The Place of India in Postcolonial Studies: Chatterjee, Chakrabarty, Spivak

Author(s): Sanjay Krishnan

Source: New Literary History , SPRING 2009, Vol. 40, No. 2, India and the West (SPRING
2009), pp. 265-280
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27760258

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 The Place of India in Postcolonial Studies:
Chatterjee, Chakrabarty, Spivak1
Sanjay Krishnan

The prominence of postcolonial studies in academia today is

belied by persistent misunderstandings over its aims. The reasons
for this are too various to be treated here, but what follows is a
brief list of charges: that postcolonial studies caricatures "Enlightenment
reason"; that it embraces nativism and identity politics; that it dresses
political resentments in academic language; that it is a watered-down,
depoliticized form of anticolonial thinking; that it is obsessed with
nineteenth-century colonial institutions to the neglect of current forms
of political and economic domination; that it is a tool of self-promoting
immigrant academics.
In this essay I do not respond directly to these allegations but will
attempt to lay some of them to rest by exploring what I take to be the
animating question of postcolonial studies: whether it is possible for
formerly colonized or underdeveloped peoples to articulate a creative,
that is, textured, response to the institutions of modernity. I argue that
recent scholarly writing on India teaches us how to think about this
fundamental issue, and will demonstrate that it holds valuable insights
for those of us who are students of places other than India.
Elaborating Indian history and cultural politics, Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, and Dipesh Chakrabarty are among the most
influential of those scholars who have generated the style of thinking
called "postcolonial." To help us understand this term as it has come to
be associated with these scholars, we might begin by distinguishing post
colonial from the term anticolonial Anticolonial thought refers to forms of
ideology critique that expose as false the colonizer's claim that colonial
values are properly enlightened or universal. Postcolonial thought is a
reflection on the categories and reflexes through which anticolonial
resistance takes place. Postcolonial thought asserts that anticolonial
resistance tacitly reproduces the culture and values of imperialism. A
good example of this, it is argued, is elite anticolonial nationalism, where
native elites (for example, Nehru or Sukarno) criticized their masters
while reproducing colonial norms and schemata to articulate their po
litical and economic goals.
New Literary History, 2009, 40: 265-280

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266 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

As such, we can name the difference between anticolonial and post

colonial thought as follows: anticolonial thought is the ideology critique
of colonialism, whereas postcolonial thought signals a critique of the
anticolonial conformism to the culture of imperialism (its premises,
norms, styles of valuation, schemas, and categories). Postcolonial thought
therefore scrutinizes the dominant rules of representation set in motion
by knowledge production in academia and beyond. If the colonial and
anticolonial subject has been trained to produce truth effects within a
particular regime of truth, it is tacitly understood that other ways of see
ing and saying must now be imagined, not the least part of which is to
infiltrate and recode the received terms of disciplinary knowledge.
In other words, the distinction of postcolonial studies lies in its attempt
to revalue the phrase "India and the West" as an epistemic problem,
rather than as an encounter between two self-evident empirical entities.
The terms India and the West are both equally the result of a single
representational schema that believes its truth effects. It is precisely this
schema as well as its presuppositions that postcolonial studies subjects
to questioning. This forum offers us an opportunity to scrutinize the
reflexes by which we are trained to produce truth about objects?India
and the West?rather than on the objects themselves. Comparative
exercises implied by phrases such as "India and the West" generally pre
suppose a conformism to existing forms of thinking, most notably those
inculcated during the colonial period. We will do well to defamiliarize
this comparison by supplementing it with epistemic questioning. "India"
and "West" ought not be made the unthematized point of departure for
the production of truth-effects.
This insight enables us to grasp the importance of Partha Chatterjee's
Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. 2 Chatterjee
believes that anticolonial thought in the strict sense combines a critique
of colonial ideology with an embrace of the norms and valuations of
the colonizer. The "India" so produced is continuous with the values
and culture of imperialism even or especially where it appears most
critical of imperialist domination. Chatterjee provides a critique of the
anticolonial that proves effective for that approach we call postcolonial.
However, implicit in his argument is a belief that the limitation in anti
colonial thought is also the precondition for a postcolonial thinking
peculiar to the Indian theater. In Chatterjee's work, I would argue, the
two terms are not fully separable; the possibilities and limitations of the
one make possible the dialectical emergence of, and dangers attendant
upon, the other.
In this light, "postcolonial" no longer refers simply to a period after
formal independence from Western colonial rule. It connotes a way of
questioning that period's rules of representation, not rejecting its repre

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THE PLACE OF INDIA IN POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 267

sentations. Chatterjee drew this insight from Edward Said's Orientalism.

