Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
04 November 2019
The postcolonial discourse of this text, in this case on Europe, is in a field that is also
dominated with views on other continents such as Africa that tussled with an ‘end’ of
historians, he paves the way for an external intervention into problematic histories of previously
colonized peoples Historians had only targeted the information that they perceived to be
One of his primary concerns in his thesis is not in forgetting the Eurocentric history that
preceded him, but in reshaping internal European viewpoints towards the communities
originating geographically from outside it. He explains that the act of “provincialising Europe is
outside of Europe (16). This act of collaboration is a common theme throughout his work and
he seeks to show how thinkers within Europe had continually remained staunchly located within
their continental boundary when assessing influence abroad. Indeed, Europe displays “everyday
habits of thought that invariably subtend attempts in the social sciences to address questions of
political modernity in South Asia” and he evolves internalist European thinking towards better
practices in a more global post-colonialist historical world (4). However, this very social-focused
monograph cannot avoid economics and study of labor within this as a vital cog in colonialism
and the legacy it left behind. Marxist theory is continually referred to but has a negative place in
postcolonial theory as it “builds a memory into this analytical category of that which it can never
completely capture” (92). This temporal thinking into commodities spills into political thought as
minorities. In writing that “democracy requires hitherto neglected groups to tell their histories”,
he calls to the duty of communities and historians to offer different views of the past through a
Returning to the personal nature of his work, he draws on his own experience in life, and
from others originally from outside of Europe, to make a larger comment about the historical
field. Chakrabarty identifies as part of middle-class Bengali community, the “first Asian social
group of any size whose mental world was transformed through its interactions with the West”,
and this upbringing helped him to find the liberal histories available from the Enlightenment that
embraced themes of greater equality between Europe and its colonies (4). He communicates this
history directly in later sections and assures the reader that they are a more modern way of
viewing this in comparison with appropriated histories, in this case, of India. The issue of a
modernism based on retained colonial ideas affects the communities perceived as being
‘outsiders’ and this book shows how European development models are “inadequate in helping
us to think through the various life practices”, in this case of India (5). Education has clearly
formed a significant part of the insufficient attempt to counter the separatism with colonized
nations. One of his most explicit case studies outlining the differences in current European and
external thinking is the power of the father over his child. He believes that “political authority in
this modernity was modelled on parental authority, which never ceased to be” and within this,
there is no death of parental authority within his personal community (231). Contrary to all that
has been said, Chakrabarty’s belief that “European thought is a gift to us all” resonates
particularly strongly with his overarching theme of educating historians to lead future studies
into viewing the interconnection of colonized and colonizers (255). This strikes at the heart of
his view that rather than forgetting history, cooperating in a postcolonial world is imperative to
previously accepted notion of global European models. Provincializing Europe accepts the role of
Europe in providing great thinkers, but places greater agency on the individual communities and
how their voice is more important. A clearly personal work, this relocation of European thinking
was timely in revealing the haunted legacy that colonial discourse had laid out and providing a
Bibliography
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference (Princeton: