Subaltern Studies: Vol. 9
Journal article by David Kopf; The Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 119, 1999
Journal Article Excerpt
Subaltern Studies: Vol. 9 by David Kopf Edited by AMIN SHAHID and DIPESH CHAKRABARTY. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. 284. $29.95. This volume, far more than any previous one, explores the varieties of dominance by means of which one group exploits another in the British and more recent Indian historical context. So overwhelming is the evidence in each of the studies that dominance existed in so many different situations among all categories and groupings, that it could be argued that power is the primary human need, even though it is often disguised in the rhetoric of political idealism or humanitarianism. This position is underscored by the godfather of the subalternists, Ranajit Guha, who in the first article writes: The colonial rulers are said to have won the minds of the natives everywhere by helping them to improve their bodies. This is a commonplace of imperialist discourse meant to elevate European expansion to the level of a global altruism. The control of disease by medicine and the sustenance of health by hygiene were, according to it, the two great achievements of a moral campaign initiated by the colonizers entirely for the benefit of the colonized. But morality was also a measure of the benefactor's superiority, and these achievements were flaunted as the triumph of science and culture. It was a triumph of Western civilization symbolized for the simple-minded peoples of Asia, Africa and Australia touchingly by soap. (p. 40) In the first study, "Writing, Orality and Power in the Dands, Western India, 1800s-1920s," Ajay Skaria examines the manner in which writing was perceived by non-literate peasants and tribals and how it was utilized by the colonist overlord. One common view is that the British asserted their power through the written word because "natives" perceived it as being magical. Utilizing his data on the tribals who have inhabited the heavily forested tract known as the Dangs in western India, Skaria has this to say about the impact of writing under the British: There was an ideology surrounding the written word that valorized it far above the oral in administrative practices. This could be called the rhetoric of fixity, or the notion that meanings, once inscribed in writing, were more stable and less arbitrary than those embodied in oral traditions or pre-colonial forms of writing. From this perspective, the inscription of colonial laws, for example, substituted a regular and ordered world for a personal, tyrannical, and arbitrary one. (p. 37) In "Science between the Lines" Gyan Prakash reflects on the true impact of modernization, with its attributes of reason and science, on India, because it was introduced by the imperialist West. Citing the work of Ashis Nandy, Prakash offers the convincing argument that modern science could be said to have contributed to cultural genocide because "traditional" cultural practices and social structures had to either justify and transform themselves in accord with the standards of reason and science set by the discourse of colonial modernity or face extinction (p. 60). From material taken largely from nineteenth-century Bengal Renaissance historiographical literature, Prakash comes up with a different conclusion, by no means original. The fact is that the Indian intelligentsia did not always succumb to the lure of the West or obliterate their tradition by Westernizing it. They fused much from the modern West with their own culture, thus modernizing their tradition rather than Westernizing it. One of the more intellectually provocative essays is Shall Mayaram's "Speech, Silence and the Making of Partition Violence in Mewat." Mayaram's underlying problem is ethnic identity and nationalism in the process of nation-building and his field of study in South Asia are the Hindu-Muslim genocidal massacres during Partition in the Mewat region of northeast Rajasthan. How and why do people articulate protest or remain silent in the face of mounting violence? In the end, with the aid of scholars of genocide such as Robert J. Lifton, Mayaram sees communal dominance and violence as ever-present potential dangers in multi-cultural, especially new nations. Of the social science articles dealing with recent history, this reviewer found Kancha Kiiaih's essay on scheduled caste-Hindu relations or the lack of them most fascinating. Those outside the caste system must, like the ethnic minorities, construct a cultural consciousness, identity, and sense of pride which the community finds necessary before or during the power struggle to end their "subaltern" existence under Hindu "hegemony."For what it purports to do, Subaltern Studies, IX, however limited by restrictions imposed by its founder, is an excellent collection of scholarly ... |
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