What distinguished Orientalism from earlier critiques of imperialism was
Said's attention to the lines of thought which made the non-European
world available for explanation and objective description. Orientalisms
distinction does not lie in its exposure of how westerners negatively
represented the Orient. The insight to be drawn from it is not that de
meaning European depictions of natives should be replaced with more
sympathetic portrayals. The point rather is how Said delineated the rules
by which such a mode of representation was possible.
We can read Said's work as an attempt to reveal not misrepresentation,
but the form of representation. He was describing not an object, but the
form of objectification. Among the first to examine the implications of
Michel Foucault's work in colonial contexts, Said's contribution is to
show that colonial representations were not merely ideologically moti
vated, but rather bore the frame that natives had to learn to replicate
wholesale if they were to make themselves over as historical and political
agents. This is the central insight of Said's work that was seized upon
by Chatterjee.
Thus it is incorrect to cast postcolonial theory as a pretext for natives
to express unhappiness at their unjust treatment by a colonial master
long departed. It attends instead to the ways in which apparently anti
imperialist thought and activity can be complicit with the very thing it
opposes. Said did not comment directly on this matter, and it is never
fully articulated in Chatterjee. But we can nonetheless underscore this
point by noting why the enabling rules of representation need to be
inhabited in a critical and "unhomely" manner. It would be a mistake
to label as rejectionist such critical engagement with the indispensable
frames of thinking. It is fair to say, however, that unless mainstream
Euro-American scholars take the trouble to educate themselves about
how to read the diverse and uneven social texts that postcolonial studies
deals with, they are liable, at best, to view it as an information-gathering
exercise which reports back on what happens at the margins of an
absolutized modernity, rather than the struggle to develop a properly
global form of cultural study. The issue for postcolonial studies, then, is
not to generate more empirically based descriptions and explanations
of native societies but to look at how truth is produced and to see how
new rules of description and practice are made possible by learning to
read knowledge production?whether history, economics, anthropology,
sociology, literature, political theory?critically, in the sense of inhabiting
its weave and revaluing its aims.
In Nationalist Thought, Chatterjee activates the insight that remains dor
mant in Said's Orientalism: in order to become historical agents, colonial
subjects must master the rules of representation that have been used to

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268 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

subjugate and govern them. He identifies this necessity in the language

of what Gayatri Spivak had earlier called "enabling violation." Chat
terjee transposes the anticolonial motivations that inform Said's critical
gesture?exposing the frame through which the Orient was objectified?
into a style for postcolonial theory. He draws on Indian cases to extend
his questioning of how the Western epistemic frame is constituted, as
well as the way in which it is conferred with the aura of universality. He
suggests that important Indian colonial subjects articulated themselves
through a tacit adherence to the culture of imperialism. Writing of the
great nineteenth-century Bengali reformer, Bankimchandra Chattopad
hyay, Chatterjee asserts:

Bankim's critique of Orientalist knowledge is not epistemological, or even meth

odological. His charge is still one of prejudice, from which "certain Europeans?
an extremely limited number happily" suffered. It does not occur to Bankim
that these distortions in Orientalist knowledge might actually be a much more
fundamental and systematic feature of the content of many of the theories which
made up the rational sciences of society, even in those aspects not directly re
lated to the subject of Indian civilization. His critique of Orientalist scholarship
remains at the level of technical criteria, showing how a priori prejudices could
vitiate a truly objective enquiry. It does not extend to questioning the cognitive
or explanatory status of the framework of concepts and theoretical relations
which defined the science of society. (NT 61)

Indian nationalism is used by Chatterjee to show how the relationship

"India and the West" is put into play as a problem that frames all knowl
edge production. We can extrapolate from this insight important lessons
for those who study ex-colonial spaces other than India, not to mention
Europe or North America. Bankim is in this sense typical of the modern
subject?in the ex-colonial as much as the imperial metropole?produced
by education in his acceptance of "the fundamental methodological as
sumptions, the primary concepts and the general theoretical orientation
of nineteenth-century positivist sociology and utilitarian political economy
and the stadial thinking in which social institutions are assumed to be
evolving from primitive to modern forms, the Enlightenment belief in
the perfectibility of man, the unreflective acceptance of 'free trade' as a
more developed form of economic organization" (NT 61-62). Nonethe
less Chatterjee also intuits that in his antagonistic relation to colonial rule,
the native subject has broached a creative approach to modernity, one
that is capable of producing enabling rules and loci of enunciation.
Chatterjee seeks to extend this critical relationship to modernity with
out succumbing to the necessitarian thinking that he believes character
izes both modern Indian reformers like Bankim as well as the influential
work of contemporary European scholars such as Benedict Anderson

