Sanjay Seth

Postcolonial Theory and the Critique of International Relations

This article in three parts offers the beginnings of a postcolonial critique of mainstream International Relations (IR). The first part argues that IR, where it has been interested in history at all, has misdescribed the origins and character of the contemporary international order, and that an accurate understanding of the ‘expansion of the international system’ requires attention to its colonial origins. The second part suggests that IR is deeply Eurocentric, not only in its historical account of the emergence of the modern international order, but also in its account(s) of the nature and functioning of this order. The human sciences are heirs to a tradition of knowledge which defines knowledge as a relation between a cognising, representing subject and an object, such that knowledge is always ‘of’ something out there, which exists independently of its apprehension. The third part of the article suggests that knowledges serve to constitute that which they purport to merely cognise or represent, and that IR theory serves to naturalise that which is historically produced.

Reason or Reasoning?Clio or Siva

Everyone, we moderns believe(d), has a history, though not everyone has historiography. The West developed a tradition of history writing; the Muslim world and the Chinese are admitted to have had such a tradition, albeit in an underdeveloped form; but most cultures had myths and religious epics instead of history writing, even if they sometimes confused the former for the latter. But because everyone nonetheless had a history, that history could be narrated in the terms of a rational historiography that would redescribe this past in terms alien to those whose past it was. Their own forms of recording and relating to the past—be they myths, legends, religious epics, or other—could serve, at best, as (rather unreliable) raw materials in the reconstruction of this past. This did not occasion any discomfort, for these indigenous intellectual traditions were held to have demonstrated that they were unequal to the task of recording and narrating their history by mixing myth with reality, wish with fact, gods with men. And the epistemic commitments that suggested that these were people incapable of representing their own past were the same as those which further suggested that these people were backward. Or vice versa: that these people still belonged to the past was indicated, among other things, by their inability to properly represent their past.

Liberalism and the politics of (multi)culture: Or, plurality is not difference

Liberalism and culture are not normally words which one juxtaposes, for it is thought to be a hallmark of liberalism precisely that it is impervious to culture, just as it is blind to colour, sex and creed. Yet while it may be liberal to ‘bracket’ culture, to treat it as morally irrelevant, liberalism is itself a product of a time, place and culture. It was born in and of the West. For most of its history, the paradox that this gives rise to—namely that liberalism proclaims the values which define it to be of universal provenance, despite their parochial origins— has not constituted a problem for liberalism.

A 'Postcolonial World'?

The international environment changed decisively after the Second World War. Many processes served to reshape the political map of the world, but the most important, by far, was decolonization. From the 1940s through to the 1960s and beyond, there was a steady accession of new members to the world community of states, out of previous colonies — India and Pakistan, Indonesia, the two Vietnams, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda — the list goes on. Decolonization saw a largely European international society, one composed of a few leading states and their empires, and a number of lesser ones, transformed over time to one where the majority of nation-states in the United Nations General Assembly are from the continents of Asia and Africa. With decolonization, the world we inhabit changed fundamentally.

Changing the Subject: Western Knowledge and the Question of Difference

In 1840, the General Committee for Public Instruction in Bengal, presiding over the ‘Anglicist’ educational policy enunciated five years earlier, declared, “the ultimate object which we have in view is to infuse into the student, possessed of talents and leisure, a taste for literature and science,” all of which would “hasten the regeneration of the country.” The Committee observed with satisfaction that English education was proving very popular with the middle classes, but also noted, “At present, education is for the most part appreciated only for the direct returns it yields.” The Committee clearly hoped that over time education would come to be appreciated for other reasons. In the meantime, its instrumental value constituted a useful and even necessary inducement. A few years later, this same body reported many more students were entering and completing school, thus achieving their goal of attaining “the qualifications requisite to perform the mechanical duties of a writer [a clerk].” But, they continued, “our object to raise the character of the people by education and not by their purses is still far distant.”

Nationalism, Modernity, and the “Woman Question” in India and China

The nationalist struggle to bring about the end of colonial rule in India, and the Republican and communist struggles to arrest and reverse the humiliation and the “carve-up” of China by foreign powers, were both closely allied to the struggle to become modern. Indeed, the two goals were usually seen to be so closely related as to be indistinguishable: a people had to start becoming modern if they were ever to be free of foreign domination, and they had to gain sovereignty and state power in order to undertake the laborious but necessary task of building a strong, prosperous, and modern nation. Thus in India, as in China, political movements from the latter nineteenth century sought to found a sovereign nation free from domination by a Western power or powers, and also sought to make this putative nation and its people “modern,” both as a necessary means towards the nationalist end and as an end in itself.

Is Thinking with ‘Modernity’ Eurocentric?

