionof a Westernpower-knowledgenexus
upon a society that knew little of exploitation and oppression (105). According
to Sarkar,imperialand postcolonialhistories are equally beholdento the opposi-
tions of East and West, spiritualand material,and the like (95-97).
To understandwhat kind of history Sarkarfinds 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"and E. P. Thompson.Sarkar'saccount of the birthof
SubalternStudies, in which he played a not inconsiderablerole, stresses the fact
thatthe membersof the collective, while criticalof "orthodoxMarxisttheoryand
practice,"still 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 Foucault and Said
startedto become hegemonic, and the Soviet Union showed signs of fragmenta-
tion, Marxism came increasingly under assault and was dismissed not only as
irrelevantbut as a species of Eurocentrism."Radical,left-wing histories"were
replacedby "culturalstudies and critiquesof colonial discourse";resistancewas
construedas being ineffective against the totalizing power of the colonial state;
the colonized subjects were seen as capable of producingonly "derivativedis-
courses";and the "dialecticalsearchfor contradictionswithin structures,"which
Sarkardescribes as centralto Marxistanalysis, was abjuredfor a "unitaryvision
of the modern bureaucraticstate as the sole source of oppression"(5, 84, 90).
Sarkarargues that E. P. Thompson, mindful of the difficulties in conventional
Marxistanalyses of "class,"had arrivedat such seemingly paradoxicalformula-
tions as "class struggle without class"; and similarly Subaltern Studies had
eschewed a rigid economistic class analysis, signified to some extent by its
deployment of the term "subaltern."Yet, Sarkarcontends, a shift occurred in
SubalternStudies, which he attributesto the influence of ParthaChatterjee(and
Ashis Nandy outside the collective), from "subaltern"to "community,"such that
"late SubalternStudies" came to embody little more than a "vague nostalgia"
which identifiedthe authenticwith the indigenous,and located both "in the pasts
of an ever-recedingcommunity,or a presentthatcan consist of fragmentsalone"
(108, cf. also 42, 91, 98-101).
What hamperstrue historicalwork, which is attentiveto "context"ratherthan
the "fragmentary,"is the postmodernist's fetish for the "fragment"and the
nativist's hankeringfor an idealized past (45).5 Thus one of Sarkar'sfavorite
words of abuse, though he is scarcely singularin this respect, is "romantic":in
essence, Sarkarviews Nandy, his formercolleagues in the collective, and a great
many others who have purportedlyfallen for the view that precolonialcommu-
5. Sarkar'sire, with respect to the postmodernistemphasis on "fragments,"falls on Gyanendra
Pandey, "In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today,"
Representations,no. 37 (Winter 1992), 27-55, as well as Partha Chatteijee, The Nation and Its
Fragments:Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994).
140 VINAY LAL