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THE PLACE OF INDIA IN POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 269

and Ernest Gellner, which remains defined by an absolutist adherence

to the ideology of modernity. The latter two refuse the "varied, and often
contradictory, political possibilities inherent in [the] process [of national
ist revolution]" as it played out in places like India, settling instead for a
"sociological determinism" (NT21). It is because Chatterjee is interested
in exploring the possibility of new institutional forms and imaginings
arising from the derivative and crooked timber of anticolonial national
ist ideology that he declares that the "content" of nationalist thought
enables other groups that follow in its wake to "assert the feasibility of
entirely new political possibilities" (NT 40).
Chatterjee seeks to redo the relationship of "India and the West" by
asking an epistemic question, "Can nationalist thought produce a dis
course of order while daring to negate the very foundations of a system
of knowledge that has conquered the world?" (AT 42). Elite anticolonial
Indian nationalism, indispensable yet inadequate, must be understood
in its "true historical effectivity" (NT 41), which is ultimately of a tenta
tive and experimental spirit, exemplified by the figure of Mohandas
Gandhi (NT 102-3). Out of this spirit of practical experimentation,
Gandhi produced a discourse and practice that appeared to break with
the Western epistemic framework on which it at the same time so obvi
ously depended. Substantively new ways of mobilizing the masses and
thinking become available through Gandhi's critique of modern forms
of civil association and government:

The critique of civil society, which forms such a central element of Gandhi's
moral and political thinking is one which arises from an epistemic standpoint
situated outside the thematic of post-Enlightenment thought. As such, it is a
standpoint which could have been adopted by any member of the traditional
intelligentsia in India, sharing the modes and categories of thought of a large
pre-capitalist agrarian society, and reacting to the alien economic, political and
cultural institutions imposed on it by colonial rule . . . [But it] would indeed be
a gross error to regard Gandhi as merely another "peasant intellectual"; despite
the inherently "peasant-communal" character of its critique of civil society, the
correct perspective for understanding the Gandhian ideology as a xvhole would be
to study it in relation to the historical development of elite-nationalist thought
in India. (NT 100)

It seems to me that Chatterjee's argument here is most productively

understood as an attempt to offer a new way of reading, not to write
factually correct or positivist history. If Said made explicit the rules of
representation, Chatterjee's achievement was to show that, as one of the
native elite he writes about, the task is not to show that the native has
gained equal mastery over these rules (of explanation and description).
That was the anticolonial impulse. Rather, it is to provide away of tapping

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270 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

and reconstellating these rules to open up creative performances from

which a new institutional imagination might arise. Hence, Chatterjee
does not fall prey to nativism in spite of the risky argument he sets in
motion through Gandhi. He first notes that Enlightenment rationality
is a historically embedded form that is mobilized flexibly depending on
context and circumstance. In the context of colonial India, a "different
discourse" is produced. For instance, it is as a result of Gandhi's critique
of civil society, which employs a rhetoric of anarchy, that a distinct kind
of popular mobilization emerges. As Chatterjee notes, Nehru ultimately
subordinated this rhetoric of anarchy to the terms of a more epistemi
cally (if not ideologically) conformist elite nationalism.
Notwithstanding its own limitation, however, the value of the Gandhian
maneuver lay in its ability to bring the Western episteme to a crisis and
to raise it to an altogether new kind of political and imaginative com
plexity through its appeal to and incorporation of the masses. Chatterjee
suggests how the Western episteme produces a native discourse that is
at once derivative and original, a creative response that is filled with
danger and possibility:

Gandhism had perforce to reckon with the practical realities of a bourgeois legal
and political structure as indeed of the organizational issues affecting a bourgeois
political movement. It was the unique achievement of Gandhian thought to have
attempted to reconcile these two contradictory aspects which were, at one and
the same time, its integral parts: a nationalism which stood upon a critique of
the very idea of civil society, a movement supported by the bourgeoisie which
rejected the idea of progress, the ideology of a political organization fighting
for the creation of a modern national state which accepted at the same time
the ideal of an "enlightened anarchy." Clearly there are many ambiguities in
Gandhism. (NT 101)

Chatterjee's great service here is to show how Gandhism was derived

from the available terms of the colonial episteme but also produced
new moral and epistemic bases. His view is that while this originality
emerged within the nationalist movement, the dominant strain of the
movement needed to neutralize the more anarchic, less derivative side
of Gandhi's dynamic.
Chatterjee's insight into "India and the West" has relevance for those
of us who care to think about the specific texture of other ex-colonial
spaces, with all their historical differences. It is through an intimacy with
non-European contexts that such lines of popular mobilization become
available in ways that question the habits and reflexes upon which capi
tal and empire are premised. Chatterjee opens up a form of thinking
that we can call "postcolonial" because it addresses precisely how the
dominant can be recoded at different levels and in different institutional

