Books
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND THE SPECTER OF CAPITAL
by Vivek Chibber. Navayana, New Delhi, 2013.Vivek Chibber’s thoughtful critique of postcolonial theory via an examination of the Subaltern Studies oeuvre is a welcome academic intervention with its unremitting focus on the continuing relevance of specifically Marxian, but more generally Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment, categories and analyses to the understanding of colonial and postcolonial Indian history. That he chooses to train the spotlight on three leading lights of the Subaltern School is neither accidental nor arbitrary, as he explains repeatedly in the course of his dissection, because between them they lay out what can plausibly be called the ‘theoretical’ presuppositions and historiographical underpinnings of the entire project. It may also be mentioned at the outset that though Chibber starts out by laying out a critique, he also outlines in a fairly robust fashion what he thinks is an alternative framework for looking at particularly the Indian historical experience and more generally the postcolonial order.
The Subaltern authorities Chibber selects for his critique are Ranajit Guha, whom we can justly call the founder of the ‘movement’, and Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee, two of his most robust and consistent colleagues. Before going into the details of the critique, it would perhaps be useful to mention some of the crucial points Chibber makes to set up the mise en scene: first, the author alleges, let us say at this point, that all these writers have set up a case for Indian (or postcolonial) exceptionalism through a misreading of the history of Western Europe, which has led them up the garden path in regard to the ‘universal’ history of capital and its inapplicability to the Indian case; second, and arising from this, is a misreading of the ‘universal’ history of capital, particularly with regard to what it is that the forces of capital and the processes it unleashes are supposed to universalize and to what end. Third, therefore, is a misreading of the dynamics of the Indian historical processes, as well.
Taking his cue from Guha’s original manifesto for the Subaltern Studies project, published in volume I of the series, and his later book Dominance Without Hegemony, Chibber begins with a fundamental point, equally applicable to Chakrabarty’s work, which is about the ‘modern’ history of West Europe. The assumption, Chibber argues, in the work of these two scholars is that capital and its bearers played a ‘historic’ role in the course of what we may broadly call the bourgeois revolution – that is, specifically, say, in Britain, the agrarian and industrial revolutions – when, in sweeping away the ancien regime in the course of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, they established alongside a capitalist economy, a singular political and social establishment whose leadership they assumed.
This is to further argue that in its struggle against the old order the bourgeoisie was able to enlist the aid of other classes by being able to project the struggle against the old order as one that catered not just to the self-interest of the bourgeoisie itself but the interest of all of society. The bourgeoisie emerged from the revolution against the old order as the torch-bearers of a new nation form and a new public sphere, and its representatives and authoritative spokesmen. In other words, the bourgeoisie emerged as the spokesmen of irreducible national interests rather than sectional or sectarian interests. In the political sphere, this meant the establishment of a liberal, constitutional state with all its appurtenances: universal franchise, the rule of law, equality with respect to it, citizenship with all its associated freedoms, rights and duties, and so on. The bourgeoisie in Western Europe, thus, achieved ‘hegemony’. By definition the other ‘new’ classes accepted this hegemonic role as either inevitable or felicitous.
By contrast, in colonial India the bourgeoisie, such as it was, could not or did not fulfil this historic role of achieving ‘hegemony’. The universalizing mission of capital was subverted because in India capital and its bearers, the Indian or European bourgeoisie, had no interest in first tearing down the old, feudal order to universalize the political, social and cultural norms of a putative, new bourgeois order in which as natural leaders the bourgeoisie would ‘speak for the nation’ and suffuse through the new post-feudal order the universal cultural, social and political values supposedly central to it as mentioned. Thus, in the political sphere, in postcolonial climes, the bourgeoisie could not universalize the structures and values of what a liberal, constitutional, democratic order should approximate to.
