Questions of Modernity

Contradictions of Modernity
The modern era has been uniquely productive of theory. Some theory claimed
uniformity despite human differences or unilinear progress in the face of cata-
strophic changes. Other theory was informed more deeply by the complexities
of history and recognition of cultural specificity. This series publishes books
that explore the problems of theorizing the modern in its manifold and some-
times contradictory forms and that examine the specific locations of theory
within the modern.
Edited by Craig Calhoun
New York University
Volume 11 Timothy Mitchell, editor, Questions of Modernity
Volume 10 Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver, Chaos and Governance
in the Modem World System
Volume 9 Francois Dosse, History of Structuralism, Volume 2: The Sign
Sets, 1967-Present
Volume 8 Francois Dosse, History of Structuralism, Volume 1: The Rising
Sign, 1945-1966
Volume 7 Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the
Search for Justice
Volume 6 Craig Calhoun and John McGowan, editors, Hannah Arendt
and the Meaning of Politics
Volume 5 Gerard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration,
Citizenship, and National Identity
Volume 4 John C. Torpey, Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent: The East
German Opposition and Its Legacy
Volume 3 T. M. S. Evens, Two Kinds of Rationality: Kibbutz Democracy
and Generational Conflict
Volume 2 Micheline R. Ishay, Internationalism and Its Betrayal
Volume 1 Johan Heilbron, The Rise of Social Theory
Questions of Modernity
Timothy Mitchell, Editor
Contradictions of Modernity, Volume 11
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Copyright 2000 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
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Questions of modernity / Timothy Mitchell, editor.
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Contents
Preface vii
Introduction
Timothy Mitchell xi
1. The Stage of Modernity
Timothy Mitchell 1
2. Two Poets and Death: On Civil and Political Society
in the Non-Christian World
Partha Chatterjee 35
3. Witness to Suffering: Domestic Cruelty and the Birth
of the Modern Subject in Bengal
Dipesh Chakrabarty 49
4. Modern Subjects: Egyptian Melodrama and
Postcolonial Difference
Lila Abu-Lughod 87
5. The Thin Line of Modernity: Some Moroccan Debates
on Subjectivity
Stefania Pandolfo 115
6. The Sovereignty of History: Culture and Modernity
in the Cinema of Satyajit Ray
Nicholas B. Dirks 148
7. The Making of Modernity: Gender and Time in
Indian Cinema
Veena Das 166
8. Body Politic in Colonial India
GyanPrakash 189
Contributors 223
Index 225
Preface
This book owes its writing to a conversation begun a decade ago,
when Lila Abu-Lughod and I decided to bring together two groups of
scholars working separately on new approaches to the making of
modernity outside the West. We came from the disciplines of history,
anthropology, and political science, and were often familiar with one
another's work. But one group specialized on the societies of South
Asia and the other on those of the Middle East, and the boundaries of
area studies kept us apart. Although our paths might cross at confer-
ences and professional meetings, we had no way to sustain a theoreti-
cal conversation. We decided to find a way to overcome these limits.
The pioneers of area studies, between the 19305 and 19608, had
hoped that the development of area studies would end another kind of
professional isolation, that of scholars working in what had recently
become the separate disciplines of the social sciences. They thought of
areas such as the Middle East or South Asia as single regions and cul-
tures, each providing a definable whole around which scholars from
the different disciplines could integrate their knowledge and develop a
comprehensive social theory. The study of non-Western regions would
also expose ideas developed in the study of modern Europe and North
America to a much larger testing ground, they thought, quickly reveal-
ing which concepts and theories were not of universal significance. In
vtt
viii Preface
both these ways, area studies would cleanse the disciplines of their
parochialism.
These hopes did not materialize, and it was area studies that came
to seem parochial and isolated. After we had begun our own discus-
sions, the Social Science Research Council and other bodies decided
to abandon their long support of area studies. They turned to more
general themes, whether the study of transnational processes affecting
many different world regions, or forms of explanation that claimed to
apply to any context. These approaches seemed to offer an alternative
route to a less parochial social theory.
This was not our goal. Our concern was not to deparochialize
Western history and social science, but ratherto echo an idea ex-
pressed by one of the contributors to this volume, Dipesh Chakrabarty
to rediscover the parochialism of the West. We were scholars for whom
social theory was reached through the imaginative worlds of particu-
lar communities, places, and histories. We were aware, of course, that
modern social theory claims to be a universal language and that the
history of the West is always written as the world's history. We also
knew that imperialism has given some truth to these claims, awarding
the forms and categories of Western modernity a global significance.
But we shared an interest in questioning this universalism. Our aim
was not to uncover an infinite variety of modernities, but to explore
some of the heterogeneity out of which this universalism is produced.
The making of modernity is said to involve a splittingof modern and
non-modern, West and non-West, rational and non-rational. Since this
splitting cannot be governed entirely by the categories that result from
it, perhaps it could reveal things that trouble those categories, or hap-
pen differently, or exceed their grasp. To examine such questions was
not the moment to abandon area studies, we felt, but to reformulate it.
Our efforts began after Lila Abu-Lughod had spent a year as a
Mellon Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where she participated
in the South Asia Seminar run by Carol Breckenridge, Arjun Appadurai,
David Ludden, and others. The following year we began talking with
Cyan Prakash at Princeton and with his help planned a workshop of
South Asian and Middle Eastern studies scholars, which we held in
Cairo in 1993, with support from the Social Science Research Council.
The discussions were fruitful enough that we decided to continue to
meet, calling our endeavor "Questions of Modernity" and bringing to-
gether a changing but overlapping group of scholars of the two regions
Preface ix
for further workshops, held at the Hagop Kevorkian Center at New
York University in 1996 and 1999. We were fortunate that in the same
years NYU agreed to a major rebuilding of its area programs, begin-
ning with Middle Eastern studies. Questions of Modernity provided us
with the model for a less insular approach to area studies. We thought
of the region of study not as a fixed geography and culture to be made
available to history and social science but as a source of engagements
and insights that offered an alternative imaginative terrain to the often
self-enclosed disciplines of the North American academy.
We received the enthusiastic collaboration of NYU's new chair of
Middle Eastern studies, Michael Gilsenan, and generous support from
the dean for the humanities, Thomas Bender. In the same period Toby
Volkman at the Ford Foundation launched a new program, "Crossing
Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies," intended to counteract the move
away from area studies among other organizations. The Foundation
awarded the Hagop Kevorkian Center a major grant to support our
new direction in area studies, including the most recent Questions of
Modernity conference. In the interim we also organized a graduate
student dissertation workshop with the University of Chicago, on the
initiative of Lisa Wedeen and with the help of Dipesh Chakrabarty
and Zachary Lockman and financial support from Chicago's Center
for the Study of Politics, History and Culture.
This book is based on some of the essays from the second
Questions of Modernity meeting. Besides the authors included here,
many other participants contributed papers and ideas at that and
other meetings. I especially want to thank Talal Asad, Khaled Fahmy,
Deniz Kandiyoti, Zach Lockman, Uday Mehta, Aamir Mufti, Afsaneh
Najmabadi, and Ted Swedenburg for their multiple contributions.
Others who shared in this project and deserve our thanks include
Soraya Altorki, Shahid Amin, Janaki Bakhle, Joel Beinin, Elliott Colla,
Jenine Abboushi Dallal, Val Daniel, Huri Islamoglu, Ayesha Jalal,
May Joseph, Jayati Lai, Huda Lutfi, Saba Mahmood, Cyan Pandey,
Pramod Parajuli, Anupama Rao, Amina Rashid, Martina Rieker,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Mohammed Tavakoli-Targhi.
I also want to thank those at the Hagop Kevorkian Center at
NYU who helped with our efforts, including the associate director,
Shiva Balaghi, William Carrick, Alice Diaz-Bonhomme, Wilson Jacob,
Kristine McNeil, and Ethel Brooks. I am also grateful for all the work
of the editorial staff at the University of Minnesota Press, including
x Preface
Carrie Mullen, Jennifer Moore, and Robin A. Moir, to the anonymous
reviewers for the press, and to my colleague Craig Calhoun for sup-
porting the book's publication.
My greatest debt is to the person with whom this project was first
conceived, Lila Abu-Lughod, who has shared in its shaping and orga-
nizing at every stage.
Timothy Mitchell
Rough Park, Cornwall
May 1999
Introduction
Timothy Mitchell
The essays in this book approach the question of modernity by taking
seriously the emergence of the modern outside the geography of the
West. Each of the essays examines the realization of modernity be-
yond Europe, exploring the appearance of particular forms of poli-
tics, sensibility, temporality, and selfhood in locations ranging from
nineteenth-century Bengal to contemporary Morocco. The purpose in
bringing them together is not to offer a more global history of the
modern. One of the characteristics of modernity has always been its
autocentric picture of itself as the expression of a universal certainty,
whether the certainty of human reason freed from particular tradi-
tions, or of technological power freed from the constraints of the natu-
ral world. So its history has always claimed to be a universal one, in
fact the only universal history. For this reason, however, it has also de-
pended on assigning a different and lesser significance to things deemed
purely local, non-Western, and lacking a universal expression. The
aim of this collection is to explore whether this dependence on such
non-universal, non-Western elements might provide, in a paradoxical
way, tools that can be borrowed to fashion a more complex, rigorous,
and heterogenous understanding of how the modern comes about.
In the opening chapter, "The Stage of Modernity," I connect the
European-centered cartography of modernity with the problem of its
xi
xii Timothy Mitchell
singular history. If the modern is inevitably associated with the rise and
expansion of the West, what significance can we assign to an increas-
ing awareness that its emergence was from the beginning a worldwide
phenomenon and that the modern was not produced from within
Europe alone? One long-standing and important answer to this prob-
lem has been to expand the narrative of modernization, or of capital-
ist development, by paying proper attention to its imperial dimension
and acknowledging the impact and contribution of regions beyond
Europe. Such approaches have offered a major correction to the limit-
ed geographical vision that still defines most writing on the modernity
of the West, including two decades of writing about what is now called
its postmodernity. However, expanding the history of modernity to
portray it as a global phenomenon inevitably tends to homogenize
other histories as aspects of the emergence of the West. The expanded
vision acknowledges the significance of forces and contexts outside the
European core. But their significance can be measured only in terms of
their contribution to the singular history of the modern.
More recent approaches to this problem have talked instead in
terms of "alternative modernities" or "multiple capitalisms." These
ways of thinking stress the variety of local, regional, and global forces
whose combination shapes the particular histories of capitalist moder-
nity, producing different versions in different places. Such formula-
tions provide a less Eurocentric way of acknowledging the importance
and variation of non-European developments. An increasing number
of studies of this sort, including those of several contributors to this
volume, have begun to reveal the complex and multiple origins of what
we too easily unify under the name of modernity. Yet the strength and
consequent appeal of this work has also become its potential weak-
ness. On the one hand, the language of alternative modernities can
imply an almost infinite play of possibilities, with no rigorous sense of
what, if anything, gives imperial modernity its phenomenal power of
replication and expansion. On the other hand, the vocabulary of alter-
natives can still imply an underlying and fundamentally singular
modernity, modified by local circumstances into a multiplicity of "cul-
tural" forms. It is only in reference to this implied generic that such
variations can be imagined and discussed.
My essay proposes that we talk neither of a singular modernity
that defines all other histories in its terms, nor of the easy pluralism of
alternative modernities. Instead, we should acknowledge the singu-
Introduction xiii
larity and universalism of the project of modernity, a universalism of
which imperialism is the most powerful expression and effective means;
and, at the same time, attend to a necessary feature of this universal-
ism that repeatedly makes its realization incomplete. Briefly, if the
logic and movement of historyor of capitalism, to use an equivalent
termcan be produced only by displacing and discounting what
remains heterogenous to it, then the latter plays the paradoxical but
unavoidable role of the "constitutive outside." Elements that appear
incompatible with what is modern, Western, or capitalist are system-
atically subordinated and marginalized, placed in a position outside
the unfolding of history. Yet in the very processes of their subordina-
tion and exclusion, it can be shown, such elements infiltrate and com-
promise that history. These elements cannot be referred back to any
unifying historical logic or any underlying potential defining the na-
ture of capitalist modernity, for it is only by their exclusion or subor-
dination that such a logic or potential can be realized. Yet such ele-
ments continually redirect, divert, and mutate the modernity they help
constitute.
To understand the force that this process of marginalization and
mutation can acquire, my essay discusses a process whose importance
to the constitution of capitalist modernity, I would argue, has still not
been adequately recognized. As a shorthand, I call this process repre-
sentation.
1
Representation does not refer here simply to the making of
images or meanings but to forms of social practice that set up in the
social architecture of the world what seems an absolute distinction be-
tween image (or meaning, or plan, or structure) and reality, and thus a
distinctive apprehension of the real. This effect of the real has been
generalized in modern social engineering and the management of na-
ture, in organized schooling and entertainment, in the military, legal,
and administrative disciplines of colonialism and nation-making, in
all the mundane forms of invigilation and self-presentation that shape
the lives of modern subjects, and, quite pervasively, in the organiza-
tion of production and the market. In sphere after sphere of social life,
an immediacy of the really real is promised by what appears in con-
trast to be the mere abstractions of structure, subjectivity, text, plan,
or idea.
My argument, which I recapitulate here only in part, is that this
constitution of the modern as the world-as-picture, in the expanded
sense just outlined, is the source of modernity's enormous capacity for
xiv Timothy Mitchell
replication and expansion, and at the same time the origin of its insta-
bility, the source of the liability that opens it up to rearticulation and
displacement. No representation can ever match its original, especially
when the original exists only as something promised by a multiplicity
of other imitations and repetitions. Every act of staging or representa-
tion is open to the possibility of misrepresentation. An image or simu-
lation functions by its subtle difference from what it claims to simu-
late or portray, even if the difference is no more than the time-lag
between repetitions. Every performance of the modern is the produc-
ing of this difference, and each such difference represents the possi-
bility of some shift, displacement, or contamination. If modernity is
defined by its claim to universality, this always remains an impossible
universal. Each staging of the modern must be arranged to produce
the global history of modernity, yet each requires those forms of dif-
ference that introduce the possibility of a discrepancy, that return to
undermine its unity and identity. Modernity then becomes the unsuit-
able yet unavoidable name for these discrepant histories.
The other essays in this book do not necessarily share the specific
direction of this argument. They have in common, however, a concern
with the forms of difference and discrepancy that indicate a more
complex genealogy of the modern. One of the most important ex-
plorations of these forms of difference has been the work of Partha
Chatterjee. His studies of the genealogy of nationalism in colonial
India reveal the rather different terms in which the modern versus the
non-modern was produced in the colonial context.
2
In the case of
India, he has shown, a Westernized colonial elite was able to turn
modernizing discourse against the civilizing prerogatives of a colonial
power, by constructing an Indian "tradition" that was not open to
colonization. This traditional culture was not the pure tradition posit-
ed by modernist discourses. It was a contramodernity produced by an
alternative indexing and defining of the categories of modern and tra-
ditional. A different deployment of the difference that produces the
categories of modernity gave rise to what appeared to the colonial
power as a confused and incomplete attempt to imitate European
modernity but which Chatterjee suggests we see in terms of the par-
ticular configurations of power that produced the colonial modern.
Chatterjee develops and refines these issues in his contribution to
this volume (see chapter z). He takes up the theme of civil society, a
popular motif in recent discussions of the problem of democracy in
Introduction xv
the non-West. In current debates about democratization, the weakness
or absence of certain Western procedural forms and institutions in
many non-Western political systems is ascribed to the failure to devel-
op a civil society. The term refers to a set of intellectual habits and col-
lective practices that inculcate the rules and attitudes required for
building the larger institutions of representative democracy. Chatterjee
argues that in colonial and postcolonial India there did emerge a
Westernized, liberal sphere of rule-governed intellectual life, which
one can describe as civil society. However, the shape of this sphere was
given by its distinction not from an illiberal "traditional society," as
colonial and other European discourses would suppose, but from an-
other sphere for which he proposes we reintroduce the label "political
society."
Composed of mass political parties, social movements, and non-
party political formations, political society constitutes a zone of media-
tions between the state and the population, in which the rules and
procedures of civil society are not necessarily followed. Indeed, part of
the impetus shaping the emergence of political society was the desire
of the liberal, nationalist elite to avoid being trapped within the nar-
row sphere of a Westernized civil society and to appeal in the nation-
alist struggle to a much broader population. This required a more
fluid realm of maneuvers, resistances, and appropriations, includ-
ing appropriations of "the traditional." Chatterjee proposes that we
should understand the emergence of a political society distinct from
the realm of civil society as revealing the attempt to create forms of
modern community and democracy that cannot be thought by the so-
cial categories of the secularized Christian world.
The persistence of what appear as traditional social forms has
been examined from another angle in the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty,
who is particularly concerned with the way such forces have the ability
to exceed the terms of modernity's representation of the non-modern.
This excess often appears in the form of the traditional coexisting
alongside the modern. Chakrabarty has examined one kind of appar-
ent coexistence in a widely known essay on the emergence of mod-
ern domesticity in British-ruled Bengal.
3
During the colonial period,
the development of the civil-political sphere (discussed in Partha Chat-
terjee's essay) required the definition of a contrasting non-public sphere
of personal life and domestic relationships. Public debates of the period
reveal two contradictory ways of interpreting the relationship between
xvi Timothy Mitchell
these two spheres. One set of narratives subordinates the domestic to
the public, portraying civil-political life as the sphere in which person-
al happiness and moral improvement are to be found. But other ac-
counts are critical of the work-discipline and political compulsions of
the public sphere and celebrate the different temporality and ethics of
the domestic world, whose rhythms are based on the cycles of Hindu
rituals and the proper patterns of resting, working, the taking of meals,
and meditation.
How does one make sense of these "non-modern" elements co-
existing and reconfirmed in the face of capitalist modernity? A con-
ventional account, Chakrabarty suggests, would treat the non-modern
elements as no more than residuals, fragments of a past that cannot be
relinquished only because Bengal's transition to modernity is incom-
plete, or has happened so rapidly that different phases have been tele-
scoped together and therefore overlap rather than succeed one anoth-
er. This is the inevitable analysis of modernizing approaches, which
must gather all the different histories of colonialism into a singular
narrative of the coming of modernity. They can deal with the non-
modern only as the absence of modernity, only as forms that lack the
discipline, rationality, and abstraction of the modern order of things
and therefore, since they are defined by what they are not, as essential-
ly similar to non-modern forms everywhere else. It is not sufficient,
Chakrabarty adds, to explain these forms as the "invention of tradi-
tion" or through the idea of the "modernity of tradition." These in-
vocations of the restored, contrived, or resistant powers of a tradition
accept the notion that there is a universal narrative of modernity,
against which local variations can be measured. The alternative would
be to acknowledge that modernity "is constituted by tensions that re-
late to each other asymptomatically," so that there cannot be "any
one unitary history of its becoming."
4
To explore the possibility of a heterogenous account of the birth
of colonial modernity is the intention of Chakrabarty's contribution to
this volume. His aim, recalling Foucault's famous essay on Nietzsche, is
"to see 'birth' as genealogy and not a clear-cut point of origin, to make
visible as Nietzsche said the otherness of the ape that always gets in
the way of any attempt to trace human descent directly from God."
5
His essay explores the birth of the modern subject in colonial Bengal,
through an analysis of the representation and self-representation of
the Hindu widow. In colonial discourse the widow is a prominent fig-
Introduction xvii
ure representing the power of tradition, epitomized in the behavior of
the sati, who immolates herself on the pyre of her dead husband.
Legal reform became preoccupied with this symbol of victimhood and
oppression. This representation established tradition as the simple
negative of modernity, contrasting the freedom of the modern subject
to the traditional woman bound by the past, whom the law can liber-
ate and thus make modern. The reformist discourse on widowhood
coexisted, however, with a literary genre in which the widow came to
stand for the modern, expressivist subject. In a series of turn-of-the-
century Bengali novels, the widow's unrecognized desire, which social
custom denies her the opportunity to express, comes to represent the
self-expression of the modern subject.
At a first reading, this subjectivity seems to be staged in terms
very similar to those that define the representation of the bourgeois
individual of modern Europe. Subjectivity is presented as a struggle
between reason and passion. Reason is a shared, and therefore public,
faculty, which attempts to discipline and educate the self, whereas pas-
sion or desire is private, interior, and thus the source of individuality
and of the difference from one person to the next. Yet these appar-
ent similarities conceal important differences. In the first place, the
struggle between reason and passion is staged around questions about
the purity of body, questions drawing on local debates that reach back
to elements of Vedantic philosophy and Bengali poetic tradition. The
modern subject emerges not through the simple adoption of European
categories of thought but through a continuous process of cultural
translation. Second, the faculty of reason that defines the modern sub-
ject is understood in these writings not as a generalized and abstract
intelligence but as a kind of worldly common sense about the duties
of the householder in the context of an extended family. This larger
context of obligation-in-kinship is very different from, for example,
the triangular struggle of mother-father-child theorized and popular-
ized by Freud. In the Freudian understanding, the nuclear unit re-
places the extended kin group, and sexuality is invented as the domain
that mediates between physical desire and its psychological manage-
ment. The theory of the private management or "repression" of de-
sires that cannot be accommodated to the laws of public life becomes
critical, as Foucault has shown, to the birth of the modern European
subject, helping to maintain the new public and private spheres in
alignment with one another. In the Bengali case the same alignment
xviii Timothy Mitchell
does not occur, leaving open alternative sources of collective and indi-
vidual selfhood.
By attending to such differences in the constitution of what he
calls "the Bengali-modern," Chakrabarty suggests that we can con-
ceive of the modern collective subject as "a mobile point on something
like a relay network in which many different subject-positions and
even non-bourgeois, non-individualistic practices of subjectivity inter-
sected." Thus the public sphere in Bengal opened up a space for a
modern subject defined in part through extended kinship, making
room for "practices of the self that call us to other ways of being civil
and humane." European-modern practices were present at the colo-
nial birth of the modern subject, and colonialism has made European
narratives a global heritage that inevitably structures any subsequent
account of this modernity. Yet the heterogenous genealogy of the
Bengali-modern leaves "an intellectually unmanageable excess" when
approached with the secular analysis of European social thought.
A theme that emerges from studies of this kind is that in the produc-
tion of modernity, the hegemony of the modern over what it displaces
as "traditional" is never complete. As a result, modernizing forces
continuously reappropriate elements that have been categorized as
non-modern, such as religious elements, in order to produce their own
effectiveness. This question of modernizing religion has been explored
extensively in the work of Talal Asad.
6
The modernization of religion
is said to require its separation from politics, the economy, and scien-
tific knowledge and its placing in a separate sphere that the law de-
fines as private. But this "secularization," Asad argues, has never in
practice separated religion from politics or other social spheres. The
meaning of the term secular, moreover, is not something self-evident
or universal. The concept emerged as part of the modern development
of Christianity and defines not only the non-religious sphere but also
the concept of religion. Religion is thus a modern and originally
Christian category. It was formed through changes not in the things
people believed but in the ways their lives were disciplined, both by
methods of self-discipline and by the emergence of modern collective
discipline in such forms as schooling and the law.
7
This view of secularization contributes to alternative understand-
ings of the production of colonial modernity. In the case of nineteenth-
century Egypt, for example, Asad proposes that we should trace the
Introduction xix
process that created religion in relation to the emergence of colonial
governmentality, emphasizing the importance of the institution of secu-
lar law with its highly mobile powers of discipline. Legal and other
forms of modernization did not encounter a traditional sphere of reli-
gion but rather constructed the realm of religion, together with the
problem of its secularization, as part of the process of instituting new
forms of discipline and methods of governance. This approach offers
an alternative way of seeing the apparent failures of secularization in
contemporary politics. Such failures do not indicate the inability of
modern, secular politics to delimit the traditional powers of religion.
They show that producing a colonial modernity requires the produc-
tion of groups and forces designated as non-modern yet able to con-
test the hegemony of the modernist politics that called for them.
8
Lila Abu-Lughod's essay in this volume (chapter 4) also deals in
part with the question of secularism, in a study of the construction of
modern national subjects in contemporary Egypt. She examines this
topic through a study of television dramas and their widely popular
reception among different audiences. Treating the everyday lives and
dilemmas of common citizens, focusing on what appears as their
heightened emotionality, and always reaching a denouement that of-
fers an unambiguous moral resolution, the television serials appear to
share the characteristic conventions of modern melodrama. Abu-
Lughod refers to Peter Brooks's argument that the melodramatic imagi-
nation played a central role in European modernity, providing a "post-
sacred era" with a means of revealing the moral order in quotidian
experience. For this reason, Brooks views melodrama as "the central
fact of the modern sensibility."
9
But if this characterization of melo-
drama and the modern is useful for understanding nineteenth-century
Europe, what explains the power and popularity of a particular kind
of melodrama in contemporary Egypt, where the modern era is, among
other differences, not unambiguously a post-sacred one?
Abu-Lughod argues that television melodrama in Egypt can in-
deed be seen as a technology for the production of new kinds of sensi-
bility, and thus new kinds of selves. But it is a technology caught up in
a different configuration of political projects and imaginative alter-
natives than those that may have defined the melodramatic imagina-
tion of nineteenth-century Europe. On the one hand, she shows, the
television programs reflect the agendas and assumptions of the na-
tionalist intellectuals who write and produce them. These intellectuals
xx Timothy Mitchell
understand their role in relation to a post-independence project of
nation-building, and they consciously attempt to use television drama
to educate what they see as a less enlightened public and to inculcate
a particular moral and political sensibility. On the other hand, Abu-
Lughod argues, in seeking to develop this sensibility, the melodramatic
genre employs a distinctive quality of emotionality and a way of tell-
ing personal life-stories that may be more significant in the shaping
of personhood and sensibility than the producers' overt educational
agendas.
The Egyptian television serials draw partly on a prior tradition of
theater, film, and song, but these also cross-reference other expressive
forms, such as epic poetry, laments, and folk stories. Such popular
genres often expressed strong emotion, but emotion was not con-
structed as the pervasive interior state of a feeling subject. Sentiment
in other genres, Abu-Lughod argues, was attached to specific contexts
and took forms appropriate to that context and genre. In contrast, the
sentiments of television melodrama cover a wide emotional range and
are located in the quotidian, the personal, and the domestic. In narrat-
ing the lives of their protagonists in such terms, the serials locate emo-
tionality in the sphere of everyday personal relations and construct the
modern subject as a psychosocial being shaped and given meaning by
this conflicted inner world.
Television drama, however, is not the only social force shaping a
modern sense of personhood. In ethnographic studies of particular in-
dividuals, Abu-Lughod explores how the kinds of self-fashioning en-
couraged by the conventions of melodrama interact with other social
forms, such as the importance of kinship in constructing and main-
taining a social standing, and the new forms of women's piety and
self-discipline developed through an increased involvement in reli-
gious devotion. Such social forces offer overlapping and sometimes al-
ternative technologies of the self. These pull in a variety of directions,
Abu-Lughod concludes, offering more complex trajectories than the
singular story of modernity told on the basis of European history.
Several other essays in this book examine the heterogenous social
forms and complex modernity that unilinear histories of the modern
disavow. As with the preceding chapters, these contributions move be-
tween what we describe nowadays as two distinct world regions, the
Middle East and South Asia. Kept apart by the conventional bound-
Introduction xxi
aries of academic area studies and, to a lesser extent, by the national
and regional forms of contemporary state politics, these regions share
interlocking histories both of imperialism and earlier patterns of long-
distance trade, intellectual exchange, and Islamicate rulean inter-
locking past and contemporary disjuncture that are juxtaposed in
Amitav Ghosh's imaginative historical-ethnographic exploration, In
an Antique Land.
10
The purpose in bringing together in this book the
two regions is not to suggest any simple sociological comparison be-
tween them but rather to emphasize the reasons for avoiding such
comparison. Comparisons of this sort, once the great aim of studies of
modernization, require one first to establish the nature of modernity
in general, as a standard against which the variations among different
world regions could be measured. Since, as we argue here, there is no
simple modernization in general, this standard was always by default
the history of the West. Even the critics of modernization theory, in ar-
guing that the peripheral position of the non-West prevented it from
repeating the history of the West, still represented the non-West in
terms of its difference from the West, and thus within the West's uni-
versalizing narrative.
Stefania Pandolfo's essay, "The Thin Line of Modernity: Some
Moroccan Debates on Subjectivity," like those by Abu-Lughod and
Chakrabarty, deals with the construction of the modern subject, in
this case connecting subjecthood to the question of memory and dif-
fering relationships to the past (see chapter 5). She begins by con-
trasting the different constructions of time in Abdullah Laroui's writ-
ing on the crisis of the Arab intellectual and Driss Chrai'bi's novel The
Simple Past. For Laroui, a leading historian and intellectual of post-
independence Morocco, the past is available only as the traumatic
memory of colonization or the inauthentic neo-traditionalism of post-
colonial politics. Nothing less than a complete effacing of these pasts
can enable the emergence of a modern, authentic self, defined by the
self-mastery of a historical consciousness located unambiguously in
the present. In Chrai'bi's novel, one of the major works of modern
North African fiction, no such "simple present" is available. The
novel explores a different sense of historical memory, in which the
present is experienced as what Chra'ibi calls "a thin line" between
tradition and modernity, the interstitial space that marks the cut or
break between the two, neither disavowing one nor wholly located in
the other.
xxii Timothy Mitchell
Pandolfo uses these alternative constructions of the relation be-
tween past and present to explore a practical encounter with the dis-
crepant temporalities of modernity. She examines the problems con-
fronting Moroccan psychiatrists and psychoanalysts whose patients,
while acknowledging the efficacy of modern psychiatry, at the same
time persistently resort to the traditional therapies of spirit possession,
magic, and bewitchment. These therapies, Pandolfo suggests, might be
understood as techniques for displacing the self to another scene,
where the self appears as an other and the symbolic order can be rene-
gotiated. As such, there seems to be, at least in the abstract, an ethical
possibility of a dialogue between popular therapies and modern psy-
chiatry. But like Laroui, and echoing the attitudes and practices of the
earlier French colonial health administrators and ethnologists, the
psychiatrists and psychoanalysts insist that traditional forms are in-
commensurable with the modern. They argue in Lacanian terms that
such therapies work upon the imaginary alone and never touch the
symbolic order, where the modern, responsible subject is constituted.
Pandolfo does not argue that these views are simply mistaken and that
the worlds of patient and psychiatrist are commensurable and ought
to result in a dialogue. Rather, drawing on her work in a public psy-
chiatric hospital, she suggests that the psychiatrists' abstract intellec-
tual positions are subverted in the actual encounter with patients.
