The Invention of Private Life: Literature and Ideas

By Sudipta Kaviraj

A longtime political analyst and thinker, Sudipta Kaviraj proves in this probing collection that he is also an acute writer on literature and politics. In these works, which lie at the intersection of the study of literature, social theory, and intellectual history, Kaviraj locates serious reflections on modernity’s complexities in the vibrant currents of modern Indian literature, particularly in the realms of fiction, poetry, and autobiography.

Kaviraj shows Indian writers did more than adopt new literary trends in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They deployed these innovations to interrogate some of the fundamental philosophical questions of modernity. Issues central to modern European social theory grew into significant themes within Indian literary reflection, such as the influence of modernity on the nature of the self, the character of power under the conditions of modern history, and the experience of power as felt by an individual subject of the modern state. How does modern politics affect the personality of a sensitive individual? Is love possible between intensely self-conscious people, and how do individuals cope with the transience of affections or the fragility of social ties? Kaviraj argues these inquiries inform the heart of modern Indian literary tradition. In the writing of Rabindranath Tagore, Sibnath Sastri, and others, readers get close to the unique predicament of modern times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Feb 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9780231539548

Book preview

Introduction

Literature as the Mirror of Modernity

The essays collected in this volume analyse literature but their concerns lie at the intersection of three different academic disciplines: the study of literature, social theory, and intellectual history. Literary criticism approaches literature primarily from the point of view of its internal aesthetic values; sociology of literature, on the other hand, seeks to understand the relation between literature and society. Some approaches to literary texts tend to reduce them to history, or historical raw material. It is interesting to see that this particular form of reduction—of literature to history—is not only a problem in modern culture. Dhananjaya, the author of Dasarupaka, a major text on literary and dramatic theory in medieval India, remarked in his invitation to literary texts:

Ānandaniṣyandiṣu rūpakeṣu vyutpattimātraṃ phalam alpabuddhiḥ |

Yo ’pītihāsādivad āha sādhus tasmai namaḥ svādaparāṅmukhāya ||1.6||

[those who have only an elementary proficiency in understanding literary representations, and consequently have a rather limited comprehension of this field, those who maintain that literature is like history, I bow to them too, who are averse to the pleasure-secreting qualities of literary texts]

In a sense, Dhananjaya could be accused of a philosophical indiscretion. It is possible to claim that the only valid response to literature is a deferential silence. Literature is to be enjoyed, not taken apart by analysis. A possible defence of literary analysis in the face of this criticism would be that analysis is itself enjoyment of a different variety which does not interfere with the process of enjoying literature; and since great literature also helps us think about its own worlds in interesting and unprecedented ways, it is important to reflect on the way the text sees the world, and, as far as possible, the way the world saw the text. Particularly because I am not a scholar of literature, I should explain what draws me into it, and what I was trying to do when I wrote these essays.

I have an interest in two fields of study—modern Bengali literature, and social and political theory. Initially, I believed these two fields of intellectual curiosity were entirely separate and had nothing to do with each other: that their co-presence in my mind was simply an accident of taste, that it just so happened I had an intellectual liking for literature and political theory. For a long time in my academic life, I did not try to bring these two interests together. Then, two things broke this wall of separation decisively. I started to ask a question about the global nature—or if you like, claims—of Western political theory. This was not an illegitimate question in view of the amount of intellectual effort we had invested studying and trying to master it in our education. It is not irrelevant to ask what, if anything, the entire tradition of Western social theory is trying to achieve. It is of course true that social and political theory is a vast field of unusual diversity and creativity in Western thought, and it might be hard to find a single identifiable purpose in this body of thought. Yet it is not implausible to ask such a question.

From this point of view, what we call Western political theory appears to be a kind of self-reflection of European modernity. This is the primary form in which European modern societies asked the central questions about the deep historical change that was affecting them since the time of the renaissance. Modern social theorists in the West collectively invented a form of reflection on their own fast-moving history which sought to understand the ‘meaning’ of historical change. Though the idea of a ‘meaning in history’ is often derided by philosophers pursuing strong ideals of conceptual clarity, the basic sense of this phrase is not hard to grasp: it refers to the direction of historical processes, detection of patterns, and evaluative judgements on events and processes that constitute historical change.

