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[JOCR 9.3 (2010) 299-326] (print) ISSN 1476-7430
doi: 10.1558/jocr.v9i3.299 (online) ISSN 1572-5138
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5 POSTCOLONIALISM AND MODERNITY
6 A Critical Realist Critique
7 BY
8 NISSIM MANNATHUKKAREN1
9 Dalhousie University
10 nmannathukkaren@dal.ca
11 Abstract. This paper focuses on postcolonial theorys engagement with

12 modernity. It argues that postcolonialisms problematisation of modernity is
13 significant and has to be contended with seriously. In seeking to question the
14 predatory universalism of western modernity, postcolonial theory aspires to open
15 up paths for different modernities that have the promise of emancipation and
16 liberation for all cultures and societies. But the crux of this paper is that this
17 promise is hardly fulfilled. Using critical realism, it interrogates
18 postcolonialisms understanding of modernity. It demonstrates that, with regard
19 to various aspects such as the material dimension, structural conditions, binaries
20 and dualisms, relativism, fallibilism, temporality and structure/agency,
21 postcolonialisms formulations are incomplete and inadequate. Ultimately, from
22 a critical realist perspective, the non-fulfilment of postcolonialisms initial
23 promise has serious consequences for the subjects of the Third World that the
24 theory claims to represent.
25 Key words: anthropism, anthropocosmism, chi<?delete?>, constellational unity,
26 dualism, duality, ground-state, identity, identity-in-difference, non-duality,
27 theosis
28
29
30 No single concept, in the last three decades or so, has been dissected as much as
31 modernity. The incredulity towards metanarratives2 that is so much in vogue has put

1
Department of International Development Studies, Dalhousie University, 6299 South Street,
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 4H6. Nissim Mannathukkarens research interests include the
Communist movement in India, development and democracy, modernity, the politics of popular
culture, and Marxist and postcolonial theories. He is the author of The Rupture with Memory: Derrida
and the Specters that Haunt Marxism (2006) and has published articles in the Economic and Political
Weekly, The International Journal of the History of Sport, Third World Quarterly, and South Asian
History and Culture.
2
Lyotard 1984, xxiv.
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR.
300 NISSIM MANNATHUKKAREN
1 a question mark on anything that is associated with modernity. As Friedrich

2 Nietzsches disciples set about dismantling the Enlightenment project in the West, the
3 subject of the Third World3 is caught in a bind: just as she arrives on the threshold
4 of modernity, she is asked to forget its promise of progress and salvation as a
5 chimera. If, in the originary conception, Enlightenment and modernity meant the
6 inauguration of the rule of reason and liberation from the tyranny of the irrational and
7 the unreasonable, now it is posited that modernitys incoherences its places of
8 unreason are not cases of mere dysfunction which might readily be solved by a
9 better management of technical progress and economic growth.4
10 What does it mean to be modern in a Third World or postcolonial society? Does
11 modernity in such societies always have to be a known history, something which has
12 already happened elsewhere, and which is to be reproduced, mechanically or
13 otherwise, with a local content?5 Or do these societies always have to inhabit what
14 Homi Bhabha6 calls the liminal space a state of in-betweenness, condemned to a
15 permanent transition, an endless pause.7 What is it in their modernities that makes
16 their present a site from which they must escape?8 Are these societies characterised
17 by social blanks the lack of institutional capabilities required for modern mega-
18 societies, arising from the dissonance between western institutions that have been
19 imposed on them and their own family, caste, village, pilgrimage centre, little
20 kingdom, and so forth?9 If we do not agree with these formulations we could take
21 comfort in the fact that we are all inescapably modern now: most societies today
22 possess the means for the local production of modernity.10 This has led to a veering
23 away from canonical forms of European modernity and the positing of alternative or
24 plural modernities.11
25 In this paper I focus on postcolonial theory and its understanding and critique of
26 modernity. There have been well-known criticisms of postcolonial theory with regard
27 to its confusions about the temporal or geographical limits of postcolonialism and,
28 from a Marxist perspective, the class location of postcolonial thinkers and the
29 material conditions of the emergence of postcolonialism.12 Arif Dirlik, for example,

3
The terminology Third World, needless to say, has become obsolete since its pejorative
connotations were exposed. But here I continue to use it following Dirlik 1997, who argues for the
unexhausted radical potential of the connotation.
4
Chesneaux 1992, 140.
5
Meaghan Morris quoted in Chakrabarty 1997, 283, original emphasis.
6
Bhabha 1994.
7
T. N. Madan quoted in Deshpande 1999, 3.
8
Chatterjee 1997, 120.
9
Saberwal 1986, 2.
10
Appadurai and Breckenbridge 1995, 19.
11
See Gaonkar 2001.
12
Dirlik 1997; Ahmad 1995; OHanlon and Washbrook 1992.
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

POSTCOLONIALISM AND MODERNITY 301
1 in an influential critique, has argued that postcolonial theorys emergence is itself

2 linked to the latest phase of capitalism the emergence of Third World capitalism,
3 and the arrival of Third World intellectuals in First World academe.13 While these
4 criticisms are valid, I veer way from these to focus on an interrogation of the
5 postcolonial problematisation of modernity, for Marxist critiques have also had a
6 tendency to dismiss postcolonial theory. Dirlik argues that rather than a description
7 of anything, [it] is a discourse that seeks to constitute the world in the self-image of
8 intellectuals who view themselves as postcolonial intellectuals.14 For Dirlik
9 postcolonialisms key arguments do not represent any earth shattering conceptual
10 innovations for they are a rephrasing of older concerns. Similarly, Aijaz Ahmad has
11 argued that postcoloniality is like most things, a matter of class.15
12 Postcolonial theory raises very important questions about modernity and these
13 cannot be dismissed as easily as these quotes suggest. There has been a tendency in
14 theoretical frameworks like that of Marxism not to enter into a dialogue with
15 postcolonialism.16 This, in my view, is unproductive, for it does not allow us to
16 expand our existing frameworks of understanding and explanation. Therefore, it is
17 important to acknowledge the ways in which postcolonialism is able to bridge the
18 gaps in Marxism, especially errors spawned by a hubristic modernism or the
19 technological Prometheanism of the later Marx.17 This tendency, unfortunately, has
20 been the dominant feature of many Marxist theories and communist movements
21 inspired by them. Postcolonialisms important contribution in extending the
22 postmodern and poststructuralist critique to the empirical contexts of colonised Third
23 World societies (something that was outside the ambit of the latter) has to be
24 recognised. In particular, its theorisations of subalternity, Eurocentrism and
25 nationalism18 are vital to overcoming many of the premises of modernism.
26 Nevertheless, I argue that despite these important questions raised by postcolonial
27 theory, the answers provided have been very unsatisfactory. From a critical realist
28 perspective, they provide an inadequate and incomplete understanding of modernity
29 and its formulations are ultimately unhelpful and, in some cases, dangerous for the
30 subjects that the theory claims to represent. The fundamental problems stem from the
31 inadequacies of the philosophical paradigm that it employs, which is basically
32 interpretivist. There is a persistent refusal to acknowledge that there is a world
33 existing independently of our knowledge of it.19 In showing these limitations, I

13
Dirlik 1997, 53.
14
Dirlik 1997, 623.
15
Ahmad 1995, 120<on what p. does quote appear?>.
16
Bartolovich 2002, 1. This applies to engagement with postmodernism/postructuralism as well;
see Mannathukkaren 2006.
17
Bhaskar 1989, 126.
18
Bartolovich 2002, 11.
19
Sayer 2000, 1.