Presenting their symptoms in the idiom of popular therapies, patients
invoke a set of forces, understandings, and senses of community to
which the modern psychiatrist no longer has access. Yet this loss, as
in Chrai'bi's novel, haunts the modern sensibility. The force of their
patients' words, familiar yet strange, remote yet secretly close, draws
them into this interstitial place of loss, in which the possibility of alter-
native forms of subjecthood is posed.
The complexity and variety of relationships between past and
presentand of constructions of the subjectare also explored in the
essays here by Nick Dirks (chapter 6) and Veena Das (chapter 7). Ex-
amining representations of India's recent political past, Dirks suggests
that Indian nationalist and even post-nationalist discourse has inherit-
ed from British colonial accounts an almost entirely negative image of
India's recent past, a world of corrupt local despotisms and extrava-
gant princely power. As with the work of Laroui on the colonial his-
tory of the Arab world, examined in Pandolfo's essay, there is a sense
that nothing of value can be recuperated from this defeated political
Introduction xxiii
order, engendering a certain intellectual embarrassment toward the im-
mediate past, at least in its political aspects. When nationalism sought
an Indian "tradition" to defend and celebrate, it usually imagined a
more ancient past rediscovered through sacred and literary themes,
rather than the political order compromised and overcome by colo-
nialism. Indian postcolonial theory, Dirks argues, has sometimes in-
herited these positions and has not always been attuned to the com-
plexity with which the past is constructed or disowned.
Dirks explores a more ambiguous representation of the old order
in two of the films of Satyajit Ray, The Music Room and The Chess
Players. Ray's evocation of the world of irresponsible feudal land-
owners and incompetent local kingship can be interpreted as an am-
bivalent one, he argues. The ambivalence reflects an attempt to navi-
gate a contradictory position between tradition and modernity rather
than a simple nostalgia for or renouncing of the past. Dirks invokes
Bataille to suggest that the obsession of Ray's feudal heroes with self-
destructive consumption and conspicuous displays can be read as in-
dicating not the simple impotence and decay of tradition in the face of
the modern world but as a deliberate transgression against capitalist
modernity's naturalization of self-interest, calculation, and reason. The
effect of this different representation of tradition, Dirks suggests, is to
rework the past as a means of refusing the "self-legitimating masquer-
ades" of colonial order and capitalist economy. He concludes that
such reworkings, by writing histories that are positioned against in-
herited colonial categories, offer an essential means for opening up the
ambivalent potential of the political present.
The essay by Veena Das, "The Making of Modernity: Gender and
Time in Indian Cinema," places in question the conventional idea that
in the passage from tradition to modernity the nature of time under-
goes a simple transformation, from a conception of time as cyclical to
the idea of linear time. Exploring different representations of time in
Indian cinema, she argues that Indian modernity is marked by mul-
tiple ways of constituting the relationship between the present and its
pasts. There is no single construction of time that defines the experi-
ence of modernity, and thus there is more than one possible way of
representing and relating to the past.
Since cinema does not portray time overtly but represents it
through the differing construction of its characters, these multiple
temporalities correspond to different ways of fabricating the self, Das
xxiv Timothy Mitchell
suggests, and in particular to different constructions of masculinity.
Like a number of other scholars, she proposes that gender provides a
critical field in which struggles over modernity are fought out. And
like Abu-Lughod, she believes that the media, in this case the medium
of film, play a critical role in shaping the transformation of the politi-
cal subject and the building of the nation, providing "a form through
which the nation produces its autobiography."
Thus, in Kamal Amrohi's 1949 film Mahal (Palace), the male pro-
tagonist's impossible quest for a woman-spirit, whom he is unable to
see or know except in the forms in which he fantasizes her, provides
an allegory for a male desire for an inner space, as a protection against
the wounds of modernity. This space, imagined as a female spirit re-
turned from another age, suggests an impossible link to the past. The
past is a feminized interior world, and for the male protagonist of
Indian modernity to recover this world, Das suggests, the woman
must remain mute and unable to engineer her own identity. In other
cinematic works the gendered past is constructed differently, for ex-
ample, as a decayed "past present" for which the subject experiences a
fierce nostalgia yet which must be violently renounced out of fidelity
to the present; or as a world of nature, from which modernity departs
as a journey of the self into an unknown future.
Das emphasizes how the multiple registers of cinematic represen-
tation, in which dialogue, movement, camera angle, and music can tell
different stories, make possible disjunctive images that offset and some-
times contradict one another. Instead of a neat account of tradition
and modernity, with determined roles for women in relation to men,
cinema offers a medium in which these categories are continually ne-
gotiated and displaced.
This question of the renegotiation and dislocation of the cate-
gories of colonial modernity is taken up from a different angle in the
final essay of this book (chapter 8). There, Cyan Prakash analyzes the
deployment of modern medical science in colonial India. Colonization
developed, he argues, often well ahead of their development in the
metropole, the new methods of biopolitics, which take as their con-
cern the life and health of the population. To this end the colonial
state introduced a series of institutions and procedures concerned
with the physical condition of its subjects' bodies. Public health regu-
lations and new therapeutics made the body visible to political au-
thority and subject to its examination. Such innovations played a role
Introduction xxv
in producing Indians as political subjects. The role differed from that
of similar biopolitical procedures that Foucault analyzes in northern
Europe, Prakash argues, and was perhaps more significant. In Europe,
the large-scale operations of biopower functioned alongside small-
scale, "capillary" forms of power that encouraged the production of
modern, self-disciplining political subjects. The biopolitical manage-
ment of the bodies of the population coexisted and competed with the
sphere of autonomous interest-bearing subjects formed by the institu-
tions of modern discipline. In the colonial state, as we have already
seen in Chatterjee's essay, this "civil society" was much weaker and
sometimes absent. However, this weakness or absence was not a re-
strictive liability, Prakash argues, but a generative dislocation.
The aim of colonial sanitary and medical procedures was, as it
were, to modernize the body and thus make it healthy and productive,
by cleansing it of indigenous habits and diseases. It follows that the
body could emerge as a political object only from a space of differ-
ence, the same fissured space that Pandolfo's essay examines between
modern psychiatry in Morocco and local therapeutics. In an earlier
colonial period, before the mid-nineteenth century, European medi-
cine in India had often drawn upon local medical knowledge and
practice. But in the later part of the century, the development of
biopower demanded the organization of medical procedures based
upon an absolute distinction between Western medicine and local
practice, between the modern and the traditional, between science and
superstition. Once again, however, this differentiation must be under-
stood as a process of renegotiation and translation, for in invoking the
non-modern to perform its authority, the modern is always open to
contagion, to dissemination. In particular, it opened up the space for
an Indian nationalist elite to oppose colonial governmentality with a
specifically "Indian" understanding of the body and mode of gover-
nance, invoking ayurvedic and yunani medical traditions. Since it was
intervening in a field shaped by colonial governmentalization, how-
ever, this opposition was not an external act of negation but rather a
process of reappropriation and relocation, operating "upon the very
body that colonial governmentality made available." The result was
what Prakash calls a disjunctive modernity, fabricated upon the fis-
sure that appears to separate the Western and the native, the modern
and the traditional, its authority perpetually unstable.
The arguments of these essays are too many to recapitulate in a
xxvi Timothy Mitchell
short introduction, and the reader should be careful not to take these
summaries as an adequate account. Nevertheless, certain common
themes and approaches do emerge. First, each author moves the focus
away from the general history of modernity in South Asia and the
Middle East, to look at particular examples of the local articulation of
modernity, the way the modern is staged and performed. This focus
enables the account to break with the historical narrative that always
locates the origins of modernity in the West and represents the non-
West only in terms of its efforts to copy or resist an imported, second-
hand modernity. Staging the modern has always required the non-
modern, the space of colonial difference. Second, concentrating on the
local articulation and dissemination of modernity means paying less
attention to the grand designs of the colonial or modernizing state and
more attention to the myriad local sites where the modern is realized
and continually translated, in its articulation with and production of
the non-modern. Third, the categories and oppositions that are rene-
gotiated in these sites produce particular transformations shaped by
specific fields of force. Such local dislocations can represent points of
weakness, where the strategies of modernity are renegotiated, its bi-
nary oppositions displaced, and its apparently fixed and overarching
identities disturbed.
Notes
1. See Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, znd ed. (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1991).
2. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993),
an
^The Nation and
Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1994)-
3. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public
Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal," in Subaltern Studies VIII, ed. David Arnold
and David Hardiman (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 50-88; reprinted in
Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and
Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 373-405.
4. Chakrabarty, "The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity," 81.
5. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Witness to Suffering: Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of
the Modern Subject in Bengal," this volume, ch. 3, citing Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1977), 139-84.
6. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Chris-
tianity and Islam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
7. Ibid. Similar arguments have been made in relation to South Asia by Spivak and
Introduction xxvii
Chatterjee, among others. Thus Spivak writes, "Even 'the secular' carries upon its exer-
gue the history of a 'world' facing a specific 'ecclesia,' that inscription now effaced into
the universal name of an enlightened world that has sublated religion. Assimilated poly-
theist excolonials were brought up to presuppose that the European 'secular' imagining
of ethics, which has not lost touch with its God even in His Death, is the only space, of
critique or dogma" (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Not Virgin Enough to Say That
[S]he Occupies the Place of the Other," Cardozo Law Review 13, no. 4 [December
1991], reprinted in Outside in the Teaching Machine [New York: Routledge, 1993],
173). See also Partha Chatterjee, "Religious Minorities and the Secular State: Reflec-
tions on an Indian Impasse," Public Culture 8, no. i (1995): 11-39.
8. Talal Asad, "Modernizing Religion and the Law in Nineteenth-Century Egypt,"
communication presented at the conference "Questions of Modernity," New York
University, April 1997.
9. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1976), 15, zi.
10. Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (New York: Vintage, 1994).
This page intentionally left blank
One
The Stage of Modernity
Timothy Mitchell
Our sense of ourselves as modern, of our time as the era of modernity, is
today open to two kinds of question. One is the now familiar debate
about whether modernity is a stage of history through which we have al-
ready passed. The global mobility of finance, the world-encircling webs
of image-making, the contingency of social identities, and the collapse of
emancipatory visions have produced in recent decades an increasing
confidence that modernity has given way to a new condition. The name
it is given, the postmodern, identifies it only in terms of the stage it
claims to move beyond. But analyses of postmodernism have ignored
another kind of question about modernity, and in this respect have in-
herited and passed on some very modern ways of understanding the
world. The second question is concerned not with the passing of moder-
nity but with its placing, not with a new stage of history but with how
history itself is staged. Modernity has always been associated with a cer-
tain place. In many uses, the modern is just a synonym for the West (or
in more recent writings, the North). Modernization continues to be
commonly understood as a process begun and finished in Europe, from
where it has been exported across ever-expanding regions of the non-
West. The destiny of those regions has been to mimic, never quite suc-
cessfully, the history already performed by the West. To become modern,
it is still said, or today to become postmodern, is to act like the West.
1
2 Timothy Mitchell
Locating the origins of capitalist modernity entirely within the
West has always been open to question. Marx saw the "rosy dawn" of
capitalism not in England or the Netherlands but in the production,
trade, and finance of the colonial system.
1
The Egyptian economist
Samir Amin pioneered the study of capitalism "on a world scale," ar-
guing that conditions in the periphery represent not an earlier stage of
development but an equally modern consequence of the continuous
"structural adjustment" (Amin's 1957 phrase) to which societies out-
side the West have been subjected.
2
Wallerstein traced the beginnings
of this world-system to the transformation of a pattern of trade (from
luxuries to essentials) that was already global. A proper image of its
development, therefore, was "not of a small core adding on outer lay-
ers but of a thin outer framework gradually filling in a dense inner
network."
3
More recently, Janet Abu-Lughod has shown how this
global network operated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
long before the rise of Europe, while Andre Gunder Frank presents
evidence that Europe continued to be peripheral to an Asian-centered
world economy until the mid-eighteenth century or even the start of
the nineteenth.
4
These more global pictures make possible a less Eurocentric ac-
count of the formation of the European modern. If modernity had
its origins in reticulations of exchange and production encircling the
world, then it was a creation not of the West but of an interaction be-
tween West and non-West. The sites of this interaction were as likely
to lie in the East Indies, the Ottoman Empire, or the Caribbean as in
England, the Netherlands, or France. Presenting what he admitted
might be "a topsy-turvy view of the West," to give one example,
Sidney Mintz argued that modern methods of industrial organization
were developed first not for making textiles in Manchester but sugar
in the Caribbean. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sugar produc-
tion demanded strict labor discipline, careful scheduling and time-
consciousness, and the division of labor into work units by age, skill,
and gender, to an extent as yet unknown in mainland Europe.
5
The
discipline and coordination, as a historian of French colonial slavery
remarks, made this "a new type of work, an element of social revolu-
tion."
6
Another study of capitalism's Caribbean origins argues that
the very distances involved in colonial trade caused the development
of the modern, bureaucratic supervision of labor, on ships and in port
cities, that enabled finance capital to extract surplus value.
7
And turn-
The Stage of Modernity 3
ing from the supervisors to the slaves, Paul Gilroy suggests we see the
slave ships as "the living means" for articulating the new modes of po-
litical dissent and cultural production that he calls the Black Atlantic.
Getting on board, as it were, "promises a means to reconceptualize
the orthodox relationship between modernity and what passes for its
prehistory."
8
Beyond the constitutive role of slavery, the sugar plantation, and
the shipping industry, many other forms of social organization and
cultural production that, since Discipline and Punish, we have come
to consider as important as wage labor and the factory system in the
emergence of European modernity were first developed well beyond
the northern Europe of Michel Foucault's analyses.
9
The principle of
self-monitoring embodied in Bentham's Panopticon was designed by
his brother Samuel while assisting Russia's colonization of Ottoman
territory, while monitorial schooling was invented in early nineteenth-
century Bengal.
10
The emergence of "the population" as the primary
object of governmental power, as Partha Chatterjee notes in his essay
in this volume, and certainly the invention of "culture" as the features
embodying the identity of a population group, probably first occurred
in the colonization of non-European regions.
11
Uday Mehta shows
that India played a sustained role in the theoretical imagination of
nineteenth-century British liberalism (and in its authors' careers), ex-
posing it to a constitutive ambivalence.
12
The cultural field we know
as English literature was constructed as a curriculum and tool of char-
acter formation in colonial India before its appearance in England.
13
Colonial medicine, as Cyan Prakash examines in his chapter to this
book, pioneered the extended governmental control of the body.
14
The methods of managing persons, self-identities, space, and move-
ment that Foucault presents as essential to the formation of European
modernity in many cases came to Europe from its encounter with what
lay beyond.
To see modernity as a product not of the West but of its interac-
tion with the non-West still leaves a problem. It assumes the existence
of the West and its exterior, long before the world's identities had been
divided into this neat, European-centered dualism. It might be better
to propose that it was in the building of slave factories in Martinique,
prisons in the Crimea, and schools in Calcutta that the decisive nature
of the distinction between European and non-European was fixed.
Edward Said's Orientalism stands as the most powerful account of how
4 Timothy Mitchell
Europe's sense of cultural identity was constructed in the business of
colonizing and getting rich overseas.
15
Ann Stoler has argued that
Dutch settlers in the East Indies, anxious to secure their identity in
relation both to those of mixed blood and to poor whites, developed
a new image of themselves as European. This identity prefigured the
emergence of a bourgeois, European sense of self in the metropole and
was subsequently imported into the Netherlands under the influence
of colonial developments.
16
Similarly, the importance of Benedict
Anderson's landmark study of nationalism lies in showing not so
much that modern collective identities are constructs of the imagina-
tion but that the most important of these imaginings, territorial na-
tionalism, was first elaborated not, as was always assumed, in Europe
but in the Creole communities of the Caribbean and South America.
Creoles were those local-born "whites" whose displacement overseas
meant they could never quite be Europeans yet who feared the con-
tamination of Indian, Negro, or mestizo identities. In such mixing of
populations lay the origins of the desire to fix political identity in
the racial categories of modern nationalism.
17
White and non-white,
European and non-European, West and non-West, were identities
often elaborated abroad and only later, like nationalism itself, brought
to Europe.
Even when the term "nationalism" came into currency in Europe,
at least in English, it appeared only after the spread of the term "inter-
national" and was coined by an anticolonial movement. The idea of
"the international" was popularized in London in 1862., when the
world exhibition of that year was named the Great International
Exhibition. The new word evoked the global order of imperialism that
the exhibition was intended to represent. A delegation of Parisian
workers sent to the exhibition met with London trade unionists and
borrowed the new word, forming the Working Men's International
Association under the leadership of Karl Marx.
18
The word "national-
ism" appeared two decades later, introduced by the Irish Nationalist
party as it launched the struggle against British colonialism.
19
The tra-
jectory of the term followed the earlier itinerary of its sister term "lib-
eralism," which was also coined on the continent's colonized periph-
ery, in the latter case in the Spanish rising against French occupation
during the Napoleonic wars. The periphery, in these matters, as Perry
Anderson remarks, "pioneered the terms of metropolitan advance."
20
Such questions about the role of the periphery (an increasingly in-
The Stage of Modernity 5
appropriate term) in the genealogy of modernity have shown that we
need to reexamine much of the critical writing on the European mod-
ern that has shaped our thinking about its passing. The Postmodern
Condition, Jean-Francois Lyotard's seminal essay, allows no place for
the non-West in the defining of modernity and hence in the appear-
ance of the postmodern.
21
Jean Baudrillard's account of the historical
passage from the age of production and reproduction to the age of
simulation has the same narrowness.
22
David Harvey's more broadly
conceived work, The Condition of Postmodernity, makes occasional
reference to imperialism and its crises but pays no direct attention to
the world beyond the West, and the same is true of Jameson's com-
manding essay on the cultural logic of late capitalism.
23
This logic, ac-
cording to Jameson, represents a new, globalized form of capitalism,
in which all "enclaves of precapitalist organization" have been swept
away, including the peasantry and other non-Western "residues."
24
Thus the non-West appears in such writing only at the point of its dis-
appearance, when finally "everything has reached the same hour on
the great clock of development."
25
In the work of Foucault, the ab-
sence of the larger world is even more striking. His genealogies of
modern methods of knowledge, power, and selfhood provide no ac-
count of how France and northern Europe came to be defined as
modernity's location. Despite his frequent interest in how the spacing
of social practice can be the source of forms of power, his writing only
reinforces our sense that the place of modernity is to be taken for
granted.
This limitation of Foucault is especially marked in his genealogy
of that emblem of modernity, the bourgeois individual. Stoler's impor-
tant study of Foucault shows how The History of Sexuality entirely
overlooks the colonial projects and apprehensions that paralleled and
often prefigured the development of middle-class sexuality and self-
hood in Europe.
26
The silence in Foucault now seems remarkable, yet
before Stoler none of the major studies of his work had brought into
view what Gayatri Spivak memorably refers to as his "sanctioned ig-
norance."
27
Whether one looks at Dutch settlers in Indonesia, the
English in India, or the mixture of French and other European colo-
nizers in Algeria, colonial society was experienced as an often threat-
ening intermixture of social ranks, genders, and skin colors. To govern
these new forms of disorder, colonial discourse became preoccupied
with establishing distinctions of race, sexuality, culture, and class. These
6 Timothy Mitchell
thematics were then available to be transferred back to the metropole,
where in the later nineteenth century they helped form the racial, cul-
tural, class, and sexual identities that defined the modern bourgeois
self. For Foucault, race has only an oblique and unhistorical role to
play in the emergence of bourgeois sexuality. By relocating modernity
within empire, Stoler shows that the history of sexuality is interwoven
with that of race and that the emergence of modern forms of selfhood
cannot be accounted for within the boundaries of Europe alone.
These absences in Foucault and other recent theorists of moder-
nity are doubly marked when one realizes, as Perry Anderson points
out, that the idea of postmodernism itself, like the earlier idea of mod-
ernism (which did the work of the term postmodernism for a previous
generation, evoking the ambivalence and contradictions of modernity)
was born "in a distant periphery rather than at the centre of the cul-
tural system of the time."
28
The concept of modernismo was coined in
1890 by "a Nicaraguan poet, writing in a Guatemalan journal, of a
literary encounter in Peru," announcing a declaration of cultural inde-
pendence by Latin American writers against the authority of Spanish
literature. So too, Anderson adds, "the idea of a 'postmodernism' first
surfaced in the Hispanic interworld of the i93o's, a generation before
its appearance in England or America."
29
Moving to another interwar
interworld, it was Ihab Hassan, the son of a provincial governor in
northern Egypt (the father notorious for his violent suppression of an
anticolonial revolt in 1930) who gave postmodernism its more recent
currency in the United States.
30
Beyond Hassan, one could trace the
decisive role of a 19405-19505 Arab-Mediterranean borderland, lo-
cated on the historical and cultural boundary of colonialism, from the
Cairo of Edward Said and Anouar Abdel-Malek (and, briefly, Roland
Barthes), the Istanbul of Auerbach's exile, the Tunis of Albert Memmi
and Michel Foucault, the Constantine where Lyotard began his teach-
ing career, the Morocco of Juan Goytisolo and Abdel Kabir Khatibi,
and the Algiers of Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, and more indirectly
a generation of Parisian intellectuals.
31
The critique of the European
modern, like so much of the modern itself, seems continually to have
emerged from Europe's borders.
Relocating the question of modernity beyond the limits of the
West brings a certain risk. There is a danger that instead of decenter-
ing the categories and certainties of modernity, one might produce a
more expansive, inclusive, and inevitably homogenous account of the
The Stage of Modernity 7
genealogy of modernity.
32
Appadurai suggests that we should dispense
altogether with the picture of the globe divided into a Western core
and non-Western periphery, or any other fixed geographical image,
and think instead in terms of overlapping, disjunctive landscapes
whose centers and perspective shift according to the different kinds of
cultural, financial, and political forces one considers.
33
Stoler is care-
ful not to propose a simple extension and reversal of the narrative of
modernization, in which in place of modernist forms arising in the
West and being extended abroad, they emerge in the colonies and
are reimported to the metropole. She emphasizes instead, as does
Foucault in other contexts, a mobile process of rupture and reinscrip-
tion. When themes and categories developed in one historical context,
such as a region of the colonial world, are reused elsewhere in the ser-
vice of different social arrangements and political tactics, there is an
inevitable process of displacement and reformulation.
34
At issue, then,
is whether one can find a way to theorize the question of modernity
that relocates it within a global context and, at the same time, enables
that context to complicate, rather than simply reverse, the narrative
logic of modernization.
The Force of History
To disrupt the powerful story of modernity, rather than contribute to
its globalization, it is not enough to question simply its location. One
also has to question its temporality. One must abandon its neat image
not just of geographical space but also of historical time. The modern
age presents a particular view of geography, in which the world has a
single center, Europea Eurasian peninsula, as Marshall Hodgson
remarked, that imagines itself a continentin reference to which all
other regions are to be located; and an understanding of history in
which there is only one unfolding of time, the history of the West, in
reference to which all other histories must establish their significance
and receive their meaning.
35
These conceptions of history and geogra-
phy are related. Historical time, the time of the West, is what gives
modern geography its order, an order centered upon Europe. Accounts
of the modern world that introduce a topsy-turvy view of this geog-
raphy, by locating important developments outside the West, typically
reestablish the order of modernity by removing these irregularities
from any determining local context, or any non-European regional or
global context, and repositioning them within the West's uniform and
8 Timothy Mitchell
singular history. The discipline of historical time reorganizes discor-
dant geographies into a universal modernity.
Take the example of how Mintz explains the origins of capitalism
in Caribbean sugar production. Sweetness and Power, as the subtitle
tells us, is about "the place of sugar in modern history." The book ex-
pands the history of capitalism to bring to light "a precocious devel-
opment outside the European heartland," yet must return this aber-
rant development to its place, by putting it "in modern history."
36
Modern history means the development of capitalist modernity in
Europe. Even when the history of modernity extends to the Carib-
bean, it must remain the history of the West. It is the West that defines
the Caribbean as precocious, something advancing ahead of its time,
where time means the movement of the West.
What does the story of slave plantations tell us about the history
of capitalism? I leave aside here the long debates over the significance
of the Caribbean and the Atlantic trade to the growth of European
capitalism, except to note that Blackburn has recently confirmed that
their contribution was "decisive," and that Frank argues that plunder-
ing the New World enabled Europe not to create a world economy but
to buy into an existing Asian-centered one.
37
My concern here is with
the way in which these developments outside "the West" are reorga-
nized as part of its own history. Thus Mintz tells us that Caribbean
slave plantations are important for understanding "the chain of cau-
sation that leads from one stage of development to another." Arguing
that "it would be wrong to treat the plantation system as 'capitalistic'
in the same way that the British factory system of the nineteenth cen-
tury was capitalistic," he concludes that nevertheless "these curious
agro-industrial enterprises nourished certain capitalist classes at home
as they were becoming more capitalistic."
3
* Caribbean agro-industry
was not capitalism, in other words, for the meaning of capitalism is
defined by the factory system of nineteenth-century England; but it
can have a place in modern history, because it nourished the forma-
tion of that system. Historical time, in such an account, is singular,
moving from one stage of development to another. There is no possi-
bility of more than one history, of a non-singular capitalism. The Carib-
bean slave plantation, although longer lasting than the nineteenth-
century English factory, can be no more than a curious form of what
later emerged in its normal form in the West.
The conception of historical time renders history singular by or-
The Stage of Modernity 9
ganizing the multiplicity of global events into a single narrative. The
narrative is structured by the progression of a principle, whether it be
the principle of human reason or enlightenment, technical rationality
or power over nature. Even when discovered acting precociously over-
seas, these powers of production, technology, or reason constitute a
single story of unfolding potential.
The use of the idea of a singular historical time to reorganize the
dispersed geographies of modernity into stages of Europe's past finds
its first clear expression in the work of Marx, where discrepant devel-
opments outside Europe are translated into something else: expres-
sions of time itself. More forcefully than any other nineteenth-century
writer, Marx constructs an idea of "Europe"defined by the emer-
gence there of modern bourgeois societyas the singular center of ail
other histories. The singularity of history, in Marx's case, derives from
the development of the material forces of production, which peri-
odically outgrow the social relations in which they are organized.
39
Singular does not mean uniform. In different countries, the historical
process "assumes different aspects, and runs through its various phas-
es in different orders of succession, and at different periods."
40
But
these differences can only be thought of as different in relation to an
underlying uniformity. One can gather together a diversity of local
histories and describe them as different, in sequence, aspect, place, and
period, precisely because they are imagined as the possible variations
in a single process of development.
41
Presenting them as variations
establishes the concept of a universal history, in relation to which all
local historiesdelayed, displaced, blocked, or rearrangedreceive
their meaning.
When he comes to explain capitalism's origins, however, Marx is
forced to step outside this singular time. The step is taken at the very
point where his narrative is pushed for the first time outside the
boundaries of Europe. The general law of capitalist accumulation
explains how capital produces surplus value and surplus value in
turn produces further capital. But the law cannot escape this "vicious
circle" to explain how capital is produced in the first place.
42
After
six hundred pages on the workings of capitalist society illustrated al-
most exclusively by the case of England, the final section of volume
one of Capital, on the origins of industrial capitalism, moves outside
Europe and locates its beginnings in the colonial system.
43
"The dis-
covery of gold and silver in America," a familiar passage explains, "the
10 Timothy Mitchell
extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in the mines of the aborigi-
nal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East
Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the hunting of black-
skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production."
44
The production of wealth overseas then gave rise to the protection of
trade by the state, the colonial wars, the creation of a national debt,
and the introduction of taxation to service it. In the systematic combi-
nation of these different colonial elements lay the beginnings of indus-
trial capitalism.
This original accumulation of capital, however, did not seem to
derive from any general principle of the development of the material
forces of production. Its origins were dispersed around the globe and
required a variety of new social forms and processes: slave-based
production, colonial ports and settlements, genocide, international fi-
nance, modern warfare, and the organized power of a central state.
How could such a dispersed multiplicity of social and political devel-
opments be turned into "economic phenomena," meaning not events
related to the economy (a conception that does not exist in Marx's
writing) but events revealing the economy of historyhistory's singu-
lar logic? How could these global influences and innovations be gath-
ered back into the linear story of capital?
Marx's answer to this problem is first to leave aside an economic
explanation for the origins of capital accumulation and to focus on
what he calls the means. This enables him to find a single factor that
characterizes all these developments: the use of force. "We leave on
one side here the purely economic causes," he says. "We deal only
with the forcible means employed."
45
His account then presents the
origins of capitalism by describing it as a system of force. It consists of
both "brute force, e.g., the colonial system," and what he describes
as "concentrated and organized force," namely "the state power."
46
The narrative moves between descriptions of colonialism's physical
violencecapital comes into the world "dripping from head to foot,
from every pore, with blood and dirt"and precise images of me-
chanical force, especially the metaphor of the lever: the colonizing
corporations are "powerful levers for concentration of capital," the
national debt becomes "one of the most powerful levers" of capital
accumulation.
47
This focus on the image of force may seem unremark-
able. Marx's preceding analysis of capitalism, after all, brings to light
all the machinery of compulsion and forms of barbarism concealed
The Stage of Modernity 11
within the free exchanges of the market system. In the explanation of
original accumulation, however, every factor is reduced to a question
of force. There is no analysis of the social organization, the methods
of discipline, or the techniques of production that characterize the
slave plantation, the shipping industry, the colonizing corporation, the
colonial settlement, or the power of the army, to compare with his
painstaking analysis of the nineteenth-century English factory. There
is nothing except the use of force.
The absence of detail is not, I would argue, an innocent one, for
characterizing the colonial system solely in terms of force has an im-
portant consequence. It enables Marx's writing to fold these heteroge-
nous overseas developments into the history of the West. Having told
us first that force is just a means, not an historical-economic cause, he
reveals at the end that force operates upon history itself; contributing
to the movement of history, it is therefore something "economic" after
all. The effect of colonial force, Marx explains, is "to hasten, hot-
house fashion, the process of transformation . . . and to shorten the
transition. Force is ... itself an economic power."
48
The unusual
social forms of the colonial systemslave production, protectionism,
colonial militarism, the new compulsions of state powerare not
diversions from the singular path of capitalism's history. Deprived of
their complexity and diversity and reduced to mere expressions of
force, they serve the purpose of forcing history, the way a greenhouse
forces plants. Colonial developments whose difference in social form,
disrupted timing, or displacement across the globe seem to undermine
the effort to make history homogenous become simply the unlawful
force that forces history ahead. Their separation abroad appears as no
more than the mechanical distance of a lever, whose very length en-
ables an outside event to propel the West forward.