Underlying this vast field of enquiry is the implied sense that modernity is a historical stage of deeply paradoxical quality. It intensifies the impulse towards clarification, understanding, even transparency of history—on the grounds that the historical field is increasingly marked by vast attempts at collective, concerted action, revolutions, movements, the creation and destruction of states, and the deliberate transformation of economic and social structures. The demand for transparency is linked to the idea and ideal of self-consciousness: the idea that since human beings collectively and individually undertake such actions, they should be clear about their purposes, if not their consequences. But many modern Western thinkers also suggest that the question of ‘transparency’ in history has to be complex, as there are forces and patterns in modernity which make this history unusually cognitively untransparent. Although thinkers like Hegel, Adam Smith, Marx, and others advanced similar intuitions, I would like to illustrate this by taking a theme from de Tocqueville.

In the last chapter of Democracy in America, after his magisterial survey of the history of democracy in the West, de Tocqueville evinces a paradoxical sense of cognitive bafflement: ‘I go back from age to age up to the remotest antiquity; but I find no parallel to what is occurring before my eyes: as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.’¹ I do not think the phrase, ‘the past has ceased to throw light upon the future’, is mere rhetoric: it seems to gesture towards a deeper obscurity at the heart of the making of modern history. Modernity is a stage of history in which, as Marx noted in another famously Shakespearian rhetorical phrase, ‘all that is solid melts into air’. There is a shared sense in all these writers that the time we call modernity produces social structures of an unprecedented, paradoxical kind. Such structures possess all the Durkheimian qualities of imposing constraints upon actions, but they also undergo frequent restructuring—not because modern society is replaced by another form, but because the self-transformation of structures is in the nature of modernity itself. Modernity is cognitively intractable in a special sense, because of this reason. Social theory is the cognitive pursuit of this elusive fugitive structure of the present.

If this is true of European modernity and social theory, it raises an interesting question for Indian history. If modernity was cognitively challenging to Western intellectuals, it must have been equally baffling for their Indian counterparts, because Indian modernity is inextricably linked to European colonialism. As the changes associated with modernity are introduced, at least partially, by external power, it must have constituted a more intractable cognitive problem for Indian intellectuals. Where does the serious reflection on modernity’s predicaments and bafflements lie?

Much of the serious reflection on the surprise of modernity, I came to realize, is contained in literature. Modernity introduced new literary forms to Indian creative writers—such as the novel and the autobiography; but literature also served as the great field of reflection on the nature of modernity, and its cognitive and ethical exploration. It is in Indian literature that much of the interrogation of modernity happens. It is not surprising therefore that some of the questions that were central to modern European social theory also constituted significant themes in Indian literary reflection. What was the nature of the self—did modernity alter this nature? What was the character of power under conditions of modern history? How is the power of the modern state felt by individuals? How does the modern political movement, so central to politics in modern times, affect the nature of the personality of a sensitive individual who responds to a revolutionary call? Is love possible between intensely self-conscious individuals? Is even something as fundamental and universal as love itself redefined? How do individuals cope with the transience of affections, the fragility of social ties?

Questions like these are not secondary to modern Indian literature: they are woven into its primary reflective fabric. The essays in this collection are primarily concerned with questions of this kind: they are not conventional literary questions, but I believe they are central to the modern Indian literary tradition. These essays view modern Indian literature as a primary field of theoretical-philosophic reflection on the nature of modern times, and particularly the experiential interior of it. Literature is so essential for the understanding of modernity precisely because it deals with experience. History, or standard social theory, explores these themes from the outside, as it were, through large aggregate processes; literary works explore them from the inside. They do not merely try to show what happens in history, they also try to capture how it feels to live when modern history happens. Accordingly, these essays are situated at the boundary of literature and social theory: they ask questions, taken from social theory, of literary texts.

