The Good of the Story:

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Vivek Chibber and

the problem of provincializing Europe

Anne Troake 008120685

Critical Essay, Anthropology 6890
Professor August Carbonella
April 1, 2014
 • • •

The God of Small Things, Arundati Roy’s semi-autobiographical novel of modern

postcolonial India, opens with the epigraph quoted from contemporary anthropological

art critic John Berger, "Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one."

Roy’s storytelling, both multi-located in space and time and multi-voiced, enables the

simultaneous holding of hybrid histories, tangled perspectives and diverse ontologies.

Roy’s story leaps from her Keralite characters’ childhoods in 1969 to their adult lives in

1993, employs Malayalam words in conjunction with English, includes an Irish protestant

studying Hindu scriptures, as well as multiple facets of Kerala life including communism,

Keralite Syrian Christianity, the caste system, interracial marriage, forbidden inter-caste

love and violent political rebellion. The story entwines events with the narrative-making

of those events. Roy’s engagement with the power implications of historical processes

and personal stories led her to become a writer of non-fictional subaltern stories, which

make no attempt to adopt the dispassionate analytical tones of academic historical

pronouncement. As a public intellectual, Roy has no truck with detached rationality “I am

hysterical. I'm screaming from the bloody rooftops. I want to wake the neighbours, that's

my whole point. I want everybody to open their eyes.”1

• • •

                                                                                                               
1
"Scimitars in the Sun: N. Ram interviews Arundhati Roy on a writer's place in politics.". Frontline, The
Hindu. 30 October 2008.
   1  

In 1992 the Canadian government declared a moratorium on the Northern Cod fishery.

This wild-fish harvest comprised the primary industry for Newfoundland’s half-million

mostly rural people and extensive federal and provincial resources were thrown into

retraining thousands of former fishers and fish processors. One such project involved

training former fisheries workers in theatre arts skills with a view to possibly establishing a

summer theatre festival in their community. I, a professional contemporary dancer at the

time, was employed through the The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy (TAGS) program, to train

fishermen in the skills of contemporary dance. Facing off across an ontological1 divide

between deeply emplaced harvesters and a post-modern artist whose community entailed a

network of practitioners in international urban centres, compromises were struck: no work

boots in the studio was negotiated in exchange for the continued wearing of peaked caps

during class, but the most profound challenge for me as a teacher came in the form of a

question posed to me: “What is this good for?” This simple question would accompany me

in all my subsequent endeavours. As an academic scholar, the question haunts. What, if any,

affect does our thinking, our writing, our analysis of the world do in an era of extreme

violent inequality, in the era of late capitalism?

It is with this question of the pragmatics of particular epistemologies that I approach

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. I refer to Vivek Chibber’s rejoinder,

articulated in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital primarily for its

contextualization of Chakrabarty’s publication within the canon of Subaltern Studies and for

                                                                                                               
1  From the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology: “Any way of understanding the world must make assumptions
(which may be implicit or explicit) about what kinds of things do or can exist, and what might be their
conditions of existence, relations of dependency, and so on. Such an inventory of kinds of
being and their relations is an ontology” (Scott & Marshall 2005:161)
   2  

his contention that Provincializing Europe is both irredeemably Euro-centric and that it

orientalizes the Indian subaltern.

Postcolonial Studies purports, says Chibber, to “enable political practice”. Leading

thinkers in Postcolonial Studies claimed it was more than “just a theory, it is also presented

as a form of practice or even a movement” (2013:2). It has positioned itself as both positive

theory and radical critique. Within Postcolonial Studies, a new specialty emerges called

Subaltern Studies. The Oxford dictionary of English defines “Subaltern” in its nominal form

as a lower ranking officer in the British army. In its adjectival form it indicates a

subordinate position within a hierarchy. Within social sciences it is, “a marker of a

theoretical orientation: an approach to the analysis of colonialism, or imperial history, or

even politics in general”. According to Chibber, it is “the face of Postcolonial Studies”

(2013:5).

The title Provincializing Europe suggests a project wherein Europe is given an

historicized place at the margins, a useful proposition in a scholarly tradition that makes

claims to manifesting a form of “activist writing” through the reorienting of a particular

history. Michel-Rolph Touillot eloquently underscores the “power of the story” in his

eponymous introductory essay to Silencing the Past, by demonstrating that the gap between

“what happened” and “what is said to have happened” is a site of power enactment within

historical production. Trouillot underscores “the importance of context; [asserting that] the

overlap and the distance between the two sides of historicity may not be susceptible to a

general formula” and further, that “tracking power requires a richer view of historical

production than most theorists acknowledge.” (1997:4, 25). The articulation of such a rich

view is inherent in the promise of a history of a colonized people written “from the bottom

up”. Such clarifying insight is offered by such radical reorientations as W.E. B. Du Bois’
   3  

“The African Roots of War”, which, Kaplan writes, entailed “a seismic shift of geographic

and historical perspectives” on the role of Africa in the history of European war (2005:171)

or Susan Buck-Morss’s re-illumination of the influence the Haitian revolution on Hegel’s

drafting of his dialectic of the master-slave relationship; a contextual element of Hegel’s

thought that was effectively removed from the frame of subsequent European scholarship

based on Hegel’s text. (2009:50). The thesis of Provincializing Europe, proposed the

production of texts that would presumably entail a similar “seismic shift” in perspectives on

Britain’s colonization of India. It promised to be good for something.

• • •

Chakrabarty introduces his treatise with a personal story of his experience of growing

up in post-colonial Calcutta. He describes his early conceptualizing of Europe; its

simultaneous geographic distance as colonial other and its presence within hybridized

conceptual and material elements: traffic rules, cricket, soccer and the Marxist-inflected

casual critiques of “feudal” practices of arranged marriage amongst he and his middle-class

urban compatriots. With his subsequent migration to Australia, he writes that he felt “a

profound combination of loss and gain” (2008:xii) It was this experience of displacement

that led Chakrabarty to propose that the received universals European enlightenment might,

in fact, belong to a particular cultural tradition. “[T]o provincialize Europe was to […] ask a

question about how thought was related to place. [D]o places leave their imprint on thought

in such a way as to call into question the idea of purely abstract categories? My starting

point in all this questioning […] was the silent and everyday presence of European thought

in Indian life and practices” (2008:xiii).

However, the ousting of Europe from the centre to the periphery for Chakrabarty does

not entail the employment of non-European epistemologies, nor does it entail a critique of
   4  

the parameters of the discourse of itself. Rather he acknowledges “a deep- and often

unknown-debt to European thought. Without that there could be no provincializing Europe”

(2008:xiii). From the outset, Chakrabarty appears to be ambivalent about his own

emplacement and both the geographic origins of his methodology as well as their

epistemological aim. He intends to “create plural normative horizons” (2008: 20) and yet

insists “it was never an aim of this book to “pluralize reason”. Rather, he intends to argue

“not against the idea of universals as such but emphasize […] that the universal was a

highly unstable figure” (2008: xiii).

To provincialize Europe, Chakrabarty proposes two historical modes within a Marxist

critique of capitol. History 1 encompasses a past posited by capital itself as its precondition

– a universalizing process dominated by totalizing categories framed in “Western”

discourses of rationality. According to this teleological model, the postcolonial world will

eventually reach the same “level” of modernity and industrialization as the West (2008:65-

66). History 2 consists of “antecedents to capital” which do not necessarily contribute to

capitol’s self-reproduction, including the particular, diverse life-worlds of the worker (2008,

63-4). The latter does not necessarily oppose the former, but rather interrupts its totalizing

thrusts. Chibber counters that the universalizing drive of capital is not the formation of

political order, as has been posed by Subaltern Studies scholars, but a drive to market

formation (2013:125). Chakrabarty’s History 2 as manifest in the durability of south Asian

pre-colonial class relations and symbols, Chibber contends, is less an interruption to

capital’s universalizing but rather a demonstration of its universalizing tendencies.

Chibber also faults the Subaltern Study group for an inaccurate understanding of the

creation of liberal politics. Guha’s proposition, endorsed by Chakrabarty, that the European

revolutions were the result of a capitalist bourgeoisie that brought democratic reform in a
   5  

way that the bourgeoisie of India failed to do, is incorrect. Not only have Sublaternists

failed to marginalize European thought, they have also interpreted European history

incorrectly. Further, Chibber insists, they have failed to acknowledge that Marxian analysis

consists of numerous forays into the theorization of “capitalism in backward [sic] settings”

(2013, 291)

Chakrabarty discusses the limitations of secular historicizing in comparative

conceptions of cosmologies. Using three examples of historic representation of peasantry,

he explains the problem of translation from theological to secular in academic

understanding of the intermeshing of religious and labour practices in India. However, his

explanation is irrevocably western and rational: the exotic other is explained to the western

secular. We, as readers, gaze down upon an objectified peasant with Chakrabarty as our tour

guide. Never once do we touch down to look a peasant in the eye, let alone see though her

eyes.