It is not a matter of rejecting, in the terms in which he says it, the
truth of what Marx tells us about the violence of modernity's origins.
It is a question of asking what other histories must be overlooked in
order to fit the non-West into the historical time of the West. To ac-
knowledge the constitutive role of these other histories, as Ernesto
Laclau among others has argued, would be to deny historyand
capitalismits singularity and to see modernity instead as a contin-
gent process.
49
This does not mean arguing that its history is random,
or simply " repudiating]... the capitalist restructuring of the modern
world," as critics of this kind of questioning have argued, or treating
12 Timothy Mitchell
capitalism as a "potentially disposable fiction" held in place only by
our acceptance of its categories.
50
Whether we want to or not, we ac-
cept these categories into our argument the moment we attempt to
question them. They are fictions, if one wants that word, of the
nondisposable sort. But even if we cannot escape the necessity of writ-
ing history as the story of capitalism, even if we must give in to it, as
Derrida says in another context, it does not follow that all ways of
giving in to it are of equal significance.
51
A writing that simply docu-
ments in increasing detail an ever-expanding globalization of capital,
as Prakash argues, simply reiterates and reinforces the process one
wants to question.
52
The alternative is to borrow from capitalism the
tools with which to deconstruct it. In particular, one can borrow capi-
talism's notion of the non-capitalist, the West's notion of the non-
West, and modernity's notion of the non-modern, and ask what these
nondisposable fictions suppress.
The apparent rationality and coherence of capitalist modernity
can be constructed only through an interaction with forces and events
that seem to stand outside its own development. This "constitutive
outside," however, cannot be referred back to any unfolding principle
or internal contradiction, or be contained by an underlying causal
or dialectical pattern.
53
If Caribbean slavery, for example, introduced
into what we call capitalism's development, among other things, the
dynamics of West African societies, the ecology of the Caribbean, the
culture of slave households, the politics of genocide, and mass addic-
tion to sugar, then that development can no longer be predicted or ac-
counted for in reference to the endogenous unfolding of a rationality
or potential, which would provide capitalism's essence and make
modernity something monadic and fundamentally the same every-
where. Developments and forces external to any possible definition of
the essence of capitalist modernity continually redirect, divert, mutate,
and multiply the modernity they help constitute, depriving it of any
essential principle, unique dynamic, or singular history.
A Specter HauntingEurope
The concept of historical time recaptures histories happening overseas
and returns them to the historical home of the West. Such representa-
tions construct the capitalist modern as a temporal object as much as
a spatial one, giving it the coherence of a single parentage and unique
abode. Uncovering the plural genealogy and ecology of what we unify
The Stage of Modernity 13
under names such as capitalism or modernity puts this coherence in
question. Each new context can reveal another parent, another logic.
The identity claimed by the modern is contaminated. It issues from
too many sources and depends upon, even as it refuses to recognize,
forebears and forces that escape its control. To overlook these differ-
ences requires a constant representing of the homogenous unity of
modernity's space and time. More precisely, it can be argued, the ex-
perience of modernity is constructed as a relationship between time
and space. It is a particular way of expressing one in terms of the
other. A way to begin to uncover this interdependence of space and
time in the construction of the modern is to ask whether Foucault's
failure to engage with the colonial genealogies of modernity is merely
an oversight. There are enough occasional references to French colo-
nialism in Foucault's work to suggest that his writing was silently
aware of the significance of empire in the origins of modernity. Is it
possible, then, that the silence is not accidental but plays a role in the
production of Foucault's argument? Foucault's genealogy of sexuality
and the bourgeois self does not entirely ignore the question of race
the element that provides the critical link with empire. Instead, as Stoler
points out, he treats race as an anachronism, representing a pre-modern
aristocratic concern with the purity of blood and the legitimacy of de-
scent. In his 1976 lectures at the College de France, Foucault expand-
ed this idea, arguing that a pre-nineteenth-century debate about purity
of aristocratic descent was recovered and reinscribed in the late nine-
teenth century to serve the new technology of biopower (the large-
scale management of life and death) developed as the characteristic
governmental technique of the modern state.
54
This argument repre-
sents a double overlooking of empire, for eighteenth-century racism,
as much as the later nineteenth-century forms, was a product of colo-
nialism. As Rolph Trouillot tells us, Buffon, Voltaire, and other figures
of the Enlightenment helped shape a scientific racism whose impetus
came from Caribbean and North American opposition to the aboli-
tion of slavery.
55
Homi Bhabha has suggested that it is Foucault's very
treatment of race as an anachronism, rather than a discrepant yet very
contemporary discourse developed beyond Europe, that provides a
clue to the significance of this silence about colonialism.
56
Treating
race as an anachronism preserves a particular way of thinking about
modernity, in which the modern is constructed not just as an historical
era but as a particular relationship between space and time.
14 Timothy Mitchell
A distinctive feature of many experiences of modernity is what
can be called its contemporaneity or presence. The modern occurs as
that form of temporality that Walter Benjamin calls homogenous
empty time, in which time is apprehended as the uniform, unfilled
spaces marked out by the calendar, the timetable, and the clock.
57
Developing this notion, Benedict Anderson suggests that it gives rise
to a new experience of simultaneity, in which people living unconnect-
ed lives can feel themselves joined by occupying the same homogenous
temporal moment. His now-familiar argument proposes that this si-
multaneity is represented in the structure of the nineteenth-century
European novel, in which characters whose lives never meet play roles
together in the same narrative, and in the phenomenon of the mass-
circulation daily newspapers of the same period, through which thou-
sands of readers shared the experience of reading the same ephemeral
material on the same day.
58
What underlies these apprehensions of si-
multaneity or co-presence is that both the characters in the novel and
the readers of the newspaper can be thought to share the same space.
They can be imagined as members of the same sociological entity,
Anderson suggests, defined as a geographical space in which all co-
exist at the same moment.
Benjamin seems to have borrowed the idea of homogenous empty
time from Henri Bergson. In his Essai sur la donnees immediates de la
conscience (1889), Bergson discusses the Kantian theory of space and
time, in which these apprehensions are considered not properties of
things in themselves but the two pure forms of human intuition.
Bergson agrees that space is "the intuition, or rather the conception,
of an empty homogeneous medium," but argues that temporality con-
sists of heterogeneous, interpenetrating moments of duration, which
our consciousness can reconfigure as homogenous time only by laying
out in a spatial sequence.
59
Through this mental contrivance, "in place
of a heterogeneous duration whose moments permeate one another,
we thus get a homogenous time whose moments are strung on a spa-
tial line."
60
The conception of time in "the illusory form of a homoge-
nous medium," Bergson argues, "is nothing but the ghost of space
haunting the reflexive consciousness."
61
In contrast to Bergson and
following Benjamin and Anderson, I would attribute the modern ap-
prehension of time as a homogenous medium to new forms of social
practice, rather than to the tricks of a universal Kantian conscious-
ness.
62
But it is useful to borrow from Bergson the insight that the ex-
The Stage of Modernity 1S
perience of homogenous empty time rests on giving temporality a spa-
tial expression. As Anderson's examples of this temporality seem to
suggest, the contemporaneity of time is haunted by the ghost of space.
One can ask whether, in fact, the multiple social experiences of
modernity are all expressed within a single conception of time, as
Veena Das does in chapter 7 of this book.
63
One can also question, as
several critics have, Anderson's focus on print culture as the most im-
portant mechanism of the experience of contemporaneity. Indeed, the
second edition of Imagined Communities widens this focus by point-
ing in later chapters to the significance of such practices as census
taking and map making in constructing the homogenous space of
modernity and hence (it could be added) its temporality. Anderson's
argument, moreover, is concerned with one specific consequence of
these practices, the emergence of territorial nationalism. The more
general point I want to draw from his analysis, however, is that mo-
dernity can be characterized, among other ways, by a sense of pres-
ence or contemporaneity created by the spatialization of time.
Putting empire back into the history of Europe, we first suggested,
enables us to reverse the narrative of modernization and see the West
as the product of modernity. We might rephrase things again now and
suggest that modernity is produced as the West. The "now" of mo-
dernity, its culture of contemporaneity, the particular sense of simul-
taneity that is taken as modernity's experience, depends upon the rep-
resentation of an homogenous space. The inhabitants of this space,
almost all of whom never meet one another, can be conceived as living
the same empty moment, as occupying the same time-space. This ef-
fect of simultaneity makes it possible to construct the idea of historical
time: history is the story of a civilization, culture, or people whose di-
verse lives are imagined to share a singular epoch and to progress as a
unit from one contemporaneous moment to the next. It is only this ef-
fect of a unitary, punctual, contemporaneous present, as Bhabha points
out, that enables Foucault to present racism as an "anachronism." Race
is an element recuperated from a pre-modern past and reinscribed in
an otherwise homogenous present. The West is the space that haunts
this presence.
This is the clue to Foucault's spectral silence about colonialism.
The narrative of history, even in the brilliant revisionism of Foucault,
is the story of Europe. To stage this homogenous time-space, there can
be no interruptions from the non-West. The non-West must play the
16 Timothy Mitchell
role of the outside, the otherness that creates the boundary of the
space of modernity. This otherness, Bhabha argues, takes two forms.
The non-West, as its name implies, represents the non-place, terra
incognita, the wasteland "whose history has to be begun, whose
archives must be filled out." But it also stands for the place of time-
lessness, a space without duration, in relation to which the temporal
break of modernity can be marked out.
64
In this sense, the colonial is
not something absent from the story of modernity that Foucault tells.
Or rather, Bhabha suggests, the colonial is a constant absence essential
to Foucault's text. By relegating the non-West to the margins and foot-
notes of his account, Foucault reproduces the spatialization of moder-
nity. The homogenous time of modernity, its characteristic contem-
poraneity, is preserved by the way Foucault respects the territorial
boundaries of the modern. Thanks to the boundaries of this time-
space, he can portray a synchronic discourse around the theme of the
bourgeois individual and see race as an anachronism, rather than as
the discrepant product of colonial developments whose otherness, in
announcing the homogeneity of the modern, haunts it.
The Stage of Modernity
"What is this 'now' of modernity?" asks Bhabha. "Who defines this
present from which we speak?. . . Why does it insist, so compulsively,
on its contemporaneous reality, its spatial dimension, its spectatorial
distance?"
65
How can one approach such questions in a way that does
not simply produce a more global and more homogenous narrative of
modernization, and inevitably end up retelling the story of the West?
Is there some way to address the time-space of European modernity
that does not end up remapping, as Foucault seems to, the contours of
that time-space? Any adequate response to this problem must begin
from what I would argue is the most powerful aspect of the produc-
tion of the European-modern, and what at the same time exposes it to
specters of difference and displacement that deny it the originality and
coherence it claims: the way in which the modern is staged as repre-
sentation. There is a tendency in recent scholarship to see the prolif-
eration of media images, sign systems, simulations, and other forms of
representation as the defining characteristic not of modernity but of
the postmodern. Jameson defines the era of postmodernism or late
capitalism as the age of the simulacrum, in which the real has been
transformed into so many pseudo-events.
66
Baudrillard describes it as
The Stage of Modernity 17
the age of simulation.
67
It is no doubt the case that what Appadurai
usefully calls "the work of the imagination" plays an increasingly im-
portant role in the postelectronic age.
68
Yet it is important to remem-
ber that the orchestrating of image and imagination, the managing of
the place of meaning in the social world and the experience of person-
hood, and the manipulating of populations and ecologies by their re-
duction to technical schemes and disciplinary programs, were already
characteristic features of modernity in the colonial period. As I have
argued in Colonising Egypt, consumerism and the great world ex-
hibitions, tourism and Orientalism, urban planning and compulsory
schooling, forced migration and mass conscription, global militarism
and imperial commerceall the novel institutional forms and political
practice of late nineteenth-century Paris and London, or Cairo and
Calcuttawere organized around the simulation, diagramming, and
replication of the real.
69
From this perspective, the postmodern would
have to be understood not as a disruption of meaning or loss of cer-
tainty that comes after the modern but as an instability always already
at work in the production of modernity.
To claim that the modern is always staged as representation is not
to argue that modernity is concerned more with image-making than
with reality. It is to argue that the colonial-modern involves creating
an effect we recognize as reality, by organizing the world endlessly to
represent it. Representation does not refer here simply to the making
of images or meanings. It refers to forms of social practice that set up
in the social architecture and lived experience of the world what seems
an absolute distinction between image (or meaning, or structure) and
reality, and thus a distinctive imagination of the real. This dualism of
the real can find certain roots, no doubt, in early modern social thought
and practice and may draw upon and transform earlier traditions.
Since the nineteenth century, however, it has been generalized in mod-
ern architecture and urban planning, social engineering and the man-
agement of nature, organized schooling and literature, entertainment
and tourism; in military order, imperial pomp, and the disciplines
of colonialism and nation-making; in all the mundane forms of self-
monitoring and self-presentation that shape the lives of modern sub-
jects; and, quite pervasively, in the organization of production and the
prestidigitations of the market mechanism. In sphere after sphere of
social life, the world is rendered up in terms of the dualism of image and
reality. This corresponds, in turn, to a series of other simplifications,
18 Timothy Mitchell
each of which stages the complexities and antagonisms of social expe-
rience in terms of a simple binarism: life and its meaning, things and
their exchange value, activity and structure, execution and plan, con-
tent and form, object- and subject-world. In each case an immediacy
of the really real is promised by what appears in contrast to be the
mere abstractions of structure, subjectivity, text, plan, or idea.
The passage from pre-modern to modern is always understood as
a rupture and separation, whether of a rational self from a disenchant-
ed world, of producers from their means of production, or of nature
and population from the processes of technological control and social
planning. Each of these so-called ruptures is a way of accounting for
a world increasingly staged according to the schema of object and
subject, process and plan, real and representation.
The significance of this world-as-picture for understanding the
colonial-modern lies in the fact that representation always makes a
double claim. On the one hand, something set up as a representation
denies its own reality. The representational text, image, model, game,
structure, or project, however realistic, always asserts that it is only
a text, a mere picture, a copy, a play, a scheme, a framework, an ab-
straction, a projection, not something real. It defines itself by what it
lacks, its missing originality, its immateriality, its want of immediate
presence, by the gap in time, space, and substance that separates it
from the real thing. On the other hand, in asserting its own lack, a
representation claims that the world it replicates, projects, reorga-
nizes, enacts, or endows with meaning and structure must be, by con-
trast, original, material, immediately present, complete in itself, with-
out lack, undelayed, filling its own time and spacein a word (what
we imagine as) real. Colonial European modernity stages the endless
set-up that pictures and promises us this complete, unmediated, self-
present, immediate reality.
70
If we return for a moment to Anderson's examples illustrating the
creation of homogenous empty time, it is clear that they all share a
common feature: the modern novel, newspaper, census, map, and mu-
seum, as well as the many other, more invasive practices that create
the punctual time-space of modernity, are all methods of representa-
tion, in the specific sense just defined. The newspaper claims to cap-
ture a record of the present and make this passing presence available
through a form of replay. The map and census provide figures that are
imagined to picture the nation as a real and knowable totality. The
The Stage of Modernity 19
theater, novel, and museum stage objects and characters to create simu-
lations of a real world. Anderson considers the significance of these
proliferating representations to lie in the experience of replication,
meaning not simple copying but endless serialization. In its new social
practices the modern state does more than count and classify the ele-
ments of the nation, he says. Since almost every state by the late colo-
nial period was beginning to replicate similar procedures of statistical
and cultural representation, the idea could emerge that the nation ex-
ists as a particular instance of an almost infinitely replicated series of
nations.
71
More recently, he has argued that the logic of serial repli-
cation underlies the creation of all modern political identities and is
therefore essential to the modern "imagining of collectivity."
72
I do not doubt that the representation of community is made
more effective by the repetition of such representations from one
country to the next, across a world that can now be imagined for the
first time as a horizontal plane of equivalent social units. The effect is
probably stronger in the case of numerical representations of the na-
tion, which make it possible repeatedly to compare nation states and
arrange them in groups and sequences. The twentieth-century inven-
tion of national-income accounting and the idea of the "national
economy" is the most important example of this.
73
Representation al-
ways gathers its strength from the way one picture is echoed and con-
firmed by another, so that each image forms part of a world-encircling
web of signification. Yet the effectiveness of this world-as-picture
lies not simply in the process of serialization. It lies in the apparent
contrast created between images, which are repeatable, serializable,
hyperlinked, open to endless imitation, and the opposing effect of an
original, of what appears to be the actual nation, the people itself, the
real economy. The act of representation, constantly repeated, makes
each of these referentsnation, people, economyappear as an ob-
ject that exists prior to any representation, as something given, materi-
al, fixed in its unique time and space, not fissured by replication, not
open to serialization and interlinking, and to the difference, instability,
and misrepresentation that endless repetition might introduce.
It is this novel myth of immediate presence, of an original, materi-
al reality, a world prior to and apart from all work of replication, dif-
ference, antagonism, meaning, management, or imagination, that de-
fines the peculiar metaphysic of modernity. It is this metaphysic in turn,
that theories of postmodernity in most cases continue to reproduce.
20 Timothy Mitchell
The postmodern is typically understood as a world of images and
replications that have lost touch with this supposedly original reality.
The real, it is said, has been replaced by the pseudo-real. In other
words, such accounts continue to assume the unproblematic nature of
a distinction between the real and represented, even as they announce
its historical disappearance. For this reason, most theories of post-
modernity remain within the binary metaphysics of the modern.
The Mysterious Thing
If the presence of modernity occurs only as representation, this repre-
senting is not a phenomenon limited to the deliberate methods of mak-
ing meaning on which accounts of the modern and the postmodern
tend to focus, such as the modern novel, news reporting, museum
displays, mass media, or the organization of medical, statistical, and
other forms of official knowledge. Much of the best recent writing on
modernity and postmodernity has been developed in the field of cul-
tural studies, which tends to focus on these intellectual and cultural
forms of representation, together with related spheres such as archi-
tecture, music, and fashion. As I have already suggested, however,
modernity's methods of staging and representation structure much
more than what we designate as the cultural and intellectual spheres. I
will briefly discuss three broader aspects of the experience of moder-
nity that can be understood in relation to the staging of the world as
representation. Representation is the key, first of all, to how we imag-
ine the construction of modern selfhood. On the one hand, the world-
as-picture demands a spectator. It typically positions the person as
the subject for whom the social world seems to exist as a view to be
observed, an experience to be had, a set of meanings to be interpreted,
or a code to be followed or deciphered. On the other hand, in the
Western philosophical tradition, as Dipesh Chakrabarty's essay in this
volume reminds us, the modern individual came to be defined as the
one who could occupy such a position of disembodied observer of the
world. Freed in this way from the traditional constraints of habit or
belief and transcending their localism, it was said, modern subjects
could discover a universal faculty of reason and employ it to represent
to themselves the experiences and feelings of others and to submit
their own interior life to its pedagogy. These individual powers of rep-
resentation, moreover, were to be cultivated through literature and
other imaginative social forms, shaping the modern sensibility through
The Stage of Modernity 21
a further recourse to the process of representation.
74
Conversely, in
the racialist discourses of colonialism, the backwardness of the native
population could be analyzed in terms of a weakness of the mental
power of representation. French colonial psychiatry in North Africa,
as Stefania Pandolfo explains in her essay here, diagnosed the path-
ology of the indigenous mentality as an inability to symbolize. Unable
to produce abstract representations, the colonized mind was said to be
trapped in the mimetic faculty, the prisoner of images from which it
could not obtain a spectatorial distance and thereby establish itself as
a subject. Such analyses opened up the space for the twentieth-century
project of psychiatry to produce the modern subject, by freeing the
mind from this imprisonment in images and enabling it to represent
truthfully the self and others. Similarly, Lila Abu-Lughod's essay on
television considers how the contemporary powers of the mass media
seem to produce a subject defined by what Raymond Williams has
called "the dramatisation of consciousness." Under the influence of
mass media, and television drama in particular, selfhood comes to be
understood as something fashioned by staging one's life as a story, in a
continuous representation of oneself to oneself and to others.
75
Second, among the most pervasive examples of the way experi-
ence is rendered up in the dualism of image and reality is the simple,
seemingly material form of the commodity. The system of commodi-
ties, Marx pointed out, is an arrangement of production and exchange
in which objects present themselves to us always as representations of
something else. "The mystical character of commodities," as he called
it, arises from the fact that nothing can become a commodity, a thing
of value, by standing for itself. An object can acquire value only by
appearing to embody, or represent, some quality beyond itself.
76
"A
commodity is therefore a mysterious thing," as Marx says, because it
can never be just "a thing" but always appears, like a character on
stage, as something representing something further.
77
Yet as Derrida
has written, if the commodity is never single but occurs as a relation-
ship between "a thing" and the value that it promises, then the pos-
sibility of anything being merely a thing, of standing only for itself,
of having only one, natural use, is compromised. Why should one
suppose that an object can exist as pure use-value, if the possibility of
exchange, of one thing standing in for another, is always already part
of its potential?
78
The system of commodities is not a masquerade
or fetish ceremony in which the true nature of objects is disguised or
22 Timothy Mitchell
misunderstood. It is that theater in which all the characters assure us
that they are merely standing in for something else, so that we leave the
performance reassured of the real world outside, seldom noticing that
the illuminated exit signs lead only to other, much larger theaters.
79
If this effect of real versus represented is embodied in the ex-
change of commodified objects, it is far more extensively inscribed in
the larger theaters of consumption, services, entertainment, and manu-
factured experience that, even in Marx's day, were beginning to con-
stitute the social worlds of modernity. The processes we simplify
under the name of commodification transform the nature of labor and
exchange but also encompass the birth of modern schooling, science,
and entertainment and the transformation of leisure and personal re-
lations. In every sphere, objects and experiences come to be organized
as systems of consumption, requiring them to represent some value,
idea, or imaginative realm beyond themselves. The proliferating corn-
modifications of life entail the staging of social relations and realities,
so that everything presents itself as the representation of some prior
value, some larger meaning, or some original presence.
80
In the third place, representation is the novel method of creating
colonial modernity's distinctive apprehensions of space and time. What
distinguishes the experience of modernity is not simply, as we suggest-
ed above, its sense of contemporaneity. It is not just a particular effect
of shared presence within a common social space, the homogenous
space of the nation or the West. What is distinctive is that such con-
temporaneity or presence is an effect that can be rendered up to ex-
perience only through the structure of a replicationthrough a rep-
resentation of the social, a mapping of the nation, a narrative of its
history, a set of statistical images, or the varieties of representational
practice that structure modern politics. It occurs only as something
staged. This, it should be noted, is a somewhat different formulation
from those, such as David Harvey, who follow Henri Lefebvre and
discuss modernity in terms of changing ways in which space is pro-
duced. In The Condition of Postmodernity, Harvey analyzes the his-
tory of capitalism in terms of increasing speeds of communication and
the increasing physical space that technology can control. He calls this
changing power over time and space a process of "space-time com-
pression" and analyzes the shift from modernity to postmodernity as
the transition of this process to a new stage.
81
Such arguments capture
much of the dynamic of recent history. Yet they overlook what is most
The Stage of Modernity 23
distinctive in the modern, a difference on which the new compression
of space and time depends: what occurs is not simply a change in the
way space and time are produced but the production of the apparent
difference between space (or time) and its representation. Modern so-
cial and political practice realizes a distinction between what might now
be called not only "abstract empty time" but also "abstract empty
space" and its meaning. This distinction makes space and time appear
for the first time as inert, contentless scales or dimensions. As mere
scales or frames, they can then be made to compress, expand, or speed
up, and to carry different meanings.
Modernity, we have said, seems to form a distinctive time-space,
appearing in the homogenous shape of the West and characterized by
an immediacy of presence that we recognize as the "now" of history.
This time and space are the products of an endlessly replicating system
of representation. Modernity's present is not that immediate experi-
ence of the real imagined by phenomenology but a present displaced
and replayed through the time lag of representation.
82
Its location is
not the plenitude of immediate surroundings but the homogenous,
empty coordinates produced in the modern diagramming and program-
ming of space. Capitalist modernity reproduces social worlds whose
characteristic historical immediacy and spatial extension are gener-
ated only through their proliferating forms of representation, that is,
through forms of replay, replication, and staging.
What conclusions can we draw from this for thinking about the
place in modernity of the non-West? If modernity is not so much a
stage of history but rather its staging, then it is a world particularly
vulnerable to a certain kind of disruption or displacement. No repre-
sentation can ever match its original, especially when the original ex-
ists only as something promised by a multiplicity of imitations and rep-
etitions. Every act of staging or representation is open to the possibility
of misrepresentation, or at least of parody or misreading. An image or
simulation functions by its subtle difference from what it claims to
simulate or portray, even if the difference is no more than the time lag
between repetitions. Every performance of the modern is the produc-
ing of this difference, and each such difference represents the possi-
bility of some shift, displacement, or contamination.
Once one places at the center of an understanding of modernity
the process of representation and insists upon the importance of dis-
placement, deferral, and delay in the production of the modern, the
24 Timothy Mitchell
non-West emerges as a place that makes possible the distance, the dif-
ference, and the time lag required for these forms of displacement. In
Bhabha's analysis, the non-West is not a place that is entirely outside
the West, not a site of pure difference. The difference between West
and non-West must be constantly produced, through a process of
disavowal, "where the trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but
repeated as something differenta mutation, a hybrid." The hybrid
forms of colonial modernity return to disrupt the West's claim to origi-
nality and authority, disturbing it with "the ruse of recognition."
83
Modernity must be staged as that which is singular, original,
present, and authoritative. This staging does not occur only in the
West, as we saw, to be imitated later in the non-West. Its authority
and presence can be produced only across the space of geographical
and historical difference. It is this very displacement of the West that
enables modernity to be staged as "the West." If colonial modernities
often prefigure the emergence of modern forms and programs in the
West, as I suggested at the start of this chapter, their significance is
not in enabling us to revise the narrative of the West and to provide
an alternative history of origins and influences. Nor should a more
global view of the modern encourage us to talk simply of alternative
modernities, in which a (fundamentally singular) modernity is modi-
fied by local circumstances into a variety of cultural forms. As with
the discussion of different paths of capitalist development, the plural-
ist language of alternative modernities always presupposes an under-
lying unity in reference to which such variations can be discussed.
Rather, the significance of allowing the non-West to disrupt the his-
tory of the West is to show that the West has no simple origin, despite
its claims to uniqueness, and its histories cannot adequately be gath-
ered into the form of a singular narrative. It is not that there are
many different modernities, any more than there are many different
capitalisms. Modernity, like capitalism, is defined by its claim to uni-
versality, to a uniqueness, unity, and universality that represent the
end (in every sense) of history. Yet this always remains an impossible
unity, an incomplete universal. Each staging of the modern must be
arranged to produce the unified, global history of modernity, yet each
requires those forms of difference that introduce the possibility of a
discrepancy, that return to undermine its unity and identity. Moder-
nity then becomes the unsuitable yet unavoidable name for all these
discrepant histories.
The Stage of Modernity 25
The Double Difference
The limits to this process of displacement and rearticulation are likely
to be as varied as the political and discursive contexts in which the
modern is produced. To conclude, however, I want to argue that the
staging of modernity is characterized by another kind of limit, one
that is not related to specific discourses but to a more general way,
within the worlds of modernity, in which systems of meaning are
produced. Oppositional discourse must intervene in a field already
shaped by the highly mobile powers of government that mark out the
terrain of modern politics. But this is also a terrain shaped, as I have
suggested, by the distinctly modern techniques of representation.
These techniques define not only the ground over which modern poli-
tics will be fought but also the nature of its objects.
We can take the example of colonial medical practice, which Cyan
Prakash discusses in his essay (see chapter 8), to examine what this
means. Colonial power defines the body as an object of hygienic regula-
tion and medical intervention, Prakash argues, a body that is marked by
its difference from indigenous discursive treatments of the person. But
one could add that this process also creates what appears as a second
form of difference: the new difference between "the body itself" and its
meanings. Modern medical practice creates a network of significations
in terms of which the body can be diagnosed, monitored, and adminis-
tered. Other forms of biopower produce further representations of the
body. Schooling, public health, economic planning, industry, and the
labor market each develop their systems of measurement and evalua-
tion, all seeming to refer to the same object. This proliferation of repre-
sentations produces numerous different images of the body but also
produces something further: the apparent distinction between the body
and its image. The very multiplication of significations generated by
modern governmental power, each presented as a mere representation
of the same physical body, appears to establish the object quality of the
body. This is a modern effect, presenting the body as an inert, material
object, not possessed of any inherent force or significance. The differ-
ence between the body and its meanings will be increasingly accepted as
the fundamental difference, and political debate will begin to occur only
between alternative representations of the body. The debate will come
to accept the underlying assumption of capitalist modernitythat so-
cial reality is to be ordered according to the principle of representation.
26 Timothy Mitchell
The production of modernity involves the staging of differences.
But there are two registers of difference, one providing the modern
with its characteristic indeterminacy and ambivalence and the other
with its enormous power of replication. The modern occurs only by
performing the distinction between the modern and the non-modern,
the West and the non-West, each performance opening the possibility
of what is figured as non-modern contaminating the modern, displac-
ing it, or disrupting its authority. But the performance of modernity
also stages the difference between what is staged and what is real, be-
tween representation and reality. The effect of this staging is to gen-
erate a new world of multiple significations and simulations. But its
more profound effect is to generate another realm that appears to pre-
cede and stand unaffected by these proliferating signs: reality itself
what now appears as a material order that preexists the constitution
of the social, an order that is only reflected by the processes of signifi-
cation, never shaped by them.
This effect of the real will appear, as we have suggested, in the dif-
ference between the "physical" body and the meanings through which
biopower organizes its management. It is in this sense that biopower
does not simply provide new significations for the body but produces
the body. In the staging of modernity, however, the real will be pro-
duced in countless other ways as well. What will appear especially real
is the modern production of the social as a spatial object. Just as medi-
cal practice produces the modern difference between the body as
physical object and its meanings, other social practices of modernity
establish what appears as the difference between physical space and
its representation. The closed, imaginary space of the modern nation-
state is produced through forms of mapping, boundary making, bor-
der control, and the management of cultural forms and economic
flows that create what Thongchai Winichakul calls the "geo-body" of
the nation.
