.§UBALTERNS TUDIESV III :,,,' Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha edited by DAVID ARNOLD and DAVID HARDIMAN DELHI OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS 1994 Go ogle Original from Digitized by · UNIVERSITYO F MICHIGAN Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford New Ym·k Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta . Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi [)qr es Salaam CapeT own Melbourne Auckland Madrid and imociato in Berlin Ibadan C Oxford UniversityP ress 1994 ISBN O 19 563411 X Typesetb y Raslrm, New Delhi 110070 Printed al Ro.jltamalE lectricP ress, l)elhj.llOOJJ and published.b y Neil O'Brien, 0%/ord_U nivmily Prrss YMCA Library Building, ]ai Singh &ad, New Delhi 110001 Go ogle Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITYO F MICHIGAN Contents Prefac.e vii Notes on Contnoutors ix 1. Claims on the Past: The Genealogy of Modem Historiography in Bengal ..1.. .. . PARTHA CHATTERJEE 2. The Difference-Defe rral of a Colonial Modernity: ., P~blic Debates on Domesticity in British India · .50 DIPESH CHAKRABARTY 3. Power in the Forests: The Dangs, 1820-1940 89 DAVID HARDIMAN 4. The Colonia l Prison: Pow er, Know ledge and Penology in Nine teenth-Century India 148 DAVID ARNOLD ( .~~ 5. The Prose of Otherness GYANENDRA PANDEY 6. Ranajit Guha : A Biographical Sketch 222 SHAHID AMIN AND GAUTAM BHADRA 7. A Bibliography of Ranajit Guha's Writings 226 COMPILED BYG AUTAM BHADRA Index 229 Go ogle Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITYO F MICHIGAN • I I Or::!oal Go gle I UNIVERSITYO F II. CHIGAN Preface T his volum~ of SubaJte,71S tud~e~i s dedicated. t~ Ra~aji~ Guha. Through his research and wnting, through his mspuation and vision, his encouragement and guidance, and through his keen and energetic editorship of the first six volumes of SubalternS tudies, Ranajit Guha has been more than just the founder of the series: he has been the intellectual driving force behind it. We are pleased to recognize his leader ship and scholarly contribution through the publication of these essays in his honour by five of the Subaltern Studies collective and to include a biographical note and bibliography of his published works by two further members of the editorial team October 1993 DAVID ARNOLD DAVID H ARDIMAN Go ogle Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITYO F MICHIGAN Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITYO F MICHIGAN N otes on Contributor s DAVID ARNOLD is Professor of South Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and the autho r of PoliceP ower and ColonialR ule: Madras, 1858- 1947 (1986); Famine:S ocia(Ci'isis--rmd Historical Change (1988); and Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and EpidemicD iseasei n Nineteenth-Centu1-yIn dia (1993). DIPESH CHAKRABARTY is Director of the Ashworth Centre for Social Theory at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Rethinking Working-ClassH isto1-yB: engal,1 890-1940 (1989). His current work is on gender and domesticity in modem Bengal. P ARTHA CHATTERJEE is Professor of Political Science, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His publications include Bengal, 1920-47: The lAnd Question (1985); Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World( 1986); and The Nation and Its F1·agments:C oloniala nd Post-colonial Histories (1993). DAVID HARDIMAN is currently a Simon Research Fellow at the Unive rsity of Manchester. He has written Peasant Nationalists of Guja1·at: Kheda District, 1917-34 (1981) , and The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India (1987), and has edited PeasantR esis tance in India, 1858- 1914 (1992). GYANENDRA PANDEY is Professor of History at the University of Delhi. He is the author of The Ascendancy of the Cong,·essi n Uttar Pradesh, 1926-34 (1978), and The Construction of Communalism in ColonialN orth India (1990). He has also edited The Indian Nation in 1942 (1988). Go ogle Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITYO F MICHIGAN .,. • Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITYO F MICHIGAN 1 Claims on the Past: The Genealogy of Modern Historiography in Bengal P ARTHA CHATTERJEE H istory is today, not implicitly, but in the most explicit way pos sible, the pretext for violent political conflict in India. It is a conflict which threatens to tear apart what was for several decades taken to be the consensus about the fundamental character of the nation -state which the Constitution calls 'India, that is Bharat . For almost three years now, the most contentious debate with which the very centre of organized political life in India has been preoccupied is a dispute over the statu s of a certain mosque in a small town in Uttar Pradesh. The reason why this dispute is producing such shat tering reverberations in the central corridors of Indian politics is that it has become implicated in the increasingly powerful claims now being made by the organized proponents of political Hinduism. The central demand of this campaign is that the past, present and future of the Indian nation be constituted around a notion of hindutva, Hindu ness. I will not go into the question of why the campaign of Hindu extren1is1n should have acquired such a mon1entum at this particular time in Indian politics. Nor will I discuss here the complex question of the evolution of 'communalis t' politics in India, the contradictions Go ogle Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITYO F MICHIGAN 2 SUBALTERNS TUDIESV III in the politics of 'secularism', and the problematic involvement of the state and the 'secular' political parties in the politics of religious iden tity. My focus in this essay will be on the construction of the historical claims of 'Hindutva'. My argument will be that such claims become possible only within the modem forms of historiography, a historiography which is neces sarily constructed around the complex identity of a people-nation state. To the extent that the genealogy of modern historiography in India is deeply implicated in the encounter with British colonialism, these historical claims of political Hinduism are also a product of contestations with the forn,s of colonial knowledge. I will also show that many of the themes that run through the contemporary rhetoric of Hindu-extremist politics were in fact part and parcel of the historical imagining in the nineteenth century of 'India' as a nation. This implies that with respect to the fragile consensus over 'na\jon-ness' in India today, the tendency which en,phasizes the singularity of a historically constituted national formation called 'India, that is Bharat' -a sin gularity often demanded by the need to legitimize the centralized apparatu ses of a modern nation-state-will always have available for its sectarian use the common resources of a single 'national' history of 'the Hindus'. Finally, I will show that a genealogical investigation of modem historiography, at least in the case of Bengal, reveals other possibilities for the imagining of 'nation-ness', possibilities that were suppressed or erased by the onward march of the dominant history of 'Indian nationalism'. 'WE MUST HAV E A HISTORY!' In a series of lectures delivered in Calcutta in 1988, 1 Ranajit Guha discussed the conditions and limits of the agenda developed in the second half of the nineteenth century for 'an Indian historiography of India '. It was an agenda for self-representation, for setting out to claim for the nation a past that was not distorted by foreign interpreters. Reviewing the developn1ent of historiography in Bengal in the nine teenth century, Guha shows how the call sent out by Bankimchandra - 1 Ranajit Cuha, An Indian Historiog,·aphyo f India:A Nineteenth-CenturyA genda and its Implications( Calcutta, 1988). Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITYO F MICHIGAN