Review

Reviewed Work(s): Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical

Difference by Dipesh Chakrabarty
Review by: Gyanendra Pandey
Source: Journal of World History , Fall, 2002, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Fall, 2002), pp. 504-506
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press on behalf of World History Association

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/20078992

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 504 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, FALL 2002

provocative than fully convincing. But this is not a subject on which

anyone can expect to be definitive, and this book remains very worth
while for people in several disciplines: whether you agree or not, it will
make you think.
KEN POMERANZ
University of California, Irvine

Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical

Difference. By dipesh chakrabarty. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 301. $16.95 (paper).

This is less a book about history in its traditional sense than a con
tribution to the philosophy of history?an intervention in the debate
on how histories might today be written. It takes the form of a sus
tained reflection of history writing even as it seeks to recover the his
tories?in this instance?of a set of colonized peoples and practices.
Which, some might say, is the only way of doing good history today.
If the idea of provincializing Europe has been available for some
time, as one of the previews on the back cover of the book suggests,
Chakrabarty does an outstanding job of thinking it through and teas
ing out its implications. His discussion of the history of the Hindu,
upper-caste, male (the adjectives are all his) Bengali encounter with
modernity in the nineteenth century and after is an intrinsic?and
invaluable?part of the exercise.
Chakrabarty has three perverse propositions to argue, one or two of
which may by now (as a result of earlier writings by Chakrabarty and
others) be a little more familiar than the others: that "Europe" is not
only the land mass, the continent, and the peoples classified under that
label; that "history" is not a continuous, gradually unfolding story of a
game played out (as it were) on a level plane; and that "time" is far
more treacherous, unequal, and disjointed than we imagine. He pro
poses the provincialization of Europe by asking questions about the
universality of its experience, or rather how (aspects of) its experience
came to be represented as universal?through imperialism and through
the complicity of nationalisms.
He advocates the provincialization of history by recognizing its irre
ducible plurality and untameability. For this, he distinguishes between
two types of history that have arisen with the spread of capitalism and
the emergence of the modern world: "History 1-," that is, a past posited
by capital as part of its precondition (p. 63), and "History (or Histo
ries) 2," which do not belong to the life process of capital, which may

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Book Reviews 505

not be subsumed in the narrative of its progress, yet live in intimate

and plural relationships with it, and which allow us to make room for
human diversity and the politics of belonging (63, 66-67).
Finally, he recommends the provincialization of time. He intro
duces the concept of time-knots?joints of various kinds "from the
complex formation of knuckles on our fingers to the joints on a bam
boo-stick," which we can only try to straighten out in some part (p.
112). And he argues, with a host of examples, that the present is not
contemporaneous with itself, that it is in some senses always out-of
joint, and (in that sense) that it is not only Indians who are "capable
of living in several centuries at once."
In the course of this study, we are given a fascinating history of Ben
gali struggles with the question of how to be comfortable in a world of
capitalism, imperialism, and globalization?for instance in the chapter
that deals with the (upper-caste, middle-class, male) Bengali nostalgia
for adda. That may, indeed, constitute the central problematic of this
work: how at different times, in different places, different sections of
people have struggled to accommodate themselves to the demands of
modern state and society, including the language of economics and
history.
This is where the particularity of different "History 2s," different
inheritances and memories, and different engagements with modernity
comes into play. The differences between the "European bourgeois"
and the "Bengali modern" cannot be explained on the grounds of the
different pace of the dissemination of reason, writes Chakrabarty. What
is needed instead is that we try to tell a different history of reason (pp.
235-236). To attempt to provincialize Europe is, in this view, to see the
modern as inevitably contested. Subaltern histories must, therefore,
seek to recognize the aggregation of power to history, and to glimpse
an outside of it: they need to hold history and "other forms of mem
ory" together in the hope that they may interrogate each other.
It has been pointed out, by more than one scholar, that what the
British colonialist historiography (and its successors, too) have called
the history of India is nothing but the history of the British in their
Indian career. What Dipesh Chakrabarty investigates, by contrast, is a
history of the Bengali/Indian?largely Hindu and male?middle-class
and its complex experience of modernity: its interaction with European
colonialism and coming to terms with an increasingly globalized "mod
ern." This is obviously a much more carefully, and honestly, delineated
object of inquiry. I wonder, however, whether even the bhadralok imag
inary, and their struggle with the "modern," might not have more place
in it for the Bengali wretched-of-the-earth, the lower-caste peasants

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 5?6 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, FALL 2002

and workers, casual laborers and destitutes, who fill the pavements and
slums of Calcutta as much as they inhabit the villages of plains and hills
in the countryside; or for the Muslims against whom?as whose Other
?"modern Bengal" dreamt itself up. What would it require, in the way
of social location, political hopes, academic training, and so on, to pro
duce a history of historical, political, social, cultural difference within
Bengal/India?
Reading Provincializing Europe, I wondered also whether the separa
tion of the "universal history of capital" and the "politics of human
belonging" does sufficient justice to the enchantment of capitalism
itself and the many new forms and desires of belonging that it gives rise
to. In other words, History 2 is perhaps rather more implicated in His
tory 1 than it is allowed by the simple separation of the "life process" of
capitalism from that which does not belong to it?even with the qual
ification that the latter is not external to the former, but lives in inti
mate and plural relationships with it. There seems to be another irony
here, not unlike the irony that a critique of Enlightenment reason and
its aggrandizing history must (for the moment at least) be mounted
from a position within that reason itself, or the irony of a Bengali poet
(whom Chakrabarty quotes) writing of hunger, in an unforgettable
line, that: "In the kingdom of hunger the world is only prosaic."
GYANENDRA PANDEY
Johns Hopkins University

Facing Each Other: The World's Perception of Europe and Europe's

Perception of the World. An Expanding World: The European
Impact on World History, 1450-1800, Vol. 31. 2 parts. Edited
by Anthony pagden. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing
Company, 2000. Pp. xxxvi + 699. $275.00 (cloth).

This collection of twenty-five previously published articles endeav

ors to map recent historiographical and ethnographic developments in
the study of Europe's encounters with non-European peoples. Given
the flowering of scholarship on this topic that has resulted from the
interdisciplinary movement of the last four decades, such a compila
tion would seem a worthy, highly desirable project. Unfortunately, defi
ciencies in editing and production compromise the effectiveness of this
two-volume set.
Published between 1964 and 1996 and focused on European con
tact with Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific, these scholarly
pieces vary in their continued relevance. Many of the articles remain

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