1 proceed here as immanent critique in critical realism would do by identifying

2 theorypractice inconsistencies, contradictions and anomalies and remedying the
3 constitutive absences or incompleteness that give rise to them, thereby effecting a
4 move to a fuller, richer conceptual totality.20 Ontologically and epistemologically,
5 postcolonialisms formulations are incomplete. As I elaborate below, these are
6 reflected in its understanding of modernity. After outlining and establishing some of
7 the key arguments of postcolonialism, I undertake a critique of its understanding of
8 modernity in relation to various aspects such as capitalism, the place of the peasant,
9 Eurocentrism and the relationship to the past. In each of these areas I demonstrate its
10 inadequacies with regard to some key themes such as the material dimension,
11 structural conditions, binaries and dualisms, relativism, fallibilism, temporality and
12 structure/agency.
13 At least in some of these a return to a Marxist problematic is vital and
14 unavoidable, for its critical realist tools make it possible to overcome postcolonial
15 theorys deficiencies. There is a close link between Marxism and critical realism. Roy
16 Bhaskar argues that socialist emancipation will not be possible without critical
17 realism. Many of the key themes of critical realism are already present in Marx, even
18 if they are not explicitly articulated.21 This does not mean that Marxism and critical
19 realism can be conflated or that critical realism naturally leads to Marxism.22 Critical
20 realism provides a platform for taking on board the critiques of positivist fallacies
21 raised by postcolonial theory without abandoning the Marxist concerns with
22 objectivity, truth and emancipation. The Marxism that is reconstructed in this fashion
23 is a non-reductionist one.23 It is imperative that the heterogeneity of the Marxist
24 tradition24 is reinstated. The error that postcolonial theory commits is in reducing
25 Marxism to Eurocentrism,25 thus ignoring the various counter-hegemonic struggles in
26 the Third World that have appropriated Marxism to their cause in an engaging way,
27 demonstrating its universalist implications.
28 The Critique of Modernity

29 In this paper I only look at postcolonial authors from India who have been associated
30 with the Subaltern Studies project. The project has contributed to some of the major
31 themes of postcolonial theory, and scholars associated with it are some of the

20
Hartwig 2007a, 99.
21
Bhaskar 1989, 192, 134<re-order?>.
22
Hartwig 2007a, 1001; Sayer 2000, 8; Bhaskar and Collier 1998, 392.
23
For a critique of Marxist reductionism, see Sayer 1998, 121.
24
Benton 1998, 297; Mannathukkaren 2006.
25
Bartolovich 2002, 10.

1 important voices of postcolonialism.26 If the Subaltern Studies project began in India

2 towards the late seventies by a group of historians who were disillusioned with
3 existing trends of Indian historiography, which in their view had been completely
4 dominated by elitism, thus ignoring the subaltern,27 it broadened its horizon from the
5 study of the subaltern to an understanding of the postcolonial condition and a
6 criticism of modernity in the Third World. Subaltern Studies, in the beginning,
7 especially, drew inspiration from Antonio Gramsci, who had grappled with the
8 question of subaltern identity through a Marxist framework. But from the beginning it
9 was clear that the project of reclaiming the subaltern voice could not proceed on the
10 basis of a mere inversion within modernist discourse. Dipesh Chakrabarty, prominent
11 postcolonial thinker, argues that subaltern historiography differs from Gramscian-
12 inspired social history from below in three important respects: it necessarily
13 entailed a relative separation of the history of power from any universalist histories of
14 capital, critique of the nation form, and an interrogation of the relation between
15 power and knowledge.28 And this critique of modernity and the Enlightenment was
16 visible as early as in the first volume of Subaltern Studies, where a distinction was
17 being drawn between two spheres of politics: first, traditional peasant-communal
18 politics based on community; and second, modern organised politics defined by the
19 centrality of the individual and sectional interests.29 As we will see, postcolonial
20 theory is built on such binaries, e.g. modernity/tradition.
21 One of the fundamental problematics of postcolonialism, following Subaltern
22 Studies, has been to question the stagist (allegedly Eurocentric) notion of history in
23 which agrarian societies have no option but to transform themselves into industrial
24 societies to achieve progress and democracy. In this view, some the main culprits of
25 linearity are Marxists who see peasant consciousness (which is mainly governed by
26 religion) as an aberration in modernity. Postcolonialism argues, instead, that peasant
27 consciousness is both radical and political and is perfectly capable of adapting to
28 conditions of modernity.30
29 The essence of Subaltern Studies could be described as a democratic project
30 meant to produce a genealogy of the peasant as citizen in contemporary political
31 modernity. The main way in which political modernity in postcolonial societies
32 diverges from that of the West was that in the former it was not founded on the
33 assumed death of the peasant. Moreover, the western notion of the political as a
34 story of human sovereignty in a disenchanted world does not apply to non-western

26
Even though the focus is on India, these authors have generalised its experience to stand for the
entire postcolonial condition something that has drawn justifiable criticisms.
27
Guha 1982, 13.
28
Chakrabarty 2002, 8.
29
30
Chakrabarty 2002, 9, 11.

1 contexts where a strict separation between politics and religion is not sustainable.31
2 The endeavour to read postcolonial modernity on its own terms would mean the
3 critique of the tendency in existing historiographies to describe it using negative
4 prefixes borrowed from European metahistories: not bourgeois, not capitalist, not
5 liberal, and so on.
32
6 According to postcolonial theory, colonised societies history has always been

7 read in terms of a lack or absence, from the perspective of (western) modernity.
8 Instead, they want to recover the deep ambivalences that mark their modernity in
9 which anti-historical and anti-modern tendencies meld seamlessly with modern
10 institutions and even projects like nationalism.33 The implication is that postcolonial
11 modernity fundamentally differs from western modernity. Partha Chatterjee, another
12 key postcolonial thinker, argues in a similar vein when he speaks about our
13 modernity. The distinguishing feature of the modernity of the colonised is the
14 persistence of a certain scepticism about modernitys values and consequences even
15 in its acceptance, which according to Chatterjee stems from the intertwining of
16 modernity with colonialism. As a result, while modernity in the West has been
17 characterised by a conception of the present as the site of ones escape from the past,
18 for us it is precisely the present from which we feel we must escape. The complicity
19 of modern knowledges with modern regimes of power has condemned the colonised
20 to be perpetual consumers of a universal modernity. This subjecthood has resulted in
21 the coloniseds urge to produce their own modernities. Chatterjee detects the
22 adaptation of modernity not only in the supposedly cultural domains of religion,
23 literature or the arts. The attempt to find a different modernity has been carried out
24 even in the presumably universal field of science.34
25 Postcolonial theorys critique of a universal modernity has important implications
26 for the theory and practice of Third World politics. The crucial argument that it
27 makes is the external and alien character of modernity because of the introduction
28 of new ideas such as liberal rights, individual subject, the state as an impersonal
29 entity, etc., by European colonial powers. This externality was compounded by the
30 fact that the anti-colonial national movement led by the elitist middle class, rather
31 than explore structural possibilities of their own societies, followed European models
32 and ideals.35 Chatterjee argued in a similar vein when he posited that nationalism,
33 even when it opposed colonialism, shared its thematic of reason, progress and
34 modernity, accepted its Orientalist conception of India, and thus was a derivative

31
32
Chakrabarty 2002, xxii, original emphasis.
33
34
Chatterjee 1997, 19, 1314, 18.
35
Kaviraj 1991, 789, 84.