Chibber quite rightly points out that the historical representation of developments in Western Europe as put forward by Guha and Chakrabarty is pretty far from the reality that the records testify to. From the rapine of primitive accumulation through the barbaric enslavement of the working people in Britain, up until the last century the history of the universalizing mission of capital is no more a history of an idyllic embourgoisement of either the political and economic system or the working people of Western Europe than it has been, say, in India. And, again, as Chibber shows in detail, every right that the working people (or women) won against the regimes of capital (or patriarchy) had to be wrested from the ruling class through unremitting struggle: from shop floor rights (the eight-hour day), through the right to form unions and associations to, indeed, fundamental political rights, like the vote. As for the more rarefied ones, like old-age benefits, housing, free universal education and healthcare, Western Europe had to wait till after the First World War – more than two centuries and a half after both the Glorious Revolution in Britain or the much-interrupted French Revolution.
In other words, as we head for the ex-colony or colonies, we have no really clear template for what the universalizing mission of capital is supposed to be and equally, no very clear idea what role the bourgeoisie in India should have played during or after colonial rule to bring about an embourgeoisement of politics, society and culture. Well, if it wasn’t the institution of a liberal political regime, allied to a cultural and social complex within the format of a nation-state, by taking on all feudal forms head-on and repulsing them, so that the bourgeoisie would speak for the entire nation and all the classes that constituted it as a hegemonic spokesperson, in what could we say lay the failure of the Indian bourgeoisie?
Another possible candidate appears to be another of the usual suspects. In its relentless drive to universalize its mission, capital is first reviled for doing so in Western Europe and North America, roughly, and then pulled up for not doing so and thus having failed to consummate its manifest destiny in the rest of the world. Thus, in India, for instance, since the discussion pertains mostly to the subcontinent, the bourgeoisie’s abject failure to, first, launch a ruthless campaign against feudalism in all spheres in order to bring about its extirpation and, two, to subjugate all forms of, especially, cultural and social ‘difference’, so as to establish throughout the globe the monochrome of an idealized bourgeois form of life, so as, we presume, to establish the regime of capital, is perhaps the failure of capital’s universalizing mission. We are further, with Chibber, left to presume, though the Subaltern protagonists themselves have not spelt this out very programmatically, that this is to create the most optimum conditions for the reproduction and ‘self-expansion’ of capital through extended accumulation.
But, as Chibber points out, capital or the regime of capital or individual bourgeois agents need not, usually do not, have any overriding urgency to obliterate all ‘difference’. They have to erase or modify only those areas of difference that obstruct what is capital’s overriding priority – extended reproduction and accumulation of capital. Chibber dwells at length on Chakrabarty’s early work on factory labour in Bengal, where, the latter had noted, a mélange of cultural and social ties both bound together and fractured the working class in the jute mills of the province – a situation which made for different workplace practices and labour-recruitment strategies in the area. These findings are neither odd, nor were they a particularly new discovery when Chakrabarty unearthed them. And, most significantly, these never came in the way of the jute mills functioning as an industry, dedicated to pursuing profits and accumulating capital. Often, as Chakrabarty himself will have noted, other labour historians certainly have, they proved to be useful to entrepreneurs and managers as they set about the tasks of organizing production to their greatest advantage.
Before moving somewhat further afield it would perhaps be germane at this stage to reiterate a point that Chibber makes at various places in his book, but a point nonetheless that others have made elsewhere and which constitutes to this reviewer’s mind one of the biggest problems of the Subaltern enterprise – apart from the fact, of course, that the subaltern got written out of it long, long before the Subaltern Studies volumes were discontinued, though the project still prospers. The point to which I allude is that the obsession with ‘Eurocentrism’ and the totalizing paradigms of the Enlightenment has fostered an equally obsessive concern with an indigenism that threatens to destroy the possibility of writing any sane, intelligible historical account of, say, colonial or postcolonial India. The alternative threatens equally, to be on the one hand an ‘Orientalist’ enter-prise that will merely celebrate the obscure and exotic, or should we, strictly speaking, say endemic and, on the other, struggle at all times to fashion narratives struggling to achieve even a simulacrum of coherence.
Nowhere is this escape from ‘Eurocentric’ history better observed than in the Subaltern characterization of the Indian peasantry. It isn’t just Partha Chatterjee. Other Subaltern scholars too have noted that the Indian peasantry has a paradigmatic consciousness impervious to the wiles of bourgeois, or for that matter any other metahistorical rationality. This consciousness is rooted in community, which is itself shaped and nurtured by the bonds of religion, caste, kinship and other traditional forces. This means that the Indian peasantry functions always as a paradigmatic community; its members do not act as individual agents, motivated by individual interests. Chibber has dealt with this idea. Perhaps a few more observations are in order.