There is a second way in which literature bears a crucial connection to the modern. It is generally acknowledged that the autobiography, along with the novel, is one of the major genres of modern literature. Biography is not modern, autobiography is. Biography is based on a radical separation between character and author. Premodern literature is full of biographies of the most varied forms—biographies of saints, of warriors, of heroes of action, contemplation, renunciation. Autobiography is by comparison unheroic, though there is always an underlying temptation towards a surreptitious exaggeration in narratives of the self. But autobiography, particularly the early modern versions of it like the one by Sibnath Sastri (analysed in one of these essays), serves an essential function in the ethical persuasion in favour of modernity. Sastri’s autobiography is centred on two relations of intimacy—with his two wives, and with his father. Sastri’s father should be taken as a figure, not an individual. The characteristics to be found in him are not the entirely contingent, accidental features of a Sanskrit scholar with a high premodern education: he constitutes a type, a figure that can stand in for a whole generation of premodern intellectuals troubled by a world being restructured with baffling rapidity and finality in which they are both inhabitants and outcasts.

The exchange between Sastri and his father captures a central theme of intellectual life in the early modern period. His father evidently regarded the Brahmo ideas his son absorbed in Calcutta as a monstrous and degrading fashion, something which ought to be historically transient but is not. To his father, Brahmo ideas are alien suggestions, external to his embedded ethics, and should seem abhorrent to a highly educated Brahmin youth of good character. When Sibnath refuses to renounce his modernist ideas about family and social life, his father rejects him completely, refusing to speak to him for the rest of his life, till the last tragic, emotionally wrenching reunion before his death. This rupture of intimacy signals a central moral conflict of the early modern epoch, a fascinating spectacle of a battle of ethicality between two cultures, the premodern and the modern. To play on Sheldon Pollock’s wonderfully evocative phrase, it shows the final end of the ‘ends of man’ at the end of premodernity, a process by which a conceptual world of ethics, based on Hindu dharmic ideals of chūturvarnya and purusārthas, loses its moral adequacy for a new generation of intellectuals (like Sastri) placed electively between the two conceptual worlds. We do not grasp the dignity and the tragic quality of the confrontation if we do not understand that it is a battle of two ethical worlds. Sastri faces an immense challenge: he has to convince his father that his conduct is not driven by fashion, or, even worse, by the modern pursuit of unrestrained selfish inclination, but an opposite, equally demanding moral vision of the good life. What modernity offered were not fashionable, meretricious, ethically suspect ideas, but alternative ethical ideals. They demanded equal rectitude, an equally attentive cultivation of a moral personality, an even more elaborately self-critical reflexiveness. The deep tragedy of the encounter was that although the moderns saw the premoderns as following an ideal of moral life, though a degenerate and indefensible one, traditional persons rarely saw their sons following a moral ideal at all. The story of Sibnath Sastri’s autobiography is so historically significant precisely because this morally excruciating tragic drama was played out in innumerable families’ internal lives. It was the norm in those modernizing times, not the exception.

Although this collection contains only one reading of a single autobiographic text, the autobiographic form plays an indispensable role in the moral transformation towards modernity.

The essay titled ‘Literature and the Moral Imaginations of Modernity’ adds a supplement to this argument. Narratives of elective affection, celebrated in modern novels, perform a function complementary to that of the autobiography—in persuading individuals to own a modern life-ideal, and to live by its rules. Probably the most significant function of modern literature was a supplementary one to the ethical discourse of philosophic writings and autobiographic narratives. Autobiographic narratives too centred on solemn ethical questions: but gave them a narrative form. Ethical principles could be stated assertorically: like the injunction that an individual must always speak the truth, or that one should take decisions autonomously about one’s own life. Philosophical writings provided compelling arguments in favour of such ethical principles. Autobiographic narratives brought an experiential dimension to ethical imperatives: these showed how real individuals tried to live by such ethical principles in real lives—the hardness of choices, the emotional sacrifices involved, and the satisfaction of successful ethical conduct. The narrative form helped readers understand the difficulties of leading an ethical life in the face of the surprising complexities that life throws in people’s paths, and the nobility of this pursuit in a way that mere assertoric statements never could. That is why, although modern people knew the principles of autonomy, they avidly read stories about selves.