1 discourse.36 Even in the postcolonial period, despite the fact that bourgeois rights
2 have been adopted by the constitution, they cannot claim to unify society because of
3 their externality to the immanent forms of social consciousness.37
4 As far as the material domain is concerned, postcolonialism argues that the global
5 history of capital does not reproduce the same history of power everywhere: In the
6 calculus of modernity, power is not a dependent variable and capital an independent
7 one. Chakrabarty accepts that Marxism is relevant but inadequate to theorise power,
8 especially in colonial societies. The fundamental characteristic of power in
9 postcolonial societies is the direct domination and subordination of the subaltern by
10 the elite, a political domination rather than an economic one.38 Postcolonialists want
11 to question the foundational status attributed by Marxists to capitalism in
12 understanding the colonisation of societies and also their tendency to read
13 particularistic histories of region, culture, race, nation from the universalistic
14 language of capitalism (or class) only. Instead, they assert difference as the condition
15 of historys possibility and that the histories of the metropolitan proletariat and the
16 colonized are discrepant, even if both are exploited by capitalism.39 Even
17 colonialism survived only on the condition that the colonising bourgeoisie failed in
18 its universalising mission. Colonial capitalism definitely impacted society but could
19 not incorporate vast areas in the life and consciousness of the people. It was
20 capitalism, but in leading subalternist Ranajit Guhas famous words, it was
21 dominance without hegemony.40
22 Increasingly, differences became the main motif of postcolonial theory. The
23 divisions on the basis of religion, caste and language that mark the working-class
24 movement make Chakrabarty argue that the singular failure of Marxists has been the
25 lack of an anthropological and theoretical understanding of culture(s)41 that stems
26 from their disenchanted and hyper-rationalist view of the world, which shows
27 antipathy to anything that smacks of the religious .42 Obviously, with the emphasis
28 on differences, totalising claims of other hegemonic discourses such as nationalism
29 were also questioned. The focus began to shift to the fragments that resist such
30 totalities.43
31 There is no denying the fact that postcolonial theory has exposed many of the
32 linear, evolutionist and progressivist notions of the theoretical paradigms mainly
33 influenced by modernism. Postcolonial theory is definitely justified in criticising the

36
Chatterjee 1986.
37
Quoted in Bannerji 2000, 909.
38
39
Prakash 1992, 184.
40
41
42
43
See, for example, Chatterjee 1993; Pandey 1997.

1 dominant theories of modernity, which Charles Taylor has described as a-cultural, for
2 believing in the linear transition of all societies to a single end-point, a modernity that
3 is immune to the immense cultural markers of difference that exist among them.44
4 The older modernisation theories and political development approaches were
5 characterised strongly by the traditionmodernity dichotomy. Even theories like
6 dependency, which opposed modernisation from a Third World perspective, were
7 ultimately operating within the same discursive space of development,45 and thus
8 were unable to overcome their ethnocentrism. Postcolonial theory offers an important
9 corrective to the widespread tendency among such accounts of non-western societies
10 to treat them as mirror images (in the making) of western societies; hence the
11 appellations such as developing, modernising, etc. that have been used to describe
12 them. But, as we will see, postcolonialism succumbs to the many errors that it points
13 out in other theories.
14 Whither the Material?

15 One of the most important flaws of postcolonial theorys understanding of modernity
16 is its lack of attention to its material basis. This stems from its interpretivist refusal to
17 acknowledge the the presence of a non-discursive, material dimension to social life
18 and that meanings are related to material circumstances.46 Postcolonialism does a
19 poor job of theorising about the irreducible material dimension of human social
20 life.47 Social structures are definitely reliant on the agents consciousness; at the same
21 time they cannot be reduced to it. Even when they are concept-dependent, that is not
22 the only aspect, for the material dimension is as important.48 Postcolonial theory does
23 not move to a non-idealist critique of ideas by acknowledging the possibility of
24 non-ideational causality.49 The later linguistic and cultural turn in Subaltern Studies
25 led to seeing social reality in terms of ideational aspects. This was a justifiable move
26 when positivist and materialist frameworks were dominant. But problems arise when
27 a complex reality is reduced to merely one aspect of it, the level of ideas and
28 discourse. Postcolonialists might concur with Arturo Escobar that the criticism of
29 discourse and culture is a nave defence of the real for it does not see discourse as
30 material.50 The whole debate is not whether discourse is material with real effects
31 (which it is) but whether postcolonial theory has reduced reality to discourse alone.

44
Taylor 2001, 179, 192.
45
Arturo Escobar quoted in Crush 1995, 20.
46
Sayer 2000, 1718.
47
Hartwig 2007b, 231.
48
Bhaskar 1989, 4; Sayer 1998, 122.
49
Bhaskar [1979] 1998, 158.
50
Escobar 2006, 449.

1 Moreover, frameworks that focus on discourses tend to conflate discourses with

2 effects and practices, as if the intended ideas are completely translated into practice.51
3 I argue that, even with regard to the discursive level, it does only a partial job of
4 excavating various discourses and the contradictions in them. As in poststructuralism,
5 texts gain primacy over institutions.52 Questions of objectivity, validity and
6 materiality are ignored for the focus on representation and meaning.53 Of course,
7 concepts like the material cannot be understood in a reductionist fashion, and
8 phenomena such as economic exploitation are not experienced in an unmediated
9 fashion. They still need the medium of language.54 Nevertheless, it is here that critical
10 realism with its conception of a stratified reality, i.e. the existence of multiple levels
11 and modes of engagement between knower and known,55 is able to provide a more
12 nuanced understanding of reality. This is missing in postcolonial theory. While
13 differences are emphasised, it is not analysed as to how these differences are created
14 and promoted in the real world.56 The structural conditions in which these social
15 processes take place are glossed over. The classic critique that is raised by critical
16 realism about non-realist or inadequately realist frameworks applies here: while these
17 may acknowledge the reality of events they do not admit any structures lying beneath
18 them which cause these events.57
19 Despite the condemnation of the practice of reading colonised societies through
20 European-derived social sciences and political philosophies, the debt of
21 postcolonial theory to Michel Foucault is obvious and is not unacknowledged.
22 Following Foucault, the history of modernity cannot be understood through capital
23 alone, but through the emergence of a new disciplinary regime that occasioned and
24 accompanied capitalism. In new institutions like workhouses the instilling of ethical
25 consciousness of labour was more fundamental than their economic role and testifies
26 to the bourgeoisies great dream and great preoccupation of the Classical age: the
27 laws of the state and the heart are at last identical.58 This denial of a central role to
28 capitalism in the constitution of modernity is problematic from the point of view of

51
Sayer 2000, 45.
52
Dews 1987, 35. For an empirical critique of postcolonial theorys textualism, see
Mannathukkaren 2007.
53
Dirlik 1997, 5, 20, 79.
54
Bhaskar [1979] 1998, 60.
55
Norris 2007, 335.
56
Bahl 2000, 99.
57
Collier 1994, 7; Bhaskar 1989, 3.
58
Foucault 1973, 68. For Foucault, the supervision of, and intervention in, the social domain by
agencies of welfare and control is a more fundamental characteristic of modern societies than an
economy released from directly political relations of domination. This follows Max Weber, for
whom the social forms engendered by purposive or instrumental rationality, with their indifference
to personal ties, and their crushing of idiosyncrasy and spontaneity represent a profounder threat to
human freedom than the class oppression specific to capitalist society (Dews 1987, 147, 151).

