Dipesh Chakrabarty

The Climate of History: Four Theses

The current planetary crisis of climate change or global warming elicits a variety of responses in individuals, groups, and governments, ranging from denial, disconnect, and indifference to a spirit of engagement and activism of varying kinds and degrees. These responses saturate our sense of the now. Alan Weisman’s best-selling book The World without Us suggests a thought experiment as a way of experiencing our present: “Suppose that the worst has happened. Human extinction is a fait accompli. . . . Picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. . . . Might we have left some faint, enduring mark on the universe? . . . Is it possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?”1 I am drawn to Weisman’s experiment as it tellingly demonstrates how the current crisis can precipitate a sense of the present that disconnects the future from the past by putting such a future beyond the grasp of historical sensibility. The discipline of history exists on the assumption that our past, present, and future are connected by a certain continuity of human experience. We normally envisage the future with the help of the same faculty that allows us to picture the past. Weisman’s thought experiment illustrates the historicist paradox that inhabits contemporary moods of anxiety and concern about the finitude of humanity. To go along with Weisman’s experiment, we have to insert ourselves into

Minority histories, subaltern pasts

Recent struggles and debates around the rather tentative concept of multiculturalism in the western democracies have often fuelled discussions of minority histories. As the writing of history has increasingly become entangled with the so-called `politics and production of identity’ after the Second World War, the question has arisen in all democracies of including in the history of the nation the histories of groups previously excluded. In the 1960s, this list usually contained names of subaltern social groups and classesÐ viz former slaves, working classes, convicts, women, etc. This come to be known in the seventies as `history from below’ . Under pressure from growing demands for democratising pasts, this list was expanded in the seventies and eighties to include the so-called ethnic groups, the indigenous peoples, children, the old and gays and lesbians. The expression `minority histories’ has come to refer to all those pasts on whose behalf democratically-minded historians have fought the exclusions and omissions of mainstream narratives of the nation. The last 10 years, as a result, have seen the ̄ ourishing of almost a cult of pluralism in matters pertaining to history or memory. Of® cial or of® cially-blessed accounts of the nation’ s past have been challenged in many countries by the champions of minority histories. Post modern critiques of `grand narratives’ have been used as ammunition in the process to argue that the nation cannot have just one standardised narrative, that the nation is always a contingent result of many contesting narratives. Minority histories, one may say, in part express the struggle for inclusion and representation that are characteristic of liberal and representative democracies. 1

Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories

Anthropogenic global warming brings into view the collision—or the running up against one another—of three histories that, from the point of view of human history, are normally assumed to be working at such different and distinct paces that they are treated as processes separate from one another for all practical purposes: the history of the earth system, the history of life including that of human evolution on the planet, and the more recent history of industrial civilization (for many, capitalism). Humans now unintentionally straddle these three histories that operate on different scales and at different speeds. The very language through which we speak of the climate crisis is shot through with this problem of human and inor nonhuman scales of time. Take the most ubiquitous distinction we make in our everyday prose between nonrenewable sources of energy and the “renewables.” We consider fossil fuels nonrenewable on our terms, but as Bryan Lovell—a geologist who worked as an advisor for British Petroleum and an ex-president of the Geological Society of London—points out, fossil fuels are renewable if only we think of them on a

Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital

The shadow of cultural diversity—the diverse ways in which we “world” this earth — now falls across all universalistic assumptions about history or human nature that often underlie propositions of modern political philosophies. Their inherent Eurocentrism is what makes these assumptions suspect in the eyes of practitioners of the human sciences today. But neither cultural nor historical relativism is seen as an answer —a nd rightly so, for an absolutist relativism can easily be shown to be self-contradictory. Understandably, therefore, many postcolonial debates on political philosophies such as Marxism or liberalism often try to work out a middle ground between the two options of universalism and relativism. Critical energies are focused on questions such as how and where one

A Correspondence on Provincializing Europe

On December 14, 2000, after reading Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, I sent an e-mail message to its author, Dipesh Chakrabarty. I had never met or corresponded with Dipesh before, and I was not aware that he was in Australia at the time. Despite other more pressing concerns, Dipesh was quick to respond, and over the next few days we sent each other a series of e-mail messages centered broadly around Provincializing Europe. Rereading the correspondence later, we agreed that some of the themes and issues we had touched on might be of interest to others. —Amitav Ghosh

From civilization to globalization: the ‘West’ as a shifting signifier in Indian modernity

This article tracks the shifting cultural meanings that the East/West distinction has produced in the history of nationalism in colonial and post-colonial India. It does so by focusing on the word “civilization” and the role it played in promoting a rich sense of inter-cultural dialogue in the writings of nationalist leaders such as Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, and Jawaharlal Nehru. The article documents how the word figures with much reduced significance in contemporary cultural debates about globalization in India and concludes by asking if the rise of China and India to global prominence holds the potential today to initiate a conversation across cultures similar to the one that accompanied the rise of the West in the age of modern imperial rule.

