Qadri Ismail Not at Home in Hindu India Shahid Amin Dipesh Chakrabarty and The Critique of History

(Not) at Home in (Hindu) India: Shahid Amin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and the Critique of History
Author(s): Qadri Ismail

Source: Cultural Critique, No. 68 (Winter, 2008), pp. 210-247
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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(NOT)AT HOMEIN (HINDU)INDIA
ANDTHE CRITIQUEOF HISTORY
SHAHIDAMIN,DIPESH CHAKRABARTY,
Qadri Ismail
INTRODUCTION
The second Spivak's most famous, most misun

sentence of Gayatri
derstood?and, okay, okay, notoriously difficult to read?essay has
not received much critical attention. Yet it raises an important ques
tion, especially for the leftist, about the relation between theory, for
want of a better word, and politics. "Whatever power these medita
tions command/' she writes, "may have been earned by a politically
interested refusal to push to the limit the founding presuppositions of
my desires, as far as they are within my grasp/'1 A particularly dense

formulation in an essay replete with them, its elements need disag
gregating?or as a frequent flying academic might put it.

unpacking,
The first,and perhaps easiest, observation concerns the statement that
her desires?to be precise, their "founding presuppositions," but let's
stay with desires?are not completely within her grasp. The invoca
tion, obviously, is the subject of psychoanalysis. The next concerns the
statement that she will not push to the limit the founding presuppo
sitions of these desires. But what are these unnamed presuppositions,
the ground, in a sense, fromwhich she speaks? The critique of the sov
ereign, autonomous, self-conscious enlightenment subject; or, to use

a much-abused term, a certain strand of poststructuralism. She will,
that is, refuse, perhaps even resist, being consistently or rigorously
This sound from a scholar
poststructuralist. might shocking coming
whose work, at its best, is exemplary in its rigor ("at its best" because
often, too often, Spivak resorts to anecdotes?truth claims in narrative

form, unverifiable by definition?to establish some of her positions).
What is at stake in the refusal? Is there a lesson here for the leftist?
Why does the essay begin, necessarily, with such a position/ing?
Cultural Critique 68?Winter 2008?Copyright 2008 Regents of the University of Minnesota

(NOT)ATHOMEIN (HINDU) INDIA | 211
For, as Spivak puts it,politically interested reasons: her political

convictions overdetermine her theoretical ones. To grasp this politics?
or, better, this tension between theoretical rigor and the commitment
to politics, which always brings strategic/tactical considerations into
play?one has tomove to a much latermoment in the text,where Spi

vak refuses to disavow
[r]eporting on, or better still, participating in, antisexist work among

women of color or women in class oppression in the First World or the
Third World. [It] is undeniably on the agenda. We should also welcome
all the information retrieval in these silenced areas that is taking

place
in
anthropology, political science, history, and sociology. Yet the assump
tion and construction of a consciousness or sustains such work
subject
and will, in the run, cohere with the work of imperialist
long subject
constitution, mingling epistemic violence with the advancement of
learning.2
Her theoretical convictions suggest thatwhat is blandly called "infor

mation retrieval"?it sounds less innocent if called the production of
disciplinary truth claims?will reinscribe and reinforce the sovereign,

self-conscious now also termed, and from a
subject, damningly post
colonialist, imperialist. (Those familiar with the essay will realize why
the adjective becomes necessary by its end.) Nevertheless, her poli
tics, the commitment to feminism?more precisely, the opposition to
sexism?makes it impossible to dismiss feminist social science. The
political or strategic necessity for knowledge overdetermines both

the critique of the subject and the critique of knowledge, even though
Spivak knows, as itwere, that the desire for knowledge?always a

desire formastery (of the object by the subject)?is, at best, suspect;
and, at worst, coincides with the epistemological strand of imperial
ism. So, while suspect, to be handled with caution,
history and the
other social sciences are also necessary; not just unavoidable, but nec
essary; to abuse the literary critical term, pharmakonic.
In a later essay, on Subaltern Studies,
Spivak strengthens her cri
tique of the discipline.3 It contains the celebrated sound bite defend
ing the work of the collective as "strategic essentialism"?but only,
with the qualifier most of her readers have missed, "in a scrupu
hasty
lously visible political interest."4 (Even though, as Madhava Prasad
reminds us, this is a political resolution of a theoretical problem and
so is unsatisfactory.)5
Impossible without the subject, history now is

212 | QADRIISMAIL
an of imperialism; information retrieval is

unqualified accomplice
defended just implicitly, qualifiedly, is no longer actively welcomed.
Given this sharper position, this stronger alignment of theory and pol
itics, the essay as a whole strains when attempting to produce Subal

tern Studies as not disciplinary but deconstructive in impulse. For, as
Spivak iterates, "If... the restoration of the subaltern's subject-position

in history is seen by the historian as the establishment of an inalien
able and final truth of things, then any emphasis on sovereignty . . .
will. ..
inevitably objectify the subaltern and be caught in the game
of knowledge as power" and
mastery.6 My essay works from and
with this position. In this politico-epistemological moment?after
poststructuralism and the successes, however constrained, of the "new

social movements"?the question must be posed: is the desire for the
for knowledge or information,
discipline, something to be actively
pursued, grudgingly conceded, or persistently critiqued? Is the "infor
mation" in history something we cannot desire, since a (close) reading
of any historical narrative demonstrates thatwriting coherent history,
on the very terms itpredicates for itself, is
impossible? These questions,
which emerge from reading history and not just "theory," drive this
essay on two provocative histories from the most innovative recent

intervention in that notoriously discipline, Subaltern
antitheoretical
Studies: Dipesh
Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe and Shahid Amin's
Event,Metaphor, Memory, symptomatic of very different strands within
the group.7 Chakrabarty's influential (at leastwithin theU.S. academy)
text,with its self-consciously, ifnot pretentiously, theoretical stance,
desires to save history by "subverting" it; itworks within the thematic
of nationalism (or identity politics, more broadly) and therefore of
Eurocentrism. Amin's less familiar text, at firstglance a straightforward
historical narrative, is an extremely sophisticated, exceptionally rig
orous, truly subversive, and resolutely antinationalist treatment of
the discipline. An open, collaborative text, itdemands the close, dili
gent attention of the reader. Chakrabarty's is closed, offering the reader

information, meaning, the final truth of things; it promises a radical
critique of history but doesn't deliver. Amin makes no grandiose
promises but instantiates such a critique. Event,Metaphor, Memory and

its
Provincializing Europe also raise further questions this essay, given
commitment to postcoloniality, must consider. How exactly do they

(NOT)AT HOMEIN (HINDU) INDIA | 213
work with poststructuralism or, more particularly, what might be

called the French critique of history? And with postcoloniality, the
critique or putting into question of Eurocentrism?

As everybody knows?though most ignore?the discipline
and was
emerged with, helped produce, produced by modernity.8 His
tory is enabled by its cardinal categories, subject and past being per
haps the most indispensable. For as it could be phrased, and only
somewhat facetiously, once upon a time there was no past, in a very
precise sense: it is a particular conceptualization and organization of

time?also a concept?produced by the discipline. In making the
modern distinction between that time and another deemed the pre
sent, different from but produced by the past, history also distin
guished itself from chronicle, a narrative that simply ends, as Hayden

White reminds us, in a present without closure or separation from a
past.9 As for the modern subject, it could be understood as consti

tuted by the tight or intimate interweaving of two strands: in its self
conception, it is rational, sovereign, autonomous, etc; however, as the

new social movements
brought forcefully to our attention, it also has
a political strand?is white, male, heterosexual, etc. Now, calls can
always be made, and in this instance have, for a change in the politics
of history, formaking the object subject, forwriting the histories of
(new) subjects that the discipline refused to recognize as subjects for,
as they say, centuries (Chakrabarty's demand).
History from below,
whether feminist, queer, or subalternist, treats groups hitherto objec
tified by the discipline as subjects. Fernand Braudel famously pro
duced even theMediterranean as subject. But this is a political shift,
not an epistemological break. If the argument against the discipline?
what is being called
the French critique?is not just that the subject of
or even its is marked
history, object, profoundly by its colonialist and/
or elitist and/or
patriarchal career but that its categories, epistemo
logical assumptions and preconceptions?including subject and past?
its unreflexive reliance on (realist) narrative, its desire tomake truth
claims and so on have been subject, as itwere, to persuasive
critique,
we should ask: can we continue to desire "information"?a
coding
that effectively represses the very questions raised the French cri
by
tique?10 Despite the influence of poststructuralism?no longer as fash
ionable as itonce was?the dominant strand within the contemporary

214 | QADRIISMAIL
Western episteme, whether in its academic or quotidian incarnation,

thinkswith, finds indispensable, terms like "subject," "agency," "cau
sation," and other concepts bequeathed by the Enlightenment. But
can we, to put thematter as simply as
possible, carry on like this? Can
we pretend that no critique has been advanced, ifnot established, of
the discipline? Can we settle, as historians like Joyce Appleby?and,
as will be argued here, Chakrabarty?desire, formerely reforming
the discipline? Isn't Appleby's claim that the critique of objectivity is
valid, but history must nevertheless try to be as objective as itpossi
bly can?continue to produce something itknows to be invalid?since
its task, if not duty, is not just the production of knowledge but of
good democratic subjects, patently ludicrous?11

The French critique, after which one cannot understand history
as an innocent or disinterested account (information) of the past, has
treated the cardinal categories of the discipline to a careful, rigorous,
and systematic evaluation. After it, and in an interventionary post
colonial spirit, history can be conceptualized as a discipline that autho
rizes the production of knowledge (truth claims), usually emplotted
in narrative form, by a (rational, autonomous, sovereign) subject in
the present, of an termed the past, in which events are caused
object
by and/or happen to (other) subjects. The itinerary of this particular

discipline, like others, is deeply accompliced or interwoven with colo
nialism and cannot be traced back, in any rigorous sense, before the
politico-epistemological moment that has taken the name modernity.

If such a formulation is persuasive, the discipline cannot be a pro
ductive accomplice of postcoloniality, which I understand, deploying
the terms of Partha Chatterjee, as putting into question the thematic
of Eurocentrism, not just its problematic. (To do only the latterwould
be anticolonial, not postcolonial.)12 Working from this position?from
the French critique, from a reading of Subaltern Studies, most particu
larly of Chatterjee and Spivak?means calling into question the produc

tion of disciplinary knowledge, makes postcoloniality an accomplice
of poststructuralism, prompts one to ask: can postcoloniality throw
its lot with history, desire information, seek mastery? Can it even
produce information, rigorously? Provincializing Europe and Event,

same concerns; indeed, they prompted,
Metaphor, Memory address the
will enable an
provoked them. Reading Amin and Chakrabarty, then,
intervention in the still-unsettled debate over history.