1 the marginalised and the subalterns whose voice the theory is trying to reclaim.
2 Despite the few gestures59 towards understanding capitalism, they do not attain any
3 significance.
4 The denial of causal effectivity (prompted by the interpretivist belief in the
5 efficacy of meanings alone and not causal explanation60) to questions of political
6 economy by postcolonial theory is also a major drawback in analysing the present
7 conjuncture of late capitalism. Modernity is mainly seen as a cultural phenomenon,
8 not as capitalist modernity. Like postdevelopmentalist arguments that speak of the
9 strawman of capitalocentrism,61 postcolonial theory sees capitalism as nothing
10 more than a potentially disposable fiction which can be refused in favour of
11 marginal histories, of multiple and heterogeneous identities.62 With the transition
12 from formal to real subsumption by capital in almost all societies, and the resultant
13 predatory globalisation (combined, it is extremely important to note, with
14 precapitalist forms of exploitation and oppression), it is imperative that the
15 gargantuan global scale of capitalism is understood. But postcolonial modernities
16 with their emphasis on articulating difference are not able to provide this and, as a
17 result, are unable to talk about exploitation of labour as a common reality under
18 different cultural capitalisms (which is all the more pronounced in those societies
19 marked by traditional forms of consciousness as outlined by postcolonial theory).63
20 The critical realist emphasis on using scientific tools to understand the causes of
21 exploitation and enabling the oppressed to change those conditions64 is alien to it. The
22 postcolonial position on capitalism is vague and ambivalent; if it has posited
23 capitalism as unimportant, it also sees the homogenization of the contemporary
24 world by capitalism.65 But it does not prescribe any programme to counter this
25 phenomenon.
26 Postcolonial theory is correct in questioning the discourse of capitalocentrism that
27 has consecrated capitalism as the holy grail of modern social formation: capitalism is
28 not a monolithic entity but is constantly interrupted by other logics that run counter to
29 its logic of accumulation.66 The universal triumph of capital is not inevitable and

59
Among the postcolonialists, Dipesh Chakrabarty is the only theorist who has sought to rethink
many of the postcolonial positions in light of Marxist criticisms (see Chakrabarty 1985; 1993). He
accepts that Marxs critique of capital and commodity will be indispensable for any critical
understanding a critique of modernity in India [cannot] ignore the history of commodification in
that society (Chakrabarty 1993, 1094).
60
Hartwig 2007b, 230.
61
See Escobar 2001.
62
OHanlon and Washbrook 1992, 147.
63
The extreme levels of repression and exploitation of labour during the growth of the miracle
economies of South East Asia is an example.
64
Hartwig 2007a, 97.
65
Prakash 1990, 398.
66
For an empirical substantiation, see Gidwani 2008.

1 there is definitely an outside of capitalism that can be one of the main sources of
2 imagining alternatives to capitalism.67 At the same time, there is also a need to
3 understand its real effects which are causing the commodification of human beings
4 and nature to an extent that is unprecedented, and this it does not attempt. Crucially,
5 postcolonial theory fails to explain developments such as the remarkable and
6 emphatic consensus from the 1980s on the adoption of neoliberalism in political
7 economy by diverse nations ranging from the First World to the Third World.68 As
8 Harvey points out, transformations of this depth and scope do not occur by
9 accident.69 It also fails to elucidate how Oriental societies such as China and India
10 immersed in millennia of non-accumulationist traditions and governed in recent
11 history by communist and socialist ideas have, in a matter of two to three decades,
12 spectacularly became the drivers of the global market economy. This is obviously a
13 material transformation but also involves changes in the discursive level. But what is
14 important from my perspective is that to understand modernity in the Third World,
15 the crucial question that has to be asked is how the market logic is becoming all-
16 pervasive despite the existence of other discourses, and very often in conjunction
17 with them. Here it is imperative that (non-reductionist) Marxist tools be employed to
18 understand this material conjuncture while simultaneously making sense of its
19 cultural/ideational aspects.
20 The postcolonial project of peasant as citizen in contemporary political
21 modernity remarkably does not involve the material transformation of the peasant.
22 Material questions such as the structural position of the peasant in either feudalism or
23 capitalism are not addressed, as broad categories like the subaltern and elite are used.
24 The theoretical focus on differences has not translated into practice and is thus unable
25 to understand the complex reality marked by class, religion, gender and other
26 divisions. The notion of class is alien and was brought in only by the coloniser. Class
27 itself is understood in a non-economic way, as a part of power relations, thus
28 obfuscating processes of surplus expropriation.70 The peasant is supposedly able to
29 relate to modernity but curiously remains constrained by the moral economy of
30 feudalism and a peasant-communal ideology that is pitted against modern organised
31 politics. There is no understanding of the implications of the breadth and scope of the
32 different kinds of peasant struggles in the twentieth century that went beyond
33 Scottian everyday forms of peasant resistance and the various ways that they have
34 related to organised politics. Ironically, the most successful peasant struggles have
35 been those that have combined spontaneity with organisation and transcended various

67
See Nigam 2007.
68
For a brilliant summation of these processes, see Harvey 2005.
69
Harvey 2005, 1.
70
Mannathukkaren 2010b, forthcoming.

1 internal divisions.71 It is no ones case that there is a linear transition to secular

2 identities like class from pre-existing ones like religion and caste as in modernist
3 narratives. And we can accept that religious consciousness is a big part of the peasant
4 world. But postcolonial theory does not move to explaining how this consciousness
5 has also been transcended or conjoined with other ideas in thousands of struggles all
6 over the world. In reducing the peasant struggles for recognition as well as
7 redistribution to merely cultural struggles for meanings, its emancipatory project of
8 bestowing citizenship on peasants is rendered ineffective.
9 The problems in postcolonial theory arise from its unwillingness to move beyond
10 interpretivism to understand the various kinds of false beliefs that can inhabit peasant
11 (and other kinds of) consciousness. It privileges lay narratives as truth without
12 seeking to criticise them. In interpretivism, peoples own understanding of their
13 actions exhaust or constitute the social. So there is no scope for critique. This
14 ignores unintended consequences, tacit knowledge and the unconscious, as well as
15 that conceptualisations may be inadequate and/or distort what is going on, or that
16 aspects of social reality may not have been conceptualised at all. This therefore
17 tends to an interpretative fundamentalism.72 There is no concept of ideology in it.73
18 On the other hand, Bhaskar argues that the hermeneutic mediation of meanings (or
19 fusion of horizons) is not sufficient; it must be complemented by [a] consideration
20 of the question posed by semiotics as to how such meanings (horizons, etc.) are
21 produced.74 Explanatory critique here plays an important role in human
22 emancipation by unveiling the false beliefs that aid in human oppression.75 Thus there
23 is a need to marry understanding with explanation and the material with the
24 discursive to better understand capitalism and the place of the peasant, and this is
25 missing in postcolonial theory.
26 The Strawman of Eurocentrism

27 If the recouping of subaltern voices was the main agenda of the Subaltern Studies
28 project in the beginning, it soon began to lay the foundation for an essentially cultural
29 critique of western Enlightenment and Eurocentrism, putting in place the building
30 blocks of postcolonialism. Hence the task of provincialising Europe a process of
31 documenting how Enlightenments reason which was not always self-evident to
32 everyone, has been made to look obvious far beyond the ground where it

71
For details, see Mannathukkaren 2010b, forthcoming.
72
Hartwig 2007b, 232.
73
Bhaskar [1979] 1998, 21.
74
Bhaskar 1998, 232.
75
Bhaskar and Collier 1998, 389.

