Abstract
The question at the centre of this paper is part of a larger debate. Though the more limited question is hardly ever asked in academic discussions, the larger question – how can knowledge - or more broadly and less helpfully- thought in the world outside the West can be decolonized is at the center of lively debates surrounding the ‘end’ of postcolonial theory. Even this question can be asked in two significantly separate forms: about decolonizing knowledge in these societies; or, alternative, knowledge about these societies, which would presumably include knowledge produced in the Western academia about these societies. The two propositions make a lot of difference. This essay, therefore, deals with that larger question of the humanistic and the historical sciences indirectly, because I believe that without becoming clear about this smaller question – what is Western about Western thought? - which might strike people as odd, we cannot make much progress. Indeed, my claim is that so much of uncertainty still attaches to the first discussion – whether we are making any progress at all or not – is precisely because the second question is not seen with clarity as being a precondition to making progress in the first.
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Notes
Because of the standard assumption that, whether in modern or pre-modern societies, knowledge about society X is ordinarily produced by knowledge agents in society X. It is an unusual, colonial, historical condition in which knowledge of a particular kind about society X is produced by knowledge practitioners of another -Y.
That does not mean that pre-modern societies did not have information systems of their own. Ain-Akbari, for instance, is a compendium of information about statecraft of Mughal India. Taxation required detailed information systems.
While the first part of Said’s Orientalism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1978 mobilizes literary textual evidence, there are significant critical observations about the major European philosophies of history–stage theories, Hegel and Marx; and the second part marshals evidence primarily from more recent literature of social science and public discourse.
Said’s work relies methodologically on Foucault’s theory of discourse in this sense.
In the case of India, for instance, writers in the middle of the nineteenth century forcefully disputed this stagiest conception of world history, but these rejections were primarily written in the vernacular; and could be easily ignored by the British and their Indian collaborators.
See, as an example, Max Mueller’s. India: What It Can Teach Us, Penguin Books, New Delhi, 2000.
Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The sudden death of Sanskrit knowledge,’ Journal of Indian Philosophy, 20,025.
Orientalism, chapter 3, 201 ff.
Partha Chatterjee on Said. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, Zed Books, London, 1986.
Partha Chatterjee, Ibid.
Partha Chatterjee, Ibid, chapter on Gandhi.
In the Indian cases, there were a few, though significant, thinkers who were exceptions to this rule: e.g., Gandhi and K C Bhattacharyya. See, M K Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, (ed) Anthony Parel, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, and K C Bhattacharya, ‘Svaraj in Ideas’ (1928), Chapter 7, in Nalini Bhushan and Jay L. Garfield (eds) Indian Philosophy in English: From Renaissance to Independence, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011, 101-112, and also Jonardon Ganeri, ‘Freedom in Thinking: The Immersive Cosmopolitanism of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya’, Chapter 36, in Jonardon Ganeri (ed) Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2014, 718-736.
In the literature of postcolonial literary studies, works of Homi Bhabha and others advanced this argument of colonial mimicry. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994.
Chatterjee’s analysis of Nehru’s ideas—which he names ‘the moment of arrival’ for the trajectory of Indian nationalism—presents this argument. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, chapter 5. I agreed with this view at the time: now I feel that Nehru’s ideas contained aspirations towards a theory of ‘a non-national state’—i.e., a state structure that was constitutionally liberal but based on an idea of peoplehood or of a collective political community that was a contrastive model to the European nation-state. I have argued this point in Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Democracy and the non-nation state,’ in Nadia Urbinati (ed), Thinking Democracy Now: Innovations and Regressions, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2020, and in a Bengali essay, ‘Sahabas: kacher lok kara?,’ Anustup, Puja Sankhya, 2022.
Though the clearest exposition of this argument could be found in Lenin, Indian nationalists from the time of Dadabhai Naoroji developed a powerful argument about exploitation, economic drain and dependency, and early version of the theory of ‘development of underdevelopment.’ Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, Publications Division, Government of India, 1962, R. C. Dutt, The Economic History of India, two volumes, Publications Division, Government of India, Delhi, 1970; the phrase ‘development of underdevelopment’ is taken from the later work of Latin American economists like Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America: underdevelopment or revolution; essays on the development of under development and the immediate enemy, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1970.
For an early attempt to specify this content, see Bhikhu Parekh and Jan Niederven Pieterse (eds) Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge, Power, Zed Books, London,1995.
Dipesh Chakrabarti, Provincializing Europe, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000. It is notable that Chakrabarti’s analysis was not restricted to history narrowly defined as an academic field, but ranged over the social sciences.
Ibid.
Ibid.
In an earlier work, I have called this form of analysis Euronormal thinking. Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Outline of a revisionist theory of modernity,’ European Journal of Sociology, Volume 46, No. 3, 2005,497-526.
Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol II, Polity Press, London, 1988.
Because analytics of systems needed abstraction from intentions and experience.
Especially the work of Dilthey whose influence in shaping modern social science methodology often goes unnoticed. Wilhelm Dilthey, Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, (trans. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi), Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002.
A radical re-reading of the argument could be that subjecting the theories to the Bengali historical material would show that they do not work well in this historical ecology, and demand re-theorization.
Chakrabarti has recently drawn attention to some other infelicities of excessively global forms of historical research. Chakrabarti, Parichay, Puja, 2022. At times, it is purely the connections that are valorized, but the worlds or ‘somewheres’ between which the connections exist are obliviated.
One field in which mixtures, or ‘fusion’ often happened and worked was philosophy. Philosophers working on ancient and medieval Indian systems have insightfully compared and mixed technical arguments from ancient, medieval and modern systems. Bimal Krishna Matilal and Arindam Chakrabarti (eds), Knowing from Words: Western and Indian Philosophical Analysis of Understanding and Testimony, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1994; Arindam Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber (eds), Comparative Philosophy Without Borders, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2016,Jonardon Ganeri, The Concealed Art of the Soul: theories of self and practices of truth in Indian ethics and epistemology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007.
Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The sudden death of Sanskrit knowledge’, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Volume 33, No,. 1, February, 2005, 119-142 examines this historical process.
For example, the Arthasatra, the rajaniti sections of the Dharmasastras, or the very different treatment of the same subjects in the Sukraniti.
For example, Ziaul Barani’s Fatwa-i-Jahandari or the Fatwa-i-Alamgiri.
That of course does not mean that ordinary people do not have epistemic coping strategies in dealing with the world of politics: extracting those ideas from the ordinary life of politics can be an interesting field of new research. But that will require at least a two tier cognitive enterprise: the first would have to be an immersion in the local experience of politics in the vernaculars, and second, a conversion of that knowledge into theoretical forms.
Some of these difficulties with Diltheyan historicism are well-known, and have been explored at great depth by critics like Gadamer. For the detailed arguments, Wilhelm Dilthey, Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, and Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Book 2.
The Cambridge School explored this side of the question in detail: Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas,’ in Visions of Politics, Vol 1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002; Dunn, ‘On the identity of the history of ideas.’ Philosophy, Volume 43, No. 164, April, 1968, 85-104. But ‘context’ is invoked by radically different schools of theories of reading: for example, Jacques Derrida, 'Signature, event, context', Margins of Philosophy, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1982.
The title of Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) points to this specificity.
These considerations highlight the need for fresh discussion about the logic of comparison, the precise mix and balance between the capture of similarity and contrast internal to this activity.
Though this locution is found earlier in Kant as well—e.g., from a ‘universal point of view’ or ‘cosmopolitan point of view’.
I am using the term used by Koselleck. Rinehart Koselleck, Futures Past: on the semantics of historical time, MIT Press, 1985.
Sometimes called a ‘placeholder.’.
For the relevant texts, Karl Marx, Pre-capitalist Formations, (edited by Eric Hobsbawm), Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1971; my argument can be found in Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Marx and postcolonial thinking,’ Constellations, Volume 25, Issue 1, March, 2018, 3 - 17.
Though this might also be contaminated by problems of anachronism.
See the discussion about the use of the two conceptual terms ‘feudalism’ and ‘Asiatic mode of production’ in Indian theoretical debates. Kaviraj, ‘Marx and postcolonial thinking.’.
This is logic behind naming the modern economy ‘capitalism.’.
Victor Kiernan, ‘History,’ in David McCelland, (ed), Marx: The First Hundred Years, Fontana Books, 1983.
For discussions on Shariati, see Mina Khanlarzadeh, ‘Theology of Revolution: in Ali Shariati and Walter Benjamin’s political thought’, Religions, 2020, 11 (10), 504, and Arwa Awan, ‘Alienation and consumerism in Ali Shariati’s anti-colonial political thought’, Unpublished dissertation chapter, University of Chicago, presented at MESAAS Graduate Students Conference, April, 2023.
Harbans Mukhia, ‘Was there feudalism in Indian history?’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 8:3, 1981, 273-310.
G W F Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, (trans. William Wallace), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975. chapter 2. ‘On Determinate Being: Something and Other.’.
Ibid. ‘Something and the other are, in the first place, both determinate beings, and somethings. Secondly, each is equally an other. It is immaterial which is first named, and solely for that reason, called something. Something therefore is self-related determinate being, and has a limit in the first place, relative to an other; the limit is the non-being of the other, not of the something itself, in the limit, something limits its other. But the other is itself a something in general; therefore the limits that the something has relative to the other is also the limit of the other as something, its limits whereby it keeps its first something as its other apart from it, or is a non-being of that something; it is thus not only the non-being of the other but the non-being equally of the one and of the other something, consequently of something as such.’
Ajantha Subramanian Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2019. chapter 7.
This is a large question that requires a separate discussion.
I am using with thanks Bhrigupati Singh’s title for the workshop—‘Thinking from Elsewhere’— which generated the papers in this collection: because of the generative ambiguity of the term/concept ‘elsewhere’—some of its implications need to be explored much beyond what is allowed by the scope of this paper. Thinking from elsewhere can obviously mean two quite different ideas: thinking that is done—i.e., thought—elsewhere—i.e., not where I am doing my thinking. It can also equally easily mean thinking that is done elsewhere being brought into the place where I ordinarily think.
Aditya Nigam, Decolonizing Theory, Routledge, Delhi, 1922.
James Tully’s exploration of Canadian indigenous thinking in Strange Multiplicity is an example; so is the analysis of Chinese and Indian reflections on language in this collection, Brandel, Das and Puett, ‘Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere’. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995.
On the benefits of parochialism, see, James Tully, ‘De-parochializing Political Theory and Beyond’ in (ed), Deparochializing Political Theory, ed. Mellissa Williams, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2022.
Kaviraj, ‘Rethinking representation,’ Special Number on Representation, Philosophy East and West, Volume 71, No. 1, 2021, 79-107.
For an innovative application of the Kashmiri theory of representation and theatricality to modern democratic politics in India, Vivek Yadav, Political Drama: Geneology of a Degraded Form of Publicity, Unpublished PH D Thesis, Columbia University, 2021.
For example in the works of Aladair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor.
Elizabeth Harney, ‘Rhythm as the architecture of being’, Third Text, Volume 24, Issue 2, 2010, 215-226, Souleymane Bachir Diagne ‘In Praise of the Post‐racial: Negritude Beyond Negritude’, Third Text, Volume 24, Issue 2, 241-248.
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Kaviraj, S. What is Western About Western thought?. SOPHIA 62, 485–514 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00963-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00963-2