SOMEOF MY BESTFRIENDSAREMUSLIM:
CHAKRABARTY'SIDENTITYPOLITICS
One of the sadder failures of that all too brief but nevertheless inspir
ing and sometimes brilliant moment in postcolonial studies, Subaltern
Studies, is that Dipesh Chakrabarty's commitment to the politics of
a following through with rigor of the consequences
identity prevented
of his own insight.13He located a critical problem with history, could
have posed some truly difficult questions to the discipline; instead,
he settled for reform. He could have pushed postcolonial studies in
new and important directions; instead, he effectively, ifunconsciously,
reined it in, aligning itwith U.S. identity politics. His ubiquitously
cited Provincializing Europe is a difficult text to read: a series of arti
cles presented as a book without the coherence one expects from a
book. Its central claim is that Europe, understood as a
"hyperreal"
and not a geographic entity, is effectively the subject of all histories,
including those of the (real, geographic) non-European world, that

European categories are seen as adequate, when patently not, to the
task of describing non-Europe.14 The significance of this claim?sim
ply put, that iterases difference?cannot be stressed toomuch, for the
critique of history and for postcoloniality; both should consider it,

work tomake it, routine. (Though it is not an unfamiliar one to post
coloniality, either; Spivak, for instance, has written persuasively and

at length of "epistemic violence," a more productive concept.)15 This
essay, however, must depart from Chakrabarty's position when it

claims to have located the real, the authentic, to have discovered hid
den histories not destroyed by Eurocentrism that can now be narra
tivized on "their own" terms, those of the subjects/agents of those
histories?even if the task may be difficult. In my case at least, this
claim dimmed the initial excitement of encountering the principal
argument of Provincializing Europe when it appeared in article form.

There, the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of writing history after
Europe led to Chakrabarty calling his position characterized by the
"politics of despair." But he retracts this in the book, without tell
ing us why. Presumably, though, because he found nirvana: he now
claims to have discovered a way towrite a
radically different history,
one thatwould actually subvert the the history
discipline. However,
Chakrabarty calls for keeps postcoloniality within the thematic of

216 | QADRIISMAIL
Eurocentrismbetrays itsmost subversive potential. He sacrifices rigor

and his own insight about the work of Eurocentrism to the shelter,
comfort, and certainty?to the home?promised by identity politics.
As JohnMowitt argues, such politics are limited, "a liberalism con
tent to sacrifice emancipation to recognition ... utterly unwilling to
think through the anxiety that attends its organizing concept."16
Take, for instance, the following in Provincializing Europe's

acknowledgments, a statement that never ceases to amaze me:
"My
dear friend Ahmed Kamal, a historian
of the University of Dhaka,
Bangladesh, has been my teacher of the social history of Bengali Mus

lims.Without his kind and critical interest inmy work, Iwould have
been even less aware of the inescapable Hinduness ofmy imagination"
(xi). Chakrabarty doesn't explain how imaginations could be consid
ered religious or cultural in texture, so one aspect of that statement
is a little difficult to decipher. Still it is clearly an absolute formula
tion: his imagination is inescapably Hindu, something unavoidable,
an unchangeable fact of (at least his) life. But why draw attention to
a statement that, after all, it is not to be found in themain body of the
text? The sentiment, actually, doesn't just serve as an acknowledg
ment of thanks dissociated fromwhat is to come; it reinforces one of
Chakrabarty's cardinal positions in the book proper: his avowed fail

ure to address theMuslim question. "I am ... very sadly aware of the
historical gap between Hindu and Muslim Bengalis, which this book
cannot but reproduce ... I have not been able to transcend that his
torical limitation, for this forgetting of theMuslim was deeply em
bedded in the education and upbringing I received in independent
India" (21). A historical foundation is now claimed forChakrabarty's
Hindu imagination. Effectively, this denies agency; the fault is not in
his self but in his stars: due to India's history, its education system
and, notably enough, his parents?though I suppose he might well
have been brought up by servants, an extended family, or some com
bination thereof?he, a self-identified Bengali Hindu, not only cannot
write about Muslims but will "forget" them.17 If this contention sounds
plausible to any reader, consider its theoretical ground: only the "self,"
or subject, however defined, can comprehend the group or identity
by which that subject is interpellated. Colloquially: it's a Hindu thing,
you don't understand. Theoretically, this position would make it im
possible for the self to address the other, or the converse, women to

address men, blacks whites, queers straights, carnivores the misbe

gotten ways of vegetarians, and so on. But, Chakrabarty might reply,
he was only making a particular statement about Hindus and Mus
lims in independent India, perhaps even one particular to just him
self, not a theoretical one regarding coming to terms with the other.
(Though literary critics might recall here that the imagination has been
consistently theorized as enabling precisely this.)18 In that case, it
sounds suspiciously like a bad alibi. That is to say, Chakrabarty can
not be bothered attending to theMuslim question in Provincializing
Europe so he provides himself a defense in advance, cunningly antic

ipating a potential critique (like thatmade here). The move is an alibi
because, first,as implied above, its theoretical ground is dubious. Sec
ond, Chakrabarty wrote about Bengali Muslims extensively, intelli
gently, and with great sympathy in his earlier book, Rethinking Working
Class History. What kind of an imagination did he possess then ifnot
a Hindu one? If itwasn't Hindu at thatwriting, did it
change subse
quently? How could this change be explained? How does one theorize
imaginary change? Or did Chakrabarty only realize that his imagina

tion was inescapably Hindu aftermeeting Ahmed Kamal, afterwrit
ing the first book? Though not made, this would be a conceivable
explanation?except for the fact that, just seven pages later, he speaks
of his "Australian self" and thatmuch of Provincializing Europe is de
voted to lengthy discussions ofMarx and Heidegger. Again, though,
these statements need not be read as contradicting the one about his
imagination: his Australian selfmay well have had a Hindu imagina

tion; and Marx and Heidegger could very well have been Hindus?at
least in previous births. Or, maybe, some theorists don't have or need
imaginations. But you are beginning to get the point, I hope, about
identity overdetermining, undermining rigor.
Let us consider another, perhaps more significant one
example,
pivotal to Chakrabarty's argument. Citing Marx, he distinguishes
between two kinds of history, which he somewhat
unimaginatively
calls "history 1" and "history2." History 1 "is the universal and neces
sary history we associate with capital. It forms the backbone of the

usual narratives of transition to the capitalist mode of
production"
(63). "History2s are ... not pasts separate from capital; they inhere in
capital and yet interrupt and punctuate the run of capital's own logic"
(64); they allow for "the politics of human belonging and diversity"

218 | QADRIISMAIL
(67). History 1, then, is about modernity, universality, and is thought

in the singular; history2, both modern and not quite, is about diver
sity and thought in the plural. The point is simple: the reach of capi
talmay be universal, but it has been unable to eradicate difference,
which can be identified without going outside capital. A common
sense understanding of history, both 1 and 2, grounds this position.
Historyl "forms the backbone of... narratives." Chakrabarty distin

guishes, in other words, between history?the real event, thatwhich
happened?and its narrativization. The event itself gives form, shape,

order, structure to the narrative rather than, as argued by the French
critique, the converse. In other words, language or writing or narra

tive is not constitutive of history, which happens outside language.
Chakrabarty, that is, operates within the referential illusion (Barthes).

History2, as noted above, is about "pasts" (plural). The past, here, is
understood in themost conventional of terms, as a period of time dis
tinct from the present inwhich events happened; it is not seen as a
concept, an organization of time. For, after all, the question could be

posed seriously: when does the past end and the present begin? Chak
even themost conventional categories
rabarty, that is to say, happily inhabits
of his discipline. There is, the reader must begin to suspect, nothing
very radical going on here. That, of course, doesn't make him unrig
orous. However, these are the opening sentences of the text:
is not a book about the region of the world we call

"Provincializing Europe
That . . . has been
'Europe/ Europe already provincialized by history
that the so-called
itself.Historians have long acknowledged 'European
inmodern to to other regional and global
age' history began yield place
toward the middle of the twentieth century." (3; empha
configurations
sis added)
The region Europe has been provincialized by something Chakra

true because historians?the same
barty calls "history itself." This is
bastards who cannot acknowledge the subaltern as subject?have
acknowledged this. But is "history itself" historyl, the logic of capi

in capital)? Was
tal, or history2, the logic of difference (that inheres
or difference, or both? He does not
Europe provincialized by capital,
say. Could "history itself" be something quite different from 1 and 2,
a combination of the two, perhaps? Is there, in other words, a history3
unconsciously inhabiting this text, a category that is not theorized but

invisibly punctuates the text from time to time, like the "historical
gap" between Hindus and Muslims? Was that particular gap caused
or what?
by capital, or difference,
The reader isn't told; but hopefully the point about rigor is becom
ing clear. Indeed, itwill be reinforced later by the argument that the
careful reader could even detect the possibility of a history4, again
untheorized, in this text. Before that, let us consider Event, Metaphor,
Memory's cortical position, itsmost important theoretical thrust, the

sound bite that has made it an academic bestseller and the Bhagavad
Gita, as itwere, of identity politics: the "project" of "provincializing"
concern the geographical Europe, which
(Europe). We know itdoesn't
history itself has dealt with, but rather a "project of alliance between
the dominant metropolitan histories and the subaltern peripheral
pasts." This alliance seeks to provincialize "the Europe thatmodern
imperialism and (thirdworld) nationalism have, by their collaborative

venture and violence, made universal. Philosophically, thisproject must
a radical critique and transcendence of liberalism"
ground itself in
(42). And further down the same page: "The project of provincializ
ing 'Europe' refers to a history that does not yet exist." Provincializing
Europe is about opposing imperialism and nationalism and tran
scending liberalism; it sounds like putting into question the thematic

of Eurocentrism. So far,one might say, so good. But the project seeks
to achieve this essentially by writing history. This is not to say that
Chakrabarty, despite accepting most of its categories and the acknowl

edgment of historians when convenient, doesn't have any critique of
the discipline. He does, if only of the criteria by which it acknowl
edges or authorizes subjects. Chakrabarty admits that the discipline,

once elitist and exclusivist, has
changed. Ithas come to accommodate
new minorities, etc. However, it does so as far
subjects?women, only
as their stories can be told in rational terms. The (nonrational) subal
tern, in contrast, presents itwith a serious, insurmountable problem.
Chakrabarty's example is the Santal hool or rebellion of 1855. He

doesn't produce himself as a Santal but, presumably, they share with
him that same Hindu imagination, so he can write of them. His cri
tique: the discipline cannot narrativize the "Santal leaders' own un
derstanding" (104) of their action and motivation.19 They found "God
... as themain
instigator of the rebellion." Nevertheless, since god is
not an agent that history can acknowledge, the Santal sentiment has

