Review: Marxist-Thompsonian Social HistoryAuthor(s): Achin VanaikSource: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 33, No. 21 (May 23-29, 1998), pp. 1242-1244Published by: Economic and Political WeeklyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4406801Accessed: 21/10/2010 08:43

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REVIEWS

Marxist-Thompsonian Social History Achin Vanaik

Writing Social History by Sumit Sarkar; Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1997; pp 390, hardback Rs 495.

GIVEN Sumit Sarkar's stature as one of the best historians of modern India, a new book by him always carries the promise of being an event. The promise has not been belied. His latest book, a collection of nine essays of which only two (in slightly different form) have been printed earlier, will reinforce the respect felt by his many admirers just as it will also anger others, especially those strongly influenced by the application of post-modernist and deconstruction;st fashions to history writing. Among the latter those most infuriated are likely to be one- time marxists who have now become disillusioned with or indifferent (even hostile) to that tradition.

Sarkar has refused to follow or endorse that trajectory. Nor has he hesitated to excoriate the later theoretical turn of the Subaltern Studies School which under Saidian influences has moved towards its own distinctive mix of post-modernism and pre-modern indigenism. Some of the key ingredients common to both are, of course, an excessive culturalism and an unbalanced

-hostility to Enlightenment rationalism, universalism and humanism. This book then is-bound to raise the hackles of those who have identified themselves with this later turn in Subaltern Studies, all the more so because Sarkar's critique carries the ad- ditional authority (besides the power and lucidity of the critique itself) of coming from aone-time insider, someone who was himself once a part of the editorial team entrusted with bringing out the Subaltern Studies volumes.

The book has two parts. In the first part, Sarkar assigns himself two principal tasks. (1) He defends marxist historiography in one of its most productive forms -

Thompsonian social history. (2) He undertakes a panoramic survey of the social history of Indian historiography with particular attention.devoted to post-inde- pendence developments. In tlhe second part of the book, Sarkar has basically sought to apply the perspectives earlier illuminated to the study of late 19th and early 20th century colonial Bengal. If part one is Marxist- Thompsonian social history explained, part two is Marxist-Thompsonian social history applied. The last chapter is an interesting and important attempt to relate the construction

of nationalist and hindutva discourses to the pressures imposed by lower caste assertions with a specific empirical focus once again on early 20th century Bengal.

Facts are theory laden. Theories are paradigm laden. Paradigms are culture and value laden. There is a plurality of histories both in terms of different genres/styles (defined by differences in the principal objects of inquiry) and in methodological approaches or in underlying theoretical frameworks or paradigms, if you like. But the existence of this plurality is not a licence for the adoption of a relativist free-for-all. Depending on which of different sets of questions we are asking, certain paradigms do not merely coexist but compete and thus within specified terrains there are better and worse historical approaches. The great superiority of marxism as a theory of history is that it still has no serious rival when it comes to handling the dialectic of social structure and change.

It is not what Marx says that is vital in this regard but how marxists have used his original insights to develop marxist historiography and produce better marxist histories. Much debate about what is central to the construction of a powerful and sophisticated marxist theory of history has focused on explicating the metaphor of 'base and superstructure', on explaining what 'social relations of production' are supposed to embody, on the relationship between social being and social consciousness', and

on the notion of endogenous and dynamising 'contradictions' within a social structure of which that between the 'forces and relations of production' is said to be a principal example. Inevitably, Sarkar's chapter on Thompson's Marxism covers this ground, in particular, endorsing his anti-reductionist understanding of the base-superstructure metaphor. This was opposed to the kind of thinking which saw this as a distinction between 'material life' (base) and 'consciousness, ideas, etc' (superstructure) or even to the Althusserian distinction between different levels or instances, econolnic, political, ideological. Thompson always operated with an understanding of social relations of production' which were

inseparably and simultaneously economic, political, cultural, juridical and ideological.

And yet he defended the value of the base- superstructure metaphor. He understood it to mean the existence of a complex hierarchy of causes in which the primacy of production relations is for certain key purposes (understanding the endogenous mechanism of large-scale structural change) the most important 'base' from which other kinds of relations at varying and shifting 'distances' interacted/intersected within an overall ensemble of social relations which was always complexly structured and which must always be concretely examined and uncovered without resorting to formulaic explanations of determination.

The key marxist insight in all this was the recognition that the 'anatomy' of any social structure hinged crucially on the ways in which the processes of surplus (surplus value in capitalism) production, appropriation and realisation were reproduced or underwent incremental and qualitative change. Thompson used this fundamental insight to explore the dialectics of being and consciousness, contingency and deter- mination, and the relationships between the more and the less cultural to produce outstanding social history, precisely because it was powerfully marxist. But although such an approach was central to his practice as a historian, his attempts at theorisation of this practice were never quite as impressive. Here he was always better at attacking his opponents like Althusser or others who were either dismissive of the historian's craft or those who believed (like Gellner and many a post-modernist- an unusual if not altogether inexplicable conjunction of a positivistic form of liberalism with a relativist pluralism) that an anti-reductionist marxism was no marxism at all.'