84
Like the medical body, the geo-body appears as a physi-
cal object that preexists its social constitution, rather than as the effect
of a process of difference. This process is also at work in the cadastral
surveys and legal arrangements that produce the modern institution
of landed property, understood not as a network of social relations
among multiple claimants to the land's productivity but as an indi-
vidual right over a physical object.
85
This brings us back to the theme with which we began: the spa-
tialization of modernity. Even in some of the most critical studies of
The Stage of Modernity 2 7
modernity, the geography of the modern is not in question. Modernity
is staged as the West, and each account of the modern and the post-
modern reenacts this staging. We have argued that this is only a par-
ticular representation, produced out of an imperial past and present,
eliding the role of the non-West in the production of the West and ig-
noring the constant displacements involved in staging the difference
between the two. But we have concluded by suggesting a further prob-
lem with this spatialization of the modern and a reason for its persis-
tence. Modernity presents not only a particular version of the produc-
tion of space, a particular image of the spatial order. The modern is
produced as the difference between space and its representation. It is
not a particular representation of space that characterizes the produc-
tion of the modern but the organization of reality as a space of repre-
sentation. The questioning of modernity must explore two forms of
difference, both the displacements opened up by the different space
of the non-West, and the ways in which this space is made to appear
different. Modernity is the name we give the stage where this double
difference is performed.
Notes
1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 3 vols. (New York: Inter-
national Publishers, 1967), 1:703.
2. Samir Amin, L'Accumulation a I'echelle mondiale (Paris: Anthropos, 1970),
Eng. trans. Accumulation on a World Scale, 2 vols. (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1974). The book was first written as a doctoral thesis in economics in Paris in 1957
under the title "On the Origins of Underdevelopment: Capitalist Accumulation on a
World Scale." For its history, see Samir Amin, Re-Reading the Postwar Period: An
Intellectual Itinerary, trans. Michael Wolfers (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994),
chs. 2 and 3.
3. Immanuel Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-
Century Paradigms (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 1991), 75. For another important
recent study of the rise of the European world economy, see Giovanni Arrighi, The
Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York:
Verso, 1994).
4. Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D.
1250-1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Andre Gunder Frank,
ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998). Another notable critique of Eurocentric world history is Peter Gran, Beyond
Eurocentrism: A New View of Modern World History (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1996).
5. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New
York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 46-52, 55-61. The quotation is from p. 48.
6. Gabriel Debien, Les engages pour les Antille, 1634-1715 (Paris: Societe de
1'histoire des colonies franchises, 1952), 257, quoted in Robin Blackburn, The Making
28 Timothy Mitchell
of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London: Verso,
1997). 333-
7. Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The
Political Economy of the Caribbean World (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1995). 57-58.
8. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 17.
9. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pan-
theon Books, 1977); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's
History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press,
1995). The colonial origins of European modernity are also explored in Paul Rabinow,
French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1989)-
10. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991), 185. On Samuel Bentham, see Matthew S. Anderson, "Samuel Bentham in
Russia," American Slavic and East European Review, 15 (1956): 157-72. On monitori-
al schooling in Calcutta, see Henry Binns, A Century of Education, Being the Centenary
History of the British and Foreign Schools Society (London: J. M. Dent, 1908), 110-11.
11. Partha Chatterjee, "Two Poets and Death: On Civil and Political Society in the
Non-Christian World," this volume, ch. 2. On the colonial invention of culture see
Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 61-2,101,104-5,
an
^Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism
and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 3-4.
12. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century
Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
13. Gauri Viswanathan, "Currying Favor: The Beginnings of English Literary Study
in British India," Social Text 7, nos. 1-2 (Fall 1988): 85-104, reprinted in Dangerous
Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir
Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 113-29.
The beginnings of English literature have also been traced in another imperial context
the English subjugation of Scotland in the eighteenth century. See Robert Crawford,
Devolving English Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Robert
Crawford, ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
14. Cyan Prakash, "Body Politic in Colonial India," this volume, ch. 8. See also the
major study by David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic
Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press 1993);
Megan Vaughn, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1991); and the essays collected in Warm Climates and Western Medi-
cine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500-1900, ed. David Arnold (Amsterdam:
Rodopi Press, 1996).
15. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); see also his Culture
and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).
16. Ann Laura Stoler, "Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities
and the Boundaries of Rule," Comparative Studies in Society and History 13, no. i
(1989): 134-61, reprinted in Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture, 319-52; idem,
"Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of
Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia," in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a
Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997), 198-237; and idem, Race and the Education of Desire, 44-45,
102-23.
The Stage of Modernity 29
17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, ind ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), 47-65. See also Claudio
Lomnitz-Adler's study of the emergence of modern Mexican identity in Exits from the
Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1991).
18. Karl Marx, Address and Provisional Rules of the Working Men's International
Association (London, 1864), reprinted in Karl Marx, The First International and After:
Political Writings, vol. 3, ed. with an introduction by David Fernbach (New York:
Vintage, 1974), 73-84; see also Fernbach's introduction, 10-12. The inaugural meeting
of the International Association was held in London on September 28,1864. The coin-
ing of the term "international" is attributed to Jeremy Bentham, in his colonial projects
for a system of "international law" (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "international").
19. See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "Nationalism," and Oxford English Dic-
tionary, Additions Series (1993), s.v. "nationalist." The term nationalisme did not
appear in French until around the same period. See Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and
Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, xnd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), ixi.
20. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (New York: Verso, 1998), 3,
which is the source of the comment on the term liberalism.
21. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984).
22. Jean Baudrillard, "The End of Production" and "The Order of Simulacra," in
Symbolic Exchange and Death (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1993), 6-49, 50-86.
23. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Fredric Jameson, Post-
modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press,
1991).
24. Jameson, Postmodernism, 36.
25. Fredric Jameson, "Secondary Elaborations," in Postmodernism or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 197-418. In this
essay Jameson repeats his argument that postmodernism is "a situation in which the
survival, the residue, the holdover, the archaic, has finally been swept away without a
trace. . . . Everything has reached the same hour on the great clock of development or
rationalization," but then adds "(at least from the perspective of the 'West')." For an
exploration of this note of uncertainty, see Santiago Colas, "The Third World in
Jameson's Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Social Text
31/31 (1992): 2.58-70.
26. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire. There is an equally remarkable neglect
of colonial developments in Foucault's archaeology of modern medical practice, The
Birth of the Clinic (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
27. Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988),
71-313; reprinted in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick
Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66-m.
"Foucault is a brilliant thinker of power-in-spacing," Spivak writes, "but the awareness
of the topographical reinscription of imperialism does not inform his presuppositions.
He is taken in by the restricted version of the West produced by that reinscription and
thus helps to consolidate its effects. . . . [T]o buy a self-contained version of the West is
to ignore its production by the imperialist project" (85, 86).
30 Timothy Mitchell
28. Anderson, Origins of Postmodernity, 3. Conservative social theorists used the
term "modernism" as a term of disapproval in the 19605 and 19705, much as they
would use the term "postmodernism" in the 19805 and 19905. See, for example, Daniel
Bell, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976). Marshall
Herman recalls how certain Columbia University faculty described the 1968 student
protest as "modernism in the streets" (All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience
of Modernity [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981], 31).
29. Anderson, Origins of Postmodernity, 3-4.
30. Ibid., 17, citing Ihab Habib Hassan, Out of Egypt: Scenes and Arguments of an
Autobiography (Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 46-48.
31. Anouar Abdel-Malek and Albert Memmi wrote early critiques of Eurocentrism
and Orientalism. See Anouar Abdel-Malek, "Orientalism in Crisis," Diogenes 44
(1959-63), 103-40, and Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (rpr. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1991). The novelist and essayist Juan Goytisolo, one of the most impor-
tant critics of Spanish modernity, was drawn to North Africa after working on behalf of
Algerian independence in Paris and later made his home Marrakech; see Randolph
Pope, Understanding Juan Goytisolo (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1995). For a discussion of these forms of cultural displacement, see Aamir Mufti,
"Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Social Criticism, and the Question of Minority
Cultures," Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1998): 95-115.
32. These issues are examined in the important essay by Cyan Prakash, "Writing
Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,"
Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 2. (April 1990): 383-408, revised
and reprinted in Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture, 351-88.
33. Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,"
in Public Culture i, no. ^ (1991): 1-14, reprinted in Modernity at Large: Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 32..
For a related view about the absence of clear spatial geographies and the consequent
predicament of fluid, fractured cultures see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
34. Ann Stoler and Fred Cooper also caution against the tendency to homogenize
the diverse experiences of colonialism and to overlook its tensions, limitations, and con-
tingencies, in an excellent review of recent writing on colonialism and empire: "Between
Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda," in Cooper and Stoler, eds.,
Tensions of Empire, 1-56.
35. The Eurocentrism embedded in the idea that Europe is a "continent," while the
larger and more culturally diverse area of South Asia is only a "subcontinent" (and
China a mere "country"), was brilliantly explored more than a generation ago by
Marshall Hodgson; see Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and
History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974),
and "The Interrelations of Societies in History," in Rethinking World History: Essays
on Europe, Islam, and World History, ed. Edmund Burke III (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 3-28. For a more recent discussion, see Martin W. Lewis and
Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997), and Frank, ReOrient, i.
36. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 55.
37. The classic twentieth-century statement of the economic significance of Atlantic
slavery to the development of industrial capitalism in Britain is Eric Williams, Capital-
ism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). Revisionist
works of the 19705 and 19805 disputed the argument that colonies and colonial trade
The Stage of Modernity 31
made a decisive contribution to Britain's industrialization, especially Paul Bairoch,
"Commerce international et genese de la revolution industrielle anglaise," Annales 28
(1973): 541-71, and Robert Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalism," New Left Review
104 (July-August 1977): 2.5-93. F
r a
review of these debates, see Seymour Drescher,
"Eric Williams: British Capitalism and British Slavery," History and Theory z6 (1987),
180-96. Robin Blackburn has recently refuted the revisionists, arguing that slave pro-
duction in the Caribbean "decisively advanced" the process of capitalist industrializa-
tion in Britain (The Making of New World Slavery, 509-80, quotation from p. 572). See
also Stinchcombe, Sugar Island Slavery. On earlier attempts to explain the theoretical
place of slave economies in the development of capitalism, see J. Banaji, "Modes of
Production in a Materialist Conception of History," Capital and Class 7 (i979):i~44.
On the larger problem of Eurocentrism in economic history, see J. M. Blaut, The
Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History
(New York: Guilford Press, 1993), and Frank, ReOrient, 158-320.
38. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 59-61; emphasis in original.
39. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York:
International Publishers, 1970), 20-21.
40. Marx, Capital, 1:669-70.
41. The presenting of contemporary differences as the simultaneous existence of dif-
ferent stages of a single history was elaborated in twentieth-century Marxism in formu-
lations such as Trotsky's "combined and uneven development" and Ernst Bloch's "si-
multaneity of the non-synchronous." For the latter, see his "Nonsynchronism and
Dialectics," New German Critique n (Spring 1977): 22-38.
42. Marx, Capital, 1:667.
43. The initial discussion of the original accumulation of capital (ch. 27), on the be-
ginnings of agrarian capital in the clearing of the agricultural population from the land,
continues at first to focus on England. But here too the real significance of these devel-
opments can only be found in colonial developmentsthe colonization of Ireland and,
especially, Scotland. What the removal of the population "really and properly signifies,
we learn only in the promised land of modern romance, the highlands of Scotland.
There the process is distinguished by its systematic character ... [and] by the magnitude
of the scale on which it is carried out at one blow" (ibid., 1:681).
44. Ibid., 1:703.
45. Ibid., 1:676.
46. Ibid., 1:703. On "the state power," see also Karl Marx, "The Civil War in
France: Address of the General Council," in The First International and After, vol. 3 of
Political Writings, ed. with an introduction by David Fernbach (New York: Vintage,
1974), 187-268, at 208-9.
47. Marx, Capital, 1:712, 705, 706.
48. Ibid., 1:703.
49. Ernesto Laclau, "New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time," in New
Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (New York: Verso, 1990), 3-85. For par-
ticular developments of Laclau's argument about capitalism, see J. K. Gibson-Graham,
"Identity and Economic Plurality: Rethinking Capitalism and 'Capitalist Hegemony,'"
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 (1995): 275-82, and Timothy
Mitchell, "The Market's Place," in Directions of Change in Rural Egypt, ed. Nicholas
S. Hopkins and Kirsten Westergaard (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998),
19-40. Major contributions to the question of writing post-Marxist history include
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," in
Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New
32 Timothy Mitchell
York : Oxford University Press, 1988), 3-31; Cyan Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist
Histories of the Third World," Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. z
(April 1990): 383-408, and "Can the 'Subaltern' Ride? A Reply to O'Hanlon and
Washbrook," Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. i (January 1992.):
168-84;
an
^ Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Marx after Marxism: History, Subalternity and
Difference," Meanjin 52 (1993): 421-34.
50. These criticisms are made by Arif Dirlik, "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World
Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism," in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation,
and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 501-28, at 515; and Rosalind
O'Hanlon and David Washbrook, "After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics
in the Third World," Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. i (January
1992): 141-67, at 147.
51. Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978), 278-93, see especially 282.
52. Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World," and "Can the
'Subaltern'Ride?"
53. See Laclau, "New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time."
54. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire.
55. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of
History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 77-78, citing, among others, Gordon Lewis,
Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in
Its Ideological Aspects, 1492-1900 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1983), and Pierre Boulle, "In Defense of Slavery: Eighteenth-Century Opposition to
Abolition and the Origins of Racist Ideology in France," in History from Below: Studies
in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology, ed. Frederick Krantz (London: Basil Black-
well, 1988), 219-46.
56. Homi Bhabha, "The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency,"
in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 194-96.
57. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New
York: Schocken Books, 1969), 263.
58. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 22-36.
59. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910), a transla-
tion of Essai sur la donnees immediates de la conscience (Paris: 1889), 95. On the
Kantian conception of space and time, see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed.
and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
157-67.
60. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 237.
61. Ibid., no, 99.
62. For an examination of social practices that give rise to the new apprehension of
time as a pure medium of consciousness, see Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 73,120.
63. Veena Das, "The Making of Modernity: Gender and Time in Indian Cinema,"
this volume, ch. 7.
64. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 246.
65. Ibid., 244.
66. Fredric Jameson, "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," in Postmodernism,
or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
67. Baudrillard, "The Order of Simulacra."
The Stage of Modernity 33
68. Arjun Appadurai, "Here and Now," in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions
of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1-13, at 5.
69. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt.
70. See Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, ch. i, for a further development of this argu-
ment, which draws, inter alia, on the work of Martin Heidegger, especially "The Age of
the World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New
York: Harper and Row, 1977), and also the work of Jacques Derrida, beginning with
Speech and Phenomena (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
71. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 184. His argument here draws on Benjamin's
argument in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illumina-
tions, 117-51.
72. Benedict Anderson, "Nationalism, Identity, and the World-in-Motion: On the
Logics of Seriality," in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng
Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 1x7.
73. See Timothy Mitchell, "Fixing the Economy," Cultural Studies iz (1998): 82-101.
74. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Witness to Suffering: Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of
the Modern Subject in Bengal," this volume, ch. 3.
75. Lila Abu-Lughod, "Modern Subjects: Egyptian Melodrama and Postcolonial
Difference," this volume, ch. 4, citing Raymond Williams, "Drama in a Dramatised
Society," in Raymond Williams and Television, ed. A. O'Connor (London: Routledge,
1989), 3-13.
76. Marx, Capital, 1:76.
77. Ibid., 1:77.
78. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourn-
ing, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 160. Derrida's writing
aims to show how the possibility of exchange, of value, and of meaning itself is always
already present in the occurrence of any object and is therefore part of the condition of
possibility of the appearance of an object world. However, he limits his dismantling of
this metaphysics of presence largely to the writing of literature and philosophy, seldom
examining the larger texts of the social world. He therefore offers no investigation of
ways in which the reorganizing of the social world as a system of representation in the
projects of colonial modernity has extended and reinforced but perhaps also made more
vulnerable the Western metaphysics of presence. For an exploration of these questions,
see Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, chs. 1,5, and 6. On Derrida and Marx, see the insight-
ful analysis of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Limits and Openings in Marx and
Derrida," in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 97-119.
79. This argument about representation has been so frequently misunderstood that
it is worth repeating here that I am not making some "postmodernist" claim that the
real world does not exist. Such a simple dogma would leave the metaphysics of terms
like "real" and "exist" unexamined. My argument is that in the modern world the real
is increasingly rendered up to experience through binary strategies of representation, in
which reality is grasped in terms of a simple and absolute distinction between the real
and its image. Yet a rigorous ethnography of these strategies shows that the image is
never just an image but is infiltrated and undermined by elements that belong to what is
called the real world. And conversely, that what we call the real never stands alone but
occurs in relationship to and is continually compromised by the possibility of represen-
tation. The problem of modernity is not so much, in Latour's terms, that "we have
never been modern" (because, as he argues, the distinction between real and represen-
tation that defines the experience of modernity was never successfully established).
The problem is to understand, given this failure, what forms of social arrangement have
34 Timothy Mitchell
persuaded us to believe in such a simple metaphysics. It is this arrangement and meta-
physic that I refer to here as representation and elsewhere have called "enframing" (see
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter [Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1993], and Mitchell, Colonising Egypt).
80. The argument is frequently made that post-structuralist analyses of the cultural
aspects of modernity cannot be extended to the "more concrete" political forms of
modern society, because of a fundamental difference between texts and institutions.
Peter Dews, for example, argues that "institutions are not simply textual or discursive
structures" but form a "non-textual reality . . . traversed by relations of force" (Logics
of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory [London:
Verso, 1987], 35). I would argue that any adequate understanding of capital, the state,
or any of the other "more concrete" institutional forms of modern politics must address
the techniques of difference that make possible the very appearance of what we call
institutions. For a development of this argument in relation to the modern state, see
Timothy Mitchell, "The Limits of the State," American Political Science Review 85
(1991): 77-96; see also Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, "Beyond the Positivity of
the Social," in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), 93-148.
81. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991);
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 101-313.
82. Cf. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena.
83. Bhabha, "Signs Taken For Wonders," in The Location of Culture, in, 115.
84. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of the Nation
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).
85. See Timothy P. Mitchell, "Making Space for the Nation State," in Colonialism,
Postcolonialism, and the Production of Space, ed. Derek Gregory and Daniel Clayton
(New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
Two
Two Poets and Death:
On Civil and Political Society
in the Non-Christian World
Partha Chatterjee
Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, the most renowned modernist liter-
ary figure in nineteenth-century Bengal, died on April 8, 1894. Three
weeks after his death, a memorial meeting organized by the Chaitanya
Library and the Beadon Square Literary Club was held at Star The-
atre.
1
It was decided that the speakers would be Rajanikanta Gupta,
the historian; Haraprasad Sastri, the famous scholar of Buddhism and
early Bengali literature; and Rabindranath Tagore, then a young but
already much acclaimed poet. Nabinchandra Sen, one of the most re-
spected senior figures on Bengal's literary scene and a younger con-
temporary of Bankim in the civil service, was asked to preside. To the
surprise of the organizers, Nabinchandra refused. In his place, Gurudas
Banerjee, judge of the Calcutta High Court, presided over the meet-
ing. The address on Bankim delivered by Rabindranath that day went
on to become something of a landmark essay in Bengali literary criti-
cism. Memorized by generations of schoolchildren, it has been for
more than a century a staple of the formation and transmission of aes-
thetic canons in Bengal's new high culture.
What will concern us here is not the assessment of Bankim's liter-
ary output or of his historical role, on which much has been written.
2
Instead, our concern will be the reasons for Nabinchandra Sen's re-
fusal to come to Bankim's memorial meeting. The poet Nabinchandra
35
36 Partha Chatterjee
was known to have been close to Bankim, and although he did not
often share what he thought were the latter's excessively Westernized
literary tastes, he clearly deferred to his superior erudition, intellect, and
public standing. The reasons for Nabinchandra's refusal had nothing
to do with Bankim. Nabinchandra objected to the very idea of a pub-
lic condolence meeting.
"Imitating the English, we have now begun organizing 'condo-
lence meetings,'" Nabinchandra wrote. "As a Hindu, I do not under-
stand how one can call a public meeting to express one's grief. A
meeting to express grief, think of it!" "How many buckets have you
arranged for the public's tears?" he is said to have remarked to one
of the organizers. "Our" grief, he claimed, was "sacred"; it drove one
into seclusion. "We do not mourn by wearing black badges round our
sleeves." A meeting in a public auditorium could only create, he
thought, the atmosphere of a public entertainment; this was not "our
way of mourning for the dead."
3
Soon after the memorial meeting, Rabindranath Tagore wrote an
essay published in the journal Sddhana.
4
"The Condolence Meeting"
began by mentioning the objection that had been raised to the public
condolence of Bankim's death. It was true, he said, that the practice
was hitherto unknown in the country and that it was an imitation of
European customs. But, like it or not, because of our European con-
tacts, both external conditions and subjective feelings were undergoing
a change. New social needs were arising, and new ways would have
to be found to fulfill them. Because of their unfamiliarity, these might
seem artificial and unpleasant at first. But merely because they were
European in origin was not a good reason for rejecting them outright.
The main point of objection to the idea of a public condolence
meeting seems to have been its krtrimata, artificiality. That which is
krtrim is a product of human action: it is an artificefabricated, un-
natural. Sometimes it indicated a "mere" form, empty within; some-
times it could even describe behavior that is insincere, false. This is
what Nabinchandra would have meant when he referred to the show-
ing of grief by wearing a black armband. The krtrim form of a public
meeting was inappropriate, he must have said, for expressing an emo-
tion as intense and intimate as grief at the death of a loved one.
In his essay, Rabindranath straightaway took up the question of
artificial social forms. A certain krtrimata was unavoidable if social
norms were to be followed, he said. Surely, not everything could be
Two Poets and Death 3 7
left to individual taste and feeling. Artificiality could be said to be a
defect in matters that were strictly internal to the self, where individu-
al feelings reigned supreme. But society being a complex entity, it was
not always easy to determine the boundary between the domain of the
individual and that of society. In matters pertaining to society, certain
universally recognized rules had to be followed if social relations were
not to degenerate into anarchy. For example, Rabindranath pointed
out, grief at the death of one's father, oranother examplethe feel-
ings of a devotee toward god, could be said to involve some of the
most intimate and intense emotions in human life. And yet society
claims to lay down the procedures of funerary and other associated
rites to be followed on the occasion of a father's death, or, in the other
case, the procedures of worship to be followed by all devotees, irre-
spective of individual preference or taste. This is so because society
deems it necessary to regulate and order these aspects of life in a way
that is beneficial for all of society.
Having made this general point about the necessary "artificiality"
of all social regulations, Rabindranath then goes on to argue that
Indian society was for long largely a "domestic society" or a "society
of households" (gdrhasthyapradhdn samdj), a society in which the
strongest social bonds rested on the authority of parents and other el-
ders within the family. The specific forms of social regulation in India
reflect this domestic character of traditional society. But this was now
changing.
Recently there have been some changes in this society of house-
holds. A new flood has swept into its domain. Its name is the public.
It is a new thing with a new name. It is impossible to translate it
into Bengali. The word "public" and its opposite "private" have now
come into use in Bengal i . . . . .
Now that our society consists not only of households but also
of an emergent public, the growth of new public responsibilities
have become inevitable.
5
One such new public responsibility was the public mourning of
the death of those who had devoted their lives not just to the good
of their own households but to the good of the public. The form of
mourning was "artificial" as before, but it was now a form in which
not just the members of the household but members of the public were
required to participate.
What is interesting about this part of Rabindranath's argument is
38 Partha Chatterjee
the explicit identification of a new domain of social activity involving
"the public" and of new social regulations ordering these public prac-
tices. But he then goes on to make some observations about this emer-
gent public domain that are still more interesting.
I do not deny the fact that the public in our country is not ap-
propriately grief-stricken by the death of great men. Our public is
still young; its behaviour bears the mark of adolescence. It does not
recognize its benefactors, does not realize the true value of the bene-
fits it receives, easily forgets its friends and thinks it will only receive
what is given to it but will not incur any obligations in return.
I say such a public needs to be educated, and discussions in pub-
lic meetings are a principal means of such education.
6
What we have here is a public that is not yet a proper public and a
group of social leaders who think of their role as one of guiding this
public to maturity. Rabindranath, as we can now recognize easily, is
only restating here the fundamental problematic of the nationalist
project of modernity under colonial conditions. The driving force of
colonial modernity is a pedagogical mission.
What a "proper" public must look like is also, needless to say,
given by world history. Rabindranath has no doubt about this. The
examples that come to his mind in the context of Bankim's death are
from the literary world of Europe and the relationship there between
eminent literary figures and the public.
We do not have a literary society in our country and in society itself
there is no cultivation of literature. Social practices in Europe make
it possible for eminent persons to appear on numerous occasions at
numerous public meetings. Their circle of acquaintances is not
restricted to their family and friends; they are at all times present
before the public. To their compatriots, they are close at hand and
visible. Which is why at their death, a shadow of grief falls over the
whole country.
7
By contrast, great men in India, despite their greatness, are not
similarly visible in public. "Especially since women have no place in
our outer society, our social life itself is seriously incomplete." The
kind of intimate knowledge of a great person's life, habits, and thoughts
that can evoke love and gratitude among ordinary people is completely
lacking in our society. Instead of loving and respecting our great men,
we turn them into gods to be worshipped from afar. The condolence
meeting, argued Rabindranath, was precisely the occasion at which
Two Poets and Death 39
those who were close to a great person could tell the public what he
was like as a human being, with faults and idiosyncrasies. They could
make the great man as a private person visible to the public.
It is easy to recognize the sort of public sphere Rabindranath was
wishing for. It was a public sphere consisting of not only books and
journals and newspapers but also active literary societies, literary
gatherings, an involvement of the public with things literary and cul-
tural, an interest of ordinary people in greatness not as a superhuman
gift but as a human achievement. Following Habermas, we can even
sense here a hint of that new conception of personhood where the pri-
vate and the intimate are, as it were, always oriented toward a public.
8
Rabindranath, we can see, was imagining for his own country a world
of literary activity embedded in a public sphere constituted by a va-
riety of civil social institutions, the sort of world he himself had seen
at first hand when, some fifteen years ago, he had lived in England for
more than a year as a student.
Was Nabinchandra not appreciative of a public sphere of this
kind? What was the older poet objecting to? Many years after this in-
cident, when writing his autobiography, Nabinchandra Sen returned
to the subject. He was, as can be expected, strongly derisive of literary
societies and literary gatherings, dismissing them as places where people
met for idle talk, or rather idle listening. His idea of commemorating
great literary figures was a very different one.
If instead of these utterly wasteful meetings and speeches, the orga-
nizers were to preserve the birthplaces of the ancient and [modern]
poets of Bengal and hold a sort of religious festival [debpujdr mata
utsab] every year at those places, then we can pay our respects to our
great writers, hold a community gathering and at the same time bring
credit to the cause of Bengali literature. Mendicant bairdgis and itin-
erant singers have in this way turned the birthplaces of the Vaisnava
poets Jayadeva, Chandidas and Vidyapati into places of pilgrimage
where they hold annual festivals. But we, instead of following this sa-
cred and "indigenous" [svadest] path, thanks to English civilization
and education, spend our time organizing these laughable condolence
and memorial meetings devoid of all true compassion.
9
He indeed suggested that like the Vaisnava poets of old, the birth-
places of modern writers like Madhusudan, Dinabandhu, and Bankim
should be turned into places of pilgrimage where devotees would
gather once every year.
40 Partha Chatterjee
Nabinchandra also gave in his autobiography a particularly caus-
tic description of Bankim's condolence meeting.
The condolence meeting was held. When Rabi Babu finished his
long, meandering lament, wiped the tears from his eyes and sat
down, the audienceso I was toldstarted shouting from all sides,
"Rabi Thakur! Give us a song!" The eminent Gurudas Babu, who
was chairing the meeting, was much annoyed by this and said that
Rabi Babu had a bad throat and would not be able to sing today....
They say in English that people go to church not to worship but to
listen to the music. Perhaps it is truer to say that they go there to dis-
play their clothes. Similarly in our condolence meetings, people walk
in chewing pan, humming a tune from Amrita Babu's latest farce,
asking for a song in Rabi Thakur's effeminate voice and generally
expecting a good evening's entertainment.
10
Nabinchandra seems clearly unwilling to accept that a public con-
dolence meeting, like many other formal occasions in modern Euro-
pean social life (including going to church), has any significance apart
from mere show. Indeed, he is unprepared even to accept that humani-
zation of greatness which is part of the celebration of ordinary life
that lies, as Charles Taylor has pointed out, at the heart of the trans-
formation in social consciousness brought about by Western moder-
nity.
11
Nabinchandra would rather have the great deified after their
death, their birthplaces turned into places of pilgrimage, their statues
"worshipped with flowers and sandalpaste." This, he would say, was
"our" way of collectively expressing our gratitude to the great.
We have here the seeds of a serious disagreement. Does modernity
require the universal adoption of Western forms of civil society? If
those specific forms have been, in fact, built around a secularized ver-
sion of Western Christianity, then must they be imitated in a modern-
ized non-Christian world? Are the normative principles on which civil
social institutions in the modern West are based so culturally particu-
lar that they can be abandoned in a non-Western version of moder-
nity? These questions have been raised often enough in recent discus-
sions. I wish to discuss here only a particular aspect of the matter.
I have not brought up this incident at the beginning of this paper
merely to present one more curiosity from the history of colonial
modernity in nineteenth-century Bengal. I think this largely forgotten
disagreement can be shown to have an interesting significance for us
today, one that was not clear to any of the antagonists a hundred
Two Poets and Death 41
years ago. In order to bring this out, let me first state that the question
of condolence meetings is not, as far as I can see, a matter of debate
today. Their form is largely the same as in the West, with the laying of
wreaths, observing a minute's silence and memorial speeches. These
practices of a secularized Western Christianity are rarely recognized as
such in India today: they have been quite thoroughly domesticated in
the secular public life of the country's civil institutions. Of course, it is
not unusual to find a few indigenous touches added on, such as the
garlanding of portraits or the burning of incense sticks. Music can be
part of such a secular function: in West Bengal as well as in Bangla-
desh, by far the most likely music on such an occasion would be some-
thing composed by Rabindranath Tagore himself. However, the atmos-
phere would not be one of a public entertainment: Nabinchandra's
fears on this count have proved to be unfounded. Rabindranath's hopes
of grooming a public into maturity seem to have been borne out.