220 | QADRIISMAIL
to be "anthropologized," written in the voice of reason, "before itfinds

a place in the historian's narrative" (105).20 In other words, the record
admits the possibility of a history2, of narrating the Santal story in
terms other than that of Europe, of establishing the final truth of things.
But despite the evidence the discipline will?must?"convert" this
into historyl.21 Thus Chakrabarty's persuasive and crucially impor
tant argument, mentioned above, that" 'Europe'... [is] the sovereign,
theoretical subject of all histories," because even histories of the other
are written through and with European categories, something the
founder of Subaltern Studies doesn't avoid either. But Provincializing
Europe will not stop at critique. Rather, itwill take the next step. Like
Foucault with madness, history2, when it comes, will make the sub
altern speak, forces history to give up a seat at the table, thus Chak
a more radical, more "subversive" work in
rabarty's claim that his is
relation to the discipline than any possible minority history. Provin
cializing Europe is the project ofwriting non-European history, or his

tories of the nonmodern/subaltern, in subaltern terms. This constitutes
theentiretyofChakrabarty's critique of thediscipline. The French may have
taken apart every single category the discipline is grounded upon, but
Chakrabarty is unmoved by that (perhaps because historians haven't

this). If history can be conceptualized as a discipline
acknowledged
that authorizes the production of truth claims, usually in narrative
form, about an object termed the past inwhich events are caused by
and/or happen to subjects, all Chakrabarty demands from the disci
room for one more subject, for the narrativizing
pline is that itmake
of the story of the nonrational other in the other's "own" terms. Non
rational here means a subject who denies her agency, who produces
herself as the agent of god. However, this same Santal, inChakrabarty's
account, is self-conscious, actually understands her subjectivity?as
without agency. In other words, in one crucial element the Santal is
not very different from the Enlightenment subject, the subject Spivak
termed imperialist. And she would yet, in the name of postcolonial
ity, subvert the discipline?

on "returning] the gaze" (29),
Provincializing Europe also insists
"a inversion" Where sees "'lack' and 'in
making gesture of (34). Europe
new history will "read
adequacy'" amongst the Indian peasantry, this
and Consistent with em
'plenitude' 'creativity'" (35). Chakrabarty's
piricism, reading is synonymous with looking, the gaze. Contradicting

his earlier formulation, signifying instead his profound commitment

to the politics of identity, Chakrabarty cannot see that inChatterjean
terms he thinks like any nationalist?and let us not forget that nation
alism is a form of identity politics?within the thematic of Eurocen
trism. To Chatterjee, (anticolonial) nationalism accepts the thematic
of Eurocentrism, the distinction between West and East/rest. It just
rejects the problematic: asserts that the East is as good as theWest.

One way of characterizing this position is to put itprecisely inChak
rabarty's phrases, to say that it is about returning the gaze or making

a gesture of inversion. Which iswhy, I submit, there is nothing par
ticularly radical, let alone subversive, inmaking this move?not in

the current politico-epistemological moment, after anticolonial nation
alism and poststructuralism, certainly not forpostcoloniality. It is actu
ally a pedestrian and derivative move, especially when one remembers

that in the Indian context Nehru looked back?in both senses?
decades ago. all of this lies implicit in the very notion of
Indeed,
"provincializing." does itmean to provincialize
For what an
object,
any object? It a but not of the deconstructive kind:
implies decentering,
to take something large?or, in this instance, dominant?and make it
no
small/er?or longer dominant?but equal to everything else; and
in so doing, make the object (non-Europe) subject just as in any other
type of history from below. An instance of liberalism, structurally

speaking, in its classic and original articulation, it reproduces one of
the foundational premises of liberalism, that all subjects are equal. In
any case, Chakrabarty's position, despite his occasional protestations

to the contrary, is explicitly committed to some of the fundamental
promises of the liberal project:
Concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society,

public sphere, equal
ity before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private,
the idea of the subject, democracy, social
popular sovereignty, justice,
so on all bear the burden of
rationality and European thought and history.
One simply cannot think of political
modernity without these concepts
that... entail an unavoidable?and in a sense
indispensable?universal
and secular vision of the human....
I too write from within this inheritance. Postcolonial is
scholarship
committed, almost to the universals . . . that
by definition, engaging
were
forged in eighteenth-century Europe and that underlie the human
sciences ... Fanon's on to the
struggle to hold Enlightenment idea of the
human?even when he knew that European had reduced
imperialism

222 | QADRIISMAIL
that idea to the now itself a

figure of the settler-colonial white man?is
part of the global of postcolonial thinkers.22 The ensues

heritage struggle
because there is no easy way of dispensing with these universals in the
condition of political modernity. Without them there would be no social
science that addresses issues of modern social justice. (4-5)
All the concepts cited in the first statement are from liberalism, as a
reading of John Stuart Mill alone will show. To argue that they cannot
be dispensed with since they are necessary for social justice is an
acceptable position. But to hold on page 4 that the project of provin

cializing Europe finds liberal concepts indispensable and then, on page
42, that one hopes to transcend liberalism is to be incomprehensible,
impervious to rigor, just plain confused, possessed of a short mem
ory?or all of the above.

Now to the possibility, mentioned before, of a history4 inhabiting
the argument. It occurs in the chapter, which Chakrabarty calls a his
... from the city of Calcutta in the first
tory, of adda: "a social practice
half of the twentieth century," where he examines a series of published
texts?despite which he ignores the possibility that language, writ
ing,may have a constitutive role in the production of his object. These

texts give him direct and transparent access to adda, a practice, he
states, thatwas largely male and completely middle class; the chap
ter, a "historical study of . . . [the] struggle to be at home inmoder
... as 'a
nity." Adda is "translated place' for 'careless talk with boon
companions' or 'the chats of intimate friends'" (180). Is this history a
1 or a 2? After all, if there are only two kinds of history?even ifwe
have spotted the of a third?Chakrabarty should know
possibility
(what he iswriting). Irritatingly enough, he does not say. Indeed, and
to the entire
incredibly, even though the notion of history2 is central
project of provincializing Europe, it is discussed in just one chapter
the epilogue) and disappears from the rest of the book. But the
(plus
text provides its own signs. Since the history of adda is about a "strug
this suggests that it
gle" to make oneself "at home in modernity,"
couldn't be an instance of historyl where the transition tomodernity
is seamless. The following passage reinforces the possibility that it is
history2:
That there should be a tension between the ideals of the adda and those of
themodern civil society is understandable. are mutually antithetical

They

of time and place. Civil society, in its ideal construction,

organizations
a result-Con
builds into the very activity the telos of
idea of human
in an on are to the
versations adda, the other hand, by definition opposed
idea of achieving any definite outcome. (204)
This argument is predicated upon the opposition between adda, de

scribed as a social practice, and civil society, which is not a verb but
a noun, raising again the question of rigor. But, to Chakrabarty, the
distinction is an instance of difference of an event that enables the
"politics of human belonging and diversity" (180). So adda sounds

very much like an instance of history2, the beginnings, perhaps, of
that history yet to be written. If that is the case, why doesn't Chak
rabarty make it clear? First because as already noted, history2, at least

in its Santal incarnation, requires writing the history of a subject on
its own terms. Chakrabarty, however, interprets adda on his terms,
not on those of the participants. According to the texts he cites, its
as
participants don't understand themselves struggling to find a home
inmodernity; it depicts them as understanding themselves as chat
ting with boon or some such

companions thing. After stating this,
Chakrabarty proceeds to interpretthis practice as actually about home
finding?giving the term "homemaker" a new sense the OED might
want to explore?blithely forgetting that just three chapters earlier
he had accused Guha of exactly the same thing, imposing interpreta
tion on his object or, as Spivak might put it, seeking mastery. Like
Guha's, then, this is a profoundly ethnographic enterprise. Second,
because he has already implied that the Santal rebellion could be an
instance of history2, given that their story is not reducible to the logic
of reason. Whereas the topics of conversation at addas included, accord
ing to one writer, "patriotism, wrestling, sports, England, Germany,

Switzerland" (189); according to another, "Mohunbagan [a soccer club],
spiritual truths, the funeral ceremony of the old man Adhar in the
neighborhood, the new crocodile at the Alipore [zoo]?no subject is
leftundiscussed" (191); and to a third: "A adda ... has no... hard
pure
and fast agenda-There is no certainty as towhat topic an adda will
startwith one day....
Suppose thismoment the conversation is about
a supernova
beyond the solar system, the next moment the discus
sion could be about Plekhanov's The Role of the Individual inHistory"
(192). Being highbrow, the Tagores didn't discuss Switzerland or soc
cer clubs or even supernovas but "Matthew Arnold, Browning, Keats,