nities knew nothing of power relations,certainly nothing of communalconflict,

binarythinking,and the kind of witch hunts that characterizeEuropeanhistory,
as guilty of romanticizingthe past (for example, 60, 220, 251). Valorizationsof
"indigenouscommunity values" are, Sarkar asserts, inattentive to precolonial
hierarchiesand forms of oppression,and to the histories of subordinatedgroups,
such as women, the lower castes, and peasants(43). Against all this "culturalism"
Sarkaropposes the work of E. P. Thompson, noting that "many of the moves
away from 'Thompsonian'social historyhave been simplistic and retrogressive"
(51). Thompson'swritings come across in Sarkar'sessay as exemplary demon-
strationsof the power of historical analysis: culture is "never abstractedfrom
materialconditions, or from relationshipsof power" (54), and the contrastwith
Said is establishedby consideringhow Thompson,for instancein his analysis of
the idea of the "ruleof law,"was able to show the mannerin which it was simul-
taneouslyan instrumentof the rulingclass and open to "occasionalappropriation
by subordinatedgroups"(59).
Doubtless, some of Sarkar'scriticismsare not withoutmerit,but he is scarcely
the firsthistorianor critic to have remarkedon the unease of culturalstudies,par-
ticularly in its American variant, with considerationsof class and yet broader
questionsof political economy.The observationthatmuch of ParthaChatterjee's
work ends up becoming a set of reflectionson various"great"men, thus harking
back to nineteenth-centurypolitical histories,is one from which otherIndianhis-
torianshave also derived much satisfaction.6Sarkaradvertsto mattersthat have
been debatedendlessly in the Americanacademy,and on occasion one gets the
distinctimpressionthathe simply transplantsthese debatesonto the Indianscene.
As I shall suggest later, Sarkareschews what could have been a far more sub-
stantivecritiqueof late SubalternStudiesandcolonial discourseanalysisfor some
largely hackneyedobservationsmade familiarby the "culturewars"and, to use
his own words, a rather"romantic"and "nostalgic"homage to Marxism. In so
doing, he points the way to his own blind spots. Thus he describes himself as
"troubled"by E. P. Thompson'srelative silence on matterspertainingto gender,
but Thompson'sinexcusableindifferenceto Britain'sempirein virtuallyall of his
writing,all the while thathe was devoting himself to studiesof subordinatedele-
ments in British society, is shruggedoff with the remarkthat "Hobsbawmapart,
the greatmastersof BritishMarxianhistoriographyhave admittedlywrittenlittle
on Empire"(65). Apparentlythe offense becomes less a matterof concern when
otherMarxisthistorianscan be describedas guilty in a similarvein. Sarkarmakes
no attempt,thoughhe could have takena lesson or two from GauriViswanathan's
explorationof the same lacunain the work of RaymondWilliams,' to understand
what Thompson'sindifferenceto considerationsof imperialismmight mean for
any assessmentof his work.8Likewise, he constantlyderidesthe argumentwhich
6. See, for example, RamachandraGuha, "Subalternand Bhadralok Studies," Economic and
Political Weekly30 (19 August 1995), 2056-2058.
7. GauriViswanathan,"RaymondWilliams and British Colonialism,"YaleJournal of Criticism4,
no. 2 (1991), 47-66.
8. A similar shortcomingis encounteredin the anthology edited by Harvey J. Kaye and Keith
McClelland,E. P. Thonmpson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia:TempleUniversity Press, 1990).
 SUBALTERNSTUDIESAND ITS CRITICS 141
points to Thompson's and Marxism's Eurocentrism,but makes no attempt to
engage with it, presumablyon the groundsthatMarxismnow constitutesthe uni-
versal legacy of humankind.Marx's contemporarieswere indifferentto India,
when they were not contemptuousof it, but Marx went far beyond them in his
assessment of India's "idyllic village communities"as having "restrainedthe
humanmindwithin the smallestcompass"9:he had a theoryof history,ironcladin
his view, which accounted for India's deplorablestate. Thus Marx opined that
"whatevermay have been the crimes of England"-why "whatever,"as if there
was any doubt of the atrocitiesperpetratedby the British?-"she was the uncon-
scious tool of history in bringing about that revolution"which was destined to
overthrowthe "solid foundation"of Indian despotism.'0Sarkar'suniversalisms,
strikingly, are invariably derived from the modern West, and one has the
inescapablefeeling that he thinks of England'swork in India as yet unfinished.
ThatMarxisthistorieshave been entirelycomplicit with the agendasof develop-
ment and modernization,which have had none-too-happyconsequencesfor most
Indians,is an issue that Sarkarfails to address,unforgivablyso consideringhis
professedinterestin the emancipationof the subalternclasses.
Historianswho were always inclined to view SubalternStudies as a pompous
and dressed-upversion of "historyfrom below" will delight in Sarkar'sobserva-
tion that E. P. Thompsonclearly suffices as the exemplarof conscientious histo-
ry. Sarkaris scarcelyrequiredto be an astuteobserverof the Americanacademy,
but consideringthe intensely polemical natureof many of his observations,it is
surprisingthat he seems to be unawarehow far many historianswere eager that
an Indian school of history should not be allowed to take center stage in con-
temporaryhistoricalstudies." Though Sarkarderidesthe subalternhistoriansfor
theirready embraceof postmodernand postcolonialfashions, it is a considerable
irony that his own brandof critiquehas now become almost de rigueur for his-
torians who wish to see themselves as groundedin something more than what
one historianof premodernIndia, RichardEaton, describes as the "amorphous,
obscurantist"field of "culturalstudies."'2Sarkar'sbook might appearto convey
the impressionthathe is the "LoneRanger"of modernIndianhistory,but in fact
he is joined by many American historiansof India-Robert Frykenberg,Lynn
Zastoupil,Eugene Irschik,and Dane Kennedy,among othersl3-who character-
ize Said's intellectual frameworkas totalizing, supposedly without the aware-
9. Karl Marx, "The British Rule in India,"in Karl Marx and FriedrichEngels, The First Indian
Warof Independence1857-1859 (Moscow: Foreign LanguagesPublishingHouse, 1958), 20.
10. Ibid.
11. It is instructivethatthe AmericanHistorical Review, which not incorrectlycan be describedas
the flagshipof the profession in the United States, devoted the greaterpartof one of its recent issues
(December 1994) to subalternstudies and its increasinginfluence,for example in the LatinAmerican
andAfrican fields.
12. Richard Eaton, "(Re)imag(in)ing Otherness:A Postmortem for the Postmodern in India,"
Journal of WorldHistory 11 (Spring 2000), 60.
13. Robert E. Frykenberg, History and Belief: The Foundations of Historical Understanding
(GrandRapids, Michigan: William B. EerdmansPublishing Co., 1996), 287-303; Dane Kennedy,
"ImperialHistory and Post-Colonial Theory,"Journal of Imperial and CommonwealthHistory 24
(1996), 355-356; Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford:StanfordUniversity Press,
 142 VINAY LAL