Most striking about the conversation between Chakrabarty and Chibber’s books is that

in the quibbling over the histories of capitalism and political formation, the extraordinary tilt

of the landscape between Europe and “the East”; Britain and India over the past 500 years is

out of view. While it may be a “given” that any reader would bear in mind that a process of

translation must be called upon when discussing the collective behaviours of a middle class

in a country that has undergone a centuries-long process of economic exploitation and a

middle class of a country that has been enjoying the spoils of that same economic

exploitation, this severe economic inequality is not named. Further, Chibber, in his defence

of the universal argues that both “east” and “west” are “subject to the same basic forces and

are therefore part of the same basic history”. (2013, 291) While it might be theoretically
   6  

arguable that the master-slave dialectic of Hegel’s analysis might share the same history, but

to infer that the stakes are comparable for both players is obviously problematic.

• • •

Chakrabarty’s, History 2, characterized as a “knot” in the smooth fabric of rational

academic understandings of History 1, may ironically be the site of the universal in the

particular if it involves representation of lived or liveable narratives. Trouillot identifies the

problem with subjugating History 2 to History 1. “… no abstract theory can set, a priori, the

rules that govern the relative impact of French castles and of U.S. movies on the academic

history produced in these two countries.” He draws attention to the concrete factor of the

context of academic production: “[T]he history of America is being written in the same

world where little boys [sic] do not want to be Indians”. (1997:22) This is also the context

within which Chibber and Chakrabarty, both of Indian origin and both holding high profile

positions at American universities, duke it out, with Chibber accusing Chakrabarty of re-

branding orientalism as “radical chic”. Yet, in decimating Chakrabarty’s argumentation,

Chibber effectively brings us back to ground zero of Eurocentric academic rational analysis.

Perhaps such an undertaking requires too radical a departure from the conventions of

academic history making when it entails what Trouillot calls the “confusion [of] making

people doubly historical, or, more properly fully historical” (1997:24). Whatever the

motive, neither of these scholars destabilizes the centrality of western intellectual tradition

or the practice of top-down historicizing.

When Chibber accuses Chakrabarty and the Subalternists of reiterating the centrality

of Europe, material or imagined, he charges that they revive the orientalism of western

theories and repackage it “as radical chic”(2013:21). It is notable that “radical chic” and
   7  

self-orientalizing appear historically in British-Indian relations as an adaptive function of

identity formation for the subaltern in such a relationship.

In Black Hole of Empire, Partha Chatterjee relates the journey of Mirza Shaikh

Ihtishamudden, an apprentice munshi or letter writer in the court of Nawab Mir Jafar, from

Calcutta to London in 1766 where he remained for two years enjoying a special status as an

exotic darling of the elites. During this period, Ihtishamudden wrote extensively on the

wonders of modern London; of streetlights and garbage removal, public entertainment in

theatres and the widespread use of watches and clocks. According to Chatterjee,

Ihtshamudden summoned up the “normative English lifestyle” with the following words:

“Till forty the English apply themselves in business and also in travel, and study the

wonders and curiosities of the world. Then they return home with their amassed wealth,

marry, and live in pleasant retirement with their families. […] in contrast the behavior of

Hindustanis fills me with shame and sorrow” (2012, 69-70). Similarly, educational

reformer and emissary for the Mughal ruler, Rahomman Roy who advocated for “sound

mind and judgment” in the face of “the tomfooleries of the Hindu mode of worship” (134-

135) declared himself, from Calcutta, to be “the humblest of the subjects of his Britannic

Majesty” (148) Rahomman embraced individual rights based on rational self-determination

and actively disseminated these views in tracts such as his excoriation of religious thought,

Tuhfat-ul Muwahhidden, via the new print medium, but simultaneously cautioned against

the applicability of a universal freedom of the press in India.