224 | QADRIISMAIL
Shelley and others" (195). Whatever else one may say about the con
tent of these conversations?which sound quite modern/rational to
me?it would take a truly intrepid mind to consider them homolo
gous to the statements of the Santal rebels.
So, then, is the adda an instance of history4? While it sounds like

a
hybrid of 1?that part of it that ismodern?and 2?a part of a part
of it that isn't?my honest response is that I do not know. Neither is it
easy to figure out how itfitswith the project of provincializing Europe,

which, to repeat Chakrabarty's own formulation, is a
"project of alli
ance between the dominant metropolitan histories and the subaltern
peripheral pasts" (42). The participants in adda, by Chakrabarty's

account, are middle class; by definition, thiswould make them non
subaltern.23 So, how does this chapter contribute
to his project? Or
disrupt history? Again, I do not know. A rigorous effortwould make

all this evident to its reader. However, itwas also stated that Chak
rabarty's commitment to the politics of identity prevented him from

being rigorous. That can be seen in the argument about adda, too. Its
"perceived gradual disappearance from the urban life of Calcutta
over the last three or four decades . . .has
produced an impressive
amount of mourning and nostalgia. It is as ifwith the slow death of
adda will die the identity of being a Bengali" (181). Undoubtedly, iden
tity is crucially at stake here. (And one should perhaps note inpassing
that the understanding of adda as gendered and classed has disap
re
peared by now; themiddle-class male stands here inmetonymic
lation to Bengali identity.) Impressive means, among other things,
inspiring, remarkable, and moving; it is in part given this inspiring
and quantum of mourning
remarkable and nostalgia for adda that
doesn't so much mourn its passing as feel nostal
Chakrabarty?who
for it?is himself moved to write. Nostalgia, states the OED, is a
gia
"form ofmelancholia caused by prolonged absence from one's home
or country; severe home-sickness."24 Chakrabarty defends such recent
am not interested in reading this nostal
Bengali nostalgia for adda: "I
gia as an error of some kind_I have no way of determining inwhat
proportions the archives of the nostalgia for adda that this essay doc
uments are mixed with my own desire?as an immigrant inAustralia
or the United States?to be at home in a Calcutta of a once-upon-a
time. ... It helps me to be at home somewhere else" (182). Now the

burden of psychoanalysis is precisely that it promises to help deter

mine such unconscious desire; but then this narrateme is sympto
matic of Chakrabarty'sanxiety (Mowitt): he is "utterly unwilling" to
interrogate his nostalgia but simply demands that it be recognized,
valued, ifnot celebrated, which makes it,of course, an exemplary in

stantiation of identity politics, which desires, metaphorically, tomake
its subject feel at home.
Among the many OED entries for home are the following: "the
fixed residence of a family," "one's proper abode," "the place of one's
one finds refuge, rest, or sat
dwelling or nurturing," "a place where
isfaction," "one's native land." One way of reading the project of
provincializing Europe, then, is to conclude that it seeks security: to

find or create a shelter, a safe, comforting, hospitable, and nurturing
space, a proper place, one that is fixed, stable, permanent?in the sense
of being always available?within an inhospitable and destabilizing
Western modernity?for the subject from the geographic non-West; it
is to conclude that Chakrabarty writes (history) to find such refuge,
to be inside such a safe place, and at least some of the time to keep
Western modernity at bay.25 "Provincializing Europe" may imply a
decentering but at the service of a recentering, the search for,
only
location, and habitation of another home. Recognition, not emanci
pation, is the demand ismore than

of this project. Home, of course,
just a secure space; it is also, as we know, one that you share with
others who share your subjectivity, others "like" you, other "selves"
who understand you, your share your concerns?in
speak language,
cluding, presumably, religion?and, in this specific instance, do adda.

Home, to take a set of terms from Jean-Luc Nancy, could be understood
as a space of "common
being," which Nancy opposes to "being-in
common."26 The former is structured around homogeneity, or
homoge
nous community; the latter, or, better
heterogeneity yet, singularity.27
us once
Giving again an instance of incoherence but of a more com
plicated kind this time: desiring heterogeneity, Chakrabarty would
critique modenity/historyl for its universalism, but what he seeks in
its place (at least some, ifnot most, of the time) is
only an alternative
homogeneity, a place of identity; a more radical alternative would
have been to seek a heterogeneity thatwas itself (sin
heterogeneous
gularity). However, given his commitment to (Bengali) identity, to

226 | QADRIISMAIL
being at home inCalcutta-in-the-West,

Chakrabarty cannot make that
move.
Desiring to be at home, of course, coincides exactly, ifmetaphor

ically, with the problematic of anticolonial nationalism. One way of
reading its project, its promise, is that it seeks to take the national, liv
ing in a space that used to be his own but has since been usurped by
the colonizer, back home again?and so cure the national's
nostalgia
for the lost space. This, to state the obvious, is thinking within the
thematic of Eurocentrism. But we should not forget that while the
nostalgic seems to be the dominant current reaction of postcolonial

studies?to its detriment, its loss of critical energy?to Eurocentrism,
thatwasn't always the case: Edward Said worked consistently with a
notion of exile, the implications of which are yet to be adequately
explored; Homi Bhabha's choice of alternative was the hybrid; being

deconstructive, Spivak doesn't offer an alternative. Still, while I am
no nationalist, ifChakrabarty writes, in part, to get over or beyond
homesickness, Iwill, as they say in these United States, be happy for
him?especially since this strategy appears to be successful. What

makes the argument incoherent is the presentation of history2 (or is
it history4?) as a solution to a theoretical problem facing postcolo
niality and a radically subversive critique of history when all it seeks

is a home for (yet) another subject. Chakrabarty isn't a nationalist?
whether Indian, Hindu, or Bengali?in any simple or straightforward
sense, but he formulates his critique of Eurocentrism within its the
matic. So doing cannot enable either a solution to any theoretical prob
lem facing postcoloniality or a subversive or even radical critique of
own argu
history. Sadly enough, he appears to know this, despite his
ments to the contrary. These are the concluding words of the book:
never be a project of shunning European
"Provincializing Europe can
is
thought. For at the end of European imperialism, European thought
a gift to us all.We can talk of provincializing itonly in an anticolonial
spirit of gratitude" (255). Anti-, not post-colonial. If postcoloniality

is understood as the questioning of the very basis of Eurocentrism,
which is not synonymous with shunning European thought, then
Chakrabarty's project cannot be taken as a contribution to that cri
tique. It criticizes Eurocentrism but only in order to seek its reform
in an anticolonial spirit likeNehru's.

THE SEEMING HISTORIAN: AMIN'S INABILITY TO EMPLOT
Shahid Amin's Event, Metaphor, Memory is a study of "one dramatic

occurrence?the anti-police 'riot' of 4 February 1922 in a small mar
ket town in north India" (Amin, 1). Amin, itwould appear, has no
doubt about what "actually" happened on that date. Indeed, he repeats
the above statement, with only slightly greater detail, without the con
tentious term "riot," a few pages later: "On 4 February 1922 a crowd
of peasants burnt a police station at Chauri Chaura inUttar Pradesh,
killing twenty-three policemen" (9), that being the "event" of the title.
Chauri Chaura emerges as a problem for (subalternist) history because
itwas understood differently by different perspectives "outside,"
discourses that did not adequately take the local into account when
narrativizing the event. Or, in his terms, "the event, with all its dis
tinctivenessand specificity and multiple peculiarities, was written
"
out as itwas recounted" (9). To Indian nationalism, the 'true' signi
ficance of Chauri Chaura . . . outside the time and
lay place of its
occurrence" (9). That is to say, Indian nationalism produced a meta
phor?which could be understood as a relation of substitution?of
the event: its significance was deemed to lie not inwhat the partici
pants in the riot, its agents, might have thought or said about their
acts and motivation but inMohandas Karamchand Gandhi's inter
pretation of it. To Gandhi, and
subsequently to Indian nationalist
history, Chauri Chaura signified the failure of ahimsa, something wors

ened by the attack being carried out in his name
by Congress volun
teers. Gandhian nationalism, in other words,
replaced or substituted
a possible local
explanation of the event with a national one. As did,
not incidentally, colonialism?in its case, deploying another metaphor,
for a
substituting possible sociopolitical explanation of the event a
judicial one. Perhaps holding with Althusser that "the 'actors' of his
tory are [not] the authors of its texts," Amin desired, in true subaltern
ist fashion, to restore the
significance of the local in terms of place
and agency, to figure out the truth of
things. He wanted to generate
"a different narrative of Chauri Chaura and Indian nationalism" (5);
tell the story, as Chakrabarty
might urge, on the peasants' own terms;
replace themetaphors with the event itself, in its integrity, as under
stood by its agents and remembered by the
villagers. His chosen
method for reaching the local so many decades later was to locate a

228 | QADRIISMAIL
different archive from the nationalist and colonialist: do good histori

cal fieldwork, visit the area and ask the people how itwas remembered
(memory). Thus far, there seems to be nothing particularly radical

about this project. Any social historian would?nay, should?approve.
But Amin also articulates a problem history usually represses and
is reluctant to address on the rare occasions itdoesn't:
The content of the riot?the occurrence and the light

empirical physical
it sheds on the structure and process of peasant politics?cannot be de
duced of the pronouncements of the Judge and

entirely independently
the discourse of Gandhi, the Father of the Nation. The desire to discover
in oral history an entirely different source from the archival offers a faint
But forme itwas not a question of counterposing local remem

promise.
brance against authorized accounts: the process by which historians
access to pasts as is the
is richly problematic, between
gain relationship
memory and record, and
the possibilities of arriving at a more nuanced
narrative, a thicker seem enhanced the problems

description, by putting
on display. (4)
The difference between this endeavor

and Chakrabarty's is beginning
to emerge. Peasants, as Amin phrases it, "do not write. They are writ
ten about" (1). (Or, as Spivak might interject, the subaltern cannot
speak. But then, the boys of Subaltern Studies?even those who've

learned themost from her?are not in the habit of citing her.) The his
torian, therefore, does not have transparent access to their thoughts,
which wouldalways be overdetermined?by, for instance, judicial
discourse (colonialism), as is the case here. Chakrabarty, too, actually
has access to the statements of the Santals, the agents of his history2
whom the discipline cannot recognize as subjects, only through the
account of it),but he is pre
judicial record (and that, too, fromGuha's
pared to take
an overdetermined account as true, as giving him access
to the authentic voice and transparent thought of the subaltern. (Yet
another instance, one might add, of his politics overdetermining rigor.)
Amin has no such illusions. Indeed, he is even dubious, the careful
reader would have noticed, of the notion of the empirical; he does not
find it to be entirely outside the discursive. Amin, then,might present
himself as a plain and simple historian, but his text is clearly in
formed by a desire to be more than just another narrative history, is
within the intertext of the French critique. He knows "the process by
which historians gain access to pasts is richly problematic" (4), and

he desires towrite into the narrative itself the "problems"?finding

reliable archives and sources, sorting and sifting through evidence,
facing questions surrounding translation, and so on?associated with
writing history. These problems are usually addressed only in the

prefaces of such texts and, contained there, are disappeared from the
narrative itself,which produces itself seamlessly within the terms of
the referential illusion;28 Amin, in contrast, will make them part of the
very process of writing.

