Sunday, March 30, 2003		Books

History and conflicting nationalisms
Rumina Sethi

Beyond Nationalist Frames: Relocating Postmodernism, Hindutva, History
by Sumit Sarkar. Permanent Black, Delhi. Pages 265. Rs 550.

SUMIT Sarkar’s argument starts with his unease with the major historical assumptions of all times—the ‘single, overwhelmingly predominant, colonial/anti-colonial binary.’ The Left nationalists, Marxist and even the early Subaltern Studies historians recovered the Indian history only through the prism of colonial subjugation and rationalist tendencies. Although the current volume is an attempt to recover a Marxian social history through analyses of colonial Bengal, Sarkar locates himself between positions: as neither totally refusing nor wholly accepting the celebratory tendencies of postmodernism.

Understandably, the first few essays of the collection focus on Namasudra peasants and sharecroppers and their changing relationships with the Bhadralok gentry. What follows are chapters on the genesis of a Hindutva identity emerging from the pressures of the lower castes as well as from the creation of Muslim identity politics. Sarkar’s discussion of Ghare-Baire is interesting as it interrogates Partha Chatterjee’s celebrated dichotomy of the spiritual-material or the inner and outer (The Nation and its Fragments) which the nationalist discourse linked to its women. Instead, Sarkar posits the transitional status of Tagore’s novel, claiming that a novel has "no obligation to be an accurate representation of its times" even as that cannot be avoided altogether. Once again, the eternal binaries are put to the acid test as is common among historians who can see the logic of postmodernism yet are loathe to abandon earlier loyalties.

Sarkar’s essay on "Postmodernism and the Writing of History," which is the best argued, appears to be some kind of defense of ‘Enlightenment Rationalism’ judging by the camaraderie he establishes with Aijaz Ahmad and his own Marxist leanings which would make his adversaries uneasy since Marxism is often charged for being complicitous with the Enlightenment tradition. Sarkar goes against recommending a complete homogenized rejection of Enlightenment in the process of questioning the political implications and positions postmodernism has embraced. As he writes: "There are aspects of postmodernism which can, and at times demonstratively have, proved not only unavoidable and relevant, but extremely fruitful for historical practice: mine is not an argument for a return to the old certainties, unmodified."

Sarkar resolves the conundrum through his ‘nuanced’ claims that history for the last hundred years or so did have an inbuilt suspicion of its own truths and that there is nothing new about the postmodernist turn in history. Citing E. H. Carr’s What is History? as his defense is somewhat suspect especially when his opponents, the poststructuralists and the postmodernists, also use Carr to attack history. I see Sarkar rather like a transitional historian uncomfortably pleading for old certainties yet finding it difficult to forsake current theories which he deprecatingly calls ‘the latest intellectual fashion,’ ‘floating with the tide,’ ‘depressing’ and ‘banal.’

That the word ‘post’’ agitates him is obvious. He is right in saying that the radical oversimplification in identifying the enemy as ‘other’ is what makes postmodernism itself homogeneous. However, one has to make these contradictory claims work for oneself. Alert and vigilant, the critic can avoid the dangers of positivism and its reverse, or of building ‘phantom’ history. What lies at the heart of these contradictions peculiar to interdisciplinary studies are unresolved ‘policing’ strategies where one methodology restricts the other, calling the other hegemonic. Such a battleground is usually erected between history and literature but whereas literary critics have by and large been relating to historicism in the last few decades, historians, I daresay, are still extremely wary of making borrowings from literary texts and its new philosophies. In this regard, Sarkar’s footnotes are a fairly good indication of his own preferences and prejudices.

The last section is about the centrality that history has for Hindutva. These final essays are a telling comment on postmodernism since Hindutva has hijacked the very process of objective history-writing and established new ‘facts’ homogeneously. Sarkar examines two texts: Savarkar’s Hindutva and Golwalkar’s We, or Our Nationhood Defined. The former, in his writing of Hindu history, manages to ignore British rule altogether, although elsewhere, he had referred to 1857 as the ‘first national war of independence.’ The adversary is completely identified with the Muslim as also in Golwalkar who writes: "Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to shake off the despoilers." In fact, the Muslims are blamed for British colonialism which forces us to reconsider the British policy of divide and rule which ostensibly broke the ‘harmony’ between Hindus and Muslims.

The new Hindutva rewriting and recovery, which speaks against Christian conversions but supports the bomb, shows the deeply regressive face of cultural nationalism. Here is nationalism pretending to be both traditional and progressive, local and global. Very often, a condemnation of India’s nuclear status or a rejection of modernity can force one into a ‘quasi Hindutva’ position. The employment of postmodernism in such contexts helps to split open an authoritarian and definitive nationalism as well as a continuing neo-colonialism.