These historic examples of inherent contradictions in the lives of favoured colonized

subjects echoes the oddly disappointing contortions of Chakrabarty’s project. Racial

tensions operate in America as they do in Europe and yet the context of such tensions, a

reality that has likely touched the American lives of both Chibber and Chakrabarty, the
   8  

cloister of the ivory tower notwithstanding, do not make it on to the map in their essays.

Chakrabarty comes closest to conveying the disorientation of living a racialized identity in

the mini-autobiography that opens his book. Indeed, such narratives have the power to

convey the complex pluralities of real lived lives in ways that theory, by its very nature,

must seek to abstract and generalize. In these stories the universal and the particular

intertwine into a comprehensible whole.

• • •

In his problematizing of the translation of life-worlds, Chakrabarty acknowledges the

superior power of narrative to hold multiple ontologies in a shared space, yet he dismisses

the use of such texts as entailing an either/or scenario where historians are replaced by a

reserve army of fictionists. “Modern historical consciousness”, he maintains, is essential for

opposing “modern bureaucracies and other instruments of governmentality” (2008:86).

Unfortunately for the reader, Chakrabarty does not share Buck-Morss’s concern that

“disciplinary boundaries” tend to render counterevidence “irrelevant” (2009:22). Certainly,

“activist writing” must entail movement-building which in turn requires accessibility.

Comprehensibility does not entail the abdication of intellectual rigour as Chakrabarty

implies. Indeed, scholars of the social sciences resort to references to or the writing of

“fiction”, or the conventions of comparative literature for their apparently superior ability to

translate the complexities of lived experience between located experience and the spread of

neoliberal processes transnational profit accumulation. Examples include Mezzadra and

Neilson who, in Border as Method, reference Bengali author Amitav Ghosh’s novel The

Shadow Lines, an autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois and even Shakepeare’s Tempest to

demonstrate “[a] series of borders includ[ing] the borders separating colonizer from

colonized, present from past, memory from reality, identity from images and, the cognitive
   9  

and generic borders that mark different territories for knowledge and writing.” Edward

Said engaged extensively with the writing of Dickens and especially Conrad to illustrate the

connection between fiction and the historical world and also warned of the power of cultural

texts to be employed for sinister political means (1993, 21)

David Harvey writes “the novel is not subject to closure in the way that more

analytical forms of thinking are.” when discussing Raymond Williams choice of the novel

form (2001:168). Williams writes semi-autobiographically and uses the novel to extend

beyond the limits of academic discourse. His fictional character, who like Williams, is a

University scholar of working class origin, complains, “it’s a change of substance…the

ways of measuring this are not only outside my discipline. They are somewhere else

altogether, that I can feel but not handle, touch but not grasp” (2001:168) Harvey ties this

line to Williams’ concern with the lived lives of people at particular historical junctures,

stating; “He wants always to emphasize the ways in which personal and particular choices

made under given conditions are the very essence of historical-geographical change.”

(2001:168)

• • •

While Provincializing Europe enjoys an exalted position in the canon of social

sciences, as Chibber contends, there is little in the way of a true reorientation away from the

centrality of European intellectual tradition. The particularity of the project’s failure to

provincialize Europe recalls Gupta and Ferguson’s assertion that “We need to account

sociologically for the fact that the “distance” between the rich in Bombay and those in

London may be much shorter than between different classes in the “same” city.” (1992:23)
Works cited:

Buck-Morss, Susan, 2009, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Pittsburgh, University of
Pittsburgh Press

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 2008, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical

Difference, Princeton new jersey, Princeton University Press

Chatterjee, Partha, 2012, Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power,
Princeton, Princeton University Press

Chibber, Vivek, 2013, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London, Verso
Books

Gupta, Akhil and Ferguson, James, 1997, Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the
Politics of Difference, Cultural Anthropology 7(1) pp. 6-23

Harvey, David, 2001, Spaces of capital: Towards a Critical Geography, London,

Routledge Press

Kaplan, Amy, 2005, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, Boston,
Harvard University Press

Mezzandra, Sandro and Neilson, Brett, 2013, Border as Method, Durham, Duke
University Press

Scott ,John and Marshall, Gordon, 2005, A Dictionary of Sociology, Oxford University
Press

Roy, Arundati, 1997, The God of Small Things, Trans. New York, Harper Collins

Stevenson, Angus, Ed. 2010 Oxford dictionary of English, 3rd edition. New York:
Oxford University Press

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 1997, Silencing the Past, Boston, Beacon Press