Event, Metaphor, Memory, divided into five parts, is a very care
fully structured book inwhich arguments made in one are
chapter
not forgotten by the next. The firstpart narrates the event and its im
mediate aftermath and also contains a brief prehistory of the event/
place so as not to present it as a spontaneous eruption from nowhere.

The record, itwould seem, enables thiswithout
raising any problems
forAmin. The second part contains more and different context, descrip
tions of the villages?Chaura, Bhopa, Mundera, and Dumri?most
involved in and affected by the event: their size, socioeconomic con
ditions, population, caste, and religious composition, extent of partic

ipation in the Congress resistance, et cetera: the objects, in a word, of
themost conventional disciplinary history. So much so that the reader
could not be faulted forwondering, at this stage, ifAmin actually is
going to produce such a history, despite earlier signs to the contrary,

and even in this section, where he cites as sources some of his peas
ant informants, rather than a more disciplinary archive
(something to
which Amin's distinction between event and metaphor should have
alerted the reader). Indeed, this suspicion is reinforced by Amin being
quite clear, again in conformist historical fashion, about the proximate

cause of the event: "The famous
apocalyptic clash with the police had
its roots in... [the] effort by local [Gandhian] volunteers to
stop trade
in . . . [liquor] and to enforce a just price formeat and fish in the
nearby Mundera bazaar" (15). This section is also replete with what
Barthes terms "narrative luxury" or excessive and "futile" detail29 like,
for instance, the story of a peasant tenant being beaten
by a landlord's
enforcer, which doesn't add anything substantial to the argument but
signifies to the reader thatAmin is in command of the archive. The third
part discusses the treatment of the event by Indian nationalism. The

... roused ... [Gandhi]
"tragedy of Chauri Chaura thoroughly" (49),
so much so that, in response, he called off,
despite strong opposition

230 | QADRIISMAIL
frommuch of the Congress leadership, the organized and successful

countrywide resistance campaign and called upon the participants in
the riot to surrender to the authorities. "The dead weight of collective
guilt," concludes Amin, "had fallen on an entire population?of Gor
akhpur [district] in particular and

generally" the nation more
(18).
Even though Gandhi admitted thatmistreatment of volun
Congress
teers by the Chauri Chaura police provoked the
rioting, nothing justi
fied the resort to violence by those acting in his name.
Unsurprisingly, Gandhi doesn't emerge as a positive figure in

Amin's account:
Summing up the experiences of his triumphant train tours of 1920 Gandhi

wrote: "The is an for the mob . . .
Congress organization Though orga
nized men and women . . . our demonstrations are
by thoughtful
mob-demonstrations" ... And then he [Gandhi] added: "a
undoubtedly
few intelligent, sincere, local workers are needed and the whole nation
can be to act and democracy can be evolved out
organized intelligently,
of (13)
mobocracy."
Presented in this narrateme is Gandhi's elitism or vanguardism and

even contempt for themasses he presumed to represent metonymi
cally (in a relationship of continuity): theymust be trained, disciplined,

evolved into something else?a higher, more intelligent, thoughtful, and
sincere form of being?by a few volunteers, a vanguard, before being
permitted to resist or demonstrate against the British. One of colonial

ism's best-known opponents deploys an anthropological trope against
"his own." But then, being nationalist, Gandhi cannot but thinkwithin
the thematic of Eurocentrism. So, consistent with that strand in Sub
altern Studies that has produced a critique of Gandhi?exemplified by
Guha's essay, which he cites?Amin presents Gandhian nationalism,
our image of it
despite today, quite literally in the form of Gandhi
in a loin-cloth, as an elitist phenomenon.30 It may have needed to
produce themasses, denied the franchise, in their thousands to dem

onstrate to British colonialism that the Congress was indeed repre
sentative of the bulk ifnot thewhole of the Indian nation, but itwas
firm in its conviction that these same masses had to be led or, inGuha's
term, disciplined, rather than spoken to,worked with, or abided by.
Amin desires to relate their story in keeping with this latter subal
ternist spirit, since he discovers in the historical/nationalist record,
or metaphor, that "nationalist prose would memorialize the event by

a lesson to be learnt, the 'riot'

place and policemen killed. Forever
could no longer be accorded a narrative past" (46), prehistory, or local
meaning. The national cannot completely ignore the local; the Con
gress account admits its volunteers were provoked by the police. But
toAmin, Gandhian nationalismultimately "writes out" the event as
(locally significant) event and replaces itwith a pedagogic and disci
plinary object.31
or local context in
Having written something like a narrative past
parts one and two, and a critique of itsmetaphorization by Indian
nationalism in part three, Amin examines the other metaphor, the
colonial/judicial record, in part four. Before reading this section, it is

important to note that Event, Metaphor, Memory's narrative moves
in a certain definite direction from its first part to its last, its stress
assuredly increasing, with the text self-consciously emplotted, for

each section is longer than the one before it. The first four parts are
12, 22, 26, and 48 pages long, respectively; the fifth,86. This ismen
tioned not to compete, on their terrain,with accountants, statisticians,
or, even worse, social scientists but to emphasize that part five is
given almost as much time as the rest of the narrative combined. The
concern and emphasis of the text, not surprisingly, falls here where
the question of an alternative, subaltern account of Chauri Chaura
and the problems associated with writing one?in particular and gen
eral?are addressed, displayed, staged. The first three parts of Event,
Metaphor, Memory, then, could be understood as thatwhich must be
(re)recorded instrumental purposes: they perform a narra
for almost
tive function on their own but are mostly presented as "context" (parts
one and two) and a critique of the nationalist of the
metaphorization
event (part three), without which the last two sections cannot be com
prehended. The first three parts are necessary but mostly in order to
take the text elsewhere, to itsmain concern, which is the attempt to
write subaltern history on its "own" terms, in the subaltern's own
voice, toward the understanding of subaltern historical actors as agents
not only of events but maybe even of texts; of
producing the subaltern
as author. Amin, that is,may yet an con
produce unconventionally
ventional history, as he sometimes appears to promise. Like Chak
rabarty, we may end up discovering that the subaltern, after all, is a
speaking subject, that the diligent subalternist can discover her voice,
locate the real.

232 | QADRIISMAIL
Part four pivots around the judicial need for a peculiarly British
colonial object, "a witness for the prosecution... an 'Approver/ as he
was (and still is) called on the subcontinent" (72), an eyewitness to
and participant in a criminal event. In return forhis testimony, which
would help convict the majority of his comrades, he would be par
doned. An approver, inAmin's account, is an unusual and perilous
subject-position: the witness in question had to confess to being a
participant, and not just any participant but someone close enough to
the center of events to both know them intimately and to have been
deeply implicated. If not, his testimony would not be persuasive or

incriminate enough others; ifhe confessed to toomuch, as one poten
tial approver apparently did in this case, he could either lack credi
or be deemed too guilty to deserve pardon; ifhe confessed too
bility
little, as did another, he was unacceptable. Since the guilty faced a
death sentence, the colonial judiciary found enough cardinal partici
pants willing to confess. However, they only needed one, and selected
Mir Shikari, a "cultivator and hideseller," a Congress volunteer and
one of its leaders inChauri Chaura. From Amin's
perspective, "a very
large portion of what we now know about themomentous event at
Chauri Chaura is a consequence of Approver Shikari's prodigious
outpouring in the trial court" (75). This presents Amin the historian
with a serious problem. He terms Shikari's testimony "transactional":
produced, quite literally, in exchange for his life.Under these circum
stances, Amin wonders, can the conscientious historian accept it as
true? Shikari is undoubtedly a subaltern, but is he speaking here?in
the Spivakian sense? Do subject-position and voice, as itwere, coin
cide? That is to say, is his testimony to be understood as delivered by
Shikari qua subaltern, or Shikari qua approver-pleading-for-his-life?
To Amin, who reads this testimony, in the strict sense, it's the latter:
. . Mir
. . . the historian
"In Shikari. finally has access to the actual
words of a leading actor. But the presence of the first person singular
is... inadequate guarantee of the speaker's nearness to his own speech"
(117). Since Shikari was responding to questions posed to him by the
from the judi
police and judiciary, his statement cannot be extricated
cial discourse in which he is represented. He has no autonomy, no
effective agency, no voice or capacity to speak as subaltern-resistor.
This, of course, is in stark contrast to Chakrabarty's position: despite
the Santals' statements being available only through the judicial record,

and inGuha's representation at that,Chakrabarty nevertheless claims

to have direct access to the real, the subaltern mind. A responsible his
torian would have at least addressed the possibility that, by claiming
god as the agent of their rebellion, they sought to escape punishment.

In so doing himself, Amin identifies serious problems with generat
ing an alternative account of Chauri Chaura?or any event?from the
judicial /colonial and nationalist record.

Going over this record meticulously, Amin reveals how it is em
plotted into a coherent narrative from the approver's testimony. The

latter is "segmented" and "episodic." It has to be: thewitness has to
pause from time to time, break his story, in order to detail the partic
ular acts of particular accused so that he can provide enough infor
mation or evidence to convict them.32This, however, is unsatisfactory
to judicial discourse, which needs a more
straightforward account.
So, it
will produce a "connected" or more self-consciously emplotted
narrative, in order to construct "meaningful totalities." The consequent
text is even more useless to the historian seeking a "true" account of
Chauri Chaura: "Judicial discourse seeks to establish by certain well
established procedures the only truenarrative of past events. A prod
uct of Reason, it fixes a single, definitive, verifiable, and proven mean
ing to the 'case,' and this meaning must hold" (Amin 1995, 94) for,
otherwise, punishment becomes impossible. Though judicial discourse
seeks to establish the truth of things, Amin cannot accept it as true for
a variety of reasons,
including its overdetermination by colonialism's
need to depoliticize the event and dependence
and criminalize on an
approver's testimony to an "enormous degree." This prompts the cen

tral question disturbing this text: "what is a true account of a riot like
Chauri Chaura, where an estimated
6000 people were involved, 1000
suspects listed, and 225 put on trial?" (95). Amin is ostensibly writing
only about Chauri Chaura, but the consequence of this argument for
thewriting and critique of history, as such, is clear: What constitutes
a true account of any past event? How does one decide? Is, if
you like,
information retrieval really possible? To a postcolonial Indian histo
rian, should the nationalist interpretation be more persuasive by defi
nition? Can the subalternist?whose project is predicated on a critique
of nationalism?accept this position? The answers to all these ques
tions only appear in the next section where Amin describes his visits
to the locality, performance of fieldwork, and attempt to generate that