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THE PLACE OF INDIA IN POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 271

sites. For this, perhaps, a greater knowledge of local languages, histories,

and political idioms is necessary. Chatterjee's work suggests that an at
tentiveness to the texture of Gandhi's thought reveals both the limits
and possibilities of nationalism, as well as what this flawed but powerful
movement enabled at the level of ethico-political practice.
From Chatterjee emerges a postcolonial thought that struggles against
not only absolutist attitudes toward modernization, but also the ideo
logical mechanisms of education through which such habits become
entrenched. In Chatterjee's view, within such a framework, regardless
of one's ideological views, a conformism guides and constrains how
one sees, speaks, and criticizes. In short, for all their apparent resis
tance to imperialism, the subjects of such education are the products,
in the broadest sense, of the culture of imperialism: "[T]he problem
of nationalist thought becomes the particular manifestation of a much
more general problem, namely, the problem of the bourgeois-rationalist
conception of knowledge, established in the post-Enlightenment period
of European intellectual history, as the moral and epistemic foundation
for a supposedly universal framework of thought which perpetuates, in a
real and not merely a metaphorical sense, a colonial domination. It is a
framework of knowledge which proclaims its own universality; its validity,
it pronounces, is independent of cultures" (NT 11). This observation
brings us to the dangers attendant upon a revaluation of values that fails
to question the representational structure in which such recoding takes
place, and the second example of a postcolonial view on India and the
West situated as epistemic problem.
In Dipesh Chakrabarty's work, this epistemic understanding of the rela
tion "India and the West" is recast as a search for autonomous spaces in
India that lie outside the purview of Western modernity. What is distinctive
about Chakrabarty is his uncritical reliance upon the representational
structure that Chatterjee and Said tacitly questioned. Unlike Chatterjee,
who studies how truth is constituted, and how it operates through new
relays and ex-colonial agents, Chakrabarty boldly claims access to an
outside or "alternative" to modern epistemic order. Whereas Chatterjee
attempts to read Gandhi, Chakrabarty emphasizes the production of new
truth claims about an order culturally other to the West. Chakrabarty
suggests that such cultural difference renders these spaces outside or "au
tonomous" of the modern episteme of Europe. It is byway of pointing to
the local efficacy of these non-European spaces that Chakrabarty proposes
to "provincialize Europe," to negate the legitimacy of Europe's claim to
have produced universal categories and schemas in which thought and
action in the modern world ought to be governed.3
What is maintained in the language of experimentation in Chatterjee?
styles of thinking and negotiating between "modern" and "nonmodern"

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272 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

structures of feeling?is phenomenalized in Chakrabarty's writing. In the

latter's work, the modern form of representation merely reaches out in
familiarity to grasp its nonmodern other in order to better put it on dis
play. Shorn of Chatterjee's hesitations and equivocations, Chakrabarty's
desire to name an "outside" to the West?graspable as actual places?has
been enormously influential among students of postcolonial discourse
analysis. Such work has been less focused on the epistemic than driven
by a desire to unearth new objects, and to endlessly discover new sites
of "difference" and "hybridity."
Chakrabarty revalues Chatterjee's arguments in Nationalist Thought to
suggest that an "alternative" India can in principle now be posited as
a familiar entity, rather than problematized as an effect of the rules of
representation. Chakrabarty's writing eschews the knottier work of engag
ing the episteme for the certitudes of valorizing new kinds of identity
through putatively nonmodern sites. The nature of "subaltern national
ism" induces in Chakrabarty a nostalgia that curiously recalls T. S. Eliot's
strictures on the "dissociation of sensibility." Whereas the illiterate Indian
peasants respond to vernacular words in a manner that integrates thought
and feeling, the elite nationalist suffers from that fallen historical condi
tion in which words denote mere concepts, removed from an aesthetic
experience of the local in which they are rooted. The peasant, in short,
responds in an immediate and autonomous way to "practices sedimented
in language" whereas the nationalist elite is trapped by mediation (and
therefore alienation), as coded by "training of the mind":