Still, it is hard to believe that the conversion of large numbers of people to the modern ideals of life could be driven only by abstract philosophical ideals, however high-minded. In other words, people did not decide that it would be a good idea to lead a modern life primarily by reading Kant or Mill, or autobiographies which showed the epic struggles of individuals with a surrounding oppressive society. Sanskrit literary theory suggests that statements can be classed in three categories: the tone of the master/prabhusammita (like a master), in which the sastras speak to us; the tone of the friend/suhrdsammita (like a friend), like the puranas or the itihasas; and the tone of enchantment/love/kantasammita (like a lover), a manner of utterance which convinces by charming us. All three impart what is considered knowledge, but by speaking in different tones, and to different effects. The charm of the literary, poetic voice persuades us to make principles our own: not by making us submit in awe, or by persuading us by good advice, but by charming us and finding a way to our heart, so that the decisions and desires become our own. This is the deepest way of persuasion. To put my argument in their terms, the literary work charms us into modernity—by placing fictive models in front of our imagination. People decide to act in modern ways because they think it is good to live like that; and some of the great impulse towards this emulation comes from literature: it happens through the combined effect of novelistic narration, lyric poetry’s exploration and painting of emotions and interiority, and the introspective grandeur of the autobiographic story.

Novels, in particular, and their translation into moving pictures of emotional seduction produced the most powerful incentives for the moral persuasion of modernity. It is true that characters in the novels were fictions, phantasms in one sense, but these phantoms—like Gora, Devdas, Sucharita, Lavanya—had the most insidious ways of penetrating into the real lives of individuals, acting like shadow individuals who populated the world of readers, walking noiselessly with them, showing constantly how they could lead their lives. They produced a shadow world of romantic love which affected actual lives of intimacy in an immensely powerful fashion, providing to real people a powerful sentimental education, breaching the immovable authority of traditional conventions. These characters were impossible to invigilate, keep away, or police; they broke down the fortresses of orthodoxy by infiltrating the minds of young girls, and populating their minds with ineradicable dreams.

Literature and Re-enchantment

Also, it is quite evident, in reading modern Bengali literature, that one of its primary tasks was to repaint with colour a world which was bleached of beauty by excessive rationalism and the advance of disenchantment. By the language of his songs and poetry, Tagore seeks to re-enchant the world; others, like Sukumar Ray, try to do the same thing with humour, and Abanindranath Tagore with a narrative language which can paint the world with words. This particular aspect of the role of literature in modernity is not explored in the essays that follow.

In order to explore the complex ethical and historical associations of literary texts, these essays are, as I said, methodologically placed at the interesting and uncertain frontier of literary criticism, sociology of literature, and social theory. Despite my interest in answering historical and theoretical questions, I believe it is always essential to respect the integrity of literary texts when studying them, and never to reduce them entirely into an archive for historical enquiry. It is true that texts always tell us about the world, but this ‘aboutness’ is a complex matter; texts never tell us about their world simply and straightforwardly. Texts always have a way of seeing their worlds, and it is hopeless to try to extricate a picture of that world unaffected by that way of seeing. I have tried not to forget the literariness of my texts, and not to suppress a sense of textual pleasure in pursuing drier historical problems. Because, eventually, it is essential to remember what makes the literary text what it is: it is niyatikrtaniyamarahita, it is hladaikamayi, it is ananyaparatantra, and it is above all navarasarucira. This is a world in which the laws instituted by nature are in suspension; it consists solely of pleasure; it is unconditioned by anything else, such as history, and above all it is made resplendent by the nine rasas. Despite our attempts to bring it close to the mundane world of history, I still wish to follow the spirit of ancient criticism and want the poetic word to be victorious.

Niyatikrtaniyamarahitam hladaikamayim ananyaparatantram

Navarasaruciram nirmitiam adadhati bharati kaver jayati.

Precisely because it is outside my field of academic research, I have a more acute sense of the help I have received from many friends and teachers. I learnt to think about literature from my teachers at different stages—Amar Dutta, Gauriprasad Basu; and in Sanskrit poetry from Madhusudan Goswami. I benefited immensely from years of long conversations, often involving most instructive and enjoyable disagreements, with Asok Sen on modern Bengali literature, especially Tagore and the modern poets, and with Namvar Singh about Bengali, Sanskrit, and to a lesser extent Hindi poetry and criticism. I have always learnt from conversations on literary themes with Rajeev Bhargava and Sunil Khilnani, though I could not directly share Bengali texts with them. My greatest debt in the historical study of literature is to Sheldon Pollock. I thank him for his friendship and the intense vitality of his intellectual interaction. Participation in two of his projects, on Literary Cultures in History and on Sanskrit Knowledge Systems, were unusually intellectually stimulating and instructive. Presentations at these meetings gave me more clear and complex understanding of both methodological and substantive questions of literary studies. Conversation with colleagues who participated in those projects, and who read and kindly commented on my drafts, was intellectually invaluable. On Bengali literature, I have had greatly productive exchanges of ideas with Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Arindam Chakrabarti. I am indebted to Ranajit Guha, Pranab Bardhan, and Kalpana Bardhan for discussions that were always enjoyable and deeply instructive. I have learnt a great deal not only about Sanskrit and vernacular literature, but about literariness from Charles Hallisey and Lawrence McCrea.

Copyright over the essays reproduced herein vests with me. Some have been slightly revised for publication in the present collection. Whenever necessary, the first unnumbered footnote gives the source of first appearance.

References

de Tocqueville, Alexis. 2000. Democracy in America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

¹ de Tocqueville 2000: vol. II, book 4, ch. VIII: 331.

1

On the Advantages of Being a Barbarian

Ideally, I would like to be taken as a Barbarian (in the Greek sense of a person whose language is unintelligible) but a cosmopolitan one. This is not simply being provocative. The first hope is that it will be seen that I have a different natural and conceptual language from my academic interlocutor, and a different cultural apparatus. However, the second hope qualifies the first. People like us should not, even for temptations of nationalism, exaggerate our difference with intellectuals of the West, since we are formed, in one very significant part of our intellectual deliberative life, precisely by intellectual influence from the West. We thus have much higher levels of ordinary curiosity than can be expected in any modern person in the spectacle of the West; we are formed and shaped by those influences, and by that history. But cosmopolitanism means at least two things: first the acceptance in advance of the possibility that your own culture can be inadequate, or fallible. Or, it may not have developed a particular skill of human creativity in a certain way. In that case, we should be easily prepared to draw upon the other cultures we know to give us a more satisfactory intellectual life. I try to emphasize these two things by teaching not merely Indian politics, but also Western political theory. Yet this cosmopolitanism is of a very complicated kind.

One of the most interesting features of intellectual inhabitancy in the modern world is that the West can be indifferent towards the rest of the world’s cultures; but they can’t similarly neglect the West. I wish to argue that this is grounded in the partly unfounded assumption of progress and Western superiority in everything, a strangely unsustainable intellectual stance. Though, equally strangely, it is held as a general framework of belief by an astonishingly large number of Western academics. This does not mean that, if asked, they would assent to this view; but their entirely comfortable ignorance about how the rest of the world thinks—though they primarily think about thinking—can be made intelligible only by this unstated, unreflective belief. I wish to argue further that this is considerably to our advantage, for the rather uncomplex reason that access to two cultures is, in some ways, better than one. Our presence as academics in the Western academy should, ideally, contribute to a dialogue. I think it is rash to be too hopeful about this in the short run: in the present state of the constitution of knowledge and the rewards that go to its various forms, it is likely that we will continue in the present state in which we know too much about the West, while the West knows too little about us.

My academic interest has been in three different areas: political theory, the study of the Indian state, and the study of Indian literary culture—apparently subjects without much connection. I have, however, felt over time that there are serious and subtle interconnections which actually drove me from one field to the next. I shall try to explain what each of these means to me, because in each case I think I have been forced to take an intellectual position which is rather different from the mainstream academic thinking on these subjects. I would therefore like to give a justification of how I see these subjects, and second, whether these have any seriously defensible connection except my purely adventitious liking for them.