234 | QADRIISMAIL
alternative, "independent," subaltern account. At the beginning of

Event, Metaphor, Memory, he staged himself as not expecting to pro
duce an account of Chauri Chaura "autonomous" of colonialism and
nationalism. That would have been an absurd ambition. Still, he had
hoped towrite "an independent narrative that does not have crime for
its title." But, he concludes:
My attempt is not quite successful. This is not because the facts of the
case are incontrovertible: the same characters can, after all, be made to
several different The of my effort to generate an

play parts. difficulty
entirely alternate narrative of the event, I even say its illus
might failure,
trates, rather, the hegemonic power of judicial and nationalist discourse.
The subalterns make their own memories, but not make
they do them
as The gallows and the prison ensure that, decades
just they please.
later, judicial pronouncements remain to be heard even in the familial
recall of an event. And so it is with Chauri Chaura. Peasant narratives
that I collected were tainted or vitiated or colored in vary
inescapably
master
ing degrees by the hegemonic narratives. (118; emphasis added)
Even though the "facts" could be reinterpreted?which follows from

the empirical being understood as not outside the discursive?the local
cannot simply be extracted from the colonial and the national. The cri
tique here is ultimately of the very notion of the archive, of evidence?

and so of truth, for no source, no text could be considered pure or
untainted. The archive, by definition, takes its objects out of context and
situates them in another; no text, then, could give the historian?any
historian?transparent access to the event?any event. (So it is surpris
ing thatAmin doesn't interrogate himself, wonder how his questions

and the discipline he is / they are produced by might have affected the
answers he received fromhis informants, not tomention how his ques
tions might have shaped their emplotment of the narratives he then
or example, concerns Chauri
(re)emplotted.) The particular argument,
Chaura, a riot in colonial India; however, itwould be themost naive
reader who would not begin towonder, at this point in the text,whether
Amin is not simply critiquing, if implicitly, his own earlier work and
the information-retrieval strand?the dominant and most influential
strand?of Subaltern Studies and, going further, staking out a position
about history as such inspired, if implicitly, by the French critique.
After admitting?"staging" is starting to sound like the better
term?his "failure," Amin details those problems, the "hurdles"

presented by writing (oral) history. During his time in the field, he con
centrated on interviewing relatives of the rioters of 1922. He doesn't
say why; presumably, they would be closer to the event, cathect it

more than other villagers?and thus help fulfill his desire. However,
after much effort he was able to produce not the single coherent
account he intended and desired but no less than four narratives, char
acterized as follows: "stories by local youths; accounts fromMundera
bazaar; the narratives of distant localities; and the remembrance of

lost times among surviving family members of those who partici
pated in the riot" (123). All four stories are different. The (male) local
youth?Amin's chief source is the cousin of one of the accused?
emplotted Chauri Chaura as the heroic story of Congress volunteers,

who were terrificwrestlers to confidently attack
and therefore able
the police. (The wrestlers include, in today's memory, a famous dacoit
"who is simply absent" from the court records of 1922.) That is to say,
Gandhian ahimsa is not an element, central or even marginal, of their
story, emplotted as an instance of nationalist success with the destruc

tion of the police station. The informant in the Mundera bazaar
account is the grandson of the 1922 manager. Here, the significance
of the day lies in the memory of the grandfather having saved the
bazaar?where the liquor, fish, and meat shops picketed by the Con
gress volunteers were located?from harm by the sheer force of his
personality; he redirected the large and rowdy crowd, which in this

account went to the bazaar first,before the police station. (In Shikari's
testimony, the volunteers had planned to demonstrate outside the
police station and only then move to the bazaar to picket the shops.
But, of course, they never reached the bazaar.) Amin also interviewed
people inMadanpur, a village somewhat distant fromChauri Chaura,
where the event is dated to the 1930s during the salt march; here the
. . . are other
"agents involved people altogether": carters from their
own village who chanced to be in Chauri Chaura and
bravely led the
attack against the police station. Though no story coincides
exactly
with another, they rhyme; they are all emplotted,
by Amin, as about
local heroism?individual in theMadanpur account, collective in the
other two,which are both narrated as occasions of nationalist
triumph,
not failure as in the Gandhian
interpretation.
Predictably enough, themost narrative time is granted to the in
terviews with the two remaining survivors from February 1922: Sita

236 | QADRIISMAIL
Ahir, the son of a policeman killed in the riot, and Naujadi, thewidow
of one of the rioters, Rameshar Pasi (who served
eight years in prison).
It isn't necessary here to read the accounts in detail, but some obser
vations about Amin's treatment of them are in order. Sita, for instance,
told him that "'nineteen died at the thana [police station]; nineteen
[rioters] were hanged'" (145). To the historian, this "flawed equation
. . . establishes a
symmetry between the extent of the crime and the
degree of punishment," of policemen killed was
since the number
actually twenty-three. Naujadi told him, contrary to anything in the

record, that the wife of the officer-in-charge of the police station
pleaded with her husband not to confront the volunteers, to let them
make their protest and leave, but, unnerved by the crowd's hostility,
he ordered his constables to fire and provoked the riot. Amin doesn't
cite these statements and many others to contest the accuracy of sub
altern memory: "Incongruence with known facts has not been con
strued as a lapse inmemory, but rather as a necessary element in the
stitching together of the story of Chauri Chaura" (198). Crucially, to

him?and this is a very radical move?every story he "collected" is
valid "as an account of 'Chauri Chaura'" (197); not true?just
as valid
as that of Gandhi or the judge. This may sound relativist, except that
Amin is calling into question the very notion of historical fidelity, not
producing many alternative truths. He, the historian, stitches these
stories?the textual metaphor is no coincidence?keeps their seams
visible, doesn't pass them as transparent representations of the real.
So, he concludes:
In Dumri the end of the event is remembered for its immediate result, not
for its national consequences. Repression, punishment, survival?these
are the themes with which Sita, and others close their accounts
Naujadi,
of Chauri Chaura. do not locate its significance in the it caused
They grief
theMahatma and thebreak itput on thefightagainst theBritish. (161)
Finally, itmight appear, here is an authentic local narrative. The peas

ants did not locate the significance of the event in anything Gandhi
had to say about it but identified their own meaning, in terms that
related it to their own lives. The local is actually separate, can be sep
arated, from the national; the real can be identified. Spivak iswrong!
Chakrabarty, right! Amin has demonstrated that the subaltern has
routs . . .
spoken! Memory metaphor! Social history triumphs! But

Amin has already cautioned the reader that he has tailored these sto
ries, that the local account/s cannot be extricated from the national
(or colonial). He tells us exactly why when offering an explanation for
"the apparent lack of hostility towards Shikari" (141), the approver in
village memory. For it is unexpected, is itnot, that theman whose tes
timony was responsible for sending nineteen villagers to the gallows

and many others to prison was not vilified by the people in and around
Chauri Chaura, including several who actually knew him? Amin states
that, "in the absence of evidence," he can only speculate:
been as the a cause, and of per

Shikari would have regarded betrayer of
sons connected to it, only if the event had been considered a act
political
in the village in the aftermath of the riot. But nationalist condemnation
and judicial had foreclosed this possibility. Disavowed by
punishment
Gandhi and the nationalists the Dumri well have come
locally, people may
to accept their men as the notorious criminals of Chauri Chaura. (141)
Like Amin, we will never know. But this is as persuasive a reading of

that sentiment as can be expected: that the national could be under
stood as having theweight to profoundly influence the local, however
subaltern itmay be; that one cannot access the voice or consciousness
of the subaltern transparently, untouched by the discourses of colo
nialism and nationalism?or, for thatmatter, by the disciplines, in this
case history and anthropology, thatmake Amin possible; that to hold
otherwise is to be incredibly naive.
So, how does all this relate to the French critique? Amin clearly
works with several of the cardinal categories of his discipline?fact,
evidence, archive, past, and so on. He deploys anthropological notions
like caste without interrogating them. He uses the term "fieldwork"
without seeming to be aware of its colonialist career. (There are, if it
is still necessary to point this out, many social histories of geography's
Europe, but no one has ever done "fieldwork"

there.) On the other
hand, and despite his belief in fact, he questions the notion of truth
(not, of course, the same things). And, ofmost significance tomy read
ing, he fails to deliver on the promise that is the ostensible telos of
Event, Metaphor, Memory, which one is now compelled to read as its
enabling fiction: to produce an alternative, subaltern narrative of

Chauri Chaura. He fails, that is, to retrieve information, write history,
a failure that is
self-consciously staged: the book's emplotment and

238 | QADRIISMAIL
narrative structure leads, we can now say inevitably, to its fifth and
most important part. Amin had enough material?evidence, if you
like?to write a conventional social history of Chauri Chaura if he
wanted to.He could have vacuumed his informants' stories of every
trace of the national, repressed the singular or "improbable" accounts
not in the record, like those about the carters ofMadanpur, and pro
duced local, subaltern truth.However, as Amin knows, writing subal
tern history could only be done, paradoxically enough, by representing
the subaltern (in the sense ofmetaphor or substitute). For ifhe had,
like any other historian, written?to use his term?like the judge,
deemed one story or interpretation themost persuasive, convincing
and therefore emplotted it as the true account, this would have re
pressed, denied value to, the others. The necessity to place the prob
lems of writing history, all his informants' stories, on display arises
fromAmin's refusal to anthropologize them. It is analogous to saying
history cannot narrate synchronic diversity, cannot emplot the story

of more than one central subject in one text, and remain coherent.
Amin discovers, narrates, four?he could, no doubt, have found oth
ers?and he refuses to privilege or further subalternize any of them
one.
by excluding the inconvenient detail and emplotting the four as
He refuses, that is, to be judgmental, to homogenize; he respects the
This is
specificity, the heterogeneity, the singularity of these accounts.
not only a profoundly ethical stance to take; it also constitutes a gen
to
uinely subversive, nonrelativist critique of (writing) history. For,
Amin, unlike Chakrabarty, it is impossible towrite history, to produce
information or truth claims, without being judgmental or complici
tous with judicial discourse, the law, without repressing difference,
even ifone desires to celebrate it.
That these are, indeed, the stakes involved in Event,Metaphor, Mem
as
ory is only made evident at its conclusion. So the textmust be read
on display, inAmin's term?its failure to narrativize
staging?putting
Chauri Chaura. Event,Metaphor, Memory, to phrase itdifferently, is as
the
fruitfully read as a story about writing history with Shahid Amin,
historian, as its cardinal actant or central subject, as it could?and
must?be read as a history with Chauri Chaura as its object. But I
shouldn't we need to discuss the stakes first.
anticipate my argument;
Amin a few pages from the end, after narrating the
emphasizes, only
local stories, that: "I am not suggesting that what we now have on

record is the definitive voice and consciousness of the actors as it
played itself out in early 1922.1 simply note that the problems of cap
turing 1922 through interviews in 1990 are considerable, as are the

on contemporary evidence"
pitfalls of a pragmatic reliance (195). The
first statement situates this text firmly, if implicitly, within the cri
tique of the self-conscious Enlightenment subject; unlike Chakrabarty,