Nehru thought of the whole question of "being with" Bharat Mata [Mother In
dia], being in her presence, as it were, as a conceptual problem, a problem of
thought. He overlooked the fact that the word dharti, meaning the earth, could
not be reduced to the specific geographical boundaries of British India, and
found the concept empty of content. He proceeded to fill it up with material
proper to nationalist thought. This was, in [Homi] Bhabha's terms, a pedagogic
moment of nationalism. But if we think of the peasants' use of the expression
"Bharat Mata" as referring to practices sedimented into language itself and not
necessarily to concepts either that the mind elaborates or that contain experiential
truths, we see the legitimacy of peasant or subaltern nationalism. Their practice
of being in the presence of Bharat Mata was not based on the training of the
mind that print capitalism could administer to the formally educated nationalist
subject. Nor were they making a claim about having experienced the land as
a mother figure. "India" or Bharat could indeed be the mother because, long
before there were the newspaper and the novel, there was the age-old practice
of darshan that came to constitute a critical element in the "performative" aspect
of peasants' nationalism. As a practice, it bypassed the question of the experienc
ing subject. (PE 111)

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THE PLACE OF INDIA IN POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 273

I would argue that this signals a less productive line of argument within
postcolonial studies. Peasants in underdeveloped economies do not after
all live in a prelapsarian state (of signification) in which word and thing
are fused, nor should we make peremptory claims about whether peas
ants (unlike the colonial bourgeoisie) are operated upon by language
in a manner that bypasses the "experiencing subject." Aiming to criticize
the "pedagogic" dimension of elite nationalism, Chakrabarty sets up an
unsatisfactory binary opposition. He shores up an authentic native realm
that can by itself stand as an exemplary alternative to modern forms of
seeing and saying.
Although I do not sympathize with this aspect of Chakrabarty's exercise,
he does usefully bring into view a methodological problem in postcolo
nial studies. I refer to the apparent necessity of positing an "outside" to
a rationalized modernity as a heuristic means to questioning epistemic
conformism. That is to say, Chakrabarty works on the assumption that
modernity has an "inside" and "outside."
In the work of Spivak, by contrast, such ontological distinctions are
refused. Spivak attempts to imagine mixed modes of value production
that can take place between subaltern and civil agents, but she does
not imply that subalterns therefore find institutional validation under
existing conditions. Also unlike Chakrabarty, whose aim is to expand
the boundaries of disciplinary history and the order of representation,
Spivak's central concern is with how humanities pedagogy can enable
the "suturing" or grafting of incommensurate codes and practices onto
each other in a transactional vein, with a key heuristic distinction posited
between "rights-based" societies of the Euro-American metropoles and
"responsibility-based" collectives of the South. Spivak's refusal to describe
her students to her Western audience speaks directly to her differences
with Chakrabarty: "[I]f these people [Spivak refers to her students in rural
India] became my object of investigation for disciplinary information
retrieval as such, I would not be able to remain focused on the children
as my teachers. There is nothing vague about this activity. Since this is
the central insight of my essay, the reader will, I fear, have to take it or
leave it. This is the different way of epistemic access, this the teacher's
apprenticeship as suturer or invisible mender, this the secret of ongoing
pedagogic supplementation."4 Spivak distances herself from Chakrabarty's
valorization of the peasant with a demand that metropolitans take on
the hard work of undoing their own habits, rather than valorize "other"
consciousnesses or cultures.
In attempting to undo the mental scripts and practical reflexes into
which they are inserted, metropolitans might slowly learn to create
conversations between subaltern groups and civil society in ways that do
not presuppose the norms of the latter group. Chakrabarty's represen

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 274 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

tational urge is operated by those norms, notwithstanding his laudable

desire to provincialize Europe. It lends credence to Spivak's conviction
that change is facilitated by cultivating practices that seek, at the indi
vidual and institutional levels, to turn around the embedded values of
civil society: "[W]e need to suture rights thinking into the torn cultural
fabric of the possibility of [the] 'responsibility' [based ethics of the rural
community]; or, to vary the concept-metaphor, to attempt to access an
erased ethical script that, even at its best, was of course no more than
something lodged within the group, always in the mode of the 'to come,'
and without any intuition of a public sphere to be shared with other
groups" (OA 38).
By the same token, this approach distances itself from a widespread
trend in cultural studies toward finding multiple and discrepant moderni
ties. Such approaches admirably militate against the diffusionist or center
periphery models that are the mainstay of Eurocentric ideology. However,
they are constrained by a representational impulse that seeks to unearth
new objects in lieu of the riskier work of "rearranging desires." Raymond
Williams has shown how the dominant continually works to assimilate
and neutralize the emergent. Unless such countercultural impulses are
supplemented by qualitatively different kinds of pedagogical and reading
practices, Spivak argues, "alternative modernities" only means the eleva
tion of cosmopolitan, nomadic, and hybrid sub-oppressors: a plausible
description, at any rate, of already existing postcoloniality. What is called
for, then, are specific practices that revalue the epistemic in textured
ways, not only the discovery of new objects, past and present.
Spivak's impulse reminds us in part of the practical engagement with
the epistemic that I describe in Chatterjee's work. But unlike Chatterjee,
whose scholarship relies exclusively on India as a screen for the "colonial
world," Spivak asserts that the "expanding versions of postcolonial theory
would have to 'pluralize' Asia, rather than singularize it so that it was
nothing but one's own region ... we should not think our own corner
as exemplary of our continent" (OA 8). Spivak also partially disagrees
with Chatterjee's "derivative discourse" argument in that she consistently
approaches colonialism as a form of "enabling violation." This means first
of all that no original status is conferred upon the colonial episteme (the
term "derivative" problematically supposes the existence of a discourse
that is original). The consequence of Spivak's approach is that the modes
of thinking inaugurated by the West are not merely ontologized but seen
to be capable of changing their loci of enunciation.
To begin with, the teacher must unlearn her learning. She retrains
herself to imagine herself into the text of the other, which is easier said
than done because the educational framework in place has long been
designed solely to produce "helpers" of the status quo. Our desire to