The Present State of Knowledge about India—Orientalism and Political Correctness/The Composition of Internal and External Knowledge

My impression about Western knowledge about knowledge of India is that it has made immense strides in one respect at the cost of falling back strikingly in another. It does not have to be seriously argued now that a great part of the earlier forms of Western knowledges about India were Orientalist in Said’s sense of the term. There were, that means, at least three things wrong about it. First, it was quite often cognitively misleading or absent-minded. Either it was so absorbed about its images about itself that it emphasized and usually exaggerated the difference between the West and the Orient, casually translating every bit of difference into inferiority. Second, it admitted the existence of internal knowledges in those societies only if these found a place in a knowledge organization produced by Western Orientalists. The pandits’s views about Hindu scriptures were considered trivially arcane, but their information, reorganized by Western scholars, was acceptable. Thus there was a strong prejudice in favour of Westerners knowing these societies better than their inhabitants. Finally, these cognitive inadequacies were never detected because this knowledge had another non-cognitive purpose connected to the power of colonialism. We can add to these a fourth bias: the tendency to neglect contemporary events in Oriental societies and the tendency to concentrate on its rich cultural history.

Compared to that kind of Orientalist knowledge, the present state of Western knowledge about India is certainly less tainted by Orientalism. However, I am deeply struck by a kind of double standard I come across quite often, at times in surprisingly clever people. There is a tendency among Indianists to treat Indians’ work as nationalist and politically tendentious, while adopting a crass and unreflexively nationalist, or Western-dominant attitude in their own, and seeing their lingering pride in the British empire as the legitimate afterglow of a glorious past. I am surprised by the sensitivity of British academics when we speak about racial attitudes in British rule in India; surprisingly, even now imperialism is not seen retrospectively as a totally indefensible business. There is little understanding that just as in the West there is a kind of moral consensus against the holocaust, in India there is, understandably, a similar consensus against colonialism. Some academic work in India in recent years has sought to be self-conscious about that and tried to get out of that bias. Subaltern Studies history creates such outrage precisely because it has sometimes attempted to read history against the grain of nationalist thinking.

I have tried to stress the need to step out of what I call ‘the nationalist history of nationalism’. But two points should be made about this as well. The first is that because nationalism of a certain kind forms a kind of ‘cultural habitus’ for most of us, simply to say we should step out of the nationalist history of nationalism is not necessarily to be able to do it. I am sure, despite our conscious or declared intention, our actual historical practice must constantly fall short of it. It is the task of our European colleagues to point that out to us without the pleasant and defensible dishonesty produced by politeness; and when it is done, we should not, on our side, react viscerally to that as the rebirth of colonialism.

Second, the resolve to relate to nationalist assumptions critically does not necessarily mean that we reject every one of them. I feel surprisingly unapologetic about Indians wanting to be politically independent; I find the general business of colonialism rather unattractive. And to prove our credentials as people liberated from nationalist parochialism, we need not adopt the Cambridge history resolve to show that Indian nationalism was inspired entirely by slovenly self-interest of the lowest possible kind. I can be critical and supportive of some nationalist ideas: I feel moderately pleased that we became independent of Britain, though I am not beside myself in joy with what Indian politicians have done with that freedom. I do not find the crass Namierite premises of Cambridge history attractive or acceptable. But I think today it is difficult to find advocates of that kind of post-imperial history among people in Western universities. It has become generally politically incorrect to be a supporter of colonialism, even retrospectively, which, to imitate a famous book on British history, ‘is a good thing’.

Third, the two great spectacles of Indian contemporary life, the one of poverty and the other of democracy, and the rather more complex wonder about how the two can stay alive together, have drawn a lot of attention in Western scholarship. This has, understandably, led to a huge shift in the Western academic output and curiosity about India. Instead of the earlier interest primarily in India’s past, and what were conventionally known as Orientalist/Orientological studies consisting of philology, religious philosophy, linguistics, classical Sanskrit literature, and drama, academic interest has been enormously redistributed and the main emphasis has shifted towards social sciences: history, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and politics, etc. This is a huge advance in some ways. It is true in some cases—mainly among lower levels of academic work—that, occasionally, traditional colonial attitudes express themselves, but that is generally a negligible problem: and such uninformed or unsympathetic writing should be answered by ignoring them rather than answering them.