Amin doesn't produce himself as having access to the consciousness
of the subaltern. The second statement reinforces this by arguing that
contemporary (i.e., 1922) texts do not provide such access either, an

argument Amin has already made. Those who hold otherwise are
merely being pragmatic; they are producing?stitching?narrative his
tory, truth claims, because it is possible (but only by repressing differ

ence). In so doing Amin also situates his textwithin what I have been
calling the French critique of history. He characterizes his final prod

uct in these terms: "My effort has been to arrive at an unmeshed,
intertwined, and imbricated set of narratives from every available

source" (195). That is to say, he was only able to produce a set of sto
ries, not the truth about Chauri Chaura.
Put differently, it is not a theoretical stance, or dispute with, but
a profound and almost purist fidelity to the
protocols of his disci
pline, tomethodological rigor, that both disables Amin fromwriting
(a) history (ofChauri Chaura) and enables him to narrate the story of
this failure as a story,which is also a history, of the failure towrite his
tory. Staged as inductive, as not proceeding from a priori assump

tions but from an intimacy with the archive, including the field, the
critique is emplotted as becoming evident only after the trained his

torian realizes the impossibility of information retrieval, of writing
history without making truth claims (favoring some accounts at the

cost of others; without, that is, repressing difference), and then
stages
this impossibility as a failure, narrating it from the beginning (the
decision to produce a history) to the end (the realization of its
impos
sibility). So Amin self-consciously tells us a The
"story." importance
of that term?which is not synonymous with "fiction"?to his text
cannot be stressed too much: indeed, he
consistently refers to Event,
Metaphor, Memory as a story, his His
story.33 conclusion?the stakes?
is inevitable, even predictable: "Writing history in this fashion leads
one to
constantly ask whether the really complex questions about
the production of historical narratives have been answered, or indeed

240 | QADRIISMAIL
adequately posed" (196). Airrin doesn't provide an explicit answer him

self; by this stage in the text, he doesn't have to.
CODA
Event,Metaphor, Memory's epilogue cites a postindependence rewrit
ing of the original British colonial memorial to the policemen killed

at Chauri Chaura:
A close look at the names of the policemen killed . . . reveals that the
Muslim names are written in Urdu and the Hindu names in Hindi! . . .
The names inUrdu are the lettering inHindi is simply papered

engraved,
over. the colonial which associated Hindi with
Clearly, government,
subversive nationalism and found Urdu less threatening, had originally
all the names in Urdu. . . .An influential postcolonial
engraved figure
must have then ordered the plastering over of the for the
Urdu-writing
Hindu names! But the Hindu names were not in Devana
re-engraved
perhaps because of budgetary constraints, for a shoddier painted

gari...
inscription in Hindi. This monument to the killed in Chauri
policemen
Chaura is testimony to the ways of the majoritarian nationalist discourse
in India even today. All the policemen killed by nationalist peasants
now to "India's
belong past." But the essential difference?Hindu and
Muslim?surfaces this notorious process of
surreptitiously through
nationalist erasure and (199)
reinscription.
Amin doesn't investigate the process that resulted in the reinscription.

He simply proceeds to read the text. But why does Event, Metaphor,
Memory end with a citation of thismonument given that the Hindu

Muslim question is not raised in the book? (Amin mentions, almost
in passing, the lack of antagonism between Hindu and Muslim vil
lagers during the anticolonial agitation, when Muslim Congress vol

unteers even gave up eating meat, as a gesture of solidarity with their
Hindu comrades.) Is Amin, a Muslim after all?not in an essentialist
sense, but he is interpellated as such; even ifhe doesn't seem to have
a Muslim imagination, he has aMuslim name?compelled tomake a
gesture? Does theminority question raise itself differently at, say, the
moment after Babri Masjid? Is there a nexus between Event,Metaphor,
Memory's epilogue and its plot, the impossibility of writing history?
Recalling Chakrabarty helps: he wrote history to feel at home (in

one
Western modernity). Without being able to tell a (true) story, not

about his personal past but one that he feels produced him?let us
call it Bengali culture?he cannot feel at home. (He also desired to
disrupt the discipline, but that argument, I trust, has lost credibility.)
Read afterAmin, it is possible to argue thatChakrabarty, indeed, is the
effective subject of Provincializing Europe, a book best read as autobi
ographical, a narrative about homemaking. Read after Chakrabarty,

it could be argued thatAmin can't write history for another reason:
Shahid Amin, the historian/subject of Event,Metaphor, Memory, cannot
feel at home in post-Babri Masjid India. Hindu/Indian nationalism
reminds him?not every day but at moments like this,when encoun
tering the reinscribed monument?that he isMuslim, minor.

Historians from sociological?or census-categorized?minorities,
claiming a metonymic relation to "their" groups, often produce?pass
may be a better word?narratives of such collectivized subjects as the
representative story of their group; these texts get called minority

histories. Amin, obviously, does not value or cathect such stories or
such (identity) politics. His commitment to the singular makes that
impossible. Rather, implicit in Event,Metaphor, Memory is a radical cri

tique of the relation between theminor(ity) and (Indian nationalist)
history. Turning to an exemplary instance of such history, Jawaharlal
Nehru's The Discovery of India, would help establish this: the cost, in a
sense, of information retrieval, of letting (identity) politics overde
termine one's theoretical convictions. Early in his narrative, Nehru
wonders what makes India a unity in the face of such self-evident
diversity:
The diversity of India is tremendous; it is obvious; it lies on the surface
and can see it. It concerns itself with as
anybody physical appearances
well as with certain mental habits and traits. There is little in common,
to outward between the Pathan of the North-West and the Tamil
seeming,
in the far south. Their racial stocks are not the same, there may be
though
common strands in face and
running through them; they differ figure,
food and clothing, and, of course,
language.34
The immense diversity of India?literally superficial?is immediately

apparent to any observer, not just the Indian. In the face of such het
erogeneity, how does the nationalist (leader) produce commonality,
unity, a homogeneous object? Nehru cannot respond with an essential
ist answer, for Indians, to him, do not have in common, or share, the
usual elements?language, culture, et cetera?deemed characteristic

242 | QADRIISMAIL
of a nation. This question has consistently posed an acute

problem
for all anticolonial nationalist thought. Fanon, facing an Africa inwhich
every country was ethnically diverse, (in)famously called for the erad
ication of heterogeneity as a precondition for national unity and de
colonization.35 Like the Fanonian, the Nehruvian resolution of this
problem may not be convincing, may seem ethically suspect in our

moment, but is symptomatic nevertheless: "I think that at almost any
time in recorded history an Indian would have feltmore or less at home
in any part of India."36 Nehru is uncertain of this formulation; some
Indian nationals, implicitly, would inhabit the country more securely,
others less. Even to him, this isn't a convincing resolution of the anti
colonial nationalist problem. Still, the conceptual ground of the reso
lution is of critical interest; being a national is about being at home,
literally and metaphorically; it is about feeling secure, in your proper
place, with others like you. (If the reader of this essay had any doubts
about Chakrabarty's complicity with the thematic of nation
profound
alism, they should, I hope, get whited out now.)
However, inNehru's account, theminor does not inhabit home as
strongly, securely, unproblematically as themajor. He characterizes the

historical genesis and development of Indian culture in the following
narrateme:
The first great cultural synthesis and fusion took place between the in
and the Dravidians . . .Out of this . . . the Indian
coming Aryans grew
races and the basic Indian culture ... In the ages that followed there
came many other races: Iranians, Greeks, Parthians, Bactrians, Scythi
ans, Huns, Turks (before Islam), early Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians;
a difference, and were absorbed. India was,
they came, made according
to Dodwell, absorbent like the ocean." It is odd to think of
"infinitely
India, with her caste system and exclusiveness, having this astonishing
inclusive to absorb races and cultures. itwas

capacity foreign Perhaps
due to this that she retained her vitality and
rejuvenated herself from time
to time. The Muslims, when were also affected

they came, powerfully
by her.37
a principle of Indian
The imperative of this narrateme is to establish
commonality despite the lack of self-evident homogeneity. In seeking
to produce a self, though, itmust also?as psychoanalysis has taught
an other. To Nehru, the base, the very ground
us?inescapably produce
of Indian culture grew out of the fusion, themelding of theAryan and

Dravidian. Significantly, theAryans are described as "incoming," im

plying they are not quite native, India not their original home. Still,
by locating the beginning of Indianness in "recorded history," they
can be narratively fused with the Dravidian and both distinguished
from the other, later "foreign races and groups." The Aryans may not
be original to India, but they are not foreign, either; they found/ed
Indian culture. The other groups merely contributed to its develop
ment; these outsiders were "absorbed" by India, fused into theAryan
Dravidian synthesis?everyone except theMuslims. The other groups,
ten in all, are listed one after another, continuously, without inter
ruption. Then discontinuity, a pause in the narrative for a celebration

of India's astonishing inclusiveness; three and a half whole sentences
intervene between the listing and theMuslim being named, added to
the list.And that, too, with a difference; unlike the rest, theMuslim
presence in Indian is qualified: "theMuslims, when theycame" implies,
clearly, that theMuslim is singled out by this text, seen as different,

othered. For not only did theMuslim not contribute to the roots of
Indian culture, it is a latecomer to it, arriving after even the Bactrian
and the Scythian; most crucially, theMuslim wasn't absorbed by India,
just "powerfully affected." The Muslim, in this account, refused to

become fully Indian, insisted on retaining difference, did not play by
the same rules as the rest (and so, presumably, laid the ground for
eventually demanding Pakistan). Nehru could have conceived of the

