To understand Dipesh Chakrabarty’s
talk is first to understand its title. Chakrabarty uses "subaltern" to
refer to the peasant, a complex word that derives from interest in peasant
studies
that began
in the 1970s. "Magic" evokes the most commonly understood referent. "Belief" is
a problem to be explored through the direct examination of relevant scholarly
work.
To frame his inquiry, Chakrabarty recounts a British
scholarly debate about magic in India, published by the Times
of India in 1934. One position held that "street magic," a practice woven into the fiber of daily events, was symptomatic of India's underdevelopment. For India to realize its full potential for "civilization" and modernization was to develop a consciousness of being tricked that would turn "street magic" into an explicitly performative "stage magic." The counterposition cited the partial nature of scientific knowledge and proposed that perhaps the Indian culture had a particular capacity to tap into parapsychological vibrations.
In spite of the seemingly irreconcilable opposition of these claims, they
nevertheless share the common ground of an argument that takes as it logical
center the
concept of rationalism. Magic, then, is an ideal vehicle for the exploration
of "rationalism," a term that is linked, in colonialist discourse, to the capacity of a nation to become "civilized" and "modern."
To explore the intersection of magic, rationalism,
and nation, Chakrabarty takes as a starting point a constellation of scholars
who study magic from
a position of respect for its socio-historical and cultural significance:
Keith Thomas, Carlo Ginzburg, and Dineshchandra Sen.
British historian Sir Keith Vivian Thomas is a Fellow of All Souls College,
Oxford. His books
include Religion and the Decline
of Magic (1997 rev.), Man and the Natural World (1983), and The
Oxford Book
of Work(2003).
Chakrabarty considers
Thomas's work on the decline of religion in the English Reformation valuable
because it accords magic the status of a formal sociopolitical system,
thereby legitimizing
its historiographical study. On the other hand,
Thomas relegates the content of magic to the discipline of psychology,
revealing an implicit script of the theory of modernization; namely, that
the decline
of magic was necessary for the emergence of a rational, modern British
State.
Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian
Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies
Italian folklore
through the lens of Inquisition proceedings with peasants. His most famous
work is The
Cheese
and
the
Worms:
The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1980). Unlike Thomas, Ginzburg
takes the form
and content
of magic together as a unified historical subject. However, Chakrabarty
pointedly notes Ginzburg's insistence on maintaining a critical distance
from his object
of study, which Ginzburg himself defends on the grounds that such non-participation
and dis-identification are essential to the historiographical enterprise
and its scholarly legitimacy.
Bengali historian Dineshchandra Sen (1866-1939) spent
the early years of his career collecting Bengali folktales and published
them as evidence of India's cultural obstacles to full modernization, effectively
advocating the rationalist argument underlying the theory of modernization
(Bengali
Language and Literature, Trans. Jibendranath Siddhanta, 1996). Sen
levied a particularly scathing characterological attack against Manasa,
snake goddess
and untouchable
daughter of Shiva. (The story goes that Manasa punishes the merchant Chand
Saudagar for his refusal to worship her by killing his seven sons, who
are, in turn, all
restored to life following the plea to the gods made by Behula, the wife
of the seventh, before Chand finally relents and agrees to worship Manasa.)
Shortly after the publication of Bangabh¯ash¯a o s¯ahitya (Bengali
Language
and Literature) in 1896, Sen
fell
into a deep depression which culminated in a dream. Sen dreamed that an
endless stream
of snakes
entered his bedchamber while a voice accused him of the disloyal abuse
of the goddess Manasa. On awakening, Sen smelled a fragrance that he interpreted
as
the goddess's presence; he deleted the critical material from his book
and
was cured within three days. Sen wrote a public statement shortly thereafter
in which
he interpreted the royalties from his popular text (20,000-22,000 copies
sold) as a gift from the goddess, conceding all the while that he had "no quarrel" with
those who would ridicule him from a scientific position.
