Provincilizing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Chakrabary argues Europe still influences and produces the master narratives of its former colonies. Europe and India are "hyperreal" terms whose geographical referent are somewhat indeterminate. Third world historians feel the need to refer to works in European history, their counterparts do not. The dominance of Europe as the subject of all histories is a part of a much more profound theoretical condition under which historical knowledge is reproduced in the third world.

Western social science theories concocted in ignorance of the colonial areas that many writers in those areas today apply incorrectly to their societies. Only Europe, as the most advanced society, can flesh out the intracies of others.

HISTORICISIM AS A TRANSITION NARRATIVE:

Marx, as a critic of liberalism and capitalism, reamins central to any postcolonial or postmodern project of writing history. Most modern third world histories are written with the themes of development, modernization, and capitalism animating throughout, and for the most part, looking at the failures of various classes to succeed in achieving a national purpose.

At first these "transition narratives," were unabashed celebrations of imperialism. Those living through the period were consciously aware of the fact that something was always lacking in the Indian. Citizenship and nationhood represented the end goals of history and the British were necessary to teach it to the Indian. The working class were told by the elite that they were the ones bearing the inadequacies.

At first, to be a modern individual was to be a European. Later nationalists scraped this idea because the central tenent of nationalism because individual rights and abstract equalities were univerals that could find succor anywhere in the world: one could be both Indian and a citizen. As the state and economy modernized, Indians began thinking that the acme of human activity was this state, whose theoretical subject was Europe.

Yet the autobiographies coming out of India were not traditionally bourgeois in that their topics were public rather than private. Bourgeois desire to split the figure into the public and private in contestation, alliance, and miscegenation with other narratives of the self and community. These will never get treatment, according to Chakrabarty because they undermine the modern, that is "European" sense of history.

HISTORY AND DIFFERENCE IN INDIAN MODERNITY:

Struggle against old system of marriage now represented in new one. The voices opposing it are subordinated to the supposedly higher purpose of making Indian history look like yet another episode in the universal march of citizenship, of the nation state, and of themes of human emanciation spelled out in the course of the Enlightenment. Citizens speak through these stories. The modern will always be understood as that which already happened elsewhere and is to be reproduced, mechanically or otherwise, with a local content. And many nationalist movements have used "nonmodern" reactions to spur their independence. Indians arrogated time and again during the colonial period a subjecthood which was not theirs. Anti-historical constructions played a part in the anti-colonial movement.

On the one hand, there is an Indian elite who seek to modernize the Indian peasant for the sake of creating an Indian state that emulates the Europe they saw. Socialist or nationalist, both seek to emulate Europe. On the other hand, maneuvers are made within the narrative to represent the distinctnes of Indian history and the difference and origniality of Indian ideas. But these people lack the resources to transmit their narratives on the same volume as the transition narrative writers. Universities prejudice in favor of modernizing narratives. It is because European imperialism and third-world nationalists achievced together: universalizing the nation-state as the most desirable form of government. States possess self-justifying narratives of citzenship and modernity that harken back to European political philosophy.

PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE?

Chakrabarty proposes a project of alliance between subaltern studies and metropolitian histories grounded in a radical critique and transcendence of liberalism. He is not calling for a simplistic out-of-hand rejection of modernity, liberal values, universals, science, reason, grand narratives, etc. The struggle to understand history is comprehending how coercion in physical, institutional, and symbolic forms establihes truths and meanings and goes a long way in deciding whose "universal" wins. This is not about cultural relativism either.

He proposes this:

1. Recognizing that one Europe got a hold of the adjective modern for itself, it animated its global imperialist history 2. and the equating a certain version of Europe with modernity is not the work of Europeans alone as thirdworld nationalisms have been equal partners in the process. History, a disciplined and institutionally regulated form of collective memory with grand narratives of rights, citizenships, and nation-states, as well as public and private spheres, one can't see India as having a problem while dismantling Europe. The idea is to write into the history of modernity the ambivalence, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and ironies that attend it. Modernization cannot occur without repression and violence. Chartabarky wants the politics of despair written into the narrative and why this is unescapable.