Muslim in different terms, like, for instance, theMuslim
League was
asking him to when it insisted that theMuslims weren't a minority
be conceived or
(to through the logic of arithmetic quantity) but a
nation (e/quality). This, however, was incomprehensible toNehru, to
whom two nations could not inhabit one country, towhom theMus
lims were self-evidently a minority,
being fewer in number than the
Hindus. What he couldn't see, and what is easier to notice in our
politico-epistemological moment, is that theMuslim League is better

understood as demanding equality, refusing to be minoritized, treated
as minor, lesser, of That is how the statement "we
slighter significance.
are a nation, too," like the Hindus, is best read. The League wasn't
necessarily claiming that theMuslims were a nation in a positivist

sense; they just wanted to be acknowledged as equal to the Hindus,
to be allowed the same
adjective or category and, therefore, status.38
But the League made this argument using the only terms available to

244 | QADRIISMAIL
it, those provided by nationalism, which led to a legitimate ifdisas

trous misunderstanding of its position by Nehru. To further compli
cate matters, Nehru faced another interlocutor: in The Discovery of India
he didn't only address Indians but, more importantly, British colo
nialism, which insisted that Indians weren't homogeneous. The task
facing Nehru was to produce homogeneity, overriding difference,

both in the present and in the past. For as every student of national
ism knows, any nation/alism, to legitimize itself,must produce its
nationals as sharing something not only now but then. IfNehru had
produced Indian homogeneity as a thing of the present alone, itwould

have been deemed recent and therefore artificial, at best of uncertain
provenance. A narrative of homogeneity through time is necessary to

reinforce the claim to homogeneity in the present. When he turns
to the past, though, Nehru had no alternative but to tell a story that
minoritizes theMuslim. Working in tandem, the structural logic of
nationalism and the record of history?the information available?pre
sented him with no other choice. Nehru wasn't a communalist, but
that narrateme produces theMuslim as playing an insignificant role
not just in the Indian present but in the Indian past. It shares the same
thematic as themove Amin identifies in the reinscription of themon
ument, which refuses to see unmarked Indians in India's past since
there are none in its present. Given such an authoritative narrative,
which grounds Indian nationalism, can the reader be surprised that
Shahid Amin cannot feel quite at home in (Indian) history? Unlike
Chakrabarty or Nehru, he cannot write history so as to feel at home.

Indeed, unlike Spivak, Amin's theory and politics coincide: while writ
ing (Indian) history, he writes himself out of history.
Notes
The informed reader will the reference in the title to the wit and wis
recognize
dom of Ranajit Guha. My thanks to Premesh Lalu and two anonymous readers for
comments on an earlier draft.
1. Spivak 1988, 271.

2. Spivak 1988,295.
are
3. Spivak 1985. The dates of publication confusing, but "Deconstructing
refers to "Can the Subaltern as written.
Historiography" Speak?"
4. Spivak 1985, 342.
5. See Prasad 1997.

6. Spivak 1985,345.
7. Chakrabarty 2000 and Amin 1995.
8. See especially Foucault 1973 and de Certeau 1988.
9. White 1981.
10. The cardinal texts of this critique are Althusser 1997, Barthes 1986,
de Certeau 1988, Foucault 1973, Griemas 1990, Ranciere 1994, White 1981. Itwas
arguably inaugurated by Nietzsche's remarkable essay (1995). Nietzsche and White,
of course, are not French?at least, not in the essentialist sense.
11. et al. 1995.

Appleby,
12. at
See Chatterjee 1993.1 this question
address length in Ismail 2005.
13. Itmight be useful to here that I understand as a
clarify postcoloniality
and studies as a field constituted (at least) by all the work
concept postcolonial
that name. Subaltern Studies is an element?easily the most
claiming significant
after Said?of that field.
14. here, like itself," refers not to a but a

Geography "history discipline
material reality.
15. See, for instance, Spivak 1988,280-83.
16. Mowitt 2005, xxviii.
17. Itmight be useful to recall here that the psychoanalytic term for
forget
ting is repression.
18. for instance,
See, Shelley 2002.
19. It bears out here that this statement works within the logic of
pointing
the self-conscious in command of language and motiva
Enlightenment subject,
tion, who understands why she acts, even claim is that the
though Chakrabarty's
Santal, as is incomprehensible to and outside of Enlightenment reason.
subject,
20. It should, actually, be difficult for a trained historian tomaintain that rea
son and God are after all, termed his history a "theodicy."
incompatible. Hegel,
21. Chakrabarty's is Guha 1983.
example
22. The reference is to the conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth; for an alter
native see Ismail 2005.
reading of it,
23. For the definition, see Guha 1994.
24. the OED records the first case of this condition
Ironically enough, among
James Cook's sailors in the Pacific. Which make the exem
just might nostalgia
plary colonial disease.
25. To avoid any confusion, it should be made clear here that I do

perhaps
not draw the distinction, common in cultural studies, between (abstract)
space
and place (concrete).
26. 1991.
Nancy
27. The to understand is as a relation between two
simplest way singularity
(or more) entities that are not identical, but rhyme.
28. On the function of prefaces in histories, see Barthes 1986.
29. Ibid.
30. The essay and Mobilize" is reproduced in Guha 1997.
"Discipline
31. Amin also out in this section that later postcolonial nationalist
points

246 | QADRIISMAIL
narrativizations of Chauri of the rioters as

Chaura justify the violence provoked
by the police.
32. Genette 1980 might inform Amin here, that all narrative works
though,
like this; itmust Genette, a technical to provide
"pause"?to term?occasionally
information about character, and so on.
background, setting,
33. Shikari is called "the (100). In contrast,
Additionally, chief-storyteller"
the colonial and nationalist accounts are termed "authoritative" discourses.
34. Nehru 1985, 61.

wrote ...
35. Decolonization, Fanon, "unifies people by the radical decision
to remove from it its heterogeneity" (Fanon 1963,46).

36. Nehru 1985, 62. The statement seem too convenient for my argu
may
ment, but I did notmake itup!
37. Nehru 1985, 73. And, no, I don't know what a Bactrian is, either. The
I believe, invented the scythe.
Scythians,
38. The classic statement here isMuhammad s 1930 address
Iqbal' presidential
to the League, where he termed India "a continent of human groups" (9).
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Qadri Ismail Not at Home in Hindu India Shahid Amin Dipesh Chakrabarty and The Critique of History

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(Not) at Home in (Hindu) India: Shahid Amin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and the Critique of History

Author(s): Qadri Ismail

This content downloaded from 67.115.155.19 on Mon, 30 Dec 2013 20:24:03 PM

The second Spivak's most famous, most misun

my desires, as far as they are within my grasp/'1 A particularly dense

gregating?or as a frequent flying academic might put it.

ereign, autonomous, self-conscious enlightenment subject; or, to use

often, too often, Spivak resorts to anecdotes?truth claims in narrative

Why does the essay begin, necessarily, with such a position/ing?

Cultural Critique 68?Winter 2008?Copyright 2008 Regents of the University of Minnesota

This content downloaded from 67.115.155.19 on Mon, 30 Dec 2013 20:24:03 PM

For, as Spivak puts it,politically interested reasons: her political

play?one has tomove to a much latermoment in the text,where Spi

[r]eporting on, or better still, participating in, antisexist work among

Third World. [It] is undeniably on the agenda. We should also welcome

all the information retrieval in these silenced areas that is taking

Her theoretical convictions suggest thatwhat is blandly called "infor

disciplinary truth claims?will reinscribe and reinforce the sovereign,

political or strategic necessity for knowledge overdetermines both

Spivak knows, as itwere, that the desire for knowledge?always a

This content downloaded from 67.115.155.19 on Mon, 30 Dec 2013 20:24:03 PM

an of imperialism; information retrieval is

itics, the essay as a whole strains when attempting to produce Subal

Spivak iterates, "If... the restoration of the subaltern's subject-position

poststructuralism and the successes, however constrained, of the "new

essay on two provocative histories from the most innovative recent

gent attention of the reader. Chakrabarty's is closed, offering the reader

critique of history but doesn't deliver. Amin makes no grandiose

promises but instantiates such a critique. Event,Metaphor, Memory and

This content downloaded from 67.115.155.19 on Mon, 30 Dec 2013 20:24:03 PM

work with poststructuralism or, more particularly, what might be

critique or putting into question of Eurocentrism?

precise sense: it is a particular conceptualization and organization of

guished itself from chronicle, a narrative that simply ends, as Hayden

past.9 As for the modern subject, it could be understood as consti

conception, it is rational, sovereign, autonomous, etc; however, as the

This content downloaded from 67.115.155.19 on Mon, 30 Dec 2013 20:24:03 PM

Western episteme, whether in its academic or quotidian incarnation,

good democratic subjects, patently ludicrous?11

by and/or happen to (other) subjects. The itinerary of this particular

politico-epistemological moment that has taken the name modernity.

larly of Chatterjee and Spivak?means calling into question the produc

produce information, rigorously? Provincializing Europe and Event,

This content downloaded from 67.115.155.19 on Mon, 30 Dec 2013 20:24:03 PM

including those of the (real, geographic) non-European world, that

ply put, that iterases difference?cannot be stressed toomuch, for the

critique of history and for postcoloniality; both should consider it,

coloniality, either; Spivak, for instance, has written persuasively and

essay, however, must depart from Chakrabarty's position when it

argument of Provincializing Europe when it appeared in article form.

This content downloaded from 67.115.155.19 on Mon, 30 Dec 2013 20:24:03 PM

Eurocentrismbetrays itsmost subversive potential. He sacrifices rigor

Take, for instance, the following in Provincializing Europe's

Bangladesh, has been my teacher of the social history of Bengali Mus

Chakrabarty's cardinal positions in the book proper: his avowed fail

by which that subject is interpellated. Colloquially: it's a Hindu thing,

you don't understand. Theoretically, this position would make it im

This content downloaded from 67.115.155.19 on Mon, 30 Dec 2013 20:24:03 PM

address men, blacks whites, queers straights, carnivores the misbe

Europe so he provides himself a defense in advance, cunningly antic

imaginary change? Or did Chakrabarty only realize that his imagina

imagination: his Australian selfmay well have had a Hindu imagina

sary history we associate with capital. It forms the backbone of the