1 originated76 and uncovering the externality of modernity. There is nothing to quarrel

2 with in an endeavour to decolonise and de-Orientalise postcolonial consciousness.
3 But the fundamental question that is not being asked here is whether postcolonial
4 societies can attain emancipation and liberation just by eliminating European
5 influence in all spheres. The cultural/material split and the resultant attention to
6 Eurocentrism without capitalism fails to explain the particular power of European
7 colonialism and its distinguishing feature from other colonialisms in history.77 This
8 leads to the rupture of the moral dimension of the critique of colonialism from its
9 mooring in radical, often rich, structural critique of capitalism and
10 imperialism/colonialism.78 Europe or the West becomes a fetish with no credible
11 referent.79
12 Even though Subaltern Studies arose as a counter to elitist colonial, nationalist and
13 Marxist historiographies, because of its later obsession with Eurocentrism it
14 eventually became an indigenist discourse uncritically upholding tradition, religion,
15 community, etc., ignoring in the process questions like that of internal hierarchies and
16 oppression.80 The series of dichotomies that characterise its enterprise
17 cultural/material, tradition/modernity, coloniser/colonised, West/East and so on
18 hardly enable it to answer them. Ironically, it can be seen as a replication of the
19 binaries that characterise many modernist projects. Thus, as Bhaskar argues,
20 productivist socialism drew a sharp dichotomy between nature and society (which
21 licensed unlimited expropriation of nature). This is reflected in other false binaries
22 such as physical/mental, natural/spiritual, individualism/collectivism and
23 science/morality.81 Postcolonial theory mimics these, differing only in privileging a
24 different half of the binary. The pitfall of such a binarising strategy lies in not seeing
25 the different aspects of the binary in continuous dynamic causal interaction.82 This
26 is where the projects political programme has serious negative consequences for the
27 oppressed multitude of the Third World. Postcolonial theorys Third World seems to
28 resemble the one that scholar Geeta Kapur characterised as excelling in revenge
29 histories about otherness but lack[ing] the initiative on historical reflexivity for
30 envisaging a future.83
31 If in the beginning subalternists critiqued the complicity of the nationalist elite in

76
77
Dirlik 1997, 68; Mannathukkaren 2009, 481.
78
DSouza 2007, 70.
79
Lazarus 2002, 44.
80
Mannathukkaren 2009, 481.
81
Bhaskar 1989, 1, 67. Hermeneutics is also characterised by dualisms like the ones between
history and theory and the universal and the particular. And when they are bridged they result in the
identity of social being and thought (Bhaskar [1979] 1998, 20, 57).
82
Bhaskar 1989, 6.
83
Kapur 1998, 202.

1 silencing the voice of the subaltern and its failure to speak for the nation and also
2 saw nationalism in the political domain as deeply complicit in the project of
3 modernity and its forms of disciplinary power,84 later they partially redeemed the
4 nationalist elite.85 The turn to Mahatma Gandhi despite the earlier trenchant critique
5 of him as affirming the status quo and against any radical change86 is an example of
6 this. Now Gandhis anti-modernist, anti-individualist rhetoric of love, kinship,
7 austerity, sacrifice becomes the symbol of the struggle for the sovereignty of the
8 inner spiritual domain of the nation.87 A re-reading of Gandhi is extremely relevant in
9 the present conjuncture when western modernity is facing a severe moral and
10 material crisis. Some of Gandhis views on modernity, which were considered
11 archaic at the time, have acquired a particular meaning and salience now.88 But the
12 problem with postcolonial theory is that it has selectively appropriated Gandhis anti-
13 modernist writings while ignoring the immense contribution that Gandhi has made to
14 developing a democratic public sphere and the critique that he launched against an
15 unreconstructed traditional order.89
16 Even pre-political resistance to colonialism is redeemed as nationalism:
17 nationalism in the material domain is still imitative of western models, but in the
18 cultural and spiritual domain it is now seen as launching the
19
20 most powerful, creative, and historically significant project: to fashion a modern
21 national culture that is nevertheless not Western. If the nation is an imagined
22 community, then this is where it is brought into being. In this true and essential
23 domain, the nation is already sovereign, even when the state is in the hands of the
24 colonial power.
90
25
26 The culturalist assumption is seen here in the positing of the cultural domain as a
27 true and essential domain. The internal hierarchies and contestations within this
28 domain are papered over. Moreover, the artificial and false separation between the
29 material and cultural domains prevents an analysis of how the constraints imposed by
30 the former shape the imagination possible in the latter.91 Such a lacuna is carried over
31 to the postcolonial present in which the valid concern with decolonisation of
32 consciousness is severed from an analysis of the material prerequisites for the same.
33 The limitations of the interpretivist approach are again clearly visible.

84
Chatterjee 1986, original emphasis.
85
Bannerji 2001<2000?>; Mannathukkaren 2007, 1203.
86
Pandey 1982, 187.
87
Chatterjee 1993, 22039; Mannathukkaren 2007, 1204.
88
See Nigam 2009.
89
Gupta 2009.
90
Chatterjee 1993, 6.
91

1 Flight to the Past

2 I argue that this obsession with Eurocentrism and colonialism leads to temporal
3 problems as in non-engagement with the present, despite providing a critique of
4 modernisation theories.92 Without an understanding of the present, the attempt to
5 provincialise Europe may, paradoxically, simply trap us in that province.93 If there
6 are indications of recognising the ambivalent nature of the modernities of the non-
7 West one cannot be for or against modernity; one can only devise strategies for
8 coping with it94 these are overshadowed by a resolution that rejects modernity. The
9 attempt to reclaim subjecthood by charting our own modernities regresses into
10 judgemental relativism. This leads to the elision of the present and a constant harking
11 back to the past, the pre-modern. This way of looking at modernity reinforces the
12 modernisation paradigm. For in both the in-betweenness is not overcome: in the
13 first, the past becomes the ideal, and in the second, the future. Some postcolonial
14 writers have recognised that there is no going back to pre-modern political languages
15 to solve modern-day problems.95 But this is occluded by the strong tendency to see
16 the past as the ideal. Chatterjees definition of non-western modernity and the present
17 as a site from which we feel we must escape is a strong indicator of this: At the
18 opposite end from these days marked by incompleteness and lack of fulfilment, we
19 construct a picture of those days when there was beauty, prosperity and a healthy
20 sociability, and which was above all, our own creation.96 Chatterjee attributes this
21 disenchantment to a failed project of cultural modernisation undertaken by the elite.
22 The failure arises from the latters desire to
23
24 replicate in its own society the forms as well as the substance of Western modernity.
25 It was a desire for a new ethical life in society, one that is in conformity with the
26 virtues of the enlightenment and of bourgeois freedom and whose known cultural
27 forms are those of secularized Western Christianity.
97
28
29 The disenchantment is attributed to ignorance of traditional social practices and the
30 imposition of western modernity. Despite its recognition that this may lead to
31 dehistoricising and essentialising tradition ,98 Chatterjees position slips into the
32 tradition/modernity dichotomy.
33 The interpretivist approach adopted by postcolonial theory has, of course, the
34 merit of understanding the worldviews of subjects and the meanings that they

92
93
Dhareshwar 1995, 322; Mannathukkaren 2007, 1218.
94
95
Kaviraj 1991, 96.
96
97
98

1 construct. Interpretative understanding is an indispensable part of everyday practice