ness, which by contrastSarkaralways finds presentin E. P. Thompson,that con-

trol and domination were never absolute, and that everywhere communities
offered resistanceto regimes of power by strategic and imaginative interpreta-
tions of local traditionsand customs (58).
Certainly,judging from Achin Vanaik'sThe Furies of Indian Communalism,
Sarkarhas found a numberof soulmates who are disenchantedwith the post-
modem and specificallypostcolonialturnof late SubalternStudies.Vanaik'scan-
vas extends beyond recent Indianhistory and scholarly writings on religion and
communalismto an examinationof the political contexts behind the resurgence
of militantHinduism.The concluding chapter,for instance, describes the "com-
munalizationof the Indianpolity" (296-360), which Vanaikattributesto the dis-
appearanceof the "Nehruvian consensus" (301), the decline of the centrist
Congressparty,and the inabilityof any secularpolitical formationto fill the vac-
uum. JawaharlalNehru embracedthe four principles of "socialism, democracy,
secularism,andnon-alignment,"all of which suffereda precipitousdecline in the
last two decades; in a longer list of "specific internalreasons"for the demise of
the Nehruvianconsensus, Vanaikmentions a great many otherpolitical and eco-
nomic developments, such as the growth of an indigenous industrialelite that
looked for greatercollaborationwith foreign capital, the rise of a "criminalized
lumpenized business class linked to the black economy," the advent of an
increasingly consumeristmiddle class, the emergence of regional political for-
mations, and so on (301-302). It is striking, though there shall be occasion to
reflect furtheron this, that nothing of "culture"or "religion"-such as an intel-
lectual and culturaldisenchantmentwith secularism,or a widely held view that
the effects of developmenthave not only been vastly uneven, but have been such
as to put into seriousjeopardy a diverse arrayof local culturaltraditions-finds
a place in Vanaik'sanalysis, and thatultimatelyVanaik'sunderstandingof mod-
ern Indianhistoryremainsthat of the conventionalpolitical scientist who knows
little of politics beyond political parties, electoral alignments, vote banks, and
center-staterelations.True, elsewhere in the book Vanaikstrays into apparently
more complex questions, and an entirechapteris devoted to the question of how
far, if at all, "Hindu communalism"can be viewed as a species of fascism.
Vanaikis right in pointing to the immense historical and theoreticaldifficulties
in accommodatingmilitant Hinduism under the rubric of fascism, but no one
other than orthodoxIndianMarxistsever attachedmuch credence to fascism as
an explanatoryparadigmfor Indiancommunalism.Thus what is really an inter-