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It is this conversion
story of Sen's that most intrigues Chakrabarty. It seems to
provide a point of departure for the mapping of an epistemological
difference
between the positions represented by Sen and Ginzburg. Ginzburg
posits a relationship of identity between peasants and their beliefs
and a disidentification of the historiographical
subject with respect to this peasant-belief object of study. Sen,
on the other hand, proposes a mode of dealing with authority (in
this case, magical/religious) which Chakrabarty characterizes as
participatory "acknowledgment" that
does not necessarily imply "belief" in the strict (and Western)
sense of the word. That is, Ginzburg's reading of peasants'
beliefs
locates peasants as disciplined subjects of their own belief system,
simultaneously removing himself from identification with that systemic
process. Sen, on the other hand, proposes (and participates) in
a model of acknowledgment and acceptance of divinity (to be understood
as a form of authority) that may not constitute complete epistemological
subjugation (i.e., he does not necessarily "believe in" the deity
he is acknowledging, as his professed acceptance of rationalist
ridicule suggests).
To approach this distinction from a different angle would be to ask what the theory of modernization would ask: can India produce Carlo Ginzburgs? To put this yet another way, is there a teleological path--of rationality--leading from a Sen to a Ginzburg? Chakrabarty says no.
Chakrabarty first of all argues that India has not taken the same kind
of
disciplinary turn from orality to writing that happens in the work that Ginzburg
studies.
In other words, Ginzburg interprets postdisciplinary peasant magic. By the time
he arrives at this cultural phenomenon, it is through the documentary lens of
the Inquisition, which has already pressed the day-to-day,
lived practices of belief (analogous to Indian "street magic") into the translation,
perhaps false,
of a codified and written form of "belief." In the Western
scholastic tradition, this connotes a relationship of monolithic discipline between
believer and belief-as-authority.
The implication of Chakrabarty's argument is
that this is the locus of a breakdown in the Western tradition that has gone
unrecognized by its own scholars. Ginzburg himself does not interrogate the
Inquisition process that might have resulted in the epistemological
erasure, or writing over, of
an everyday practice of magic among the European peasantry. Instead, he aligns
himself (in resignation?) with the Inquisitors themselves, accepting a relationship
of homology between the object of historiographical inquiry and Inquisitional
discipline (Chakrabarty cites Ginzburg as saying, "What I am doing [as historian]
is not so different from what Inquisitors were doing.").
The second difference between Sen and Ginzburg is a continuation of the first:
Chakrabarty argues that this putatively "rational" transition from oral to
written culture could not happen in India because the Western notion of a disciplinary
authority is itself incompatible with the Indian conception of power. If, in
the West, a totalizing, monolithic model of discipline has prevailed (e.g.,
the Foucauldian conception of a web of power relations nevertheless operating
with a unity of institutional purpose), it is because the Western subject,
including the scholar, accepts such a model and self-regulates accordingly.
In India, Chakrabarty asserts, power is pluralistic and fragmented, and disciplinary
knowledge does not enjoy the same hegemonic status in the culture of everyday
life that it does in the West. If, for example, disciplines function to help
subjects internalize the sovereignty of the State (Chakrabarty here cites the
final chapter of Foucault's The History of Sexuality) then, Chakrabarty
warns, it must be acknowledged that in India, the State has never acquired
the degree of sovereignty that
it has in the West. It has not, therefore, developed a means of self-regulating
that produces the same disciplinary reach of the State to the individual. Chakrabarty
wonders if there is some Eurocentric violence in transporting Ginzburg's methods
to the Indian context, not to mention the violence that Ginzburg's own methods
would seem to do to the European context itself, as described above.
In conclusion, Chakrabarty reminds his audience of Salman Rushdie's pithy characterization
of the postcolonial speaker's "forked tongue." Chakrabarty calls for a critical
reevaluation of the formulation of "history from below," which he questions
as a hierarchical vindication of the subaltern subject complicit with Western
models of discipline. Instead,
he favors of a historiographical approach, one informed by the view of India
as being modern in a fundamentally different way from the West, with a different
political
system and a different model of power that yields multiple locations of authority
and fragmented sovereignties.
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