In recent times it has been argued that thinking with the concept of ‘modernity’ entails, or at least makes one prey to, Eurocentrism. Those who are troubled by this have sought to rethink the concept such that one can ‘think with’ modernity, while avoiding, or even challenging, Eurocentrism. This article surveys some such attempts, before moving on to argue that the question of whether modernity is principally a European phenomenon or not cannot be adequately framed without considering the knowledge within which the question comes to be posed; for the knowledge through which we represent and understand modernity is itself, in its origins, European (and modern), and thus the relations between this knowledge and the ‘real’ that it purports to characterize, also need to be interrogated. Doing so, the article suggests, complicates the task of understanding modernity in non-Eurocentric terms, and leads to the recognition that the concept of modernity is not simply a means by which we describe, grasp or apprehend a phenomenon external to it, but that it is itself involved in the production of the modern. If this is so, we are (West and non-West) modern, though not in the way that we have hitherto presumed.

Travelling theory: Western knowledge and its Indian object

From the1830s the colonial government in India became the agency for the promotion of ‘Western education’, that is, education that sought to disseminate modern, Western, rational knowledge through modern institutions and pedagogic processes. This paper examines a historical episode in which certain key categories of modern Western thought were pressed into service to explain a consequence of the dissemination of Western knowledge in colonial India. The episode in question was that of the alleged ‘moral crisis’ of the educated Indian, who, many argued, had been plunged into confusion and moral disarray following his exposure to Western knowledge in the schools and universities established by his British ruler. In the discourse of moral crisis, the knowledge being disseminated through Western education was simultaneously put to use in explaining an unanticipated effect of this education. How adequate was Western knowledge to explaining its own effects? More generally – for this paper is drawn from a larger study of how modern Western knowledge ‘travelled’ when transplanted to colonial India – what is the status of the knowledge we produce when we ‘apply’ the categories of modern Western thought in order to understand or explain India?

Which past? Whose transcendental presupposition?

This paper starts from the presumption that historiography is not the objective retelling of a self-evident object?‘the past’?but is rather a ‘code’, one that constitutes its object. The central element in this code, it suggests, is humanism/anthropology. It is not because man is a meaning producing being, who leaves behind traces of himself, that history-writing is possible; rather, it is historiography that helps secure this humanist/anthropological presumption. Moreover, the presumption that Man is a culture secreting and meaning producing being is not universally ‘true’, is not (pace Weber) a ‘transcendental presupposition’, but is rather a specifically modern and presumption. History-writing, the essay concludes, is not always adequate to non-Western pasts.

The critique of renunciation : Bal Gangadhar Tilak's Hindu nationalism

In an introductory ‘appreciation’ to a collection of speeches and writings by the radical (the word often used at the time was ‘Extremist’) nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856 /1920), Aurobindo Ghose wrote that Tilak had ‘Indianised the [nationalist] movement and brought into it the masses’. Tilak’s status as a ‘trusted and accredited leader of conservative and religious India’, and his command of ‘a language and a spirit’ that spoke to the nonWesternised, had ‘enabled him to effect the union of the new political spirit with the traditions and sentiment of the historic past’, and, most important, ‘with the ineradicable religious temperament of the people’. This distinguished Tilak from the ‘Moderate’ and Anglicised nationalist leadership of the Congress, which Tilak had criticised and sought to displace. In this, as in many similar remarks made about Tilak, two claims were being made. The first was based on a general perception of a cultural / not a class*/divide, for to Aurobindo and other observers the term ‘masses’ included trading and merchant groups, who in material terms were not poorly off. The first claim then was that the vast majority of the Indian people were not Westerneducated and, more generally, Anglicised, but were culturally far removed from their colonial rulers, and also from the Indian elites these rulers reared in their new schools, colleges, lawcourts and offices, some of whom had become critics of British rule. The nationalist movement had for the most part spoken in a language and accent of its rulers, and even the terms in which it conceived of some form of self-rule owed more to British history and culture*/to Macaulay and Mill, let us say*/than to the traditions of the Indian subcontinent. The second claim was that, unlike many other nationalists, Tilak understood and even belonged to the world of the masses (despite being himself Western-educated, and able to function in the world of colonial civil society), and was therefore both able and willing to appeal to their religious and cultural sensibility. In a speech delivered to the Bharata Dharma Mahamandala (All-India Religious Association) at Benares in 1906, Tilak told his audience, ‘During Vedic times India [. . .] was united as a great nation. That unity has disappeared bringing on us great degradation and it becomes the duty of the leaders to revive that union.’ What was the source of disunity? The fact that in ‘the present condition of our religion’ Indians ‘think ourselves separated and the feeling of that unity which was at the root of our advancement in the past is gone’; the unfortunate division of Hinduism into