1994); and Eugene Irschik,Dialogue and Histori: ConstructingSouth India, 1795-1895 (Berkeley:
University of CaliforniaPress, 1994). This brief and by no means complete list obviously excludes
the so-called Cambridgeschool historiansof India and their supporters.The point here is to establish
how even Americanhistoriansof India, who in a mannerof speaking might be viewed as observing
a certain neutralitybetween the two opposed paradigmsof the Cambridgeand SubalternSchools,
have in recent yearsjoined in the assault on Said. Their critiques,however, do not have the sophisti-
cation of Aijaz Ahmad'sobservationson Said: "OrientalismandAfter:Ambivalenceand Cosmpolitan
Location in the Work of EdwardSaid," Economic and Political Weekly37, no. 30 (25 July 1992),
Section on Political Economy,98-116, reprintedin In Theoty:Nations, Classes, Literatures(London:
Verso, 1992).
 SUBALTERNSTUDIES AND ITS CRITICS 143

nal, quaint,and strikinglyirrelevantdebate in IndianMarxistcircles is elevated

to a subjectof immense importance.
As with Sarkar,one cannot doubtVanaik'sprofoundattachmentto the idea of
secularism,or the sinceritywith which he defends the Indianattemptto forge a
secularstatein the two to threedecadesfollowing independence.While his attack
on Hinducommunalismis entirelylaudable,Vanaikhas no patiencefor the view
thatnot every critiqueof Hinducommunalismmust emanatefrom the standpoint
of secularism.Since his readingsof history are much less nuancedthan those of
Sarkar,his intolerancefor critiquesof secularismis all the more extreme,and he
adopts the elementary view that those who critique secularism are by default
friendsof communalism.Thus, in his accountAshis Nandy and many of the his-
torians of late SubalternStudies are explicitly equated with those who have a
"crudeconstructof Hindutva,"thoughhe concedes thatthe "argumentsof the pro-
ponents of anti-secularismand anti-modernismare often highly sophisticated"
(12). The persuasivenessof theirideas is enhanced,Vanaikarguesalong the lines
of Sarkar,"in a milieu markedby the decline of Marxistintellectualinfluence,the
rise of post-modernistthinkingand the currentdilemmas of liberal modernism"
(12), and insistentlyVanaikrefers to the perniciousinfluenceof "post-modernist
and anti-moderniststrandsof thinking"(for example, 4, 17, 107).
Much of the immense debate on what "postmodernism"is is lost on Vanaik,
nor does he recognize thatthe more astutecritics speakof postmodernismsin the
plural.Nowhere in the book does he show any understandingof postmodernism,
beyond observationsabout postmodernism'scritique of Enlightenmentnotions
of rationalityand its decenteringof master narratives,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 makes ontological claims about the radicallychanged natureof reality in
the modern world. Vanaik's lumping together of "postmodernist"with "anti-
modernist"strandsof thinking betokens a failure both of imagination and the
analytical faculty: thus Gandhi, Nandy, Partha Chatterjee,Edward Said, and
present-dayHindutvaideologues, whose predecessorsloathed Gandhi and, in a
mannerof speaking, engineered his assassination,are all described as molded
from the same clay. To be logically consistent, Vanaikshould have addedto that
list of villains the large numberof 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 similarkind of instrumentalisminforms Vanaik'sunderstandingof history,
or how else can we understandhis descriptionof China as an example of a coun-
try that underwenta "successful socialist revolution"(31)? If China's literacy
rate is betterthanthatof India, and a greaternumberof its people have been lift-
144 VINAY LAL