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THE PLACE OF INDIA IN POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 275

think of ourselves as free, autonomous subjects blinds us to the ways we

too are produced through particular historical "scripts" and the structures
of feeling they entail. India is invoked to make this point:

Romila Thapar has persuasively shown how the myth of a shared "Aryanism"
was used to justify the British colonial adventure as a historical reenactment of
a manifest destiny. At the other extreme, this notion of more similarities than
differences allows the powerful Cambridge historians almost to argue away colo
nialism as a major repressive force. Unmistakable alliances?as with a pharmakon
that is both medicine and poison?can be remarked between this narrative and
the narrative of Indian nationalism, the force of Indian feminism, the importance
of Indian Colonial Discourse Studies, and the role of Indian intellectuals in the
study of hybridity and transnationality. Even subalternist historiography, in spite
of disclaimers, must work with these narratives. (OA 105)

In a counterintuitive way, this diagnosis leans toward placing knowl

edge production in postcolonial India as a historical ally of the colonial
episteme. This is why the "enabling violation" must be constantly made
into a way of entering other spaces in friendship and humility, rather than
used to consolidate one's identity by producing sympathetic descriptions
of others. It is from this shared or common perspective that the Indian
case begins to provide a more global perspective. Spivak turns to Af
ghanistan, Bangladesh, Armenia. This move?which requires "'reading',
suspending oneself into the text of the other" (OA 23)?also engages
the epistemic shift that is necessary for a creative response against the
grain of an absolutized modernity. In this, all ex-colonial elites are part
of the problem rather than the solution.
Spivak uses "India" to foreground a tacit consensus in metropolitan
centers the world over, where children are educated and adults are em
powered as "helpers" of the current global dispensation. "The general
culture of Euro-US capitalism in globalization and economic restructuring
has conspicuously destroyed the possibility of capital being redistribu
tive and socially productive in a broad-based way" (OA 30). This culture
is global, and the upwardly mobile young are quickly inducted into its
supple and seductive forms, trained to think social justice as corporate
benevolence. The mantra of resistance amongst such groups, Spivak
claims, is cultural relativism (which would not exclude nativism of the
kind seen in Lee Kuan Yew's talk of "Asian values," at one extreme, or
of "indigenous knowledge as science" [OA 17, 10], at another).
This is why Spivak suggests a maneuver that invokes spaces of difference
without phenomenalizing them, on the one hand, or, on the other, retriev
ing them for identitarian or nationalist purposes. The project of "other
Asias"?reclaiming the abstraction "Asia" for textured engagement? is
accompanied by a project to "rearrange desires" by activating texture

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 276 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