2 and the hermeneutic tradition is vital in making sense of the meaning-laden human
3 social reality. This reality is a pre-interpreted reality, a reality already brought under
4 concepts by social actors.99 Interpretivism is therefore correct in asserting the
5 necessity of different kind of method from the natural sciences to understand human
6 reality. But this does not mean that any interpretation is possible in a given situation
7 it is limited by the practical context in which communication and action take place.
8 So the position that there cannot be a differentiation between good and bad
9 interpretations is problematic.100 The problem with such relativism is that, while
10 correctly recognising that all knowledge is culturally and historically bound, it goes
11 to the extent of denying therefore that arbitrating between different knowledge claims
12 is possible.101 To the extent that interpretivism seeks to provide depth to the meanings
13 that govern reality, it is complementary to critical realism. Even poststructuralist
14 deconstruction can be useful in opening up the uncertainties of meaning and
15 exposing how power relations within discourse privilege certain terms while
16 excluding others. Thus it is complementary to critical realisms emancipatory
17 project.102 At the same time critical realism goes further than poststructuralism to
18 argue for a richer conception of ontology entrained by Bhaskars critique of
19 ontological monovalence (denial of the reality of absence).103 According to Bhaskar,
20 ontological monovalence erases the contingency of existential questions and
21 despatialize[s] and detemporalize[s] (accounts of) being.104
22 I also argue that postcolonial theory has been inadequately interpretivist. It
23 succumbs to the tendency, often seen in interpretivist frameworks, of imposing the
24 researchers categories on subjects.105 It does not unpack the caste and class coding of
25 the desire to escape the present. Once we do that, it can be seen that generalisation of
26 this desire as a characteristic of our modernity cannot be sustained across social
27 categories. The relation to the past is governed by ones social location. As in
28 Chatterjees account based on the elite, the past is one of beauty and prosperity: the
29 villages teemed with healthy, happy and robust people, who spent their days mainly
30 in sports;106 for those who live under slavery, however, the story is completely
31 different:
32

99
Bhaskar 1998, 21.
100
Sayer 2000, 46.
101
Potter 2007, 274.
102
Joseph 2007, 441.
103
Joseph 2007, 441.
104
Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 7.
105
Sayer 2000, 46.
106
Motilal Ghosh (founder of Amrit Bazar Patrika, famous nationalist daily in Bengal) describing
the 1850s, quoted in Chatterjee 1997, 6.

1 The entire history has become an affair which makes us angry and rebellious. It has
2 all got to be changed. We only have the minimum. Our health is not improving. We
3 have no education or art of our own, no culture, no work, no money, nothing.
107
4
5 Unlike the accounts of the landed classes and other elites who have lost much of their
6 power under modernity, there is no romanticisation and idealisation of the past here.
7 Instead, the account of it is animated by the desire for freedom, for equality of all,
8 and for liberation from oppression, servitude and basic wants. It demonstrates clearly
9 the aspiration to create a society in which needs are not frustrated108 and unwanted
10 and unnecessary constraints, especially those that perpetrate oppression and
11 exploitation, are removed. The idea of freedom is not only negative but also includes
12 rights and needs and possibilities, such as possibilities for self-realization and self-
13 development.109 What Bhaskar calls the dialectic of desire to freedom110 is
14 precisely what receives insufficient attention in postcolonial theory because of its
15 reliance on elite and dominant accounts (ironically for a framework that has the
16 subaltern as its central focus). This dialectic takes its departure from the consideration
17 that human beings, by and large, want to be free, under some (sets of)<is this your
18 addition or in original?> description(s).111 If the subaltern desire and aspirations for
19 freedom have remained largely unfulfilled, it is not merely because the postcolonial
20 elites tried to bring their societies into conformity with the virtues of the
21 enlightenment<cap E previously, please check consistency throughout>, as argued
22 by postcolonialists. Such a position ignores the efficacy of pre-modern history in
23 shaping the present, especially the role of economic and cultural capital acquired over
24 centuries of hegemony of the upper castes and the dominant classes. It avoids a
25 critical examination of tradition and the role of the feudal propertied classes in the
26 hollowing out of democracy in postcolonial societies; 112 and it misses the ironic ways
27 in which the modernity/tradition divide is bridged, as in the powerful monopoly of
28 elites built by what is called a syncratic alliance: a concord uniting traditional
29 agrarian interests, too strong to be destroyed, with a modernizing industrial elite.113
30 In postcolonial theory there is a detachment of the theoretical critique from any
31 kind of conception of a political praxis. Here, once again, the operation of a
32 binarising strategy is visible. Even a vague idea of the institutions that are going to be
33 put in place in the de-colonised and post-Eurocentric societies is missing. This is
34 because the project of the Third World writing its own history is ultimately shackled

107
A labourer from an untouchable caste in India quoted in den Uyl 1995, 32.
108
Benton and Craib 2001, 139.
109
Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 2612.
110
Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 260.
111
Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 269, original emphasis.
112
Mannathukkaren 2010b, forthcoming.
113
Haynes 1997, 172.

1 by the incoherent conception of structure and agency and inadequate understanding

2 of the present and the past: The bitter truth about our present is our subjection, our
3 inability to be subjects in our own right. And yet, it is because we want to be modern
4 that our desire to be independent and creative is transposed on to our past.114
5 Postcolonial theory oscillates between voluntarism and determinism, but ultimately
6 all agency is directed towards recreating an unattainable past, ignoring the structural
7 constraints of the present. As noted before, one of the ironies of frameworks like that
8 of hermeneutics and interpretivism is that they mimic and reproduce many features of
9 positivism because of the hegemony of positivism.115 Their fear of positivism has led
10 them to the other extreme of a complete voluntarism that is nothing but the simple
11 inverse of positivisms blanket determinism.116 Critical realism endeavours to avoid
12 the errors of both voluntarism and reification.117 There is no sense of the dual
13 character of society and human praxis in postcolonial theory: society is not created by
14 us but it is both the ever-present condition (material cause) and the continually
15 reproduced outcome of agency. And praxis is both work, that is conscious
16 production, and (normally unconscious) reproduction of the conditions of production,
17 that is society.118 What is notable in this account is that, unlike dualist
18 understandings, social structures are seen as both conditions and outcomes of human
19 agency and people as both products of and conditions of possibility of social
20 structures. At the same time the society and people have their distinct nature.119
21 Postcolonialism only indulges in empty critique of the present-day institutions like
22 the state because of its deep fear of the modern impersonal Leviathan, and seeks to
23 recover the fragmentary and [the] episodic that cannot dream of the whole called
24 the state.120 While it is definitely important to think of new forms of political
25 sociability that go beyond the state in order to creatively envisage the future,
26 postcolonial theory consistently refuses to articulate the exact nature of the
27 fragmentary or how it can engage with/overcome the structure called the modern
28 state. Postcolonialist adoption of the notion of governmentality to argue for the
29 blindness of the modern liberal state to communitarian identities and its inherent
30 coerciveness121 leads to a position that fails to understand the multifarious effects

114
115
Bhaskar [1979] 1998, 19.
116
Bhaskar [1979] 1998, 20.
117
Bhaskar 1989, 4.
118
Bhaskar [1979] 1998, 213.
119
Benton and Craib 2001, 132; Sayer 2000, 18. Bhaskar distinguishes between (1) duality, a
combination of existentially interdependent yet irreducibly distinct correlatives, as in agency and
structure; and (2) dualism, which is characterised by dichotomy or split.
120
121
Chatterjee 1994. Chatterjee argues that western notions of secularism are inapplicable to a
multi-religious society like that of India.