For all the attractions that post-modernist ideas may have for historians and would-be historians and their limited usefulness, the value of marxism for addressing certain crucial and enduring questions that must always mark the project of history writing and study is so great, that one can be fully confident that it will long outlast its other contenders. Indeed, its main rival in this respect remains a Weberian approach to historiography, not post-modernism or associated currents. And cross-fertilisation between Marx and Weber has been, and will be, more fruitful than any cross-fertilisation of either with post-modernist influenced currents in historiography.

But Sarkar has not just reminded us of the value of marxist social history; he has also sought to contrast it with the limitations of those theoretical approaches that the group of Indian writers (not all historians, e g,

1242 Economic and Political Weekly May 23. 1998

Partha Chatterjee is by discipline a political scientist) associated with the later turn of Subaltern Studies have promoted. Taking up both extrinsic and intrinsic factors Sarkar has sought to explain why this has led to the embrace by these theoretical stalwarts of Subaltern Studies of anti-Enlightenment rhetoric. their excessive preoccupation with 'western power-knowledge', and to constructions of an undifferentiated 'community' (first peasant now religious) as the main tools of analysis.

Earlier binary oppositions themselves far too rigidly constructed and understood, such as elite-subaltern, autonomy-domination, have been replaced by the new binaries of colonial-indigenous community, material- spiritual (actually a rather old binary opposition), western-third world cultural nationalist, world-home, inner-outer. Somewhere along the line even the preoccupation with the figure of the subaltern and the emphasis on field study to capture the actual context in which subaltern consciousness operated or irrupted has been replaced by a focus on middle-class or elite personalities and on the 'deconstruction' of familiar texts. As Ram Guha, another historian and contributor to the Subaltern Studies volumes who has since become disillusioned with its later theoretical turn, has aptly declared, what we are witnessing now is really a form of 'post-Subaltern Studies' for which western (particularly the US) academia has become the most important point of reference.

Sarkar's dissection of the evolution of the Subaltern Studies project is not motivated by any sense of pique though, as might be expected. this will be the gloss put upon his criticism by some of his detractors. It is, in fact, part of his more general concern with the "social history of Indian historiography". Thus his very first chapter is on the 'many worlds' of such historiography and the way the modern idea of history emerges and takes root. He looks at the way the notion of time changes from being something concrete hnd having moral properties of good and bad to an abstract, empty, homogeneous and linear concept of duration. This transition really takes place in the colonial period but much of the Indian historiography of the late colonial period was not-social, economic or state-oriented as much as culture-oriented. It was strongly influenced by north Indian elite conceptions of Hindu civilisation (a reversed Orientalism) and was more aimed at producing historical accounts which could make Indians feel good about their past (promote a 'canned patriotism') than at properly elucidating a "diachronic social process".

After independence, the standards of historical study and writing at the high

academic level were considerably raised but the gap between such writing and more popularly written histories aimed at a general audience widened. Whereas once serious history writing was not so specialised a pursuit of only or primarily academics, this is the direction in which it has steadily moved after 1947. This has obviously haddangerous consequences not only in respect of the failure to engage in fruitful interchange between academics and activists, school-level history teaching and high research, but in leaving the terrain of popular histories wide open to communal and hindutva-influenced writings.

Even the more sophisticated kinds of history writing had problems. Mainstream nationalist historians were too prone to rein- force the myth of a 'united people' against colonialism. That is why the emergence of both feminist history and subaltern history from below in the late 1970s and early 1980s was so exciting. This promise was only partly fulfilled. The successful theoretical seduction practised by 'colonial discourse analysis' and post-modernism on many (but thankfully not all) historians and thinkers about the subaltern caused an unfortunate detour in modern Indian historiography. Sarkar sums up this journey into a cul-de- sac pithily when he points out how the 'iconic' figure of Gandhi, the staple of mainstream and elite nationalist historiography of the colonial period, once again becomes central to currents of history writing which had originally aimed to displace attention from such stultifying and elitist one-sidedness. Sarkar does not just warn against becoming a fellow traveller on this detour, he also makes an eloquent plea that "the many worlds of Indian history must not be allowed to fly totally apart".

In part two, the first and last chapters are, respectively, on the senior Edward Thompson (the famous historian's father) and on caste. These stand apart from the other chapters whose unifying focus is the bhadralok or Bengali middle class. Sarkar is resolutely opposed to treating this stratum as a homogeneous bloc. We have therefore an acute exploration of this group's internal tensions and fissures and the key institutional sites shaping much of its consciousness - the printing press, clerical jobs and mercantile offices. In brief, a focus on the English educated character of the bhadralok and the 'Iimicry' by its upwardly mobile layers of the British colonial elite cannot exhaust the story of the bhadralok or capture adequately its life and times. More attention, says Sarkar, needs to be paid to the genteel poor and unsuccessful layers of this stratum-declining traditional literati, obscure hack-writers, school teachers, clerks, school and college dropouts, etc. It is through the examination of this social category that Sarkar arrives at

his views on matters concerning Calcutta's urban ethos before and afterthe 1905 partition and during and afterthe swadeshi movement.