and unevenness through language-based humanities teaching. She asks

how humanistic learning and teaching can build collectivities that will
learn to read and graft onto their own makeup habits and reflexes con
sidered "defective for the emergence of capitalism": "It is in the interest
of supplementing metropolitan humanities pedagogy, rather than from
the perspective of some fantasmatic cultural difference that we can say
that the 'developed post-capitalist structure' of today's world must 'be
filled with the more robust imperative to responsibility which capitalist
social productivity was obliged to destroy. We must learn to re-define
that lost imperative as defective for the emergence of capitalism, rather
than necessarily pre-capitalist on an interested sequential evolutionary
model.' 'Re-define,' not recover, in some pursuit of golden age-ism" (OA
24). Spivak is convinced that the metropolitan subject's ability to imagine
those societies long considered defective?the rural or "backward" parts
of the world?as active forms is the precondition for a creative, that is,
postcolonial, engagement with modernity. Such an ethics, it appears, must
draw not just on the rights-based discourses of the Western metropole
but also the responsibility-based operations of the rural subaltern, for the
"ethical push for socialism must come from cultural formations defective
for capitalism" (OA 284 n. 70). Here Spivak appears to be pushing for
a way of thinking, to invoke an outside?much in the manner of Chat
terjee's Gandhi, who opened up new pathways by struggling against the
epistemic framework he at the same time inhabited and learned from.
It is also a challenge to the privileged metropolitan subject to step out
of her (impoverished) historical script by inviting her to learn?as one
might a new language, not as an object to be explained or described?the
interruptive value of "defective" modes whose unknowable implications
she must attend with vigilance.
Spivak asks how humanistic study?readings that attend to the texture
of literary language in particular?can help the metropolitan subject
imagine and learn from spaces in which the ethical fabric is torn or
delegitimized by capitalist modernity. This is her attempt to supplement
the metropolitan's uncritical reliance on the culture of imperialism.
When readings attentive to texture are at work, Spivak suggests, they en
able new ways of coding value that resonate with those "defective" sites.
With this training in the humanities, the next step for Spivak is to go
out of the metropolitan classroom into the discontinuous space of the
rural subaltern in order to learn from her students how to supplement
that "lost imperative": "On the simplest terms, being defined by the
call of the other?which may be a defining feature of such societies?is
not conducive to the extraction and appropriation of surplus. Making
room for otium and living in the rhythm of the ecobiome does not lead
to exploration and conquest of nature. And so on. The method of a

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THE PLACE OF INDIA IN POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 277

specifically literary training, a slow mind-changing process, can be used

to open the imagination to such mindsets" (OA 24).
The epistemic work figured through "India" in this essay bears lessons
for other ex-colonial spaces, not least in pointing to the limitations of
postcolonial studies modeled on South Asia. "India" in this instance points
to other formations, other histories which must be entered into through
language and historical work, not merely through absolutist invocations
of human rights, on the one hand, or through a celebration of multi
cultural hybridity and transnational flows, on the other. This is worth
remembering even though it is now three decades after the publication
of Orientalism, and we often hear the weary declaration that the time of
postcolonial studies is over because its lessons have been assimilated into
the academic mainstream.
It is worth pointing out also the directions taken more recently, which
have brought literary and cultural critical methods into dense dialogue
with social scientific and historical work. These developments can per
haps be briefly indicated by drawing attention to the differences that
have emerged in recent years between Chatterjee and Chakrabarty, on
one side, and Spivak, on the other. To the outsider what is striking is
the energy devoted to developing "vernacular" forms of knowledge. In
different ways, Chatterjee's and Chakrabarty's work have been influ
ential in arguing that Indian scholars must self-consciously grasp their
embeddedness within the Indian context, even if it results in the mak
ing of concepts and schemas that do not conform to Eurocentric or
developmental norms or schemas. Postcolonial subjects should cease
being, in Chatterjee's phrase, mere "consumers of modernity." A recent
book he coedited seems to have been assembled partly with the aim of
demonstrating that distinct possibilities of instrumental thought and
conceptual forms inhere within Indian vernacular languages and their
activation in precolonial contexts. These forms, it is suggested, should
be excavated by a historical work attentive to the purpose of describing
an autonomous and distinct "Indian" modernity.5
Given her literary critical emphasis on reading for the singular and
unverifiable, Spivak appears to have distanced herself from such an
enterprise. She holds instead to the figure of the pedagogue who goes
out in friendship toward "other Asias," cultivating democratic habits by
teaching humanistic reading practices. To insinuate a disagreement where
none may exist, whereas Chatterjee seeks to directly engage and redefine
how India has been made an object for knowledge production, Spivak,
as outlined above, appears to fear that nation-based projects of historical
recuperation by postcolonial elites encode forms of "feudality without
feudalism," unless they learn first to move imaginatively toward the other
(rather than describe sites of "resistance" or "difference") by strenuously
cultivating habits and reflexes designed to unlearn that privilege.6

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 278 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Whatever the outcomes of these divergent impulses?defined in one