1 produced by the state, including struggles for popular sovereignty. But it does pose
2 some valid questions, such as the efficacy of concepts like civil society (which were
3 primarily developed in western societies), with their focus on individual rights, for
4 understanding the vastly different conditions of the Third World. Thus it correctly
5 calls for the development of new theoretical vocabularies that take into account
6 innovative strategies developed by communities in political praxis and struggles.122
7 Nevertheless, this promise is not fulfilled. Various dichotomies such as
8 modernity/democracy, political society/civil society, East/West are again invoked.123
9 This misses the continuous dynamic causal interaction between the different halves
10 of the binary and the ways in which they are bridged.
11 Ultimately, postcolonialism fails in the task of proposing alternative institutions to
12 those of modernity. The political future that is envisaged is paralysed by an over-
13 dependence on the past and an unwillingness to engage with the present. Again,
14 Dipesh Chakrabarty is the only postcolonial theorist to grapple with this problem. He
15 asks: Can we build democratic, communitarian institutions on the basis of the
16 non-individualistic, but hierarchical and illiberal, precapitalist bonds that have
17 survived and sometimes resisted or even flourished under the onslaught of
18 capital?124 But the posing of the problem and its recognition of ambivalence and
19 contradictions has<have?> not been matched by the answers that have one-sidedly
20 rejected modernity.
21 For a Different Understanding of Modernity

22 The biggest failure of postcolonial theory is the lack of an explanation for the
23 attraction of modernity for the masses and its appropriation and acceptance of many
24 languages of western modernity, again showing the inadequate application of
25 interpretivism.125 After all, it is through the very institutions of alien provenance 126
26 that the masses are announcing their presence in the democracies of the Third
27 World.127 It is ironical that postcolonial theory has termed the Enlightenment
28 European when, as Andrew Collier points out, the struggles to defend it have been

122
Chatterjee 1998b, 60; Chatterjee 1998a, 2812.
123
Chatterjee 1998a, 280; 1998b, 65; 1993, 2367; 2004, 41. For a detailed empirical
substantiation of the inadequacies of these dichotomies, see Mannathukkaren 2010a.
124
Chakrabarty 1989, xiv.
125
Even when postcolonial theory acknowledges that the ideologies of modernization and
instrumental science are so deeply sedimented in the national body politic that they neither manifest
themselves nor function exclusively as forms of imperial power, it attributes them merely to their
authorization and deployment by the nation state (Gyan Prakash quoted in Dirlik 1997, 60).
126
Kaviraj 2002, 28.
127
See Alam 1999; Baiocchi 2005.

1 as much a feature of non-western societies and when serious threats to its values have
2 arisen from within Europe.128 In cases like India where democracy is still largely of a
3 formal kind, the increasing assertion of the disadvantaged classes and groups is
4 nevertheless an irrevocable reality. Without denying the uniqueness and specificity of
5 modernity, the attraction to forms of substantive equality can be considered a
6 universal spanning across cultures and different historical periods.129 Dialectic or the
7 pulse of freedom is an inner urge that flows universally from the logic of elemental
8 absence (lack, need, want or desire) especially in conditions when power relations
9 are dominant, and the logic of dialectical universalizability is such that human
10 beings will eventually accept the concept of freedom for all.130 The binary
11 categories of modernity/tradition, and the privileging of one over the other, fail to
12 understand the dialectical relationship between the two, the new and the received.
13 The range of misconceptions that have arisen in the context of the modernity debate
14 are a result, as Jayant Lele points out, of treating modernity as a unique product of
15 the West,131 which is very true of postcolonial theory. This formulation leads to the
16 fallacious assumption that tradition is unchanging, while change is brought about
17 only by (western) modernity through European colonialism. This misses the
18 strengthening of many existing pre-colonial traditional elements by colonialism.132
19 But, more importantly, it ignores the considerable empirical evidence that exists
20 about the ambiguous early modernity of South Asian and other societies prior to
21 European colonialism or the polyvalent nature of the emergence of modernity. 133
22 Postcolonial theory does not allow us to understand the emergence of universal
23 values of freedom, equality and rationality or the intimations of political theory,
24 individuality or the public sphere before the western Enlightenment and in non-
25 western contexts.134 Of course, this does not mean that there are no differences
26 between modernity and tradition if such a clear distinction can be made at all. But
27 the focus only on the dichotomy and rupture between the two misses the important
28 continuities between them.135 There is evidence for the criticality of many features of
29 pre-modern social systems in the creation of modern societies. Giovanni Arrighi
30 asserts that capitalism [is] an interstitial formation of both premodern and modern

128
Collier 2003, 53.
129
As Barrington Moore notes: Movements to do away with the priest, to attain direct access to
the deity and the source of magic, have simmered underground in both [pre-modern] Europe and Asia
for long periods, to burst forth from time to time in heretical and rebellious movements (1967, 456).
130
Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 277, 269.
131
Lele 2000, 4850.
132
Pieterse and Parekh, 1995, 2.
133
Subhramanyam 1998.
134
Lele 1981, 6; Subhramanyam<check spelling, cf. biblio> 1998, 93; Mannathukkaren 2009, 480.
135
A serious lacuna in postcolonial theory is a simplistic understanding of precolonial history.

1 times.136
2 The universalisable content of modernity thus has to be recognised. Here Jrgen
3 Habermass notions of the immanent rationality of linguistic inter-subjectivity and
4 reason as inherently communicative137 offer some resources to understand the
5 universal underpinnings of human societies if they are to be read with a Marxist focus
6 on the paradigm of production.138 The values of an alternative society should be
7 immanent in current practices, otherwise they would be utopian.139 At the same time
8 there are some equally serious problems in locating ethics on linguistic foundation as
9 there are in separating it from any concrete history.140 Habermas is also limited by a
10 Eurocentric focus.141 True enlightenment and emancipation can only be a result of a
11 dialogic process, especially if a repeat of the horrors of a monologic western
12 universalism is to be avoided. Here the language of perspicuous contrast is helpful
13 in engaging in such a dialogue. This language is one in which we could formulate
14 both their way and ours as alternative possibilities in relation to human constants at
15 work in both.142 Critical realisms belief in fallibilism would go well with such a
16 perspective that is aware of the need to overcome modernisms arrogance. It is
17 willing to recognise the knowledge-producing capacity of non-scientific practices and
18 also everyday activities of lay people. More importantly, it recognises the
19 omnipresent potential of human error and that truth can be thought of not in terms
20 of absolutes but rather in terms of true and truer .143
21 Thomas McCarthy argues that we have things to learn from traditional cultures as
22 well as they from us, not only what we have forgotten and repressed, but something
23 about how we might put our fragmented world back together again.144 Postcolonial
24 theory is not interested in such an enterprise to revitalise the modern and the present
25 by creative engagement of the past and tradition.145 Postcolonial theory, as we saw
26 above in a reductionist reading of Gandhi, misses out on articulating the universal
27 implications of Gandhis thought that would constitute a critique of western
28 modernity but at the same time extend some of its core ideas. Here Bhaskars
29 dialectical project of philosophical recapitulation of the past in relation to the

136
Arrighi 2002, 42<not in biblio, please supply ref>.
137
Rasmussen 1990, 28.
138
For a critique of Habermass abandonment of the paradigm of production for the paradigm of
communication, see Heller 1982, 345.
139
Bhaskar 1989, 113.
140
Bhaskar 1989, 114.
141
Lele 2001<2000?>; McCarthy 1983.
142
Taylor 1985, 125.
143
Potter 2007, 273.
144
McCarthy 1983, 78.
145
For such a perspective, see Mannathukkaren 2006.

1 traditions of both the East and the West146 is vital.