This, of course, only concerns public institutions of civic life,
whose formal practices are recognized as being secular. In other col-
lective institutional contexts, which it would be grossly misleading to
call "private," there is, needless to say, on an occasion such as the
death of a prominent person or of someone closely connected with the
institution, the continued observance of practices that are clearly rec-
ognized as religious. In the domain of the state itself, however, the po-
litical pressure to be scrupulously "secular" requires state authorities
to assemble, paradoxically enough, a representative collection of prac-
tices from a variety of religions. Each of theserecitations, prayers,
discourses, musicis presented in a state mourning as representing
a religion; what makes it a part of a "secular" state function is the
simultaneous presence in one event of all of these representative reli-
gious performances. We will return to this difference between secular
public practices in civil institutions and state institutions when we talk
about the relation today between civil society and political society.
Let me bring these up here: family, civil society, political society,
and the state. These are classical concepts of political theory, but used,
we know, in a wide variety of senses and often with much inconsis-
tency. I must clarify here the sense in which I find it useful to employ
these concepts in talking about contemporary India.
Hegel's synthesis in the Philosophy of Right of these elements of
what he called "ethical life" spoke of family, civil society, and the state
but had no place for a distinct sphere of political society. However, in
42 Partha Chatterjee
understanding the structure and dynamics of mass political forma-
tions in twentieth-century nation-states, it seems to me useful to think
of a domain of mediating institutions between civil society and the
state. The sharpness of the nineteenth-century distinction between
state and civil society, developed along the tradition of European anti-
absolutist thinking, has the analytical disadvantage today of either re-
garding the domain of the civil as a depoliticized domain in contrast
with the political domain of the state, or of blurring the distinction
altogether by claiming that all civil institutions are political. Neither
emphasis is of help in understanding the complexities of political phe-
nomena in large parts of the contemporary world.
I find it useful to retain the term "civil society" to those character-
istic institutions of modern associational life originating in Western
societies that are based on equality, autonomy, freedom of entry and
exit, contract, deliberative procedures of decision making, recognized
rights and duties of members, and such other principles. Obviously,
this is not to deny that the history of modernity in non-Western coun-
tries contains numerous examples of the emergence of what could
well be called civil-social institutions, which, nevertheless, do not al-
ways conform to these principles. Rather, it is precisely to identify
these marks of difference, to understand their significance, to appreci-
ate how by the continued invocation of a "pure" model of originthe
institutions of modernity as they were meant to be, since that is how
they had been conceptualized in the great texts of the Western canon
a normative discourse can still continue to energize and shape the
evolving forms of social institutions in the non-Western world, that I
would prefer to retain the more classical sense of the term "civil soci-
ety" rather than adopt any of its recent revised versions.
12
Indeed, for
theoretical purposes, I even find it useful to hold on to the sense of
civil society, used in Hegel and Marx, as bourgeois society (biirgerliche
gesellschaft).
An important consideration in thinking about the relation be-
tween civil society and the state in the modern history of countries such
as India is that whereas the legal-bureaucratic apparatus of the state
has been able, by the late colonial and certainly in the postcolonial
period, to reach as the target of many of its activities virtually all of
the population that inhabits its territory, the domain of civil-social
institutions as conceived in their classical sense is still restricted to a
fairly small section of "citizens." This hiatus is extremely significant
Two Poets and Death 43
because it is the mark of non-Western modernity as an always incom-
plete project of "modernization" and of the role of an enlightened
elite engaged in a pedagogical mission in relation to the rest of society.
But then, how are we to conceptualize the rest of society that lies
outside the domain of modern civil society? The most common ap-
proach has been to use a traditional/modern dichotomy. One diffi-
culty with this is the trap, not at all easy to avoid, of dehistoricizing
and essentializing "tradition." The related difficulty is one of denying
the possibility that this other domain, relegated to the zone of the tra-
ditional, could find ways of coping with the modern that might not
conform to the Western bourgeois, secularized Christian, principles of
modern civil society. I think a notion of political society lying between
civil society and the state could help us see some of these historical
possibilities.
By political society, I mean a domain of institutions and activities
where several mediations are carried out. In the classical theory, the
family is the elementary unit of social organization: by the nineteenth
century, this is widely assumed to mean the nuclear family of modern
bourgeois patriarchy. (Hegel, we know, strongly resisted the idea that
the family was based on contract, but by the late nineteenth century
the contractually formed family becomes the normative model of most
social theorizing in the West as well as of reformed laws of marriage,
property, inheritance, and personal taxation. Indeed, the family be-
comes a product of contractual arrangements between individuals
who are the primary units of society.) In countries such as India, it
would be completely unrealistic to assume this definition of the family
as obtaining universally. In fact, what is significant is that in formulat-
ing its policies and laws that must reach the greater part of the popu-
lation, even the state does not make this assumption.
The conceptual move that seems to have been made very widely,
even if somewhat imperceptibly, is from the idea of society as consti-
tuted by the elementary units of homogeneous families to that of a
population, differentiated but classifiable, describable and numerable.
Michel Foucault has been more perceptive than other social philoso-
phers of recent times in noticing the crucial importance of the new
concept of population for the emergence of modern governmental
technologies. Perhaps we should also note the contribution here of
colonial anthropology and colonial administrative theories.
Population, then, constitutes the material of society. Unlike the
44 Partha Chatterjee
family in classical theory, the concept of population is descriptive and
empirical, not normative. Indeed, population is assumed to contain
large elements of "naturalness" and "primordiality"; the internal prin-
ciples of the constitution of particular population groups is not ex-
pected to be rationally explicable, since they are not the products of
rational contractual association but are, as it were, pre-rational. What
the concept of population does, however, is make available for gov-
ernmental functions (economic policy, bureaucratic administration,
law, and political mobilization) a set of rationally manipulable instru-
ments for reaching large sections of the inhabitants of a country as the
targets of "policy."
Civil-social institutions, on the other hand, if they are to conform
to the normative model presented by Western modernity, must neces-
sarily exclude from its scope the vast mass of the population. Unlike
many radical theorists, I do not think that this "defect" of the classical
concept needs to be rectified by revising the definition of civil society in
order to include within it social institutions based on other principles.
Rather, I think retaining the older idea of civil society actually helps us
capture some of the conflicting desires of modernity that animate con-
temporary political and cultural debates in countries such as India.
Civil society in such countries is best used to describe those insti-
tutions of modern associational life set up by nationalist elites in the
era of colonial modernity, though often as part of their anticolonial
struggle. These institutions embody the desire of this elite to replicate
in its own society the forms as well as the substance of Western mo-
dernity. We can see this desire working quite clearly in the arguments
of Rabindranath Tagore quoted at the beginning of this paper. It is in-
deed a desire for a new ethical life in society, one that is in conformity
with the virtues of the Enlightenment and of bourgeois freedom and
whose known cultural forms are those of secularized Western Chris-
tianity. All of these are apparent in Rabindranath's argument for new
secularized public rituals. It is well recognized in that argument that
the new domain of civil society will long remain an exclusive domain
of the elite, that the actual "public" will not match up to the stan-
dards required by civil society, and that the function of civil-social
institutions in relation to the public at large will be one of pedagogy
rather than of free association.
Countries with relatively long histories of colonial modernization
and nationalist movements often have quite an extensive and impres-
Two Poets and Death 45
sive network of civil-social institutions of this kind. In India, most of
them survive to this day, not as quaint remnants of colonial modernity
but often as serious protagonists of a project of cultural moderniza-
tion still to be completed. However, in more recent times, they seem to
be under a state of siege.
To understand this, we will need to historicize more carefully the
concepts of civil society, political society, and the state in colonial and
postcolonial conditions.
The explicit form of the postcolonial state in India is that of a
modern liberal democracy. It is often said, not unjustifiably, that the
reason liberal democratic institutions have performed more creditably
in India than in many other parts of the formerly colonial world is the
strength of its civil-social institutions, which are relatively indepen-
dent of the political domain of the state. But one needs to be more
careful about the precise relationships involved here.
Before the rise of mass nationalist movements in the early twen-
tieth century, nationalist politics in India was largely confined to the
same circle of elites that was then busy setting up the new institutions
of "national" civil society. These elites were thoroughly wedded to the
normative principles of modern associational public life and criticized
the colonial state precisely for not living up to the standards of a liber-
al constitutional state. In talking about this part of the history of na-
tionalist modernity, we do not need to bring in the notion of a politi-
cal society mediating between civil society and the state.
However, entwined with this process of the formation of modern
civil-social institutions, something else was also happening. I have ex-
plained elsewhere how the various cultural forms of Western moderni-
ty were put through a nationalist sieve and only selectively adopted,
and then combined with the reconstituted elements of what was
claimed to be indigenous tradition.
13
Dichotomies such as spiritual/
material, inner/outer, alien/indigenous, etc., were applied to justify and
legitimize these choices from the standpoint of a nationalist cultural
politics. We would have noticed in the debate between the two poets
cited above a clear example of this politics. What I wish to point out
here in particular is that even as the associational principles of secular
bourgeois civil institutions were adopted in the new civil society of the
nationalist elite, the possibility of a different mediation between the
population and the state was already being imagined, one that would
not ground itself on a modernized civil society.
46 Partha Chatterjee
The impetus here was directly political. It had to do with the fact
that the governmental technologies of the colonial state were already
seeking to bring within its reach large sections of the population as the
targets of its policies. Nationalist politics had to find an adequate
strategic response if it was not to remain immobilized within the con-
fines of the "properly constituted" civil society of the urban elites. The
cultural politics of nationalism supplied this answer by which it could
mediate politically between the population and the nation-state of the
future. In the debate between the two poets, Nabinchandra's argu-
ments anticipated this strategic answer. It would, of course, be expli-
cated most dramatically and effectively in what I have elsewhere de-
scribed as the Gandhian moment of maneuver.
14
This mediation between the population and the state takes place
on the site of a new political society. It is built around the framework
of modern political associations such as political parties. But, as re-
searchers on nationalist political mobilizations in the Gandhian era
have shown repeatedly, elite and popular anticolonial politics, even
as they came together within a formally organized arena such as that
of the Indian National Congress, diverged at specific moments and
spilled over the limits laid down by the organization.
15
This arena of
nationalist politics, in other words, became a site of strategic maneu-
vers, resistance, and appropriation by different groups and classes,
many of them unresolved even in the present phase of the postcolonial
state. The point is that the practices that activate the forms and meth-
ods of mobilization and participation in political society are not al-
ways consistent with the principles of association in civil society.
What, then, are the principles that govern political society? The
question has been addressed in many ways in the literature on mass
mobilizations, electoral politics, ethnic politics, etc. In the light of the
conceptual distinctions I have made above between population, civil
society, political society, and the state, we will need to focus more
clearly on the mediations between population on the one hand and
political society and the state on the other. The major instrumental
form here in the postcolonial period is that of the developmental state,
which seeks to relate to different sections of the population through
the governmental function of welfare. Correspondingly, if we have to
give a name to the major form of mobilization by which political socie-
ty (parties, movements, non-party political formations) tries to chan-
nel and order popular demands on the developmental state, we should
Two Poets and Death 47
call it democracy. The institutional forms of this emergent political so-
ciety are still unclear. Just as there is a continuing attempt to order
these institutions in the prescribed forms of liberal civil society, there
is probably an even stronger tendency to strive for what are perceived
to be democratic rights and entitlements by violating those institution-
al norms. I have suggested elsewhere that the uncertain institutionali-
zation of this domain of political society can be traced to the absence
of a sufficiently differentiated and flexible notion of community in the
theoretical conception of the modern state.
16
In any case, there is much
churning in political society in the countries of the postcolonial world,
not all of which are worthy of approval, which nevertheless can be
seen as an attempt to find new democratic forms of the modern state
that were not thought out by the post-Enlightenment social consensus
of the secularized Christian world.
In conclusion, I wish to suggest three theses that might be pursued
further. These are three theses that arise from the historical study of
modernity in non-Western societies. I advance them on the strength of
my reading of the history of the institutions of the modern state and
the practices of modern representative politics in India in the last hun-
dred years or so. But I also venture to suggest that they have a large
degree of general relevance to the history of other postcolonial coun-
tries in the contemporary world. The theses are:
1. The most significant site of transformations in the colonial period
is that of civil society; the most significant transformations occur-
ring in the postcolonial period are in political society.
2. The question that frames the debate over social transformation in
the colonial period is that of modernity. In political society of the
postcolonial period, the framing question is that of democracy.
3. In the context of the latest phase of the globalization of capital, we
may well be witnessing an emerging opposition between moderni-
ty and democracy, i.e., between civil society and political society.
Before ending, I should make a final remark on my story about
the two poets and death. Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize
for literature in 1913 and went on to become by far the most eminent
literary figure in Bengal. In his long and active career, he steadfastly
held on to his early commitment to an ethical life of public virtue,
guided by reason, rationality, and a commitment to a modernist spirit
of humanism. Since his death in 1941, however, he of all modern liter-
ary figures has been the one to be deified. On the day he died, when
48 Partha Chatterjee
his body was taken through the streets of Calcutta, there was a huge
stampede when people fought with one another in an attempt to col-
lect relics from the body. Since then, his birthplace has been turned
into a place of pilgrimage where annual congregations are held every
yearnot religious festivals in their specific ceremonial practices, and
yet not dissimilar in spirit. We could easily imagine the older poet
Nabinchandra Sen chuckling with delight at the predicament of his
more illustrious junior. The disagreement over "our" way of mourn-
ing for the dead has not, it would appear, been resolved as yet.
Notes
1. All three institutions survive today, more than a hundred years later, although
performances at the Star Theatre were stopped after a fire destroyed a part of the build-
ing a few years ago.
2. Most recently, and brilliantly, by Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness:
Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
3. Nabinchandra Sen, Amdr jiban, vol. 5 (1913), in Nabincandra racandbali,
vol. x, ed. Santikumar Dasgupta and Haribandhu Mukhati (Calcutta: Dattachaudhuri,
1976), 2.53.
4. Rabindranath Thakur, "Soksabha" (May-June 1894), in Rabindra-racandbali,
vol. 10 (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1989), 291-99.
5. Ibid., 293.
6. Ibid., 293.
7. Ibid., 294.
8. Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1989).
9. Sen, Amdr jiban, 208.
10. Ibid., 253. Sen's description of this incident, though colored by his prejudices, is
not entirely far from the truth. Tagore's most recent biographer quotes another source
that gives a similar account. See Prasantakumar Pal, Rabijibani, vol. 4 (Calcutta: Ananda,
1988), 3.
11. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
12. An account of some of these versions is given in Jean L. Cohen and Andrew
Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).
13. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
14. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (London: Zed
Books, 1993).
15. One set of studies of Indian nationalist politics that explicitly addresses this
"split in the domain of politics" is contained in the volumes of Subaltern Studies and in
several monographs written by historians contributing to that series.
16. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, ch. n.
Three
Witness to Suffering:
Domestic Cruelty and the Birth
of the Modern Subject in Bengal
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Modernity and the Documentation of Suffering
Ekshan, a Calcutta-based literary magazine, published a remarkable
essay in 1991, "Baidhabya kahini" or "Tales of Widowhood."
1
The
author was Kalyani Datta, a Bengali woman who, since the 19505,
had been collecting from older Bengali widows she personally knew,
stories about the oppression and marginalization they had suffered as
widows. Datta's article reproduced these widows' tales in their own
telling, based on notes she had taken from informal interviews. Un-
funded and unprompted by any academic institutions, Datta's research
was a notable instance showing how deeply a certain will to witness
and document sufferingin this case, the plight of the widowfor
the interest of a general reading public has embedded itself in modern
Bengali life. Both this will and the archive it has built up over the last
hundred years are part of a modernity that British colonial rule inau-
gurated in nineteenth-century India.
What underlay this will-to-document was the general figure of the
Bengali widow of upper-caste Hindu families as a figure of suffering.
This figure itself is an abstraction of relatively recent times. There
have been widows, of course, in Bengali upper-caste families for as
long as such families have existed. It is also true that there have been,
49
50 Dipesh Chakrabarty
from time immemorial, pernicious little customs in place for regulat-
ing and dominating the lives of widows. It is not that every Bengali
upper-caste widow has suffered in the same way or to the same extent
throughout history, or that there have been no historical changes at all
in widows' conditions. Many widows earned unquestionable familial
authority by willingly subjecting themselves to prescribed regimes and
rituals of widowhood. Many have also resisted the social injunctions
meant to control their lives. Besides, factors such as women's educa-
tion, their entry into public life, the subsequent decline in the number
of child brides, and an overall increase in life expectancies have helped
reduce the widows' vulnerability. Kalyani Datta's private act of (pub-
lic) recording of some widows' voices is itself a testimony to these un-
deniable historical changes.
Yet there is no question that widowhood exposes women to some
real vulnerability in the patrilineal, patrilocal system of kinship of
upper-caste Bengali society. The prescribed rituals of widowhood sug-
gest that it is regarded as a state of inauspiciousness (for the inauspi-
ciousness of the woman is traditionally blamed for bringing death to a
male member of the household). The rituals take the form of extreme
and life-long atonement on the part of the widow: celibacy, ban on
meat-eating, avoidance of certain kinds of food, frequent fasting. Un-
adorned bodies carrying some permanent marks (such as the lack of
jewelry, shaved head or cropped hair, and white saris with noor
blackborders) aim to make widows unattractive, setting them aside
from others. Stories recounted since the nineteenth century have re-
vealed the element of torture, oppression, and cruelty that often, if not
always, accompanied the experience of widowhood.
Until the coming of colonial rule, however, widowhood was not
thematized as a problem in Bengali society. Pre-British Bengali litera-
ture and writing had concerned itself with many aspects of women's
lives and suffering: the daughter-in-law's suffering at the hands of the
mother-in-law and sisters-in-law, the question of chastity of women,
jealousy and quarrel between co-wives, but seldom, if ever, did the
problems of widowhood receive attention.
2
Yet colonial rule changed
all that. From the question of sati (widow-burning) that raged in the
18205 and 18308 and the widow-remarriage act (1856), through to the
early Bengali novels written between the iSyos and 192.05, the widow
and her plight remained a subject of central importance in Bengali
writing. Indeed, in the last hundred and thirty years or so, many Bengali
Witness to Suffering 51
Hindu widowsboth in life and in fictionhave told their own sto-
ries in the different genres of fiction, memoir, and autobiography. Ever
since the nineteenth century, the question of the widow's oppression
has remained an important aspect of modern critiques of Bengali kin-
ship. Kalyani Datta's short essay in Ekshan was part of this continu-
ing and collective act of documentation of the suffering that widow-
hood has traditionally inflicted on women.
Why the figure of the widow came to be the focus of so much at-
tention has been addressed by many scholars critical of both Bengali
patriarchy and colonial domination. They have demonstrated a con-
nection between "colonial discourse"in particular the British use
of the "conditions of women" question as a measure for quality of
civilizationand the beginnings of a modern form of social criticism
in Bengal that focused on such issues as sati and widow remarriage.
3
The questions I want to pursue here are somewhat different. It is obvi-
ous that the general figure of the suffering widow was produced in
Bengali history by creating a collective and "public" past out of many
individual and familial memories and constructions of the experience
of widowhood. This collective past was needed for the pursuit of jus-
tice under conditions of a modern public life. What kind of a subject is
produced at the intersection of these two kinds of memories, public
and familial? What does this subject have to be like in order to be in-
terested in documenting suffering? How would one write a history of
a modern and collective Bengali subject who is marked by this will to
witness and document oppression and injury?
Compassion and the Subject of Enlightenment
Let me state in a schematic fashion and with brutal simplification how
I understand the problem of suffering as it relates to the subject of
modernity posited by thinkers of the European Enlightenment. The
capacity to notice and document suffering (even if it be one's own suf-
fering) from the position of a generalized and necessarily disembodied
observer is what marks the beginnings of the modern self. This self
has to be generalizable in principle; in other words, it should be such
that it signifies a position available for occupation by anybody (with
proper training). If it were said, for instance, that it was only a particu-
lar type of personsuch as a Buddha or a Christwho was capable
of noticing suffering and of being moved by it, one would not be talk-
ing of a generalized subject-position, for to be a Buddha or Christ may
52 Dipesh Chakrabarty
not be within the reach of everybody. People could not be made into
a Buddha or a Christ through simple education and training. So the
capacity for sympathy must be seen as a potential inherent in the
"nature" of man. Such a "natural theory of sentiments" was indeed
argued by Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume and Adam
Smith.
A critical distinction also has to be made here between the act of
displaying suffering and that of observing or facing the sufferer. To
display suffering in order to elicit sympathy and assistance is a very
oldand perhaps universal and still-currentpractice. The deformed
beggar of medieval Europe or of contemporary Indian or U.S. cities is
a subject of suffering but he or she is not a disembodied subject. Their
representation of suffering is through the semiotic of their bodies. The
sufferer here is an embodied self. The embodied self as such is always
a particular self, grounded in this or that body. Nor would the sym-
pathy felt for only a particular sufferer (such as a kin, or a friend)
be "modern" in my sense. It is the person who, without being an im-
mediate sufferer himself or herself but with the capacity to become a
secondary sufferer through sympathy for a generalized picture of suf-
fering, and who documents this suffering in the interest of social inter-
vention, it is such a person who occupies the position of the modern
subject. In other words, the moment of the modern observation of suf-
fering is a certain moment of self-recognition on the part of an ab-
stract, general human being. It is as though one person who is able to
see in himself or herself the general human also recognizes the same
figure in the particular suffererso that the moment of recognition is
a moment when the general human splits into the two mutually recog-
nizing and mutually constitutive figures of the sufferer and the observ-
er of suffering. It was argued, however, that this could not happen
without the aid of reason, for habit and custom could indeed blunt the
natural human capacity for sympathy. Reason, that is, education in
rational argumentation, was seen as a critical factor in helping to real-
ize in the modern person this capacity for seeing the general.
Something like this "natural theory of sentiments" was argued in
effect by the two most important nineteenth-century Bengali social re-
formers who exerted themselves on questions concerning the plight of
widows: Rammohun Roy (1772/4-1833) and Iswarchandra Vidyasagar
(1820-1901). Roy was instrumental in the passing of the act that made
sati illegal in 1829, and Vidyasagar successfully agitated for widows to
Witness to Suffering 53
have the legal right to remarry, a right enshrined in the 1856 Act for
the Remarriage of Hindu Widows.
Consider, for instance, Rammohun Roy's well-known tract "Brief
Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Right of
Females," one of the first written arguments in modern India in favor
of women's right to property. This interesting document on property
rights also discusses the place of sentiments in human relations (such
as "cruelty," "distress," "wounding feelings," "misery," etc.). Both
strands were intertwined in Roy's argument:
In short a widow, according to the [current] exposition of the law,
can receive nothing . . . [unless her husband dies] leaving two or
more sons, and all of them survive and be inclined to allot a share
to their mother. . . . The consequence is, that a woman who is
looked upon as the sole mistress of a family one day, on the next,
becomes dependent on her sons, and subject to the slights of her
daughters-in-law. . . . Cruel sons often wound the feelings of their
dependent mothers. . . . Step-mothers, who are often numerous on
account of polygamy, are still more shamefully neglected in general
by their step-sons, and sometimes dreadfully treated by their sisters-
in-law. . . . [The] restraints on female inheritance encourage, in a
great degree, polygamy, a frequent source of the greatest misery in
native families.
4
There are two interesting features of this document that make it the
work of a modern documenter of suffering. First, in observing this
cruelty to widows and women, Roy put himself in the transcendental
position of the modern subject. This becomes clear if we look closely
at the following sentence of his text:
How distressing it must be to the female community and to those
who interest themselves in their behalf, to observe daily that several
daughters in a rich family can prefer no claim to any portion of the
property . . . left by their deceased father . . . ; while they ... are ex-
posed to be given in marriage to individuals who already have sev-
eral wives and have no means of maintaining them.
5
Roy presents himself here both as a subject experiencing affect
"distress"as well as a representative subject, one who "interests
[himself] in their [women's] behalf": "How distressing it must be to
the female community and to those who interest themselves in their
behalf." The capacity for sympathy is what unites the person who
represents with those who are represented; in this way they share the
54 Dipesh Chakrabarty
same "distress." This clause in the sentence about representation
refers to a new type of representation: people who took an interest in
women's condition on behalf of women. But who were these women?
They were not particular, specific women marked by their belonging
to particular families or particular networks of kinship. Women here
are a collective subject; the expression "female community" connotes
a general community. It is this "general community" that shares the
distress of a Rammohun Roy, the observer who observes on behalf of
this collective community. And therefore the feeling of "distress" that
Rammohun Roy spoke of referred to a new kind of compassion,
something one could feel for suffering beyond one's immediate fami-
ly, for women to whom one was not tied through any bond of kin-
ship. "Compassion in general," we could call it.
But from where would such compassion or sympathy spring?
What made it possible for a Rammohun or Vidyasagar to feel this
"compassion in general," which most members of their community
(presumably) did not yet feel? How would society train itself to make
this compassion a part of the comportment of every person so that
compassion became a generally present sentiment in society? It is on
this point that both Rammohun and Vidyasagar gave an answer re-
markable for its affiliation to the European Enlightenment. Reason,
they argued in effect, was what could release the flow of the compas-
sion that was naturally present in all human beings, for only reason
could dispel the blindness induced by custom and habit. Reasonable
human beings would see suffering and that would put to work the
natural human capacity for sympathy, compassion, and pity.
Rammohun raised the question of compassion in a pointed man-
ner in his 1819 answer to Kashinath Tarkabagish's polemical tract
"Bidhayak nishedhak shombad," directed against his own position on
sati. "What is a matter of regret," he said, "is that the fact of witness-
ing with your own eyes women who have thus suffered much sadness
and domination, does not arouse even a small amount of compassion
in you so that the forcible burning [of widows] may be stopped."
6
Why was this so? Why did the act of seeing not result in sympathy?
Rammohun's answer is clearly given in his 1818 tract "Views on
Burning Widows Alive," which targeted the advocates of the practice.
Here Rammohun refers to the forcible way in which widows were
"fastened" to the funeral pyre in the course of the performance of sati
and directly raises the question of mercy or compassion (daya): "you
Witness to Suffering 55
are unmercifully resolved to commit the sin of female murder." His
opponent, the "advocate" of sati, replies:
You have repeatedly asserted that from want of feeling we promote
female destruction. This is incorrect. For it is declared in our Veda and
codes of law, that mercy is the root of virtue, and from our practice of
hospitality, &c., our compassionate dispositions are well known.
7
Rammohun's counterresponse introduces an argument for which
he presents no scriptural authority and which went largely unanswered
in the debates of the time. This is the argument about "habits of insen-
sibility." Much like the Enlightenment thinkers, and perhaps influ-
enced by them, Rammohun argued that once the practice of sati be-
came a customa matter of blind repetitionpeople were prevented
from experiencing sympathy even when they physically watched the
performance of sati. The natural connection between their vision and
feelings of pity had been blocked by habit. If this habit could be cor-
rected or its veil removed, the sheer act of seeing a woman being forced
to become a sati would evoke compassion. Roy said:
That in other cases you show charitable dispositions is acknowl-
edged. But by witnessing from your youth the voluntary burning of
women amongst your elder relatives, your neighbours and the inhabi-
tants of the surrounding villages, and by observing the indifference
at the time when the women are writhing under the torture of the
flames, habits of insensibility are produced. For the same reason,
when men or women are suffering the pains of death, you feel for
them no sense of compassion, like worshipers of female deities who,
witnessing from their infancy the slaughter of kids and buffaloes, feel
no compassion for them in the time of their suffering death.
8
We encounter the same argument about the relationship between sight
and compassion in the writings of Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, the afore-
mentioned Bengali reformer responsible for the 1856 act permitting
Hindu widows to remarry. Vidyasagar's fundamental reasoning as to
the solution of widows' problems had some critical differences from
the position of Rammohun Roy, but like the latter, he too argued that
custom and habit thwarted the otherwise natural relationship between
sight and compassion:
9
People of India! . . . Habit has so darkened and overwhelmed your
intellect and good sense that it is hard for the juice of compassion to
flow in the ever-dry hearts of yours even when you see the plight of
the hapless widows. . . . Let no woman be born in a country where
56 Dipesh Chakrabarty
the men have no compassion, no feelings of duty and justice, no
sense of good and bad, no consideration, where only the preserva-
tion of custom is the main and supreme religionlet the ill-fated
women not take birth in such a country.
Women! I cannot tell what sins [of past lives] cause you to be born in
India!
10
What this amounted to was some kind of a natural theory of compas-
sion, the idea that compassion was a sentiment universally present in
something called "human nature," however blocked its expression
might be in a particular situation. Recall Adam Smith, explaining his
theory of "sympathy": "How selfish soever man may be supposed,
there are some principles in his nature which interest him in the for-
tune of others.... Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we
feel for the misery of others."
11
Hume also defined "pity" as a general
sentiment, as "a concern for ... the misery of others, without any
friendship . . . to occasion this concern," and connected it to the gen-
eral human capacity for "sympathy": "No quality of human nature is
more remarkable ... than that propensity we have to sympathize with
others."
12
It is only on the basis of this kind of an understanding that
Rammohun Roy could claim that the physical act of witnessing sati
could act as the trigger for the production of compassion in all human
hearts, provided that this natural connection between sight and sym-
pathy was not severed by habit. Hence the role they assigned to reason
in fighting the effects of custom. Reason and sentiments here naturally
fall in line with each other in a vision of humanity where, ultimately,
being human could only be a universal way of being. Sentiments as
such are not the target of reason's work. Reason simply helps in let-
ting them take their natural course by removing the obstacle of mind-
less custom and thus allowing the modern human to be responsive to
suffering.
Supplementing the Subject of Enlightenment:
A Translation of Difference
There were two problems with the Bengali adaptation of a "natural
theory" of compassion in dealing with the question of domestic cruel-
ty toward widows. One was inherent in the theory itself. By making
truly human sentiments natural and universal and hence embodied, it
filled up what would later be regarded as the space of human subjec-
Witness to Suffering 57
tivity, with reason alone. But reason, being universal and public, could
never delineate the private side of the modern individual. To this prob-
lem, I will turn in the next section.