Chibber has cited Guha’s own magisterial opus – Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India – to show that this is simply not the case. Chakrabarty’s evidence too flies in the face of this unilateral assertion. The very fact of voluntary, non-family migration from ‘upper India’ to Calcutta’s jute mills in search of work, supplementary or otherwise, militates against a consciousness so embedded in the community that individual decisions taken as individual strategies for individual survival/gain cannot be countenanced.
It is then, perhaps, time to go back to what Chibber identifies as the discontent that so unsettled Ranajit Guha and led him and his colleagues to launch the Subaltern Studies project. If Subaltern Studies emerged as an academic tendency out of the political (and economic) crises that beset the Indian nation from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, its early career seems to be entirely comprehensible, as is the fact that in the early years of the Subaltern project many scholars and others who would have designated themselves Marxists were sympathetic to it or more. What appealed in Ranajit Guha’s remarkable manifesto in the first volume to a wider audience was if not so much the proposition that there were two barely enmeshed spheres of Indian politics – the formal and the subaltern – but that a subaltern domain did exist, and that it had been given short shrift by existing historiographical ‘schools’. Therefore, it was incumbent upon historians and other social scientists to focus attention on these.
The task, in other words, was to write a history from below of all sorts of working people – not, obviously, just peasants – to uncover the dynamics of their political, social and cultural worlds and to further examine where they fitted or intersected with, if at all they did, the political, social and cultural life of the emerging bourgeois nation, soon to be transformed into a nation-state in 1947. And to recover wherever possible their voices by uncovering new kinds of archives. This project remains as valid as it was then as much for postcolonial India as it then seemed to be for colonial India.
The problem is, however, that this project was unceremoniously dumped, by and large, along with the subaltern and his domains of life, culture, society and politics. What came to occupy centre stage instead was an interminable circling round of what we are given to understand are crucial theoretical issues that do not concern subaltern people and issues of subalternity, which grow more and more abstruse with every passing day. If one of the laments of many Subalternists is that the universals of the Enlightenment cannot capture the realities of actual histories, we and they may take some time to reflect about what realities they capture, subaltern or otherwise.
Suhit K. Sen
Senior Researcher,
Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group
NEW AGE GLOBALIZATION: Meaning and Metaphors by Aqueil Ahmad. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2013.
Aqueil Ahmad writes with a sweeping command over the affairs of human beings not seen since the days of Toynbee, or perhaps even earlier since the days of Gibbon. His literary style is combined with the passion of an educator, every chapter ending in questions the reader should ask herself.
His latest book steers clear of any arid debate, neither denouncing heartless modern ‘globalization’ and its fallouts, as Joseph Stiglitz and company have done, nor flaccidly propping it up like Jagdish Bhagwati and Niall Ferguson. Seeing the process clear-eyed, Ahmad says that the issue is not ‘globalization or no globalization, or more or less globalization. Neither is it a contest between globalization versus localization. Whether one likes it or not, globalization is the wave of the future...’ The complex and compelling phenomenon is seen as a large interconnected and interdependent system with a variety of subsystems. It is examined through the interlocking workings of eight dimensions: the vast migrations of peoples; the new economic structures of the global economy; the environmental issues facing humanity; its changing global political institutions; and the conflicts they produce; cultural globalization; the globalization of science and knowledge; and last, the influence of religions on the process and the changes they are undergoing.
Philosophically objective in scanning this vast canvas, the writing never hides where his sympathies lie. While being firmly on the side of the angels – and Stiglitz – in denouncing the growing economic inequalities in America and the world as the single most destructive aspect of capitalism, he also sees the technologies of instant communication become the technologies of revolutions of rising expectations ‘that produce the agents of change through the process of change itself,’ to quote Marcuse. But limiting himself to a situational economic analysis is far from Ahmad’s goal. He wishes us to join him in pursuing Tagore’s vision that while one’s own native culture has an immediate appeal and value, it must find its place in the wider synthesis of a ‘truly universal civilization.’ Therefore, the unique contribution of this book to the discourse on globalization is in its chapters on knowledge, culture, and religion.