2 Postcolonial theorys aim to write post-foundational histories, against
3 foundational ones, based on identities such as individual, class or structure147
4 transmutes into a denial of any kind of universal foundations, including contingent
5 foundations148 or limiting notions of birth, death and sexual relations and ethics
6 deriving from that conceded even by radical interpretivists such as Peter Winch.149 As
7 Habermas had warned prior to the advent of postcolonial theory, if we remain
8 faithful to the Aristotelian view that moral reasoning is bounded by the law of the
9 city, and [if we] remain linked to a lived-in ethos, we must be prepared to dispense
10 with the emancipatory potential of moral universalism and abandon the chance for
11 penetrating moral criticism of exploitative and repressive social structures.150
12 Postcolonial theory, in any case, reduces universalism to the Enlightenment. This
13 ignores that universalism had existed before modernity.151 The postcolonial focus on
14 differences overshadows concerns of unequal access to power and material resources:
15 having an egalitarian society and political democracy may be laudable thoughts in
16 themselves but these thoughts are not as important or as sensitive to the philosophical
17 questions of differences.152 So the democratic project of peasant as citizen is
18 contradictorily undercut by a focus on differences that does not accept any universals.
19 The problem is that postmodern thought wrongly equates universalism with
20 uniformity. It does not realise that for the genuine promotion of diversity of cultures
21 and communication among them, an understanding based on universalism is
22 required.153
23 Contra postcolonialism, western modernity itself was shaped in a dialectical
24 relationship with non-western societies, and all societies now are participants (with
25 varying strength and agency, of course) in modernity, in its critique and
26 institutionalisation. The essentialist and monolithic view of western modernity
27 propounded by postcolonial theory ignores its internal differentiation and the
28 different strands within it. If this one-sided interpretation of modernity is to be
29 avoided, then it is necessary to recover understanding of its dialectical nature. The
30 systematic reduction of the critical potential of modernity to instrumental rationality
31 and the complete separation of facts from values and the descent of the promise of
32 Enlightenment into the Weberian iron cage and the Foucauldian carceral society
33 need not be seen as the inevitable outcome of the crowning of reason. As Anthony

146
Daly 2000, 13.
147
Prakash 1990, 397.
148
This is Judith Butlers phrase (Seidman 1994, 12).
149
Winch 1970, 107.
150
Quoted in Rasmussen 1990, 70.
151
Collier 2003, 50.
152
Dipesh Chakrabarty quoted in Bahl 2000, 112.
153
Collier 2003, 534.

1 Giddens argues, modernity must be understood in four dialectically related

2 frameworks of experience: displacement and re-embedding, intimacy and
3 impersonality, expertise and re-appropriation, privatism and engagement.154 The
4 possibility of recovering a more humanist spiritual enlightenment than the
5 mechanistic, sceptical and vulgarly relativist bourgeois Anglo-French
6 enlightenment155 should be a part of any emancipatory project.
7 Conclusion
8 Postmodern-inspired streams of thought like postcolonialism need to be engaged with
9 rather than hastily dismissed. The substantial contribution of postcolonial theory is
10 the problematising of modernity, especially in the Third World. This task is an
11 absolute imperative in the present when the particular modernity that has become
12 entrenched is facing a severe material and moral crisis. Here, recognising the
13 ambivalences and contradictions of Third World modernities is important, and the
14 postcolonial focus on recovering cultural differences erased by European
15 universalism is laudable. Any solution to the crises of the present will have to recover
16 the critical elements in the submerged and discarded traditions. The violence
17 committed on these by the dominant monochromatic and a-cultural modernity has to
18 be recognised. But as we have seen, the questions posed to problematise modernity
19 have been nullified by the answers that are provided. Proposals that draw the
20 contours of the pathways out of the present morass have not kept step with the
21 outlining of the problem. The content of our modernity is thus hardly specified.
22 There is negative definition of the postcolonial present as being determined by a
23 colonial past. It characterises the present as a site of escape and much of the Third
24 World as mired in postcolonial misery.156 By blaming all the ills of postcolonial
25 societies on the foreign colonial oppressor, postcolonialism ignores the oppression
26 perpetrated by internal hierarchies that have a pre-colonial origin and are often
27 justified in the religious consciousness that it valorises. It hardly helps in the praxis of
28 liberation of those who are subject to such oppression. Thus theory here crucially
29 fails to penetrate the superficial appearances of reality and excavate truths that lie
30 behind them. The relativist conclusions of the postcolonial project result in a failure
31 to acknowledge that all modernities might have some common features. There is also
32 no conception in postcolonialism of the myriad ways in which cultural traditions of
33 the Third World societies have interacted with western modernity to create a third
34 layer, a synthesis for which an analogue can be found neither in western modernity

154
Giddens 1990, 13940.
155
Daly 2000, 12.
156

1 or<nor?> in indigenous tradition.157 The project of restoring agency to postcolonial

2 societies and constructing a modernity that is not a western replica is ultimately
3 hobbled by a lack of attention to/understanding of the material domain, especially
4 challenges such as the threat of <a?>rapidly universalising market system. The
5 ultimate equation of modernity with the West, the stand against universal ethics, the
6 occlusion of material aspects in favour of cultural ones lead to the reinstatement of
7 the tradition/modernity, individual/community and other binaries that postcolonialism
8 started out criticising, thus failing to fulfil the promise that it once carried.
9 On a number of criteria, a critical realist paradigm is able to provide a more
10 nuanced and complex understanding of modernity than postcolonialisms
11 interpretivism. This does not mean that this critique is a refurbished version of
12 modernism. As noted above, it is fully in agreement with many postcolonial
13 criticisms such as the pathologies of modernity manifested in features like
14 instrumental rationality. But unlike postcolonialism it does not reject modernity but
15 articulates the need for a dialogic modernity. The significance of critical realism is
16 that it is able to avoid the extremes of modernism and postmodernism. It seeks to
17 reject modernist arrogance of positivist frameworks that deny openness, contingency
18 and contextually variable character of social change. At the same time, it also rejects
19 postmodern-inspired frameworks that question the pursuit of scientific knowledge.158
20 Even as it avoids such simplifications, it also seeks to extend the emancipatory
21 themes of both modern and postmodern ethics,159 demonstrating the real possibility of
22 a new eudaimonian enlightenment of free flourishing on a global scale that
23 transcends modernity/postmodernity. The task of explanatory critique is not to be
24 value neutral but to move towards an emancipatory axiology. Thus in critical realism
25 there is no separation between fact and value or theory and practice.160 It is able to
26 provide a basis for unifying some of the central concerns of both postcolonialism and
27 modernist frameworks like that of Marxism while transcending them in a richer
28 differentiated totality.
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11 Abstract. This paper focuses on postcolonial theorys engagement with

1 a question mark on anything that is associated with modernity. As Friedrich

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

1 in an influential critique, has argued that postcolonial theorys emergence is itself

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

1 proceed here as immanent critique in critical realism would do by identifying

28 The Critique of Modernity

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1 important voices of postcolonialism.26 If the Subaltern Studies project began in India

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6 According to postcolonial theory, colonised societies history has always been

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Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

14 Whither the Material?

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1 Moreover, frameworks that focus on discourses tend to conflate discourses with

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

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1 internal divisions.71 It is no ones case that there is a linear transition to secular

26 The Strawman of Eurocentrism

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1 originated76 and uncovering the externality of modernity. There is nothing to quarrel

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

1 Flight to the Past

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1 construct. Interpretative understanding is an indispensable part of everyday practice

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

1 by the incoherent conception of structure and agency and inadequate understanding

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

21 For a Different Understanding of Modernity

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

1 traditions of both the East and the West146 is vital.

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

1 Giddens argues, modernity must be understood in four dialectically related

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

1 or<nor?> in indigenous tradition.157 The project of restoring agency to postcolonial

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

1 Joseph, Jonathan 2007. Structuralism, poststructuralism. In Dictionary of Critical Realism, ed.

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

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