Here, I want to draw the reader's attention to what remains an
interesting fact in the history of Bengali attempts to answer the
Enlightenment question "from where does compassion come?" The
Bengali biographies of Rammuhun Roy or Vidyasagar often present
us with an answer to this question that is very different from the an-
swer Roy and Vidyasagar themselves proposed. A central question the
biographers found themselves obliged to address in writing the life
stories of a Rammohun or a Vidyasagar was, What made it possible
for these two Bengali men to see the suffering of women that even
many parents did not see ? What made them compassionate? The bi-
ographers gave two answers. One was the Enlightenment answer we
have already discussed: the role of reason in freeing vision from the
blindfold of custom. But they also provided another answer, which is
interesting in the present context. And that answer was hriday (heart).
They argued, in effect, that it was the "heart" that Rammohun or
Vidyasagar was born with which made them compassionate.
Nagendranath Chattopadhyay's biography of Rammohun Roy,
Mahatma Raja Rammohon rayer jibancharit (1881-82), sees "sympa-
thy and compassion" (shahanubhuti o day a) as part of Roy's inborn
character: "Rammohun Roy was full of sympathy [shahanubhuti] and
compassion [daya] for the suffering poor. Their misery always made
his heart cry."
13
Chandicharan Bandyopadhyay's biography of Vidyasa-
gar, Vidyasagar (ca. 1895), describes several anecdotes to document
the compassion that Vidyasagar felt for suffering humanity. Indeed,
one of the most remarkable things about the biographies of this leg-
endary Bengali public man of the nineteenth century is that they all,
almost without exception, describe, with approval and in detail, his
propensity to cry in public (not an admirable trait, as we shall see, by
Adam Smith's standard). Crying stands as proof of his tenderhearted-
ness. Incident after incident is recounted to document how plentiful
was compassion (daya or karuna) in Vidyasagar's heart. A typical sen-
tence, to quote another of his biographers, Subal Mitra, would run as
follows: "We have already seen that, while a scholar in the Sanskrit
College[,] he showed his kindness of heart by giving food and clothing
to the needy."
14
Or consider this other example said to be typical of
Vidyasagar's life. When Vidyasagar was still a student in Calcutta, a
58 Dipesh Chakrabarty
respected teacher of his, Shambhuchandra Bachaspati, who taught
Vidyasagar Vedantic philosophy and who was by then an old, physi-
cally decrepit man, married a very young girl. Vidyasagar, it is said,
was opposed to this marriage and advised his teacher against it. His
biographers are unanimous in describing how on meeting this girl,
Vidyasagar "could not hold back his tears" thinking of the widow-
hood she seemed destined to suffer.
15
Isvar Chandra only cast a glance at the beautiful girl's face, and im-
mediately left the place. The sight move[d] his tender heart, and
drew tears from his eyes. He foresaw the miserable, wretched life
which the unfortunate little girl must have in a very short time, and
he sobbed and wept like a child.
16
Chandicharan writes of this event: "This one single incident helps us
to understand how tender was Ishvarchandra's heart and how easily it
was stricken by other people's suffering."
17
The biographies thus explain Rammohun's or Vidyasagar's capaci-
ty to generalize their compassion by reference to the special quality of
hriday, or heart. They could generalize their sympathies from the par-
ticular instance to all cases because the supply of sympathy in their
hearts was plentiful. In this they were different from, say, people such
as the eighteenth-century king Raja Rajballabh of Vikrampur, Dhaka,
who, moved by the plight of his young and widowed daughter at-
tempted, unsuccessfully, to get her married again; or somebody like
"one Syama Charan Das" of Calcutta in the early 18505, who tried to
do the same and was foiled by the local pundits.
18
These people had
compassion but did not have it in measures ample enough to move
them to see their daughters' problem as a problem afflicting, potential-
ly, all upper-caste women. A person like Rammohun or Vidyasagar,
however, was capable of moving to the general case from the particu-
lar because they were born with plentiful measures of karuna (com-
passion). Vidyasagar, in fact, was christened karunasagar ("ocean of
compassion," as distinct from vidyasagar, "ocean of learning") by the
Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt.
19
Their biographers cite
some critical evidence from stories of their childhood to establish this
karuna as an inborn character trait. Rammohun's revulsion toward
the idea of sati (widow-burning), we are told, arose first when he
learned of a close female relative being forced to this fate by the men
of the household.
20
Similarly, Vidyasagar's determination to fight for
Witness to Suffering S9
the amelioration of widows' conditions is traced back to a childhood
experience, when he discovered that a young girl who was once a
playmate of his had become widowed and was now subject to all the
prohibitions of widowhood. "He felt so much commiseration for the
little girl that he, there and then, resolved that he would give his life to
relieve the sufferings of widows. He was at the time only 13 or 14
years old."
21
Generalized sympathy here is seen as a gift on the part of Vidyasa-
gar: "He would give his life to relieve the sufferings of the widows." It
is a gift of his heart. This understanding of compassion as a person's
inborn capacity for shahanubhuti (shaha = equal, anubhuti = feelings)
was interestingly different from the Smithian or Humean position that
pity was a part of general human nature. The Sanskrit-derived Bengali
word shahanubhuti is usually translated in English as "sympathy."
Yet there are some profound differences. The idea of "sympathy"
entails the practice and faculty of (another very European word)
"imagination." We sympathize with someone's misery because we can
through the faculty of imagination place ourselves in the position of
the person suffering; that is sympathy. As Adam Smith writes: "We
sometimes feel for another . .. because, when we put ourselves in his
case, that passion arises in our breast from the imagination."
22
This
capacity to imagine was part of human nature in Smith's discussion:
"Nature teaches the spectators to assume the circumstances of the
person principally concerned."
23
The Bengali authors, however, in ex-
plaining Rammohun's or Vidyasagar's inborn character as shahriday
(with hriday or "heart") and therefore with the capacity for sha-
hanubhuti, were drawing practically but implicitly on Sanskritic aes-
thetic theories of the rasa shastra (in aesthetics, the science of rasa or
"moods"), according to which it was not given to everybody to ap-
preciate the different rasas of life (including that of karuna or com-
passion). The capacity for shahanubhuti was, unlike sympathy in
European theory, not dependent on a naturally given mental faculty
like "imagination" (for which there is no corresponding category in
Indian aesthetics); it was seen rather as a characteristic of the person
with hriday. The quality of being "with hriday" was called shahri-
dayata. A rasika person, one who could appreciate the different rasas,
had this mysterious entity called hriday. And it was in that sense a
Rammohun or a Vidyasagar could be called a shahriday vyakti (a per-
son with hriday).
2
* There is no theory of a general human nature in
60 Dipesh Chakrabarty
the rasa shastra to explain why some people are born with hriday and
others not. To have hriday was a matter of exception rather than the
rule. A Rammohun or a Vidyasagar was born that way. That is what
made them rare and godlike, and placed them above ordinary hu-
mans. There could not be, therefore, a natural theory of compassion
from this point of view.
There were thus two separate and unconnected theoretical ways
of looking at compassion and personhood jostling together in the
Bengali biographies of Vidyasagar and Rammohun Roy. One was the
European-derived natural theory of sentiments. The other, derived
from Indian aesthetics, was inscribed in the Bengali or Sanskrit words
used to describe the capacity for sympathy or compassion. Words de-
rived from Sanskrit texts of rasa-shastra circulated in Bengali writing
as a form of practical consciousness, as words belonging to the vocabu-
lary of everyday relationships. But they represented, nevertheless, a
different hermeneutic of the social that supplemented the one repre-
sented by European Enlightenment thought. After all, Adam Smith's or
David Hume's theoriesin their conscious appeal to experience as the
ground for generalizationoften offered as universally applicable hy-
potheses positions that were clearly derived from very particular and
specific cultural practices of the societies they knew. Smith, for in-
stance, would blithely assume it to be a universal proposition that "the
man who, under the greatest calamities, could command his sorrow,
seems worthy of the highest admiration," or that "nothing is so morti-
fying as to be obliged to express our distress to the view of the public."
(This could never explain, for instance, why Bengalis valued the fact
that a man of Vidyasagar's stature would cry in public.)
25
These state-
ments were as much theories as they were matters of prejudice (in the
Gadamerian sense) in that they were interpretations as well.
26
Between
them and the already existing interpretations structuring Bengali lives
was created the field of the politics of translating difference.
This politics may be seen in a duality of attitudes that authors of
biographies often express. Nineteenth-century biographical writing in
Bengal was inspired by the Victorian idea that biographies contributed
to social improvement by providing models of characters that others
in society could emulate. A natural theory of compassion was helpful
in this regard, for modern education (i.e., training in rational argu-
mentation) could then be seen as the prescribed weapon for fighting
the blinding effects of custom. Biographies were meant to be tools of
Witness to Suffering 61
such education. But if, on the other hand, compassion in general was a
function of such a contingent and rare factor, such as the hriday one
was born with, and was therefore a quality that was by definition in
short supply, how would one train people in the art of this sentiment?
How could every person cultivate that which, by its own nature, could
only be acquired as a special gift worthy of veneration? Biographers
of compassionate Bengali social reformers were often caught in this
contradiction.
A biographer such as Bandyopadhyay would have to make two
contradictory claims at once. He would convey the impression that
Vidyasagar's greatness lay in the natural rarity of his kind of people.
Not everybody was born with a heart as full of shahanubhuti as
Vidyasagar's. And yet at the same time he would want his biography
to make an example of Vidyasagar's life that othersnot as gifted
could follow. "The lord of our destiny willing," he says toward the
end of his book, "may the reading of [Vidya]sagar's life ... spread the
desire to imitate [his] . . . qualities."
27
Sometimes his text would di-
rectly address the reader, exhorting him to exercise his "imagination"
and emulate Vidyasagar's noble example.
28
Yet on other occasions, he
would emphasize the inborn nature of Vidyasagar's compassion and
sentiments, leaving a degree of ambiguity as to whether compassion
for all was something that followed from the natural human capacity
for sympathy triggered by sight or whether it was a feeling that only
the very exceptional were capable of experiencing.
Unable to resolve this contradiction between a view of hriday as a
quasi-divine gift, and their commitment to a Victorian understanding
of social "improvement" through the remolding of individual charac-
ters by disseminating stories of good examples, Bengali biographies
often fell somewhere between biographies and hagiographies. They
remained, for all their secular humanism, expressions of bhakti (devo-
tion), an act of worship, on the part of the biographer toward his or
her subject. Bandyopadhyay indicates clearly in his preface that writ-
ing the life of Vidyasagar was for him an action of the same category
as offering puja (worship). He adopts the gesture of the religious
devotee (bhakta), whose language of humility was necessarily a lan-
guage of self-denigration as well:
Vidyasagar deserves veneration from the community of learned
people; unfortunately, his present biographer, in comparison, would
62 Dipesh Chakrabarty
only count amongst the leaders of fools.... He was extremely affec-
tionate towards me ... and I will also do puja to him for that reason
all my life. This biography began as part of that arrangement for
puja and this is the only right I have to narrate the story of his very
sacred life.
29
This was quite in keeping with the understanding that an excess of
compassion in one's character was a rare gift from the world of gods.
This understanding had its historical genealogies in aesthetic theories
and devotional practices unconnected to Enlightenment thought, but it
shadowed and supplemented what came from Europe. On the ques-
tion of seeing the widow, there were thus at least two answers given to
the question: whose sight generated sympathy or compassion? Was it
the sight of the Enlightenment subject or of the subject who, as a rare
gift, possessed hriday? That we come across the answers in the same
body of texts suggests the answers did not displace but supplemented
each other, to constitute an intertwined strand in Bengali modernity.
The Widow as the Bengali Modern Subject
Rammohun or Vidyasagar saw the widow from outside herself. The
archive of accounts of widows' suffering they helped to build did not
include the widow's private experience of it. Her subjectivity was not
in question. By the time Kalyani Datta published her essay in 1991,
however, recording the widow's own voice was critical to the enter-
prise. It was not only Kalyani Datta, the observer, who was document-
ing suffering; the sufferer herself spoke of her conditions. She was her
own observer of herself. One of the archival values of Datta's essay
are the different older women who address the reader directly from
within it. The archives of this history, in other words, now included
the subjectivity of the widow. The widow was both the object and the
subject of the gaze that bore witness to oppression and suffering.
This was in keeping with what a standard account of the modern
subject in European political thoughta history of the figure of the
citizen, saywould lead us to expect. The modern subject, as many
analysts of modernity have suggested, requires social and political
thought to construct categories by which it comes to recognize the
subject as having subjectivity, so that desires and emotions could be a
part, not of anything general or universal as the biological human
body or innate human nature, but of individual subjectivity itself. In
other words, subjectivity itself, or what many commentators would
Witness to Suffering 63
call the "inferiority" of the subject, comes to be constituted by a
tension between individual-private experiences and desires (feelings,
emotions, sentiments) and a universal-public reason. One could say
that it is this opposition that manifests itself in the split between the
private and the public in modernity.
C. B. Macpherson's The Political Theory of Possessive Individual-
ism traces one source of the modern subject to the rise in the seven-
teenth century of the idea of the right of private ownership in one's
own person. The subject who enjoyed this right could only be a disem-
bodied, private subject, for the object over which his right extended
was his own body.
30
It was not imperative in the seventeenth century
that this subject, grounded in the idea of natural rights, be endowed
with a deep interiority. The "private" of such a subject may indeed
have been empty. But from the late eighteenth century on, this private
was filled up to create what eventually became the domain of subjec-
tivity. The young Marx, in "The Jewish Question," a polemic against
Bruno Bauer that built on Hegel's Philosophy of Right, drew attention
to this public/private split in the very conception of the citizen as
spelled out in the 1791-93 French Declaration of the Rights of Man
and Citizen. The citizen was the public-universal and political side of
the human, who retained "natural rights" to private interests as a
member of civil society. Religion could only be part of his private,
egoistic sphere of self-interest.
31
William Connolly's recent genealogy
of the subject of European political thought, traced through the writ-
ings of Hobbes, Rousseau, the Marquis de Sade, and Hegel, tracks the
process whereby in the very theory of the subject, accounts of "strife
and conflict in civil society" are shifted to a "site within the individual
itself," until the individual becomes, by the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the more familiar figure whose private self, now regarded as con-
stituted through a history of psychological repression, can be pried
open only by the techniques of psychoanalysis. In Connolly's words:
The modern theory of the stratified subject, with its levels of uncon-
scious, preconscious, conscious and self-conscious activity, and its
convoluted relays among passions, interests, wishes, responsibility
and guilt, locates within the self conflicts which Hobbes and Rousseau
distributed across regimes.
32
The birth of the modern subject in nineteenth-century European
theory required a conflicted interiority where reason struggled to bring
64 Dipesh Chakrabarty
under its guidance and control that which distinguished one subject
from another and which at the same time was itself not reason: this is
the (initially) conscious and (later) subconscious world of passions,
desires, and sentiments making up human subjectivity. While reason is
a human faculty, it cannot constitute individual subjectivity because it
is by definition universal and public. Passions, sentiments, etc., them-
selves have to be located within the mind and within a very particular
understanding of the relationship between sentiments/emotions and
reason. This relationship is pedagogic. Passions and sentiments, to be
modern, require the guiding hand of reason. At the same time, this is a
relationship of struggle because the two are of opposed and contradic-
tory character. This struggle is what marks the inferiority of the sub-
ject. Connolly describes this transition in the writings of Rousseau:
Rousseau . . . shifts strife and conflict from civil society to a site
within the individual itself. Demanding more from the self than
Hobbes did, he must identify the struggle within it which Hobbes
identified, and he must seek a more complete victory for the interior
voice of virtue. Politics become interiorized . . . Rousseau withdraws
politics from the general will and relocates it quietly inside the selves
which will these general laws.
33
Why was it important that the modern individual be conceptual-
ized in terms of this internal struggle between passion/sentiments and
reason? Timothy Mitchell's discussion of Durkheim in Colonising
Egypt offers a suggestive answer. The very conception of the modern
individual, Mitchell says, in discussing Durkheim's texts, poses a
threat to the conception of the social and the general: If individuals
are endowed with infinite individuality (which is what the drama of
passions is supposed to reveal, each person his or her own novelist
and analysand at the same time), what is there to guarantee the unity
of the social? What would prevent the social, made up of such individu-
als (i.e., people not simply subject to social practice), from descending
into the nightmare of anomie?
34
At the level of the individual, the an-
swer would be reason. Reason, by focusing the mind on the general
and the universal, would guide the individual's passion into its rightful
place in the social. This thought, taken by itself, was not necessarily
modern, but its generalization through society, one could argue, marks
the coming of modernity.
Archiving and observing the Bengali widow as the subject of mo-
dernity then meant documenting not just the external conditions of
Witness to Suffering 65
the widow's life but her internal suffering as well, the way passion
struggled with reason within her to mark her as modern. A clue to
what was missing, in terms of this schema, from the framework of
Rammohun and Vidyasagar is provided by the statement of Vidyasagar
quoted above. Let us read a portion of it again, this time with an eye
on the question of the widow's desires and her consequent agency:
People of India!. . . Open your eyes for once and see how India, once
a land of virtue, [is now] awash with sins of adultery and foeti-
cide.... You are prepared to consign your daughters ... to the intol-
erable fire and torture of widowhood. You agree to connive at their
conduct when, under the influence of irresistible passions, they be-
come the victims of adultery. You are prepared to help them commit
foetidde throwing aside all fears of immoral conduct and only out of
the fear of being exposed to the public eye, and yetthe wonder of
wonders!you are not ready to follow the injunctions of the shas-
tras, get them remarried, and free them from the insufferable pain of
widowhood and free yourselves from the risk of all kinds of danger.
You perhaps imagine that with the loss of their husbands, women's
bodies turn into stone, that they do lose all feelings of pain and sad-
ness, that their passions are eradicated once for all Let no woman
be born in a country where the men have no compassion.
35
I should explain that the reason why feticide and adultery assume
such a prominent place in Vidyasagar's text was because the addressee
of this textthose whom Vidyasagar in a generalizing and inflationary
move addressed as "people of India"were middle-class Bengali male
householders of Calcutta of the mid-nineteenth century. The text was
about their newfound sense of respectable forms of domesticity. Their
fear of unwanted and illegitimate pregnancies caused by sexual liaisons
between young widows and men in or outside the family was what
this text addressed. The scandals of adultery and feticidethe Bengali
word is kelenkari (disgrace), derived from the word kalanka meaning,
literally, a spot or a stain (the moon's dark spots are called in Bengali
the moon's kalanka)were the "danger" to which Vidyasagar alluded.
With a young widow in their midst, a middle-class family ran the risk
of such kelenkari and the widow of acquiring the stigma (kalanka) of
illicit relationship, which would destroy the respectability of her family.
Where in this text is the subjecthood/agency of the young widow locat-
ed? Vidyasagar's answer was unambiguous: the real problems were in
the widow's body, in the drives and passions of youth, which were too
strong to be regulated by the purificatory and self-renunciatory rituals
66 Dipesh Chakrabarty
of celibacy customarily recommended for widows. What made young
women vulnerable to the danger of illegitimate pregnancy was the very
nature of the passion physical youth engendered in their bodies. Recall
Vidyasagar's words: "You perhaps imagine that with the loss of their
husbands, women's bodies turn into stone, that they do lose all feelings
of pain and sadness, that their passions are eradicated once for all."
Vidyasagar was not alone in thinking of the widow's passions as some-
thing arising from the youth of her body. Fictional literature composed
at this time on the question of widow remarriage suggest that this
understanding was a common one.
36
To build the archive of the widow's interiority, to see into her deep
and stratified self, to hear her own voice as it were, required the de-
velopment of a set of observational techniques for studying and de-
scribing human psychology. This was a role performed primarily by the
novel. It was the forbidden love of the widow that the three stalwarts
of early Bengali fictionBankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838-94),
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and Saratchandra Chattopadhyay
(1876-1938)made the subject of their novels. The issue of roman-
tic love was itself a problem in the history of the formation of the
democratic subject in a society in which the idea of choosing one's life
partneror of love being an act of self-expression of the subject
came up against the norms of social regulation enshrined in the custom
of arranged marriages. Indeed, one reason why the figure of the widow
may have held a special fascination for the early Bengali novelists is
that the unrecognized desires of the widow represented a case of com-
plete subordination of the individual to society. In the widow one could
see the expressivist subject clamoring for (self)recognition. To delve
into the interior world of the widow, whose innermost feelings were de-
nied recognition by society, was to write the desire for freedom and
self-expression into the very structure of the new Bengali subject. In
doing this, however, the Bengali novelists also brought the question of
the widow's interiority into the general field of view. Thus, long before
such disciplines as history and sociology expressed the familiar modern
will-to-document oppression, humanist literature was experimenting
and perfecting the tools of modern description of "experience."
37
Inferiority and the Problem of Purity
The terrain of this literary development is complex. But I will have to
be schematic and simplify issues that have more twists and turns in
Witness to Suffering 67
them than I can accommodate here. It is in Rabindranath Tagore's
novel Chokher ball (1903), focused on the problem of a young
widow's unrequited love, that we see a self-conscious step being taken
in the depiction of human interiority as an absolute and autonomous
inside of the subject: a complete marginalization of the physical body
and its relationship to desire. Chokher bait is the story of the passion
of a young man, Mahendra, who was married to a woman named
Asha and who fell violently in love with a young widow, Binodini, who
came from a village to stay with Mahendra, Asha, and Mahendra's
mother in Calcutta. It is also a story about Binodini's own feelings of
love, her initial attraction to Mahendra being replaced by her eventual
love for Mahendra's best friend, Bihari. Unlike the widow characters
in Bankim's novels, Binodini is literate; she is, in fact, depicted as an
avid reader of Bankim's Bishabriksha. In a preface written to a later
edition of the book, Tagore described how, for Bengali literature, the
appearance of this novel heralded a sudden change. Its novelty lay in
its emphasis on the interior space of human beings. True, there was
still a role for the sense organs, for the idea of ripit (the traditional
Hindu view of six particular embodied passions that destroy man),
but all this was now subordinated to the work of psychological forces.
As Tagore himself put it:
What drives the story of Chokher ball from inside and gives it its
intensity is the jealousy of the mother. It is this jealousy that
provided Mahendra's ripu with an opportunity to bare itself, all
tooth-and-claw, which would not have happened under normal
circumstances. . . . The method of new literature no longer simply
delineates events in the right order, it analyses them in order to
extract stories about the inside of human beings. [Tagore uses the
expression "aanter katha."] This new method made an appearance
in Chokher bait.
One may read this statement as installing in Bengali fiction the mod-
ern subject endowed with an interiority. In Vidyasagar, the widow's
desire was understood as lust, a purely physical passion of youth regu-
lated by the laws of nature and hence powerful beyond human con-
trol. With Bankimchandra, Rabindranath, and Saratchandra, there
began a new and self-conscious discussion of what romantic (hetero-
sexual) love (prem) was, as distinct from the problem of lust. There
is, however, a twist to this story of the birth of the modern subject
in Bengali literature. That twist and its history are now condensed in
68 Dipesh Chakrabarty
a word that came into wide circulation in the period 1870 to 192.0.
This word was pabitra, used as a qualifier of secular, human love.
Usually glossed in English as "pure," but connoting something of
a combination of "sacred," "auspicious," and "unstained" or "un-
tainted"untainted, that is, by physical passionthis word has been
used by many Bengali writers to signify love that transcends physical
passion. The prem (love) that was pabitra was the highest kind of
love. Bankimchandra defined pabitra as that which has conquered or
transcended the senses (jitendriya). This was an ancient theme. As a
way of thinking about the body, it reached back to certain strands of
Vedantic philosophy; but it became central to nineteenth-century na-
tionalist discussions of conduct and the self, where the ideal of self
was posited as that of being jitendriya, literally someone who had
conquered his or her physical senses.
39
The Bengali discussion of love,
however, was more immediately indebted to medieval Vaishnava po-
etry (followers of the preserver-god Vishnu are called Vaishnava),
which modern Bengali writers increasingly rediscovered from the
18705 onward.
40
Much Vaishnava poetry was structured around the theme of the
illicit love that Radha, the married heroine of this poetry, bore for
Krishna, an incarnation of the god Vishnu in a human form. This extra-
marital love had brought on Radha the opprobrium of kalanka, which
many Vaishnava poets exonerated by portraying Radha's love as
symbolic of the devotee's spiritual longing for union with god and
therefore as actually having very little to do with narrowly construed
physical passion or self-indulgence. It was in this ideal of love as a
spiritual sentiment, as something devoid of any hint of lust, that
Bengali writers found an elaboration of desire between the sexes that
could signify individual interiority and desires and yet at the same
time seem socially respectable for avoiding any suggestion that love
could also be about the body. In an essay comparing the two medieval
Vaishnava poets Jayadev (twelfth century) and Vidyapati (fifteenth
century), Bankimchandra made a distinction between two kinds of
nature (prakriti), external (bahihprakriti) and internal (antahprakriti).
The body and its passions belonged to external nature, to the realm of
the senses. Interiority was the nature internal to humans, and it was
there that one could get away from the rule of the senses and make
love spiritual or pabitra. Bankimchandra wrote:
Witness to Suffering 69
The writers of lyrical poetry in Bengali may be divided into two
groups: those who look at man setting him in the context of natural
beauty and those who attend solely to the human heart, keeping ex-
ternal nature at a distance. . . . It is external nature [bahihprakriti]
that is predominant in Jayadeva and his likes while in the likes of
Vidyapati we find the domain of nature that is internal [antahprakri-
ti]. Jayadev and Vidyapati both sing of the love between Radha and
Krishna. But the love that Jayadeva sings of obeys the external sense-
organs. The poems of Vidyapati, and especially those of Chandidasa,
transcend our external senses . . . and become pabitra, that is to say,
devoid of any association with the senses or with self-indulgence.
41
Vaishnava doctrines were mixed in with European romanticism
Bankim, for instance, refers to Wordsworth as the poet of the spiritual
antahprakriti (internal nature) in the same essayto arrive at the
modern Bengali understanding of love as a formation of sentiment
that combined recognition of individual desire with the middle class's
need for respectability.
The story, apparently popular since the seventeenth century, of the
socially scandalous love between the famous fifteenth-century Bengali
poet Chandidasa, a Vaishnavite Brahman, and a low-caste washer-
woman called Rami, was recycled time and again in modern Bengali
writing to illustrate the ideal of romantic love.
42
In one of his poems
on this subjectand in lines that Bengali literary criticism has made
immortal since the end of the last centuryChandidasa himself com-
pared Rami's love to something as pure as "gold without dross,"with-
out, he said, even a scent of (physical) desire in it. When he was
about twenty, Tagore wrote a highly influential essay in which he up-
held these lines of Chandidasa as the ideal of love between men and
women:
How pure was Chandidas's love! He could separate love from self-
indulgence. That is why he said of his lover's beauty, that there was
not even a scent of [physical] desire in it. ... I will be with her but
not touch her body.... this is not a love of the external world, a love
of seeing and touching. This is the treasure of dreams. It is wrapped
up in dreams and has no relationship to the world which is awake. It
is love in its absolute purity and nothing else. Chandidasa's state-
ment does not belong [only] to the time when he wrote it.
43
Historians of Bengali literature, from Dineschandra Sen at the begin-
ning of this century to the more recent Asit Bandyopadhayay, have
followed Tagore in this opinion.
44
Thus while the interior space of the
70 Dipesh Cbakrabarty
widowor of the human subjectopened up to the documentary
gaze of Bengali novelists, love, being pabitra, emerged as a flight of
the spirit, which was always struggling with the aid of moral reason-
ing to avoid any suggestion of physicality. This, I want to argue, deter-
mined to a large degree the nature of the Bengali modern and some of
its significant specificities.
In Bankimchandra, Rabindranath, and Saratchandra, the body cir-
culates as what threatens the domain of interiority. The body threat-
ens its capacity to be pure, or pabitra. In Bankim, however, while rea-
son struggles with passion and this struggle is the central fact of
human interiority, the body still enjoys an autonomous existence
autonomous of the mind, that is, through Bankim's category of beauty
or external appearance (rup), which belongs to his understanding of
external nature (prakriti). According to Bankim, it is in the nature of
man to be attracted to rup. In his novel Bishabriksha (The Poison-
Tree), published in 1873, the rup of a young and beautiful widow
called Kunda plays a critical role in drawing a happily married man,
Nagendra, to itself like a moth to fire. Nagendra leaves his wife and
marries Kunda. This fire-moth relationship was, for Bankim, a perfect
image of the way external nature or bahihprakriti tempts humans to
their ironic or tragic destiny. As he himself wrote in his ironic, witty,
and humorous series of essays in the book Kamalakanter daptar:
From now on it seemed to me that every man was but an insect.
Each one of them had his own kind of fire in which he desired to
die ... Some do and some get stopped by the glass. Knowledge is
one such fire, wealth another, status, beauty, religion, sense-organs
are of other kindsthis world is full of fires. The world is also full
of glass. The light that attracts us, the light into which we want to
tumble down, drawn by that attractionwell, we do not reach it, do
we? We buzz back and forth only to return again and again. If it had
not been for the existence of [this] glass, the world would have been
burnt down by now.
45
The interiority of someone like Nagendra, the tragic hero of
Bishabriksha> is made up of a story in which his reason/will struggles,
unsuccessfully, with bahihprakriti, or external nature. Human free-
dom, suggests Bankim, lies in being able to distinguishwith the help
of moral reasoningbetween that which belongs to the interior space
of the subject, the prakriti or nature of the interior (antahprakriiti),
and that which belongs to external nature or bahihprakriti. Humans
Witness to Suffering 71
are apt to feel an attraction for physical beauty. Nagendra, the hero of
Bankim's novel, calls it "chokher bhalobasha" (lit., love of the eyes).
46
To this "love of the eyes," Bankim opposed something one might call
"love of the mind." The theory is elaborated by another character in
the novel, Haradev Ghosal, Nagendra's brother-in-law, who says to
Nagendra the following (and the reader will see how this ideal of pure
love provided a framework through which Bengali authors consumed
European literature as well):
There are many sensations in the mind which people call love... .
The desire to enjoy the beauty of a beautiful woman is not love....
This propensity ... is sent by God; it is by means of it, too, that the
world's desires are realised, and it fascinates all creatures. Kalidasa,
Byron, Jayadeva are its poets. . . . But it is not love. Love is born
of the faculties of the mind. [Its] result is sympathy, and in the
end, self-forgetfulness and self-renunciation. This is truly love.
Shakespeare, Valmiki and the author of the Bhagavat Purana are its
poets.
47
We would miss the complexity of Bankim's thought if we read him as
simply reinventing the nature/culture distinction of European soci-
ology and locating woman in nature. Rup, formal beauty, belongs to
bahihprakriti, or external nature. Bankim, as I have said, makes a
distinction between external and internal nature, bahihprakriti and
antarprakriti. But the word prakriti, in Bankim, always resonates
on two separate registers, symptomatic of the processes of cultur-
al translation, which modernity essentially was in colonial Bengal.