ed out of destitution,as indeed they have, then we have the criteriafor success.
Never mind that in the "GreatLeap Forward,"not less than twenty-five million
people were sacrificedin the name of China's modernizationand development,
and thatthe reductionof China'spopulationgrowthrate has come at the expense
of the female child. In the name of progress, as Marx himself assuredus, some
atrocitiescan be tolerated:so long as a certaintheoryof historyis held up as invi-
olable, particularhistories are of little consequence.
The limitationsof Vanaik'scritiqueof SubalternStudies and other strandsof
recent Indian critical writing become even more apparentupon a closer exami-
nation of a few specific argumentsthat first emerge in chapterthree and receive
theirdeveloped treatmentin chapterfour,which accountsfor nearlya thirdof the
book and sustainsa relentlessassaulton Vanaik'sintellectualadversaries.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 proceeds to the argumentthat
there never was any real "compositeculture"in India, and thus to the rejection
of the idea that there was a substantialsynthesis of Islam and Hinduism,or that
the Indianpast can be describedas syncretic,pluralistic,and tolerant.On the one
hand, he argues that if at all there was a "culturalsynthesis,"it was at the level
of elites (136); on the otherhand, the mere existence of variousreligions side by
side is representedas akin to the pluralismof plant life, since pluralismin this
instancecan scarcelybe viewed as a form of tolerance(114). (HadVanaikknown
more of biology, he might have understoodthat within an ecosystem not all
plants fare equally well: the banyantree does not let anythingelse grow under-
neath it, and many plants crowd out other species. Thus the observation that
"plantlife is plural"is not wholly intelligible.) Indeed, like all the other good
things of life, "pluralism"and "tolerance"are construed as specifically Euro-
pean-and more particularlyEnlightenment-virtues, since they emerged "after
the rise of individualism and individual rights" (113). It is no secret that all
Europeannarrativeswere agreed, until the recent critiquesof colonial discourse
began to emerge, that the individual in India never existed as such; indeed, the
individualin India is still presumednot to exist. But all the attendantproblems
of following this argumentto its logical conclusion are ignoredby Vanaik;nor is
it any less a problemthat the same EnlightenmentEuropewhich Vanaikdeems
to be the lodestar of human history originatedthe most pernicious theories of
racial superiority,the civilizing mission, and so on. Vanaik'sanswerto the "anti-
modernists"is that even the categories they presumeto resurrectfrom the hoary
Indianpast, such as pluralismand tolerance,were in fact born in modernity,and
that consequently their critiques of modernity are mere posturings.To believe
otherwise,he says aproposof the work of ParthaChatterjee,is to "slide into cul-
turalismand throughit towardseven greatersympathyfor indigenism"(187).
Vanaikcontends that Hinduism generateda "mystiqueof tolerance";further,
it is this mystificationwhich allows Ashis Nandy, ParthaChatterjee,and some
other influential antimoderniststo critique the received version of secularism,
 SUBALTERNSTUDIESAND ITS CRITICS 145

which calls for the separationof religion and state, by incorrectlypostulatingan

Indianvariantof secularismthatrests upon the idea of religious tolerance(145).
He supposes that one can point to the obvious intoleranceimplied 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 a religious bigot. Much of the purportedhistoricalsegmentof Vanaik's
book proceeds on the basis of inference: thus, the extremely long, varied, and
complicated history, extending to several hundredyears, of Hinduism's reach
outwardsto SoutheastAsia is dismissed with the observationthat "thereis no
way, for example, that Hinduismcould have spreadto SoutheastAsia to become
as influentialas it did for centurieswithout such conversion"(147). Not a single
piece of evidence is furnishedby way of substantiatingthis claim; in a book with
seventy to eighty pages of notes, Vanaikcannot sparea single citation in defense
of this claim. Since Vanaikknows that religions 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 declarationis likewise issued as a fiat.
Vanaiksays of Hindusthat "the will to convertexisted"but they were prevented
from doing so by "Hindusocial arrangements":now he dons the mantleof omni-
science, while pretending that the possible relationship between these social
arrangementsand the absence of conversion would be merely a sociological
ratherthan religious phenomenon.One suspects that many Hindus would point
to Vanaik'seagerness to out-Muslimthe Muslim and so deflate argumentsabout
the exceptionalismof Islam as a characteristicgesture of the tolerantHindu!
To state that Vanaik'sbook is disappointingis an understatement.Curiously,
and ominously,Vanaikends up embracingnearlyevery argumentfound in com-
munalisthistories.Thus, in his view the historyof India can only be writtenas a
historyof the dominationof religion over other spheresof life, and as the history
of the separationof religions. Vanaikasks for the strict separationof churchand
state, and so does the communalistin his own fashion:recall the oft-voiced alle-
gation by Hindutvavadisthat secularistsin India have seldom been better than
"pseudo-secularists," and that secularistslike Vanaikdo not championa common
civil code for every Indian.The communalist,while professing to be dismissive
of Westernculture,is sworn to modernity,as is the Indiansecularist,thoughthis
is often done so with the predictableproviso thatmodernityhas its own trajecto-
ry in India (12). Vanaik'sattitudetowardsWesternsocial science is, in the fash-
ion of the communalist, at once cavalier and reverential:Durkheim, Charles
Taylor,Weber,and Giddensare all paradedin turn,as thoughthey were modern-
day Ganeshas who had to be invoked before the intellectualexercise could be
launched,but when evidence is reallyrequiredVanaik'scommandof historymost
obviously fails him.'4Vanaik'sobvious belief in the efficacy of Westernsocial sci-