The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth

Features a leading scholar in early twentieth-century India, Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958) was knighted in 1929 and became the first Indian historian to gain honorary membership in the American Historical Association. By the end of his lifetime, however, he had been marginalized by the Indian history establishment, as postcolonial historians embraced alternative approaches in the name of democracy and anti-colonialism. The Calling of History examines Sarkars career - and poignant obsolescence - as a way in to larger questions about the discipline of history and its public life. Through close readings of more than twelve hundred letters to and from Sarkar along with other archival documents, Dipesh Chakrabarty demonstrates that historians in colonial India formulated the basic concepts and practices of the field via vigorous-and at times bitter and hurtful-debates in the public sphere. He furthermore shows that because of its non-technical nature, the discipline as a whole remains susceptible to pressure from both the public and the academy even today. Methodological debates and the changing reputations of scholars like Sarkar, he argues, must therefore be understood within the specific contexts in which particular histories are written. Insightful and with far-reaching implications for all historians, The Calling of History offers a valuable look at the double life of history and how tensions between its public and private sides played out in a major scholars career.

Where Is the Now

I want to speak to two concerns that are visible inmany of the comments circulated: the tendency to understand the present as a guide to the future— a historicizing endeavor—and the concern about being political (that is, working out the social purpose of criticism). Robert Pippin quotes Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “‘Philosophy is its own time comprehended in thoughts’” (p. 425). Criticism is not the same as rigorous philosophy. But it is, in our case, infected with the spirit of that statement fromHegel. Criticism must reflect its own time. It has to both interpret and speak to the world. That is the condition for effective critique. Critique has to figure out the now. “To live in and work for our century,” is how Catharine Stimpson puts it (p. 436). Our commentators share a concern about being able to name, designate, and describe the time or period we are passing through. Most of the comments assume a certain definitionof thepresent. Science and technology are critical to this definition. Tom Mitchell’s provocative opening questions set the tone: has “theory” become “therapeutic” and timid faced with “rapid transformations” in the media, biotechnology, and in the logic of capitalism itself (pp. 330, 331)? Whether or not theory has become timid, many commentators agree withMitchell’s understandingof the present. Hansen points to the conditions created by “theunprecedented acceleration of circulation and technological innovation with the advent of digitality” inwhich “consciousness ismore than ever inadequate to the state of technological development, its power to destroy and enslave” (p. 394). Jerome McGann, Elizabeth Abel, Lorraine Daston, Stimpson, J. Hillis Miller, and others advocate engagement on the part of the humanities with these new developments in science and communications technology and

Romantic Archives: Literature and the Politics of Identity in Bengal

654 Versions of this paper were presented as the Mary Keating Das lecture (2003) at Columbia University, at a meeting of the South Asian Studies Group in Melbourne, and at the Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. I am grateful for audiences at these meetings and to James Chandler, Gautam Bhadra, Rochona Majumdar, Muzaffar Alam, Bill Brown, Tom Mitchell, Gauri Viswanathan, Kunal Chakrabarti, Sheldon Pollock, Clinton Seely, Carlo Ginzburg, and Biswajit Roy for comments on an earlier draft. Special thanks to Anupam Mukhopadhyay in Calcutta and Rafeeq Hasan in Chicago for assistance with research. 1. Raghab Bandyopadhayay, letter to author, 26 June 2002. Romantic Archives: Literature and the Politics of Identity in Bengal

GANDHI'S GITA AND POLITICS AS SUCH

M. K. Gandhis “Discourses on the Gita,” a series of talks delivered to ashramites at Sabarmati during 1926 and 1927, provides a singular instance in Indian intellectual thought in which the Bhagavad Gitas message of action is transformed into a theory of non-violent resistance. This essay argues that Gandhis reading of the Gita has to be placed within an identifiable general understanding of the political that emerged among the so-called “extremists’ in the Congress towards the beginning of the twentieth century. Gandhi, we argue, wrested from the “Extremists” their vocabulary and their pre-eminent political text, the Gita, and put them to use in the cause of non-violent politics. But, more importantly, his discourses on the Gita after 1920 suggest an acceptance, on his part, of politics as it actually was. This is where he departed from the projects of Tilak or Aurobindo. The Gita, in Gandhis hand, became a talismanic device that allowed the satyagrahi his or her involvement in political action while providing protection from the necessary and unavoidable venality of politics and its propensity to violence.