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| Postcolonial Theory & the Specter of Capital |
Book: Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of
Capital
Author: Vivek Chibber
Publisher: Navayana
Price: Rs 450
Pages: 306
Vivek Chibber does not like the Subaltern Studies
historians, and his mission in this book is to tear down the early theories of,
in his order of importance, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha
Chatterjee. What these historians have influentially said seems to him to be
simply wrong-headed and methodologically dubious; his favourite descriptions of
them here are as "cultural essentialists" and
"Orientalists" (the latter without reference to Edward Said, who is
mentioned only once on page eight). Culture, in fact, is a bad word for him in
general, and one of his main objections to the Subalternists is the primacy
they choose to give to cultural locations.
Chibber chooses select early books — Ranajit Guha's
Dominance Without Hegemony, Dipesh Chakrabarty's Rethinking Working-Class
History and Partha Chatterjee's Bengal 1920-1947: The Land Question — and
systematically presents their chief premises, followed by a confident
demolition job. (Later works will make an appearance, but only in part, when
Chibber thinks something needs correction or if it confirms the thrust of his
argument.) The Subalternist historians are not gods; gaps and blind spots exist
in their work, and readers who have found parts of their argument flawed might
well agree with sections of this book, although the didactic, hectoring tone
makes this more difficult than it should be. Behind all this looms the Marxist
dislike of postcolonial studies generally, which, as Chibber has it in the
first page of Chapter One itself, would have been all right if it had been
"limited to" those unimportant "literary and cultural
studies" departments where it originated. But for it to
"migrate" from there to "other disciplines", displacing the
role Marxism played "a century ago" "to generate a theory adequate
to the needs of a radical political agenda", especially in the
"scholarship on the Global South", is simply, for Chibber,
unacceptable.
What strikes you first about the book are the astonishingly
impressive endorsements that appear on its covers — it has managed to make
Slavoj Zizek, Achin Vanaik, Robert Brenner, Amiya Bagchi and Noam Chomsky all
speak in one voice of praise. "Scrupulous… a very significant
contribution", says Chomsky on the front cover, and nobody will disagree.
Chibber is so scrupulous, in fact, that he summarises and re-presents entire
sections from the Subalternists in minute detail before he contradicts them,
making you return to the original texts to see whether what he says they say is
indeed what they say. One of the things this book will do then, paradoxically,
is make us re-read the Subalternists; there's no such thing, as we know, as
"bad publicity".
The book undoubtedly belongs to the grand tradition of
diatribes against postcolonial studies composed by Marxist critics, from Aijaz
Ahmed to Benita Parry to Arif Dirlik. Diatribes can be useful, and often
express dissatisfaction succinctly and cogently, as this book does; that it is
no match for In Theory as far as its writing style goes is no doubt besides the
point. What this book wants to do is resurrect an old Marxist Humanism,
vigorously defending the universal applicability of Enlightenment ideas against
the specificities demanded by the Subalternists in relation to the postcolony.
Sometimes this works, as when he shows that Indian subaltern agency existed,
but was not taken cognisance of by the Subalternists, or, most convincingly of
all, when he demonstrates, through an impressive reading of the relevant
material, that eighteenth and nineteenth-century European capitalists behaved
no differently from the Indian 'Tatas and Birlas' when it came to protecting
their oligarchies. The trouble lies in crucial misreadings; in his insistence,
for example, that Guha meant such capitalists when he referred to the
"indigenous bourgeoisie", when quite evidently Guha uses the term in
its larger sense of the propertied classes more generally. Sometimes, the
misrepresentation seems to stem presumably from his long location in the
American academy, as when he writes that the Birlas endow "massive Hindu
temples" in order to "rely on workers' habits of obeisance" so
that "Capitalism, in these instances, will not only fail to dissolve the
traditional culture of the subaltern classes, but will give it added strength and
substance". Anybody here will know, however, that "the traditional
culture of the subaltern classes", which is anyway a rapidly evolving and
shifting thing, has not much to do with Birla temples; that the clientele of
these temples come from the aspiring middle classes, with the poor queuing up
on festive days just to be able, for a moment, to visit their marbled premises.
If the irony of the Subalternists is that they are blind to
the agency of the working classes (although Chibber would do well here to
attend to Spivak's definition of the subaltern as 'not' the working class — is
it coincidental that she is left out of this male quarrel?), then the irony of
this work is that the critique it provides of the Subalternists tends, more
often than not, to get reduced to a debate on how to read, and not to read, the
sacred texts of Marx.
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