Bankim's category prakriti mediates between the modern scientific
understanding of nature as a collection of inert bodies driven by blind,
unconscious physical laws, and the older Tantric understanding of
prakriti or nature as a form of consciousness, a feminine power ani-
mating the world, creating it in collaboration with purush, man or the
masculine power, and tempting the latter to both live and die.
48
One fundamental difference between Bankim's approach to desire
in Bishabriksha and that of Tagore in Chokher ball is that there is
no problem of rup or the "love of the eye" in Chokher ball. Physical
beauty, as we have seen, remains a part of Bankim's cosmology; he
warns against its impact on the mind precisely because he considers it
genuinely powerful. Tagore leaves us in no doubt that his heroine
Binodini is the new woman endowed with interiority and subjectivity.
However physically attractive she may be, Binodini is a product of
72 Dipesh Chakrabarty
new education and enlightenment. Unlike in the novels of Bankim,
reason in Chokher bait does not struggle to distinguish between love
born of rup and love born of a "faculty of the mind." It was as if in
response to Bankim's idea that love or attraction could be caused by
the fact that human sight, independent of human morality, could not
help being influenced by physical beauty (rup), Tagore would quip
(through the voice of Binodini): "Has God given men only sight and
no insight at all?"
49
By thus subordinating sight to insight, Tagore
shifted the drama of sentiments from the external space of physicality
to the space of interiority in the subject.
Purity or pabitrata emerges in Bengali fiction as a set of techniques
of interiority, the use of which could make one's innermost emotions
(such as love) "pure" and thus help them transcend anything that was
external to the subject's interior spacethe body, interests, social dog-
mas, and prejudices. It created an extreme autonomy in the status of
affect and a strong sense of resolve in the subject. For this acquisition
of the quality of one's interiority being pabitra did not come without a
determined struggle against the senses that connected one to the exte-
rior world, and this battle was the spiritual struggle of an individual
to be an individual. Tagore could thus create in his fiction extremely
forceful characters of widows whose struggle against social injustice
took on the halo of a spiritual vigilance. In Chokher bait, for instance,
a character named Annapurna, an aunt of Asha's who, much like a
"traditional" widow, decides to live in the holy city of Banaras, illus-
trates this point. An elderly person, she stays well outside the circuit of
youthful romantic love in the novel. But her conversations with Asha
leave us in no doubt that this widowed aunt was nothing but her own
person. Her resolution to keep her innermost self pure or pabitra was
at the same time her quiet defiance of social conventions:
Asha one day asked her, "Tell me Auntie, do you remember our
uncle?" Annapurna said, "I became a widow at eleven. My hus-
band's image I can only recall as a shadow." Asha asked, "Then who
do you think about, Auntie?" Annapurna smiled a little and said, "I
think of Him in whom my husband resides now, I think of that
god." Asha said, "Does that make you happy?" Annapurna ran her
fingers through Asha's hair affectionately, and said, "What would
you understand, my child, of what happens inside me? Only my
mind knows it. And it is known to Him, He is who is in my
thoughts. . . . There was a day when this aunt of yours, when she
was your age, entered the commerce of give and take with the world,
Witness to Suffering 73
just as you are doing now. Like you, I also used to think, why
wouldn't my service and my nurturing give rise to contentment in
the person I served? Why would I not receive grace from him whom
I worshiped? . . . But at every step I saw that this did not happen.
One day I left the world out of the feeling that everything in this
world had failed for me. But today I see that nothing had failed. .. .
If only I knew it then. If I had done my dudes in the world as though
they were my duties to Him, if I had offered my heart to this world
only as a ruse for offering it to Him, then who could have made me
suffer? . . . This is my advice: whatever the suffering you receive,
keep your faith and devotion intact. And may your sense of dharma
[proper action] be unflinching.
50
The later writer Saratchandra Chatter] ee espoused a view similar
to Tagore's. In a move reminiscent of the way Tagore converted the
problem of "sight" into that of "insight," Saratchandra effected a dis-
placement of Bankim's problematic of rup (beauty) in order to make
room for the idea of prakrito rup (true or real beauty), an inside to
the human being that now seemed more beautiful than mere external
beauty or outward appearance. Speaking in anger at the treatment of
a young widow whom he knew from his childhood and who had lost
all her social standing overnight simply because a man was one day
found in her bedroom, Saratchandra said in 1932:
Perhaps she has nothing called chastity left any more. Suppose I ac-
cept that. But what about her femininity? Will her nursing of the sick
for days and nights on end ... and her unstinting giving to the poor
receive no ... consideration? Is the woman's body everything that
matters, does her inside (antar) count for nothing? Even if this
woman, widowed in her childhood and driven by the unbearable
urging of youth, failed to preserve the purity (pabitrata) of her body,
will that make all the qualities of her inside false?. . . Where do we
get to see the true beauty (prakrito rup) of the human being? In the
covering of his or her body or in the covering of his or her interiority?
You tell me.
51
The details of Saratchandra's argument here are worth some atten-
tion, for they help us see the working of "the aesthetic marginalization
of the body" in early modern fiction in Bengal. Saratchandra does not
argue against the idea of chastity as such; more typically and primari-
ly, he sees it as a practice of the mind and not of the body. The young
widow might have been with another man, but if anything, that only
destroyed the purity of her body; the more valuable purity was the pu-
rity of her mind, which was reflected in her acts of compassion and
74 Dipesh Chakrabarty
self-sacrifice and whichand not her bodywas what gave her real
beauty (prakrito rup). The argument about pabitrata or purity was
about the interior self. Its cultivation made the woman her own per-
son. Saratchandra saw the inner purity of the good woman as the sign
of the woman's individuality. It was therefore also his ground for op-
posing men's unquestioned rights over women. He wrote to a woman
correspondent about "[the idea] that she who became a widow at the
age of sixteen or seventeen would have no right to love or marry any-
body else." "Why not?" he asked and added, "It takes only a little
thought to see that there is but one prejudice hidden in this [proposi-
tion], that the wife is a possession of the husband."
52
The novels thus establish the idea of a private but communicable
sphere of inferiorityautonomous of the physical bodysomething
that is critical to the category of the modern subject in European
thought.
53
Bengali literary thought acknowledged lust, an animal pas-
sion residing in the body. To this it opposed the idea of prem or love.
Prem came to mark the autonomy of the individual in the widow, pre-
cisely by putting a distance between itself and the body through the
techniques of purity or pabitrata. Fiction thus shone a light by which
to see and archive the widow as an individual subject endowed with
interiority. The widow, qua widow, could now both write herself and
be written about.
But the continuing theme of purity or pabitrata suggests that it
was around the question of the body that the struggle of reason with
passion was staged in this dramatization of human interiority. The
body remains an unresolved problem in these novels. It is either com-
pletely marginalized as the seat of the lust that pabitra prem (true/pure
love) conquers or it comes back (as in Bankim) in the problem of rup
{form, appearance), as fate that teases and tempts the human's inter-
nal nature (antahprakriti). In either case, nothing mediates between
the body and the interior space of the subject. What was ideologically
invested in the practice of pabitratal How indeed was the theme of
purity meant to capture the interior strife of the modern subject?
What was the nature of this strife? In Chokher bait, Tagore gives a
particular name to the form of reason that struggles with physical pas-
sion to produce the practices of purity: kartabyabudhhi (kartabya =
duty; budhhi = intellect). This, in other words, was the mode of rea-
soning that kept one tied to one's worldly duties, a kind of common
sense about the householder's life lived in a context where the extended
Witness to Suffering 75
family, even if unworkable in practice, constituted in ideal the horizon
of well-being. As Tagore himself interjected in the course of narrating
the novel:
If love is ever plucked out and isolatedas one plucks a flower
from the difficult duties that make up the householder's world, it
cannot sustain itself by [feeding] only on its own sap. It gradually
wilts and becomes distorted.
54
The struggle that constitutes the inferiority of the subject is thus be-
tween passions on one side and familial obligations on the other, and
it is in this struggle that sentiments need the guiding hand of (a moral)
reason. It was the respectability of the extended familyand not just
of the loving couplethat was at issue. Vidyasagar's problematic had
thus indeed survived into Tagore's. The pursuit of pabitrata gave the
modern subject an interior space of struggle, created an autonomy vis-
a-vis the body and yet thereby sustained a Bengali "family romance"
that was nothing like the European psychological triangle of the
mother, the father, and the child that Freud both technicized and popu-
larized in the early twentieth century. For the category of pabitrata,
tied to an idealization of the extended family and kinship, obviated
the emergence of a category such as "sexuality," which could have
mediated between the physical basis of sexual attraction and its psy-
chological superstructure in the individual.
The Archive of the Modern Subject:
Who Gets Called to Witness Suffering?
Modern Bengali literature, then, played a crucial role in generalizing a
will to document the suffering of the widow and in enabling certain
ways of seeing. As a genre, the novel was particularly suited to the
task of aiding in the reproduction of a general and generalizing sen-
timent while preserving and nurturing the idea of the individual-
private. Its techniques of verisimilitude promoted a sense of the particu-
lar while at the same time creating a vision of the general. The growing
and close connection forged between literature, middle-class reading
practices, and new forms of personhood is a history still unexplored in
the case of Bengal. But there are some suggestive pieces of evidence.
By the 19305, for example, it would appear that the readers of Bengali
novels actually compared the different and many widow characters
created in fiction and mentally placed them in a series signifying the
76 Dipesh Chakrabarty
progressive evolution of the modern individual, a progression from
the stage of social conventions completely tying down the individual
to the idea of the individual endowed with "free" inferiority. The fol-
lowing lines from Suresh Samajpati, the editor of the Bengali literary
journal Sahitya, addressed to Saratchandra, illustrates this mode of
comparative and historicist reading:
There is a substantial difference between the character of Rohini
that Bankimchandra created and that of your Sabitri. Firstly, Rohini
was the niece of Brahmananda, she had no lack of status in society.
Her only crime was that in spite of being a widow, she loved
Gobindalal. Your . . . Sabitri enjoys no such social standing. Sec-
ondly, it required a lot of arranging [of events] for the love-affair
between Gobindalal and Rohini to look inevitable [in Bankim's
novel], . . . At least in the eyes of society there is an excuse for the
love between Rohini and Gobindalal. But there can be no such ex-
cuse possible for the love between Sabitri and Satish. One depends
on the contingency of events, the other on desire alone.
55
Individuals, including female readers of this humanist fiction, came to
see their lives in the light of literature. In her autobiographical book
Kom boyosher ami (The Me of Younger Years), the contemporary Ben-
gali writer Manashi Dasgupta describes an older, widowed aunt, "Itu-
pishi" (father's sister/cousin, called Itu) as being "somebody straight
out of the pages of Bengali fiction." "She became a widow at a young
age, now she worked for the government's education department hav-
ing put herself through school... . With ease she would converse with
my father on the subject of the failure of the United Nations while
helping my mother cook nimki [popular savories]."
56
Kalyani Datta's
research into the condition of Bengali widows in the 19505 and the
19608 were themselves inspired by fiction: "Widowhood has featured
endlessly in Bengali literature over the last hundred and fifty years....
My interest in the lives of widows was aroused in my childhood as a
result of meeting at close quarters characters in real life who resembled
those encountered in stories and novels."
57
If we assume that the different practices of writing about wid-
owsfiction, autobiographies, diaries, reminiscences, and investiga-
tive reporting of the widow's suffering in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuriescreated in Bengal something like the European bourgeois
public sphere inhabited by a discursive and collective subject of mo-
dernity, an interesting problem follows. How would we understand
Witness to Suffering 77
this collective subject? Was this subject the same as the citizen-subject
of European political thought? There is no doubt that colonial quasi-
modern law molded aspects of both action and subjectivity on the part
of the widows. The Bengali poet Prasannamayi Devi (1857-1939),
who herself became a widow at the age of twelve, tells the story,
for example, of a brave nineteenth-century village woman called
Kashiswari who, on becoming a widow at a young age, successfully
sought legal intervention against possible oppression and harassment
by men.
58
Widows' own accounts of domestic cruelty, however, bridge
two kinds of memory that together form the modern archive of famil-
ial oppression in Hindu middle-class Bengal: social-public memory
addressed by the citizen-historian who documents suffering and social
injury in the interest of justice in public life, and addresses of familial
memory articulated within specific locations of kinship.
59
Kalyani
Datta's essay itself is an example of this, for she puts into printand
thus makes into public memorymemories she could sometimes access
only as a member of a very particular network of kinship.
In standard narratives of European-bourgeois modernity, these
two kinds of memories, the familial and the public, would eventually
be aligned with each other. First, families based on modern romantic
love would replace the extended kin structure with the Freudian oedi-
pal triangle. And the unitary-expressive and rights-bearing bourgeois
subject, split into his or her private and public selves, would eventu-
ally assimilate into a structure of private "repression"that which
could not align itself with the laws of public life. So the history of
repression and sexuality would come to constitute the private history
of the subject of public life. As Foucault's History of Sexuality shows,
such a repressive hypothesis and a consequent incitement to speech
were critical to the birth of the modern subject and the documentation
of bourgeois interiority.
60
In the Bengali case, the addressees of these
two memoriesthe social-public and the familial-private one, the
citizen-subject and the subject of kinshipremain much less aligned
with each other (a disjuncture similar to that examined in Egyptian
television drama in the essay by Lila Abu-Lughod in this volume).
61
The collective subject whom we could call the Bengali-modern is
perhaps better conceptualized as a mobile point on something like a
relay network in which many different subject-positions and even
non-bourgeois, non-individualistic practices of subjectivity intersect-
ed. Kalyani Datta's text murmurs with multiple, heterogenous voices
78 Dipesh Chakrabarty
she can collect together only in a general gesture of seeking justice.
The discursive collective Bengali subject of modernity was made up of
multiple and non-commensurable practices, some of them distinctly
non-modern by the standards of modern political thought.
First, there was the voice of the archaic-modern subject, whose
cry of painalways public in an archaic sensewas indeed addressed
to the exceptional subject (not the normalized citizen) who could both
receive and appreciate the rasa of karuna (compassion): the reader
here is called to the position of somebody with hridaya Rammohun,
a Vidyasagar, a Jesus, a Chaitanya, or a Buddha to hear this voice.
Listen, for example, to this Bengali widow:
A woman who has lost her father, mother, husband and son, has no-
body else left in the world. It is only if others in the household are of
a kind disposition that a widow's life can be happy. Otherwise, it is
like being consigned to a hell-pit.
S2
The conditional clause in this statement"only if"makes it clear
that to this speaker, compassion was not a part of the normal order of
life. Its existence was unpredictable. This is the widow speaking indeed
but not as a citizen-subject seeking the promise and protection of law.
Then there is the voice that addresses itself to gods in search of
strength and support. Listen to the voice of Gyanadasundari speaking
to Kalyani Datta sometime in 1965. A child widow who in fact had
never met her husband, she was sent to her in-laws to spend the rest
of her life as a widow. Here she recounts an experience of deprivation in
which the Hindu goddess Kali plays a critical role helping her to survive:
I entered the kitchen [she said, speaking of her daily round of activi-
ties] immediately after my morning bath [to cook for] this large
family. By the time I was finished, it would be late afternoon. A
room full of cooked foodI cannot describe how hungry the smell
of rice and curry made me feel. Sometimes I felt tempted to put some
in my mouth. But my [deceased] husband's aunt had told me the
story of the wife of a certain [deceased] personthis woman had
been struck down with blindness on account of eating stealthily in
the kitchen. Stories of this kind helped me control my hunger. Every-
day I would pray to [the goddess] Kali: Mother, please take away my
greed. Perhaps it was through the grace of the goddess that I gradu-
ally lost any appetite I used to have.
63
What is the nature of the human subject here? In what mode do we
recognize ourselves in Gyanadasundari Devi? How is Kalyani Datta
Witness to Suffering 79
and indeed, the readerpositioned by this text? In more ways than
one, it would seem. Datta (or the reader) may have been there to docu-
ment the subject of suffering in the interest of eventual social interven-
tion. Her intended position may have been that of the modern, secu-
lar, historicizing, and ontologically singular human being. She may
have indeed heard the religious reference to the goddess in light of the
spirit of toleration with which the secular subject approaches reli-
gion: "It is the sigh of the oppressed, the soul of a soulless world."
64
But does not Gyanadasundari's voice also place us alongside another
human, one who is not ontologically singular, the human who acts as
though he or she implicitly knew that being human meant one could
address gods without having to first prove their reality?
65
This posi-
tioning would take us beyond the logic of the social sciences.
The point is that operating as it did through the same connections
that were expected to generate familial affection as well, cruelty to-
ward widows in the context of extended kinship was something that
constantly proliferated the positions and voices of both its agents and
victims, and sometimes blurred the distinctions between the two.
Kalyani Datta reports the story of both the victimhood and the agen-
tiality that a mother took on herself when her daughter, a six- or seven-
year-old child, lost her husband. To the mother fell the duty of ensur-
ing that the girl, who did not even understand the change in her status,
observed all the self-renunciatory rites of widowhood. The incident re-
lates to fish, not allowed to widows but considered a delicacy in the
cuisine of riverine Bengal. We have the story in Kalyani Datta's telling:
[The young girl's] mother used to feed her widows' food. The boys
of the household would sit on another side of the room and be
served fish. They said to her one day, "How come you haven't got
any fish?" Her mother pointed to fried lentil balls and said to her:
"This is your fish." The mischievous boys would suck on fish-bones
and ask the girl: "How come your piece of fish does not have any
bones?" The girl would ask her mother, "Mother, why doesn't my
fish have any bones?" . . . The mother later on used to break off
bamboo slips from baskets and stick them into the lentil balls and
the girl would proudly show them off to the boys.... It was long be-
fore she even realized the deception.
66
The mother who administered the cruelty of deceiving her own child
sufferedwe assumeno less than her child. One can also read this
story as a tribute to a loving mother's ingenuityfaced with the cruelty
SO Dipesh Chakrabarty
of both custom and callous boysin preserving her little child's digni-
ty. However we read it, clearly the actions of the boys (not necessarily
the mother's sons), the mother, and the child-widow in this anecdote
create a dynamic network of relationships that cannot be contained
within the figure of a single victim.
67
Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of widows' own
critiquesin the nineteenth and twentieth centuriesof the cruelty
they received at the hands of their relatives was an appeal to an ideal
subject of the extended family. How should a brother behave toward
a widowed sister, or a brother-in-law toward a widowed sister-in-law?
Or a nephew toward a widowed aunt? Putting widows' complaints
into print and the act of reading them were often part of a larger dis-
cussion about sentiments proper to the ideal Bengali family, which
was seldom seen as nuclear. A telling case in this regard is that of
Indumati, an aunt of Kalyani Datta. Indumati (born ca. iSyz), a young
widow of a zamindar (landlord) family, decided to live in the holy city
of Banarasa traditional refuge for many a hapless widowon a
monthly allowance from her inheritance of the deceased husband's
estate. She was subsequently cheated out of her inheritance. Her al-
lowance dwindled from Rs 250 a month to Rs 10, reducing her to the
status of a beggar. Kalyani Datta last saw Indumati in Benaras in 1955
(and we hear her in print in 1991). She had by then reached the depth
of her penury and was living in an institution. "I did not recognize
her," says Datta:
Our aunt, the wife of a zamindar (landlord) family with fifty per
cent share in the estate, sat naked in a dark room without windows,
muttering curses addressed to ... God. She could not see very well.
Feeling helpless, I started yelling out my name and that of my father.
She recognized me then and immediately started crying. . . . After a
while, she asked me how long I had been in Kashi [Banaras]. When
she realized that I had been there for twenty days and had come to
see her only a day before my day of departure, her tears returned.
"Here I am," she said, "hoping that I would [now] be able to shed
some tears and spend some days in the comfort of your company,
and all you offer me is this fake [perfunctory] sense of kinship. I
don't even want to see your face." So saying, she turned her back
on me.
68
This entire passage, one could say, is a modern discussion of what
Bengalis call atmiyata (kinship, the quality of being one's own people),
a much-valued category in Tagore and other modern writers.
69
Notice
Witness to Suffering 81
how in Kalyani Datta's telling of the story a subject voice emerges that
absolutizes a modern and relational subject of kinship, and does so by
placing the very sentiment of obligation in kinship over and above
considerations of either interest or perfunctory social form. Indumati/
Kalyani Dattafor the two voices are actually indistinguishable
hereobviously make a distinction between a fake show of kinship
sentiment and a "real" one. But they do not require such a sentiment
to be an expression of the personality of the individual expressing it,
for the sentiment would be demanded of any member of the kin group
without reference to the differences between their individual person-
alities. And yet the language allows certain claims to be made on an-
other person's affection in a way that, strictly speaking, would not be
possible in the context of typically expressivist individualism where
feelings, once dead to the individual concerned, are seen as inauthen-
tic and hypocritical. The subject of this emotional transaction is mod-
ern and yet, as I have said before, not like the bourgeois individual of
Europe inscribed in the family romance of the typical triangle of the
nuclear family.
70
I am not claiming that this idealized subject of kin-
ship was necessarily a modern construction. What is modern is the
way the coming of a public sphere opened up a space in public life for
the modern subject of extended kinship alongside, say, the sphere of
intervention made possible by law and the idea of the rights-bearing
individual.
The subject of Bengali modernity who demonstrates a will to
witness and document oppression is thus inherently a multiple subject
whose history produces significant points of resistance and intracta-
bility when approached with an apparatus of secular analysis that has
its origins in the self-understanding of the European modern. Thus we
may read the author Kalyani Datta in two different ways. As an au-
thor and a person, it is indeed possible that in writing her essay docu-
menting and recording for posterity the voices of individual widows,
she performs as a citizen subject engaged in a struggle for democracy
and social justice in the realm of the family. One could, in the same
mode, read her essay as a chapter in the biography-history of some
larger collective entity, such as "middle-class Bengali women" or "the
Bengali bhadramahila" (as women of the respectable classes are called).
But what is also documented in her essay and elsewhere, thanks to the
resolute will to witness suffering that marks modern attempts at social
justice, are practices of the self that call us to other ways of being civil
82 Dipesh Chakrabarty
and humane. These are practices of the self that always leave an intel-
lectually unmanageable excess when translated into the politics and
language of liberalism or Marxism that we owe to European moderni-
ty. At the same time, the very colonial crucible in which the Bengali
modern was originated ensured that it would not be possible to fash-
ion a historical account of the birth of this modernity without repro-
ducing some aspect or other of European narratives of the modern
subject. For the European modern was present at this birth. Colonial-
ism guarantees a certain Europe of the mindthe Europe of liberal-
ism or Marxismthis precedence. What a historian of a colonial mo-
dernity can do todaytaught as he or she is in the (European) art of
historicizingis to re-energi/e the word "birth" with all the motor
power of Nietzschean thought that Michel Foucault revived for us in
recent times.
71
To see "birth" as genealogy and not a clear-cut point of
origin, to make visibleas Nietzsche saidthe otherness of the ape
that always gets in the way of any attempt to trace human descent di-
rectly from God, is to open up the question of the relationship be-
tween diversity of life practices/life worlds and universalizing political
philosophies that remain the global heritage of the Enlightenment.
72
This account of the birth of the Bengali modern is, I hope, a step in
that direction.
Notes
Thanks are due to Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, Gautam Bhadra, Carol Brecken-
ridge, Alice Bullard, Steve Collins, Faisal Devji, Ranajit Guha, Dipankar Gupta, Anne
Hardgrove, Uday Mehta, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, Klaus Neumann, Christopher Pinney,
Sheldon Pollock, Gyan Prakash, Asok Sen, and Sanjay Seth for conversations and com-
ments on an earlier draft. It was Asok Sen's imaginative work on Rammohun Roy and
Isvarchandra Vidyasagar that awakened in many of us in Calcutta of the 19705 a sense
of the possibility that the history of modern colonialism in India could indeed be seen as
a series of shifts and reversals in the career of modern European reason. This essay is
dedicated to him in a spirit of affection and long-standing gratitude.
1. Kalyani Datta, "Baidhabya kahini" (Tales of Widowhood, in Bengali), Ekshan,
io (Autumn 1991). This essay appears to have been reprinted in Kalyani Datta, Pinjare
boshiya [in Bengali] (Calcutta, 1997). Unfortunately, it has not been possible for me to
consult this later version.
2. See Muhammad Abdul Jalil, Madhyajuger bangla shahitye bangla o bangali
shamaj (in Bengali) (Dhaka, 1986), 149-67.
3. The historical question of the oppression of Hindu widows has been studied by
many scholars. Without any pretense to being exhaustive, I may mention the following
recent studies: Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,
i/So-iSjj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Lucy Caroll, "Law, Custom
and Statutory Social Reform: The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856," Indian
Witness to Suffering 83
Economic and Social History Review 20, no. 4 (1983); Sudhir Chandra, "Conflicted
Beliefs and Men's Consciousness about Women: Widow Remarriage in Later Nineteenth
Century Indian Literature," Economic and Political Weekly, 31 October 1987, 55-61;
Rosalind O'Hanlon, "Issues of Widowhood: Gender and Resistance in Colonial Western
India," in Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia,
ed. Douglas Haynes and Cyan Prakash (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 62-108.
4. Rammohun Roy, "Brief Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the
Ancient Rights of Females," in Rammohan rachanabali (Collected Works of Rammohun
Roy, in Bengali), ed. Ajitkumar Ghosh (Calcutta, 1973), 496-97.
5. Ibid., 496-97, 500-501.
6. "Prabartak o nibartaker dvitiyo shombad," in Rammohun Roy, Rammohun
rachanabali, 2.03.
7. Ibid., 575. This is Rammohun's own translation of his 1818 text, "Sahamaran
bishaye prabartak o nibartaker shombad," ibid., 175.
8. Ibid. Hume, distinguishing between "custom" and "reason," equates the former
with "habit": "Custom or Habit. For whenever the repetition of any particular act or
operation produces a propensity to produce the same act or operation, without being
impelled by any reasoning or process of understanding, we always say that this propen-
sity is the effect of Custom" (David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Under-
standing and Concerning the Principles of Morals [1777], intro. L. A. Selby-Bigge
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], 43, emphasis in original). Hume argues that it
is "custom or repetition" that can convert "pain into pleasure" (A Treatise of Human
Nature [1739-40], ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch [Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1978], 422).
9. For a theoretically informed discussion of Vidyasagar's intellectual positions, see
Asok Sen, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar and His Elusive Milestones (Calcutta: Riddhi-India,
1975)-
10. Chandicharan Bandyopadhyay, Vidyasagar (ca. 1895; rpr. Calcutta, 1970), z66.
I have followed and modified the translation provided in Isvarchandra Vidyasagar,
Marriage of Hindu Widows, ed. Arabinda Poddar (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1976),
107-8.
11. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L.
Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 9; see also 22. Raphael and Macfie explain
(1411) that Smith's theories were in part a refutation of Hobbes's and Mandeville's con-
tention that all sentiments arose from self-love.
12. Hume, Treatise, 316,369.
13. Nagendranath Chattopadhyay, Mahatma Raja Rammohon rayer jibancharit (in
Bengali) (1881; rpr. Calcutta, 1991), 273.
14. Subal Chandra Mitra, Isvar Chandra Vidyasagar: A Story of His Life and Work
(1902; rpr. New Delhi: Ashish Publishing House, 1975), 116.
15. Bandyopadhyay, Vidyasagar, 48-49.
16. Mitra, Isvar Chandra, 78-79.
17. Bandyopadhyay, Vidyasagar, 49; see also 187.
18. Mitra, Isvar Chandra, 272-73.
19. See Binoy Ghosh, Bidyasagar o bangalisamaj (in Bengali) (Calcutta, 1973), 3
6
3-
Vidyasagar was sometimes called dayar sagar (ocean of kindness) as well.
20. Sivanath Sastri, "Rammohun Roy: The Story of His Life," in The Father of
Modern India: Commemoration Volume of the Rammohun Roy Centenary Celebra-
tions, 1933, ed. Satis Chandra Chakravarti (Calcutta, 1935), pt. 2, 20.
21. Mitra, Isvar Chandra, 261.
84 Dipesh Chakrabarty
22. Smith, Moral Sentiments, 12.
23. Ibid., 22. Hume also saw sympathy as universal to human nature.
24. For a general discussion of the place of briday in Sanskrit aesthetics, see Ranerio
Gnoli's The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta (Banaras, 1968).
25. Smith, Moral Sentiments, 45, 50.
26. See the discussion in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London, 1979),
239-53.
27. Bandyopadhyay, Vidyasagar, 478.
28. Ibid., 278.
29. Ibid., preface, 6.
30. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to
Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 137-42.
31. See Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question," in Early Writings, trans. Rodney
Livingstone and Gregor Benton, introduction by Lucio Colletti (Harmondsworth,
Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1975), 211-41.
32. William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1989), 71.
33. Ibid., 57-58.
34. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991), I2i.
35. Emphasis added.
36. See, for instance, contemporary plays written on the question of widow remar-
riage in which the widow's own problems are understood as joubanjontrona (lit., the
agony of the body in youth) or joubonjvala (lit., the burning sensation produced by the
onset of youth): Radhamadhab Mitra, Bidhaba bisham bipod (in Bengali) (Calcutta,
n.d. [1856?]); idem, Bidhabamonoranjan natak (in Bengali) (Calcutta, 1857); Anon.,
Bidhaba shukher dasha (in Bengali) (Calcutta, 1864); Umacharan Bandyopadhyay,
Bidhabodbaho natak (in Bengali) (Calcutta, n.d.); and Jadunath Chattopadhyay,
Bidhababilash (in Bengali) (Calcutta, 1864).
37. For a somewhat parallel argument about the role of humanitarian and realist
writing in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, see Thomas W. Laqueur,
"Bodies, Details and the Humanitarian Narrative," in The New Cultural History, ed.
Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 177-204.
38. Rabindranath Tagore, Chokher ball, in Rabindrarachanabali (in Bengali)
(Calcutta, 1962), vol. 8, preface.
39. Dayananda, Vivekananda, and Gandhi were nationalist leaders who played a
key role in disseminating these ideas.