14. Ganesh is the God of Learning,as well as the harbingerof auspiciousness;he is also invoked
at the commencementof culturaland academic enterprises.He is often shown in popularprintsas a
learnedscribe, with a book and pen in one of his hands.
146 VINAY LAL

ence has more than a touch of comedy: if physical anthropologycan find a safe
refuge in India,thereis no reasonto suppose that he is not that perfect specimen
about whom Macaulayhad expressed great hope in 1835, when he asked for a
class of Indianswho would be English in taste, intellect, and feeling, indeed in
everythingbut blood.'5
Setting out to demolish what he calls the "Mythof CulturalIntegration"(89),
Vanaikbetrays what might be described as one of the central difficulties of the
Marxistcritiqueof late SubalternStudies, namely-as shall presentlybe seen-
its inability to contend with myth, and its positivist endorsementof a sharpdis-
tinction between "history"and "myth."Peter Heehs, in his short collection of
essays entitledNationalism, Terrorism,Communalism,is more sensitive to these
considerations,thoughunfortunatelymuch the greaterpartof his book is a futile
exercise in attemptingto establish that the attainmentof Indian independence
was as much an achievement of the "revolutionary"movement as it was of
Gandhiannonviolence. The first four essays offer little more than a connected
narrativeof the activities of AurobindoGhose [laterSri Aurobindo]and his fel-
low Bengali "extremists,""terrorists,"or self-proclaimedrevolutionariesin the
firsttwo to threedecades of the twentiethcentury.Heehs claims thatfar too much
attentionhas been lavished on what he erroneouslydescribes as Gandhian"pas-
sive resistance,"that the revolutionarieshave not been given their due, and that
Bengali terrorists,despite some acquaintancewith terroristand anarchistmove-
ments in Europe,were essentially home-grownproducts.He considerablyexag-
gerates the neglect from which these "terrorists"purportedlysuffer, and cannot
be unawarethat a large hagiographicliteraturehas developed aroundthe figures
who presentedarmedresistance to British rule in India. Once in a while Heehs
offers an empiricalfindingof considerablevalue, such as his observationthatthe
revolutionariesmade inflated assessments about the membershipin their secret
organizations(23), or that the revolutionarygroupswere singularlyunsuccessful
in their attemptsto assassinate Europeanofficials (30), but he neither pursues
these observationsnor finds any irony in the fact that most of the bomb-throw-
ers more often hurtthemselves, usually while puttingtogetherbombs from man-
uals, than the British officials whom they so much loathed. Their patriotism,as
Gandhi himself 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 an anomalyas vegetarianismmight be in the life of a Texancattle ranch-
er. Indianrevolutionaryactivity was somethingof a sadly comical affair,a paro-
dy of masculinizing nationalism.Heehs foregoes the more pertinentquestions:
for instance, why accept the designation of "revolutionaries"for rebels who
clearly accepted the Europeannarrativeof Bengali effeminacy and attemptedto
create a mystique of hyper-masculinityaroundthemselves? What, exactly, was
so transformativein the thoughtor practicesof Indian"terrorists"?