Even more interesting are Sarkar's investigations into the insecurities and frustrations of the unsuccessful bhadralok which were fostered to a great extent by office discipline and routines making them peculiarly susceptible to the warnings embodied in certain conceptions of kaliyug which stressed the ascendancy of lower castes and of sexually liberated womanhood. Sarkar analyses the appeal to this section of the bhadralok of a figure like Ramakrishna Paramhansa. His two main chapters dealing with Ramakrishna are a remarkable piece of historical reconstruction and call for a more serious engagement by those with a much deeper grounding of knowledge about Ramakrishna and the Bengal of that period than anything this reviewer possesses.

Sarkar's central argument is that Ramakrishna's "quietistic, inward-looking bhakti" was particularly attractive to this lower section of the bhadralok caught between disillusionment about the hopes once entrusted in colonial paternalism yet still far removed from the development of a strong anti-colonial nationalist sentiment. Ramakrishna's teachings provided solace and reassurance yet did not require or imply any sharp break "with normal forms of bhadralok life and activity".

What gives his chapters on Vidyasagar's protectionist ratherthan emancipatory efforts to secure greater rights for women (widow remarriage) and on Ramakrishna's impact their wider charge is that they can be seen as important elements of a larger survey of how a more singular neo-Hinduism begins to crystallise during the late 19th and early 20th century. Here the manner in which Vivekananda transforms Ramakrishna's legacy by giving it a more philosophical (the Vedantic monism of advaita) character is particularly important to note. Though Sarkar has dealt with Vivekananda's trajectory in some detail, in view of his growing importance and the significance of current hindutva efforts to appropriate him, one hopes Sarkar will be motivated to provide much more about Vivekananda in the future.

If this is one area where the reader's appetite is whetted for more fare, the other is his final chapter survey of the relationship between anti-colonialist national histories and the extent to which their construction was sensitive or insensitive to the ongoing reality of caste oppression. In the first phase of development of such a historiography, a 'confederal unity' across communities was assumed without much questioning of internal differentiations within these discrete components. Thus a history of the 1857 'war of independence' could include 'Hindus'

Economic and Political Weekly May 23, 1998 1243

and 'Mussalmans'. iere anti-caste ideologies had no space. Later on as this discourse of nationalism developed further, caste was recognised but seen essentially as a hindrance to unity-and to upper caste self-improvement. Gandhian nationalism with its emphasis on mass involvement and its emergence at a time (early 20th century) when significant lower caste movements and assertions were taking place in certain parts of the country had to address caste. The nationalist agenda had to incorporate caste issues even if still subordinating them to the 'national struggle' much like leftists subordinating caste matters to the 'class strulele' and to class issues.

For communal histories strongly in- fluenced by hindutva. caste posed a real and definite problem. Hindu society was not conceivable without varna andjati, yet caste tensions had to be constrained or defused in some way. The ways of dealing with caste within this hindutva-inspired framework have all- persisted to this day. There cotild be diversion from this issue by positing a wider Hindu concern aLgainst an yutside enemny, the Muslim. There could he emphasis on the process of Sanskritisation as a powertul mechanism of internal flexibility and 'reform'. There coul(d be agressive assertion

of hierarchy and the legitimisation of the caste system as a necessary structural principle of differentiated hierarchy albeit with some 'unfortunate' aspects of inequali- ty-oppression. Or there could be silence and indifference. Since Hindu unity was paramount, caste and gender inequality were essentially irrelevant.

The RSS has till recently always preferred to follow the first and the last of these approaches. But the mandalisation of Indian politics has now imposed inescapable strains on the Sangh combine. Insofar as history is always a dialogue between the present and the past, there is little doubt that one direction in which Indian historiography is moving (at an accelerated pace) is this area of caste- related histories of various kinds. Traditional history is also being looked at afresh to understand its symptomatic silences as well as its particular references in this regard. It must be yet another striking indictment of the later trajectory of Subaltern Studies that it has offered so little either by way of hlcorisation or by way of empirical studies ihout lower caste struggles and their key figures and points of transition.

In the world of serious scholarship, an international politics of manipulated

recognition clearly operates. At the huh of this lies US academia. What achieves recognition and praise there is much more likely to become internationally acclaimed. If this is very often entirely justified it is also sometimes quite unjustified. In the field of modern Indian history writing, one of the better barometers of the worth of a book is whether it will have wider impact among the scholarly community in India or in the English-speaking academic commlunity abroad, above all in the US. Sumit Sarkar's book may well be taken very seriously and acclaimed in US academia. If this happens then we can still hope for the greater sanity of India scholars there. But this book will certainly receive wider attention and appreciation and have greater in- fluence in India. Given post-modernism's hold in the US, at least with respect to south Asian studies, there could hardly be higher praise.

Note

I For a powerful explication and defence of an anti-reductionist Marxist theory of history which recognises the importance of Thompson, see, E M Wood. Demtoc:lcy againsit Ctapita- lism,. Cambridge University Press. 1995

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1244 Economic and Political Weekly May 23, 1998