But I feel this advance has been at the cost of something else which is quite vital. Although earlier Orientalist studies often treated the difference as inferiorized, they took the difference and some aspects of it quite seriously. One of the most serious, I personally feel, is the ordinary cognitive courtesy of registering that Indians have their own languages—Sanskrit, Arabic-Persian, and the vernaculars—apart from the ubiquitous existence and convenience of English. The first step of taking someone culturally seriously is to accept the seriousness of his language. Sadly, this is slowly slipping in the new studies of social sciences. This can be for several reasons, three of which can be specified clearly. First, often social scientists simply take on unconsciously the unheedingly universalistic assumptions of positivistic social sciences, and assume that the state either is or is not; democracy exists or does not; there is no sense in asking complicated and delay-causing questions like ‘is it quite a state?’ Second, more often, they simply find enough people with English producing enough writing in English to maintain the illusion that, given that they are reliably bilingual, scholars do not have to know the vernacular. And finally, in some cases, scholars engage in painstaking fieldwork—not merely once, but over long years, nursing their identical field; thus, even if they do not speak the language, the recurrent opportunity of checking the statements of politicians against others, and checking statements against behaviour, gives them ample opportunity to test what they say. Anthropologists are the only branch of social scientists who—usually because their fieldwork is in relatively remote areas, and among people who usually speak only a vernacular, and because they mistrust mediated reports—usually learn languages. But this I think causes an enormous problem.

Accessibility is not necessarily an antidote to intellectual prejudice. It is a truism that people in the West now know much more about the rest of world, if knowing means primarily viewing. But the increased traffic of images also means a repetitive opportunity for reconfirming prejudices—in which the Western media, including the liberal segment, plays an intensely active role. The task of academic knowledge, I would think, is to slowly criticize and counteract this ritual of self-congratulation.

Study of the History of Political Theory

Since Marxist theory is interrelated on all sides with other forms of European social thought, even to assert its incontrovertible superiority over other ‘ideologies’ we had to acquire some understanding of other theoretical arguments.

More systematic study of social theory tended to show me that instead of what Marxists claimed about Marx—that his work was separated by an unbridgeable gulf from ideological theories before and around him—his thought was actually a part of a process of thinking about European modernity. It seemed that despite their enormous theoretical differences, most modern European theorists acknowledged that for some reasons modernity as a historical period was particularly difficult to grasp cognitively. Each one of them suggested a way of finding a process that was centrally causal to modernity. Each offered a theory of that particular process, which, because of the assumption of causal primacy, thus became a theory of modernity in general. I still retain my belief that Marxism is a most powerful theory in this group, but I have been forced to abandon the more orthodox certainty that it can simply, entirely unassisted, provide us with an understanding of the sociology of the modern West. It has to be complemented, in proper contexts by theoretical arguments from Hegel, Weber, Tocqueville, Durkheim, and others. However, this kind of enquiry forced me into another question which forms the basis of much I have written in the last decade.

In the case of people like me, the reading of these theories happened always in the inescapable context of an everyday life in modern urban India. Reading these theories gave rise to an irrepressible sense of both their familiarity and their distance: it appeared that things in my historical experience were both similar and different: it was essential to separate them. Schematically, I concluded that modernity comprised processes like industrialization, secularization, étatization, and individuation, which were universal: but this did not imply that the actual events or end-states would be similar to those in the West. This made Western social theory indispensable and inadequate at the same time: that corpus showed us what modernity was as well as what was involved in making theoretical sense of it, but it was idle to expect it to produce a theory of our experience as well. I lost my faith in a transitionist theory of modernity: the belief that the European past showed us the image of our future.

But this naturally leads to another question: did not Indian culture produce some form of self-reflection on our experience of modernity? If it did, where was it? I felt we have traditionally looked at the wrong place. Theory is a form of reflection, just as poetry and drama are. For complex historical reasons, this form was not highly developed in Indian culture; literature, by contrast, was. It was hardly surprising that when Indian intellectuals reflected upon these questions, particularly the nature of our modernity, they did it through literary forms. I have accordingly tried to read literature, at least literary texts, with questions of social theory in mind.