Ahmad sees the socio-psychological aspects of globalization as an attitude of mind about living prudently and harmoniously in an interdependent world with finite natural resources contradicted by infinite sources of exploitation of nature, violence, conflicts, self-interest, and ‘a world divided between us and them.’ Ahmad perceives a coming global consciousness advising humanity thus: ‘We are all in it together.’ The global community cannot be sustained by playing one against the other, one at the expense of the other, by the law of ‘survival of the fittest.’ The metaphor of ‘globalization without global consciousness’ is seen as an inner contradiction. His project is to convert such a mystical notion into a practical programme.
Gordon Childe long ago showed that the diffusion of knowledge across vast spaces and time was the story of human development. There is recent conjecture that humanity as we know it may have even learned a great deal from the Neanderthals. Ahmad details what modern science has inherited from other ancient cultures and laments along with Allan Bloom that Americans have only a limited and ‘provincial’ perception about the history of knowledge development. In times when ignorant Islamophobia rages through the West, Ahmad issues a timely reminder: ‘Generally unknown and unrecognized in western literary circles, the genius of the Islamic Golden Age (tenth to fifteenth centuries) flowered in innumerable forms and colours in different parts of the world that came under the Islamic rule.’ He also warns that the history of technology reveals that unless otherwise managed through public policy, ‘technological innovations tend to accentuate inequalities by being inaccessible to the underprivileged.’ But at the same time he holds out the hope that postmodern globalization of technology has radically changed the dynamics of transformation from unidirectional flows to ‘multidirectional movements of knowledge.’ Similarly, cultural transmission has never been a one-way street, and certainly not so in the age of globalization. ‘The fact of localization of the global is the only sensible way to invoke the idea of a global culture emerging.’
In a world shaped by interdependent sub-systems, a global culture can only be nourished in a planet where the principle of ‘small is beautiful’ is respected, and the Gandhian precept that there is ‘enough for everyone’s needs but not enough for everyone’s greed.’ Detailing how the environment conferences starting from the one in Stockholm in 1972 till the one in Copenhagen in 2009 all ended in ‘bad faith’, Ahmad insists that the present crisis is a product not only of bad public policy but equally of poor individual behaviour. So, it is up to everyone, from personal commitment to global international agreements. The economic underpinnings for sustainability cannot be structured on conventional capitalist or socialist ideologies. Ahmad offers the idea of an ‘open-door community’ but firmly grounded in social justice.
Over six decades ago, Aldous Huxley wrote The Perennial Philosophy, outlining the almost lyrical unifying principles of all religions. Ahmad finds a message of peace and love in every faith, and castigates fundamentalists as ‘sources of social distance, ethnocentrism, hate, and violence.’
New Age Globalization is a book more about how human beings should conduct their lives, their societies and countries, than about how things actually are. And written by a philosopher who lives between several cultures, and whose vision spans human existence from its ancient beginnings to the unknown future.
Vithal Rajan
Faculty, Transcend Peace University
BATTLING CORRUPTION: Has MGNREGA Reached India’s Rural Poor? by Shylashri Shankar and Raghav Gaiha. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2013.
Researchers Shylashri Shankar and Raghav Gaiha give us very heartening news – MGNREGA is reaching a majority of the poor in the four states they studied: Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan. They provide interesting findings from their household surveys conducted in 2007-08 (AP and Rajasthan) and 2008-09 (TN and AP) to gauge actual earnings of participants and its variations between different types of participants and states, complimented by worksite surveys in 2009-10.
Overall, apparently MP did best in targeting the programme at the poorest. Capture of benefits by affluent participants was restricted to 7%, and as many as 75% of the poorest of the poor participated. However, the contribution of NREGA earnings to the total income of the acutely poor households was the highest in AP (at 21%), while in the other states it was about 17%. This was due to both the higher average of 87 days in a year that a participating household got in AP (compared to 63 days in Rajasthan, 44 in MP and 42 in TN) as well as the higher wage rate paid in AP. The wage rates actually paid at worksites in 2007-08 were higher in AP (Rs 79) and lower in Rajasthan (Rs 59) when compared to the official rate of Rs 73 prescribed by NREGA. In MP and TN, surveyed in 2008-09, the official NREGA rate was Rs 100 but participating households earned only Rs 73 in MP and Rs 65 in TN. The discussion by the authors of these and other points of comparisons about the participation and income transfer to women-headed households compared to males and SC/ST would help administrators to refine the programme design further.