15. Thomas BabingtonMacaulay,"Minuteon IndianEducation"[1835], in Selected Writings,ed.

with introductionby JohnClive andThomasPinney(Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress, 1972), 249.
 SUBALTERNSTUDIES AND ITS CRITICS 147
However, as various scatteredremarksand the last two chaptersof the book
suggest, Heehs is attuned to developments in Indian history, the debates sur-
roundingSubalternStudies, and the politics of Indianhistoriography.His tone,
unlike that of Sarkarand Vanaik, is never polemical, and the careless reader
might overlook his softly stated but nevertheless firm critique of Sumit Sarkar,
whose work he equates with that of colonial administrators.As Heehs avers, the
views of Indian Marxist academics show a remarkableconvergence with those
held by colonial writers,who were similarlyunitedin 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 further still:
Sarkar, Vanaik, and other secular Indian intellectuals indubitably have an
immense difficultyin acceptingreligious faith as a valid category of knowledge.
Heehs could have noted that this problem is encounteredin Subaltern Studies
from the very outset, but SubalternStudies does not bear the burdenof his cri-
tique of left-wing writing in India.
Though Heehs's work does not take us very far in developing an explicit cri-
tique of SubalternStudies, there are intimationsof a critiquethat would take us
beyond the Marxistorthodoxiesof Sarkarand Vanaik.On the question of 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 at ease with the theoreticalformulations
of Althusser, Derrida, Lyotard, Barthes, Jakobson, and Foucault, but the day
when they might derive some of the philosophicalunderpinningsfor their argu-
ments from Indian logic or the literatureof the puranasseems extraordinarily
remote. They have deployed Foucault in much of their work, and though queer
studieshas now markedits arrivalin Indianstudies,'6it is doubtfulin the extreme
that any Indian historian,whether of the SubalternSchool or any other persua-
sion, would think of using a Gandhianpolitics of the body, or the complex his-
tory of Indian eunuchs,'7 to interpret Foucault's History of Sexuality. India
remains,regrettably,the empty field on which the fertile Europeanmind sets to
do its work. This limitation is common to Sarkarand his former friends in the
SubalternStudies collective.
Heehs offers the useful suggestion that the debate on communalismhas been
dominatedby "rivalhistoricalschools" and thatfar more insight would be gained
if the historianswere attentiveto the work of culturalpsychologists, anthropolo-
gists, and other social scientists (124, 134). But it is his observationson "histo-
ry" and "myth"which alert us to one of SubalternStudies' greatestfailings. As
he rightfullyremarks,"mythand history are often consideredantitheticalmodes
16. See, for example, Paola Bacchetta,"Whenthe (Hindu) Nation Exiles 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 (Winter1999), 119-140.
148 VINAYLAL

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

evidently false (142). The separationof myth and history was alreadypresentin
an incipient form in Thucydides and classical Greek thought, but it is the
Enlightenmentwhich not only pushed the distinctionbetween mythosand 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 be
conceived as the propersubjects of a propernation-state.Myth had to be ban-
ished from the account of "what really happened";it was. History came to be
tetheredto the nation-state,and as the nation-statebecame the only form of polit-
ical communitywhich 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: India did at one point make a civilization-
al choice of forsakingdiscoursesof history,and it has lived comfortablywith that
choice until very recently. All attempts, whether inspired by nationalism,
Marxism,or the desire to argue that Indianmodernityis predicatedon different
trajectories,to furnishIndia with historicalnarrativesof its own kind are point-
ers to the increasingencroachmentof history upon the fundamentaland deliber-
ate ahistoricityof the Indian sensibility, as well as to the secular and moderniz-
ing Indian'sunease with those peripheral-but numericallypreponderant-sec-
tors of Indiansociety who resolutelyfail, indeed refuse, to speak in the language
of history.History,which has ever satisfiedits advocateswith the cliched thought
that it banishes thatamnesiawhich would otherwisebe 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-
fillment of humandestiny, as the natural,inevitable, and most desirableform of
political collectivity. Doubtless, the nation-statehas come in for more than its
shareof incisive criticismby Subalternhistoriansand others,but no past or pres-
ent memberof the collective has daredto resurrectthe civilizational discourses
by means of which alone the worldviews of Indians can be comprehendedand
respected-as "subalternist"discourses. Second, history has, so to speak, occlud-
ed its own history,made us unawarethat it was at one point fatheredand moth-
ered by myth, and that myth remains,especially in large parts of the world that
are not yet overdeveloped, one of the numerousmodalities by means of which
the past is often accessed, and a futureis imaginedwhich is not merely the pres-
ent of the West. Subalternhistory,whetherof the Marxist,postcolonial, or post-
modernvariety,has not even begun to broachthese questions, and perhapsthat
is the directiontowardswhich it should move if it really wants to claim the man-
tle evoked by its name.

VINAY LAL

Universityof California,Los Angeles