Begriffsgeschichte

In doing Begriffsgeschichte I have tried to combine the careful, historical, contextual study of texts with the method of focusing on concepts that are central to the prosecution of a particular type of social practice, inclining probably a bit towards the latter. I tried this, with a slightly Bengali frivolousness, in a study of the idea of ‘filth’ and public space by looking at the history of a particular park in Calcutta.¹ Personally, I have felt that the intellectual discourses we ought to study with particular care are the vernacular, since that is the theatre of greater intellectual and artistic originality. Often, the English discourse is produced by the same figures, but they are a pale shadow of the passion, argumentative force and eloquence they show in their own language. Evidently, when they wrote to other interlocutors in other regions, or about more general questions, they often wrote in English, and those texts and discourses have to be taken with the utmost seriousness. But we should not slip into the easy supposition that what comes out in vernaculars is inferior in quality. Happily, the idea that when Indians write in vernaculars they are more original than in English has got wider support, and young scholars have turned to vernacular material, often producing compelling studies of intellectual history. But other scholars find it impossible to admit of this possibility. Oddly enough, Indian education is increasingly becoming more monolingual than before, with the unfortunate result that academics trained in modern methodological skills often lack the more basic skills of a confident use of vernaculars. But in some ways the line of argument about enumeration of communities has had a great deal of support—both within India and outside—among scholars working primarily in history and anthropology. This in part is a consequence of the wide interest in Subaltern Studies, where this argument first appeared.

Study of the State in India

My second substantial interest in a longer-term historical sociology of power stemmed from the realization that in the Indian context, unlike in the European, modernity had been introduced by the power of the state—first colonial, then nationalist. The meaning of the phrase ‘primacy of the political’ appeared to me in a much stronger and altered light. But the study of the state became infinitely tangled and deferred by a mass of problems. I became convinced that to understand both the effectiveness of the state—what it has been able to do in modern India and its failures, what we expect it to do but which it cannot—it is essential to see it as part of a historical sociology over the long term. To understand the vexed question of how much the national state has taken over from the colonial state it is essential to understand the state of colonial power. After all, all this is a study of modernity in India, and I became convinced that in India, if not in the Third World, the forces of modernity have entered primarily by the expedient of the state and its initiatives rather than by the unassisted causal powers of capital—however impressive it may have been in Europe. Even capitalism in India requires the crucial support of the state. We have to understand the state because it occupies such a large part of the story of modernity in India.

However, the major problem is to work out a way of communicating between the disciplinary languages of political scientists and historians. By academic convention, political scientists did not look at the problems of political life historically; historians, by contrast, did not always ask the question about the global nature of political authority and its place in society, though they generated a highly detailed picture of political processes in society. I have tried to argue in works over the last decade or so that the major change in Indian modernity was not even the extension of the capitalist mode of production as much as the state mode of power, i.e. the primary change in India’s modernity is the conversion of a society in which order was produced primarily by religious authority to one in which it is mainly produced by the state. The entire story of India’s modernity is how this society has become centred on the state.

The Study of Literature and its Links with Social Theory

I also have serious differences with people practising history of ideas in relation to the study of literature. I cannot deny that my interest in literary texts is driven at least in part by my sense of enjoyment of literary texts; but I can now see a deeper connection between literature and my general interest in theoretical ideas. Modernity brings in a general instability of the most fundamental conditions of social existence, and in no society can it pass without causing the greatest and deepest intellectual disquiet. Some of the most important European thinkers put this disquiet quite directly at the heart of their theories: nearly all of them imply that modernity, because of the instability at its heart, because it is so difficult to equate it with any single social arrangement or state of affairs, is particularly hard to grasp and encompass cognitively. Although modernity, out of all social systems of human existence, is the one created as a result of the deliberate designs and acts of human groups, it is also the most difficult to understand. It would have been utterly surprising if modernity did not cause a similar disquiet in India, or if Indian intellectuals did not try to understand its nature. However, every society applies to its great and most complex tasks those skills it has developed for a long time, in which it is intellectually adept and confident. Indian culture did not have a preexisting tradition of social theory; but it did have a long and distinguished literary tradition. It is hardly surprising therefore that the self-reflection of modernity that happens in Europe in the form of social theory does so in India in the form of literary writing. It is necessary to modify the hardness of this distinction, however. I think, in Europe theoretical reflection in the more abstract conceptual form was always followed by a commentary in an artistic-literary form. It is