Abstract
This anthology of eight intellectually stimulating essays, by one of the most eminent scholars of South Asian history, constitutes a landmark in the history of colonial India as well as a landmark in terms of historiographic method and philosophy. The essays—all set in colonial Bengal—are diverse in terms of subject matter and range from questions of widow re-marriage, Sati, contrasted notions of nationhood as articulated by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya vis-à-vis Rabindranath Tagore, Tagore’s views on education, particularly, their link to his views on childhood and children, a Santal insurrection and so on.
These rich, dense essays are characterised by sensitive, nuanced and insightful reading of sources and by careful reconstruction of the broader political/cultural milieus vis-à-vis which the central events and processes studied in these pieces took place. In many of them, Sarkar revisits topics that are well-known in South Asia’s colonial history. But, she illuminates facets of these topics that existing scholarship had by and large either overlooked or deemed unimportant. Space constraints, unfortunately, do not permit a substantive discussion of the essays. But, Tanika Sarkar makes us rethink well-known questions about gender, custom, scripture, faith, the nature of the public sphere in etc. In exploring these and other issues, the author poses powerful questions and critiques to well-known works such as that of Lata Mani on the Sati debates for example. Among the essays in this collection, my personal favourite is the one on Jitu Santal’s rebellion—a topic on which Tanika Sarkar herself had authored a piece in Subaltern Studies Volume IV, in 1985. The author explains that her interest in her earlier work on this tribal insurrection was to show the ‘autonomy’ of an adivasi movement and its ability to launch a resistance to both colonial institutions and to local Hindu elites. In a rare and remarkable demonstration of retrospection, Sarkar revises and modifies her characterisation of Jitu Santal’s insurrection in the present essay and highlights the multiple and fractured complexities of the enterprises led by Jitu, who, ‘like many other adivasi peasant rebels before and after him, stitched his cloth of rebellion with threads from many sources’ (p. 301). Among other things, she sees in Jitu’s movement, the manifestation of what she calls a ‘radical modernity’ (p. 301). Apart from anything else, this essay is a reminder that many more of us should engage in such mature and honest retrospection of our own work.
As the introduction to this anthology makes clear, the author intended it to be a critique of several aspects of post-colonial scholarship associated primarily with South Asia, but elsewhere as well. Sarkar acknowledges the importance and the contributions of post-colonial scholarship, but also offers a sharp critique of several iconic post-colonialist scholars such as Edward Said, Seyla Benhabiab, Asish Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, Ronald Inden, Gayatri Spivak and others. Her principal grievance is that this type of scholarship typically produced a seriously exaggerated account of the colonial/Western impact, tended to perceive of the west and non/west as monoliths without any or much internal differentiation and most importantly, ended up portraying colonised Indians as inert beings who had very little agency in fashioning their individual and collective lives, institutions and norms. Sarkar is much more comfortable with Homi Bhabha’s notion of the colonial encounter as a ‘hybridity’. She is certainly not minimising the reach and power of the colonial regime, but stakes out her own view that it was the colonial political economy rather than the power of colonial discourse which constrained the ability of different kinds of Indians to fashion the worlds in which they lived and functioned. If there is a final conclusion, so to speak, the author’s position in this regard seems to be that ‘colonised Indians produced much of the world they lived in….through mutual conversations, arguments, conflicts and clashes….the new influences they absorbed through colonial contact were filtered through grids of older norms, beliefs and practices’ (p. 8).
This anthology is undoubtedly part of an emerged and emerging trend of cri-tical re-engagement with several foundational premises of post-colonial scholarship, especially with regard to India. There are other scholars of modern South Asia who have voiced such concerns (e.g., Sumit Sarkar); a push-back has also come from scholars of medieval and early modern South Asia who have contested and challenged certain naïve, uninformed and flat-out inaccurate general-isations and characterisations about pre-colonial South Asian history and culture. However, the fact that post-colonial scholarship stimulates such wide reflection and re-thinking is also testimony to its impact and value. All strands of scholarship need periodical refreshment and reflection—this anthology is a very significant step in that process.