mode by the literary/ethical (Spivak) and, in another, by the historical/
political (Chatterjee)?they underscore styles of reflection from which
scholars working in other postcolonial formations can learn. These think
ers offer examples of how, firstly, native ways of seeing were shaped by the
European episteme, and, secondly, the reflection produced in its wake can
produce distinctive reflexes and idioms of thinking. As we have seen, one
form in which such outcomes have been examined recently, albeit very
differently in the writings of Chatterjee, Chakrabarty, and Spivak, is by
considering the activation of precapitalist or precolonial forms as active
media. Eschewing nativism and identity politics, such an enterprise would
draw upon both language-based humanities training and social scientific
thinking, placed in a relationship of mutual supplementation.
In the new phase of globalization we are told the world has entered,
the emergence of a multipolar world with Asian hegemons anticipates
the undermining of entrenched free-market fundamentalist ideology as
well as the gradual decline of Euro-American power. The rise to economic
and geopolitical influence of countries such as China and India is likely
to result, it has been argued, in their "alternative development model [s]"
gaining influence in the global South.7 Reporting on the World Economic
Forum 2009 in the midst of a grave economic crisis, the usually measured
Financial Times suggests that the experts and policy makers of the devel
oped world are equally in need of guidance: "[A]t Davos, Switzerland,
last week the delegates hung on [Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao] 's every
word . . . International expectations of China are intense?almost on
the same scale as those facing US president Barack Obama. But Mr. Wen
does not see China's role as saving capitalism from itself."8
Such giddying prospects notwithstanding, an abiding insight of post
colonial studies is that global powers (new and old) are characterized
by an epistemic conformism. This conformism is most clearly evidenced
in the strikingly continuous manner with which economic development
has been justified, first in the West and then the non-West, since the era
of decolonization began at the end of the Second World War. The rise
of new global powers offers little reason for celebration if entrenched
reflexes and values remain in place, breeding new sub-oppressors while
old ones enter retirement. The current global crisis ought to serve as an
opportunity to evaluate the values underpinning the overproduction and
overconsumption of commodities that forms the basis of modern ideol
ogy today. Lamentably, however, the nationalist mindset of Chinese and
Indian elites indicates that, more than sixty years after the end of World
War Two, anticolonialism remains the sole thought of the non-European
world: this thought combines robust ideology critique of the West with
timid conformity to the culture of imperialism ("catching-up"). In this

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the place of india in postcolonial studies 279

light the hopeful and sometimes epochal claims made for a global shift
toward lateral forms of hybrid agency and multidirectional flows of power
may in retrospect appear extravagant, as former colonial and semicolo
nial formations such as India and China seek to establish themselves as
imperial powers in the Indian Ocean region and beyond.9
Education has a vital role to play in this regard, since change, which
does not come overnight, is also contingent upon unrelated external
factors and accidents. Drawing upon Antonio Gramsci's The Southern
Question, Edward Said observes that, "intellectual work is slower, works
according to more extended calendars than that of any other social
group. . . . Much time elapses before new cultural formations emerge,
and intellectuals, who depend on long years of preparation, action, and
tradition, are also necessary to that process. Gramsci also understands
that in the extended time span during which the coral-like formation
of a culture occurs, one needs 'breaks of an organic kind' ... a fissure
that open[s] within the cultural structures that supported and occluded
the north-south discrepancy for so long in Italian history."10 In this spirit,
the complex relationship implied by the phrase "India and the West"
calls us to teach ourselves practices, habits, and rituals that patiently and
persistently revalue epistemic violation. In the long term, scholarship in
the non-European world will be assessed by its ability to produce shared
ways of questioning?if not original styles of thinking? at this level. This
enterprise may also teach us more plural ways of imagining the common
yet discontinuous condition we call "postcolonial."

University of California-Irvine
notes

1 I would like to thank Siraj Ahmed, Qadri Ismail, and Ania Loomba for t
ments.
2 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987) (hereafter cited as NT).
3 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000) (hereafter cited as PE).
4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Other Asias (New York: Blackwrell, 2008), 38 (hereafter
cited as OA).
5 Raziuddin Aquil and Chatterjee, eds., History in the Vernacular (New Delhi: Permanent
Black, 2008). In the introductory essay of the volume, Chatterjee draws attention to the
essay cowritten by Velcheru Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam included in the edited vol
ume, "History and Politics in the Vernacular: Reflections on Early Modern and Medieval
South India." Rao and Subrahmanyam argue for the existence of a body of texts (niti)
from precolonial India which bear traits of "modern" political rationality (pragmatism,
secularity, realism). Like Chatterjee's introduction, Rao and Subrahmanyam's essay is insuf
ficiently theorized. Nonetheless, they provide the reader with a sense of the collective wish
underpinning this enterprise: how a tradition of indigenous modernity can be excavated
without appeal to nativism.

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 280 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

6 Spivak, "Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular," Postcolonial Studies
8, no. 4 (2005): 475-86.
7 "Rather than emulating Western models of political and economic development,
more countries may be attracted to China's alternative development model." U.S. National
Intelligence Council Report, "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World." (Washington
DC: November 2008), iv. Available online at http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.
html.
8 "Message from Wen," Financial Times, February 2, 2009.
9 "Fear of Influence," Financial Times, July 13, 2009.
10 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 49-50.

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