While the targeting appears to have been pro-poor, apparently there was considerable confusion about the method of measuring work done – time rates were used in MP and piece rates in the southern states, with Rajasthan using a mix of the two. The authors also examined whether informal mechanisms helped the poor to access the opportunity structures created for empowerment by MGNREGA. Informing the poor, relying on networks to create agency and the importance of political competition are well highlighted. They argue that political mobilization strategies of political parties tend to rely on a top-down caste based leadership which is not empowering for vulnerable groups. Political reservations for SC/ST sarpanches have helped push up participation of members of their communities far more.
An amazing fact mentioned by the study is that all the women sarpanches in their sample in MP and Rajasthan were illiterate, in contrast to the women sarpanches in AP and TN sample, who were all not only functionally literate, but had education up to secondary school level. Nevertheless, just the fact of women being in positions of power in the northern states, albeit possibly as a front for their husbands or brothers, did encourage greater women’s participation in the programme. Political competition at the village level is a significant factor in determining outcomes.
States are permitted to build their own variants for the social audit process mandated by MGNREGA. In MP and Rajasthan, every village is supposed to create a vigilance and monitoring committee (VMC), reporting quarterly to the gram sabha. NGOs like Samarthan (MP) and MKSS (Rajasthan) are engaged by these state governments to sensitize VMCs about their roles and responsibilities. Social audit in these states, however, does not appear to have been as effective as in AP, where social auditors are drawn from the worker households themselves and this makes a major difference in watchfulness about wage payments, though less so about materials used where pilferage appears to have been higher.
An earlier programme of the state government called Janmabhoomi generated a sense of ownership of programmes in the villages of AP. Villagers felt more secure about voicing their opinions about MGNREGA works at the gram sabha. The other critical aspect of the greater effectiveness of the social audit process in AP was that the Department of Rural Development was prepared to take punitive action on cases of corruption reported by the social audit unit. The authors believe that the extraordinary state and civil society tie-up in setting up the social audit unit in AP is what accounted for the critical difference.
Though the investigation was mainly quantitative in approach, the presentation of the findings is more discursive and well done, interweaving references to the arguments of well-known scholars in political science, development studies and behavioural economics. A deeper appreciation of the programme design would perhaps have helped in framing the surveys somewhat better. For instance, the fact that the administrative construct for implementation of the programme is an amalgam of the state government and panchayat officials, rendering it intrinsically problematic to fix responsibility, would have been useful to bear in mind while probing the crevices for elite capture and corruption.
Again, while mentioning that the scheme is supposed to be a fallback option for employment during agricultural off-season and natural calamities, the differences between the design based on a utilitarian administrative outlook in British India for providing relief under the Famine Code crafted by the Famine Commission in 1878 (payment of subsistence wage rates at worksites at a fair distance from the village for ‘gratuitous’ relief to the ‘unemployable’) and MGNREGA, 2005, which was consciously designed by changing each of these stipulations, should have featured in framing the nature of the study.
Considering that in the last two financial years, the schemes under MGNREGA are failing to generate sufficient demand in most states to absorb the central budget provisions, the study would have done well to investigate if the underlying glitch may be traced to the requirement that a worker household has to make a paper application for work under MGNREGA. Making such applications may be legally essential to secure compensation if the right to employment is not honoured by the government, but is highly problematic because it requires a poor household to decide which of its able-bodied members should apply for work and further specify for which period each year. This procedure may well be dysfunctional, to the extent that it is succeeding in suppressing labour’s demand for work. Labour contractors may be back in business, taking workers out of the village for work where exploitative practices still persist. God forbid if there’s a natural calamity and people get stranded looking for application forms to fill up before they can get relief. It is worth remembering that while courts often rely on oral evidence as substantive and what is on paper as merely corroborative, our administration continues to burden the poor with more and more paper.
Amitabh Mukhopadhyay
Former Accountant General; columnist