40. The biographer of Tagore, Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay, writes: "It was the
Bengali weekly Amritabazar Patrika (March 28, 1870) that first drew the attention
of the education-proud Bengalis to Vaishnav poetry. But the first collection of these
poems in a book-form was edited by Jagabandhu Bhadra (1870)" (Prabhatkumar
Mukhopadhyay, Rabindrajibani o rabindrasahitya prabeshak [in Bengali] [Calcutta,
1960], vol. i, 68). For an informative discussion of Vaishnavism in nineteenth-century
Calcutta, see Ramakanta Chakravarti, Vaisavism in Bengal, 1486-1900 (Calcutta,
1985), chs. 21 and 22.
41. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, "Bidyapati o Jaydeb," in Bankimrachanabali
(Collected Works of Bankimchandra, in Bengali) (Calcutta, 1973), vol. 2,191.
42. Sukumar Sen, Bangla sahityer itihas (in Bengali) (Calcutta, 1991), vol. i, 126,
says that the story of the love affair between Chandidasa and Rami became popular
from the seventeenth century on.
Witness to Suffering 85
43. "Chandidas o bidyapati," in Rabindrarachanabali (in Bengali) (Calcutta, 1961),
vol. 13,635.
44. See Dines Chandra Sen, History of Bengali Language and Literature (Calcutta,
1911), 149, and Asitkumar Bandyopadhyay, Bangla shahityer shotnpurno itibritto (in
Bengali) (Calcutta, 1991), 100-101.
45. "Kamalakanter daptar," in Bankimrachanabali (in Bengali) (Calcutta, 1973),
vol. z, 58. See also the discussion in Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness:
Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
46. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Bishabriksha, in Bankimrachanabali (in Bengali)
(Calcutta, 1985), vol. i, z6i. See Marian Maddern's translation of Bishabriksha (The
Poison Tree), in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, The Poison Tree: Three Novellas, trans.
Marian Maddern and S. N. Mukherjee (New Delhi, 1996), 113.
47. Bankimchandra Chattapadhyay, Bishabriksha, 114.
48. See Mohitlal Majumdar's thoughtful discussion in Bankimchandrer upanyash
(in Bengali) (Calcutta, 1979), 2,1-51.
49. Tagore, "Chokher bali," 316.
50. Ibid., 302-3.
51. Gopalchandra Ray, Saratchandra (in Bengali) (Calcutta, 1966), vol. z, zoi-z.
52. Cited in Khondkar Rezaul Karim, Bangla upanyashe bidhaba (The Widow in
Bengali Literature, in Bengali) (Dhaka, 1979), 71.
53. Post-structuralist and feminist thought have made us skeptical of this fiction
of the autonomous subject, but for the period we are considering this was the guiding
fiction.
54. Tagore, "Chokher bali," Z3Z.
55. Quoted in Ray, Saratchandra, vol. z, 18-19.
56. Manashi Dasgupta, Kom boyosher ami (in Bengali) (Calcutta, 1974), 49.
57. Kalyani Datta, "Baidhyabar kahini," 41.
58. Prasannamayi Devi, Purba katha (in Bengali), ed. Nirmalya Acharya (1917; rpr.
Calcutta, i98z), 80-81.
59. Drawing on the work of Maurice Halbwachs, Paul Connerton discusses this
problem of articulation of social and familial memories in his How Societies Remember
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 38-39.
60. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. i: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), pt. z, ch. i.
61. Lila Abu-Lughod, "Modern Subjects: Egyptian Melodrama and Postcolonial
Difference," this volume, ch. 4.
62. Datta, "Baidhabya kahini," 43, emphasis added.
63. Ibid., 50-51.
64. As the reader will recognize, these familiar words paraphrase Marx.
65. See Ramchandra Gandhi, The Availability of Religious Ideas (London: Macmillan,
1976), 9.
66. Datta, "Baidhabya kahini," 53.
67. For other similar accounts see also ibid., 49-50; Nistarini Devi, Shekele katha
(1913) (in Bengali), in Atmakatha, ed. Nareshchandra Jana et al. (Calcutta, i98z), vol. z,
3 3 > 3 5-
68. Datta, "Baidhabya kahini," 48.
69. See the discussion in Ronald B. Inden and Ralph W. Nicholas, Kinship in
Bengali Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 3-34-
70. A similar point is made in the autobiography of the mother of the Bengali
86 Dipesh Chakrabarty
reformer Keshub Sen, Sarasundari Devi (1819-1907). When she suffered at the hands
of her in-laws following the death of her husband, Keshub Sen suggested to his mother
the solution of legally dividing up the family's property. "Keshub said to me," she
writes, ". . . Mother, if you want, I can get your and Krishnabehari's [another son]
shares, too, by getting a lawyer to write." I replied, "No. Is money the most important
thing? Should your uncle [emphasis added] go to jail for the sake of money? Let it be,
there is no need [to claim the money] at present" (Saradasundari Devi, Attnakatha
[1913] [in Bengali], reprinted in Attnakatha, ed. Nareshchandra Jana et al. (Calcutta,
1981), vol. i, 14, 2.6.
71. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-
Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard, trans. Donald
Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139-84.
72. Nietzsche, cited ibid., 143.
Four
Modern Subjects:
Egyptian Melodrama and
Postcolonial Difference
Lila Abu-Lughod
In the late 19805, a group of young university-educated Egyptians per-
formed for their friends in Cairo a clever satire of local television.
Recordings of the show later circulated informally on audio and video
cassettes. The performance made fun of the language of state officials
and religious authorities, whose frequent appearances on discussion
programs are seldom popular. The final three sketches on the tape,
however, took on Egyptian television's most popular programming,
the dramatic serials and films. Two of these stories were set in the
countryside, where the misdeeds of foolish or violent peasants were
easily found out by more educated officers of non-rural origins. The
third sketch enticed its imaginary viewers with a film that promised to
be "full of tears and surprises." The story opened with two sweet-
hearts declaring their mutual love. When the man suggested that they
should get married, the woman protested that they were of different
classes yet admitted that she had longed for the kind hand that would
rescue her from the society that despised her. She explained that she
was a dancer, forced to do this kind of work when she was driven out
of her father's home by a stepmother. So the couple went off to the re-
ligious cleric to marry. There they discovered that they had the same
last name. The young man was distraught: "The only woman I've ever
loved turns out to be my sister?!"
87
88 Lila Abu-Lughod
The performance satirizes the major interpersonal themes of tele-
vision melodrama and old filmslove, family, and class differences
and recapitulates the politics that inform them: evil is represented as
rural backwardness and good as urban modernity. It parodies the un-
likely coincidences on which melodrama thrives, but in mimicking the
expressive music and heightened emotionality of speech on which the
effectiveness of these moral dramas depends, it also nicely captures
two other key featuresa strong moral message and what seems to
be, to the university-educated satirists and to anyone more familiar
with Western television drama, an excess of emotion.
Melodrama and Modernity
Melodrama has been the subject of a great deal of literary and media
theory. The touchstone is Peter Brooks's The Melodramatic Imagina-
tion, which made a powerful case for the significance of melodrama as
a literary/theatrical genre associated with the upheavals of the French
Revolution and the onset of the crisis of modernity.
1
Brooks argued
persuasively for a particular definition and understanding of the melo-
dramatic imaginationas concerned with the revelation of the moral
order in the everyday in a "post-sacred era."
2
Most intriguing was his
claim that melodrama was "the central fact of the modern sensibility."
3
What can the satirical performance in Cairo by a talented group
of university students tell us about melodrama and modernity in
Egypt? Brooks was concerned with theater and novels in nineteenth-
century Europe. In the twentieth century, melodrama is more closely
associated with forms of mass media like radio, film, and television.
And in Egypt, as in other postcolonial contexts, cultural forms like
television melodrama, projected by national television industries, are
seen by state officials and middle-class professional producers as par-
ticularly effective instruments of social development, national consoli-
dation, and "modernization."
4
This raises the question of what sorts
of "modern sensibilities" television melodrama might mark in a place
like contemporary Egypt, where those who make melodrama see
themselves as trying to produce modern citizens and subjects.
I should note that there remains a good deal of confusionor
at least an enormous range of possibilityin the usage of the term
"melodrama" in literary, film, and television studies today and some
justification for questioning whether the term actually designates a
single genre at all.
5
For Egypt, I would be happy to call television serials
Modern Subjects 89
domestic dramas. But it is useful to keep the term "melodrama" to re-
mind us of a few features. First, these serials are unquestionably "mod-
ern" in drawing directly upon modernist literature, film, and radio.
They are mostly about the everyday and involve ordinary people. Their
characters are not the universally known heroes of epic poetry or folk-
tales but representations of the common citizen. Like Latin American
telenovelas and unlike British, Australian, and American soap operas,
the Egyptian serials are finite, generally running to either fifteen to
thirty episodes. Like melodrama, they come to a resolution, some-
thing that some scholars of media consider crucial to ideological clari-
ty.
6
What the television parody captured exquisitely, however, is that
they are also more emotional and forthright in their moral lessons
than contemporary Euro-American television dramas.
7
It is the significance of these latter two qualitiesthe unapolo-
getic moralism (apparent in the plots and storylines) and the quality of
emotionality, with affect located in ordinary life (apparent in the genre
conventions)that I explore below, concerning how Egyptian tele-
vision serials contribute to the creation of a "modern sensibility." But
I will also explore the difference it makes when a modern sensibility is
being crafted in a society for which notions of national development
remain strong as part of a political legacy, where the embeddedness of
individuals in kin and family remains ideal, and where secularism has
been only ambivalently constructed as essential to modernity.
8
Television serials in Egypt, I will argue, work with modernist proj-
ects at two levels: intentionally, through disseminating moral messages
inflected by local political ideologies, thus attempting to set the terms
of social and political debate; but also more subtly, through populariz-
ing a distinctive configuration of narrative and emotionality.
9
In this
latter way, as a genre with certain conventions, television melodrama
in Egypt might be understood most directly as a technology for the
production of new kinds of selves.
10
It is a technology, I will suggest,
for staging interiorities (through heightened emotionalism) and thus
constructing and encouraging the individuality of ordinary people.
Yet I also want to show that this technology is put to work in a
local social and political context that differs in many ways from the
context of soap opera production and viewing in Europe or the United
States, particularly in the overt projects to produce citizens of the na-
tion in a society in which kinship remains important and other forms of
community and morality exist.
11
Moreover, the growing relevance of
90 Lila Abu-Lughod
religious identity and the practices of self-monitoring being encouraged
place the genre of television melodrama, though popular, in a field of
other technologies of modern self-making, some pulling in the same di-
rection, some not. This suggests that we should be wary of telling any
unilineal stories of personhood and the coming to modernity.
Moral Vision as Political Ideology
In keeping with media ideology in postcolonial nations, television
drama is viewed by most of its producers in Egypt not simply as enter-
tainment but as a means to mold the national community. As Veena
Das and others have begun to explore, national cinemas often repre-
sent and even help produce the sense of nationhood.
12
What has not
been explored is how this ideology shapes the morality of melodrama.
The Egyptian serials are concerned with moralityas Brooks' theory
might lead us to expectbut this morality is social or community-
oriented and thoroughly imbricated with the available political dis-
courses. Like the Cameroonian miniseries Miseria, described by Petty,
and perhaps much officially sanctioned Third World drama, many
Egyptian serials privilege "dogmatic concerns at a social level." The
morality is not so much that of the individual as the social. Or as
Willemen says of Indian cinematic melodrama, of the individual as a
member of a society undergoing transformations.
13
A comparison of the storylines of Egyptian television writers illus-
trates the way morality is made social and the social is constructed
in terms of political ideologies.
14
For a liberal feminist writer like
Wafiyya Kheiry, who has written serials about women and work and
the impact of migration to the Gulf, it is the educated middle classes
or those whom she calls "the cultural elite"families with long famil-
iarity with literature and other cultural formswho represent the em-
battled values.
15
She dreads the boor as much as the nouveau riche.
For a progressive like Usama Anwar'Ukasha, Egypt's best-known tele-
vision writer, the hope in his serials usually lies in an alliance between
the good authentic peopleartisans, the honest hardworking poor
devoted to family and communityand the modern educated classes
with a commitment to progress, morality, and the good of the nation.
Even aristocrats, such as "the pasha" in his most magnificent serial,
Hilmiyya Nights, can be redeemed by nationalist sentiment. Many of
his serials are concerned with the struggles of middle-class people to
maintain principles and values and they often portray the poor as vir-
Modern Subjects 91
tuous. Some of his serials even relate individual lives to political events
such as the Palestinian intifada, the Gulf War, and the peace agree-
ment with Israel. His intertextual references are with the political dis-
course of speeches, newspapers, and historical memory. He shares
with other progressive producers like Muhammad Fadil, the director
with whom he often collaborates, a sense that his art is for the "devel-
opment" of Egypt. For example, in discussing a television film on the
1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal that he was directing in 1993,
Fadil explained that his intention in portraying this historic national
event was "to provide viewers with a sense of hope by communicat-
ing that, as Egyptians, we are capable of accomplishing things." The
responsibility of art, he added, was to portray reality "as it ought
to be."
16
The link between moral vision and political stance is just as clear
in the serials of a conservative writer like Tharwat Abaza. His work
is distinguishable from the serials of liberal and progressive writers
like 'Ukasha and Kheiry by its avoidance of reference to the national
question, nostalgia for patriarchy and feudal values, and commerce
with religion. Abaza frequently uses stories from the Quran or from
Islamic history as inspirationfollowing plots or moral themes loose-
ly while setting the stories in the present, complete with infertility clin-
ics, apartments in Europe, Mercedes cars, land seizures, and crooked
businesses. He generally ignores in his stories the anxieties and strug-
gles associated with modernity or the burning social issues of the day
that so intrigue writers like 'Ukasha and Kheiry. His politics are to ap-
pear distant from "the political"as it is conventionally conceived in
Egypt. He tends to avoid in his stories any reference to Egypt as a na-
tion, or to its place in a larger world, and thus the main concern of
contemporary political discoursenationalism. If for other writers
the citythe space of the modernis the primary setting for the
moral struggles of a complex new world, Abaza usually prefers the
countryside, which can become a timeless, seemingly apolitical, locale
for the play of good and evil, couched in the comforting tones of reli-
gious discourse.
17
Abaza is from one of the politically prominent old
landowning families of Egypt but his own background is no less mod-
ern than that of Kheiry or 'Ukasha. He is a graduate of the Law Faculty
of Cairo University and was, until recently, head of the Writer's Union.
His nostalgia is a defensive product of the social and political trans-
formations of the postcolonial age.
92 Lila Abu-Lughod
The three writers attribute good and evil to different social classes,
deploy nationalist and religious discourses differently, and represent
the past and future differently. In short, their visions of the moral
orderthat which Brooks saw as essential to melodramadiffer. This
is evidence that the melodramatic genre may be a key site for contend-
ing visions of a moral universe, visions refracted, as in Egypt in the
medium of state television, through the competing political ideologies
of the age in that particular nation.
Because television is an (albeit complex) instrument of a state that
is more ambivalently secular than the Europe Brooks describes as the
context of the birth of melodrama, its drama does not always exclude
religious referents or place morality solely within the non-sacred realm,
as Abaza's serials show.
18
But on the whole, the moral visions are not
defined by reference to religious truths. In fact, although many politi-
cal ideologies do not find expression on state television, the most
obvious exclusion is that of the Islamists, who, since media war was
declared on them in 1993, are regularly represented in dramas as vio-
lent, immoral, and ignorant of religion. However, what seems distinc-
tive about the moral referents of the Egyptian serials, compared to
most U.S. melodrama, is that they are tied, in keeping with the sanc-
tioned political ideologies, to the larger social good and the commu-
nity. With consequences I will take up below, Egyptian television seri-
als, modernist in their secularism and their concern for the nation,
explicitly worried about the moral ills threatening the social fabric,
also tend to place individual characters very much within their fami-
lies and their communities.
Melodramatic Emotions
Viewers, whether ordinary television watchers or critics, recognize to
varying degrees the ideologies informing these melodramas and react
to themeither sympathetically or with hostility, depending on their
own situations and political visions. Yet what viewers may be less
conscious ofand thus less able to resistis another aspect of tele-
vised melodramas that is actually widely shared: its placing of strong
emotion in the everyday interpersonal world. This is a generic conven-
tion that cuts across content, that has its source in the genre itself (as
adapted and developed over thirty years in Egypt) but is underwritten
by the educated middle-class assumptions of those who produce tele-
vision. This aspect of melodrama may be even more important to the
Modern Subjects 93
projects of modernity than are the conscious political messages of the
serials, because of the way it stages, and perhaps shapes, selfhood.
This is not the place to discuss general debates about reception
and the effects of media, among the thorniest problems in media stud-
ies. I think it is abundantly clear that melodramatic texts can work on
viewers in multiple ways. One cannot simply analyze the overt mes-
sages of plot and character. For example, as I have argued elsewhere,
Egyptian television dramas whose storylines promote nationalist sen-
timent might fall on deaf ears yet be, as part of a national viewing ex-
perience, engendering a certain sense of national affiliation.
19
What I want to explore here is how melodrama in Egypt might
work on people's senses of self by the very way it represents characters
as emotional. I will ask, in other words, about one of the distinctive
features of melodrama: the purloined letter of its high emotionalism.
If Feuer, in her classic article on melodrama, describes American prime-
time soap-opera acting as Wagnerian, it is difficult to know what to
call the conventions of Egyptian melodramatic acting.
20
She argues
that this overwrought acting style is necessary to distill and intensify
emotion. Brooks, more cerebral, argues that the exaggerated emotions
of early nineteenth-century melodramatic acting were expressionistic,
their purpose being to clarify the moral message.
21
I think he over-
looks the independent effectsor at least implicationsof witnessing
such "excessive" affect.
Critics in Egypt are fond of complaining about television. Many
express weariness with the nakad (an untranslatable word referring to
the piling on of troubles that I will translate as "misery"), calling for
more comedy, more musicals. Cartoonists, often the most astute com-
mentators on Egyptian life, caricature the experience of watching soap
operas as being tied up with tears. Television writers even make fun of
themselves about this. In a self-referential moment, one serial scripted
a maid (the stereotypical soap opera viewer) inviting a student to come
watch the serial with her so they could "get miserable together." But
nakad is merely an aspect of the general emotionality of Egyptian tele-
vision melodrama. Although Ang notes that melodrama may be char-
acterized by its "tragic structure of feeling" and the sense that charac-
ters are "victims of forces that lie beyond their control"favorite
themes in the many Egyptian television dramas that treat the tribula-
tions of good families facing the problems created by the shortage of
housing, a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, or the forces of corruptionthe
94 Lila Abu-Lughod
most powerful and appealing dramas actually display a wide range of
emotions.
22
Many people with whom I spoke described the good tele-
vision serial as one that "pulls" (bitsbidd). It not only "pulls" audi-
ences in but also "pulls" on their feelings. As one television producer
put it, misery is just the easiest way to play on the emotions.
This emotionality, I believe, adds a crucial lesson to melodramas.
Not only are they about the moral (and thus the social and political)
order, as suggested above, but they provide an education in sentiment.
By this I do not mean that they teach people how to feel. That is prob-
ably too crude, although they might indeed encourage certain public
expressions of emotion or even sentimentality.
23
Rather, by attaching
these strong sentiments to everyday life, melodramas fashion ordinary
characters whose personhood is defined by what seems a rich inner
life and an intense individuality.
This focus on the emotionally laden interpersonal domestic world,
what in the United States and Europe is thought of as women's world,
is what has made feminist media scholars take soap opera so serious-
ly.
24
Yet the significance of the location of sentiment in the sphere of
interpersonal relations has gone almost unremarked, perhaps because
it is so taken for granted in our society, where women and emotion are
so ideologically conjoined.
25
Modleski comes closest to noting what I
would like to consider in more detail.
26
In her analysis of the link be-
tween daytime television and women's work, she argues that the nar-
rative structures and close-up shots so favored by soap operas exercise
women viewers' abilities to read how intimates are feeling. Their
viewing experiences thus replicate their primary emotional work in
the family: anticipating the needs and desires of others.
These ideas about emotions and personhood can be linked to
Raymond Williams's hypothesis that the unprecedented exposure to
drama that television has allowed has led to a "dramatisation of con-
sciousness."
27
By this he means that television has led us to see our
own daily lives as dramas. Although I would caution against some
aspects of this, citing the methodological impossibility of gaining ac-
cess to people's "consciousness" and a discomfort with the humanist
assumptions of an unproblematic inner life such a term suggests, I
think Williams's great insight is to suggest that something novel hap-
pens to subjectivity as a result of television drama.
28
And in Egypt the
question is whether there has not developed a melodramatization of
consciousness.
Modern Subjects 95
In other words, can the growing cultural hegemony of television
melodrama (following lines laid down by radio serials and films) be
engendering new modes of subjectivity and new discourses on person-
hood, ones that we could recognize as "modern" in their emphasis on
the individual? The main features of the modern subject as it has been
understood in the Westautonomous, bounded, self-activating, ver-
balizing him/herselfhave been delineated in the philosophical and
historical literature, with Foucault offering us the most interesting
theories of the development of the technologies of the modern (bour-
geois) self and their links to new forms of power.
29
In the introduction
to the second volume of The History of Sexuality, he suggested that
the discourse on sexuality has been crucial to the development of
the modern self; one becomes the subject of one's sexuality. In later
lectures he speculated on the relationship between the confession in
Christianity and the modern forms of hermeneutics of the self.
30
Psychologizing, buttressed by the whole discourse of psychoanalysis
with its vivid conjuring of a rich and conflictual inner world, is also
instrumental in constructing modern subjects. And the discourse of
feelings and emotionthe very stuff of melodramais essential to the
psychological.
31
What is interesting about Modleski's argument about television
soap opera as that which trains women for interpersonal work is the
assumptions it makes about selves and emotion. It presumes women
who live in modern bourgeois families and have a vocabulary of sen-
timent attached to gesture. It also takes for granted that when senti-
ments are found, they are expressive of the inner feelings and personal
truths of others. This set of assumptions about emotion and person-
hood must be recognized as historically and culturally specific. As
Cvetkovich notes, nineteenth-century mass and popular culture played
an important role in constructing the discourse of affect crucial to es-
tablishing the middle-class hegemony of a "gendered division between
public and private spheres and the assignment of women to the affec-
tive tasks of the household."
32
The untheorized corollary, however, of the discourse of affect is
the discourse of the individual who is the subject of these emotions. It
is, I want to suggest, the individual who is being highlighted in the
heightening of emotionality in Egyptian melodrama. The serials are
not only directed at women but men as well. And though they mark
men as, on the whole, less emotional than women and the upper classes
96 Lila Abu-Lughod
as less emotional than the lower, all characters are more emotional
than might be thought appropriate by a bourgeois European or Ameri-
can self. In part, the extreme staging of melodramatic selves may seem
necessary for those whose goal is to "modernize" a society whose
dominant social form is still the family and kin network and whose
cultural forms until quite recently (and even contemporaneously in
some regions) could be understood to work in different ways and with
differing constructions of personhood. So I first want to contrast the
melodramatic "structures of feeling" to those of some other popular
Arab cultural forms that might previously have provided materials for
constructing or conceptualizing selves. One goal is to reveal the par-
ticularity of the relationship between modernity and melodrama in
the formation of subjectivity. I further want to suggest that the forms
of melodrama in Egypt, like the structures of the social and economic
worlds in which people there find themselves, differ in crucial ways
from the forms and the contexts of Western soap opera and life. In the
final section of this chapter, I turn to the sensibilities and the life sto-
ries of a woman who was extraordinarily enmeshed in the world of
television and radio serials in order to suggest how we might trace the
distinctive affective and narrative forms of melodrama into forms of
personal subjectivity in Egypt. I will also show, however, how other
aspects of Egyptian modernity bolster, or undermine, the work of tele-
vision melodrama.
Distinctive Subjectivities
Whatever its interreferences with or roots in other forms of cultural
expression, Egyptian television melodrama is distinct in its structure
and sentiment. The serials are created by people versed in modern lit-
erature, theater, and filmEgyptian, Arab and European.
33
Although
occasionally drawing on what they would consider "folk" traditions
for local color or regional identification, or to invoke the authentic
(as when they have "simple" protagonists reciting proverbs), the pri-
marily urban, middle-class producers of melodrama distinguish their
work unambiguously from "traditional" Egyptian and Arab forms of
cultural expression that have been, until quite recently, the popular
and familiar forms in rural areas and among the uneducated. And the
differences between the emotional styles and imaginaries created by
these narrative and poetic traditions and those of television melo-
drama are striking.
Modern Subjects 97
This difference can be seen especially clearly in the adaptations to
television of local folk forms. This happened in 1997, with the serial-
ized dramatization during the month of Ramadan of the epic about
Abu Zayd al-Hilali, considered by many the most magnificent work
of Arab oral narrative poetry. The epic, which in its entirety runs to
thousands of verses, follows the adventures across North Africa of the
Bani Hilal, a Bedouin tribe driven by drought from their home in the
Arabian Peninsula. As described by Slyomovics for Upper Egypt and
Reynolds for Lower Egypt, it is recited professionally by socially mar-
ginal poets with astonishing verbal talents, not to mention prodigious
memories.
34
Widely familiar, it is never performed in its entirety; but
when listeners hear their favorite segments, they know the context
and the shadow whole is evoked.
35
In her analysis of the differences between oral and printed ver-
sions of the epic, Slyomovics has noted not only that printed versions
(or studio-produced commercial recordings) are complete and sequen-
tial, rather than segmented and partial, but that they also lack the
elaborate punning of the performed. This absence of punning indi-
cates two things: a declining attention to the language itself, or poet-
ics, in the printed versions; and a greater reliance on the story, rather
than the multiple meanings of the puns, for establishing character.
36
The television drama shared with the printed versions (on which
the scriptwriter most likely relied) a chronological development and
decreasing attention to linguistic play, and to the verbal itself. It further
transformed the epic by turning it into a melodrama about interpersonal
relationships and individual longings and passions, many set in the do-
mestic sphere. The best illustration of these transformationsand thus
the genre conventions of serialized melodramasis how the serial dra-
matized the birth of the hero Abu Zayd. This opening section of the
epic (rarely performed in Upper Egypt, according to Slyomovics, be-
cause it is never requested by local audiences, yet popular, according to
Reynolds, in lower Egypt)
37
constituted the first and crucial week of
the television serial, drawing viewers in. The story of Abu Zayd is that
he is the son of Rizq of the Hilali Bedouin tribe and Khadra Sharifa, the
daughter of the Sharif of Mecca, a descendent of the Prophet. Khadra
is barren for many years (in some versions it is seven, in some eleven).
Despite their happiness with each other, husband and wife are miser-
able because of the absence of a son. Finally, Khadra is taken to a pool
to supplicate. She sees a powerful black bird driving away the other
98 Lila Abu-Lugbod
birds. She prays for a son as strong and ferocious as this bird. She then
does miraculously bear a sonAbu Zayd, the hero of the epic. In the
version performed for Slyomovics by an Upper Egyptian poet, the preg-
nancy and birth are described quickly, the love scene after Khadra's
visit to the pool being slightly more elaborate:
Khadra Sharifa had stopped bearing, but weak with desire
she came to the royal bed yearning.
Rizq son of Nayil came to her after the evening prayer.
Khadra wore silk brocade, she sat with him, she wore
brocade of silk, her best clothing.
Rizq asked for union with her.
She was happy! And the Lord of the Throne sent her an
infant who vexes the enemy!
She bore an infant who vexes valiant men!
Khadra passed the full nine months.
They approached the Emir Abu Zayd, Emir of valiant men,
they found the Emir Abu Zayd was blue-black, not
resembling his father,
they found the hero, Abu Zayd the Hilali, the color of a
black slave.
38
In a version recorded by Reynolds, the narrative is more elaborate and
dramatic but the focus is on the reactions of others to the black infant
and the anger and accusations of Rizq.
39
Neither version dwelt on the
emotions of the protagonists just before the birth.
In the televised episode of the birth, covered in the Upper Egyptian
performance in just the last six lines, we see Khadra going into labor,
the anxious father just outside her door awaiting the birth, a desperate
fight in the streets over the midwife (who is needed in three places at
once), more agonies of labor, the husband praying to God, and later,
when he hears the child has been born, falling to his knees, tears in his
eyes, and raising his arms to praise and thank God. Then we see
hushed arguments in Khadra's room between the midwife and the
attendant women, the midwife refusing to give the father the news.
What's wrong? The midwife points and says, "Look." They carefully
lift the cover off the baby. In a close-up, with music, we see a black
baby. The mother is sleeping, beatific. When she sits up and is con-
fronted with this, she holds the baby lovingly, innocently saying, "The
boy is our son, mine and Rizq's. Whether light or dark, he is a gift from
God whom we accept." But then she too becomes alarmed. It dawns
on her that the others are worried that she will be accused of adultery.
Modern Subjects 99
It is not that the television drama is emotional and the performed
epic not. The performed epic too describes feelings, in the convention-
al formulas for such things. In an earlier segment, for example, Rizq
and his wife Khadra cry over their inability to have a son. After sever-
al lines recounting how Rizq watched other men play with their sons,
the Upper Egyptian poet's version goes:
Rizq the Hilali eyed them and his wound increased
Inside his tent tears poured again
inside his tent tears poured again
he cried, wet his cheeks and his handkerchief
Khadra Sharifa left, her tears a canal.
Beautiful as she was, she loved him to the point of death
beautiful as she was, by God, unique
she cried and felt hardship each night he was absent:
"Tell me what is the reason for laments, O love, O Rizq,
you cry why, why?"
Similarly, a version recorded by Reynolds has Rizq saying:
I am the last of my line, my spirit is broken
I have spent my life and not seen a son, prosperous
I have taken of women, eight maidens,
And eleven daughters followed, princesses true!
This bearing of womenfolk, ah!, has broken my spirit
I weep and the tears of my eyes on my cheek do flow.
40
But the televised drama focuses on the relationships among characters
and the shifting emotions of a set of characters who often stare off
into space while music evokes their inner feelings. Instead of formu-
laic phrases about tears and their plenitude, what could be thought of
as the phenomenology of emotion, television drama tries to produce
the inner beings who feel these emotions through close-ups of facial
expressions and melodramatic acting. Moreover, the serial brings the
mythic heroes down to earth and makes them ordinary people, in line
with the process of "descending" individualization Foucault has de-
scribed as so characteristic of modern disciplinary regimes.
41
This is
reinforced by the overwhelming visual presence of interior worlds and
domestic spaces (always the case, of course, with soap operas, for ob-
vious budgetary and technical reasons).
42
Like all "folk" traditions, the oral epic's main intent is not the de-
velopment of the inner life of characters. Most of the epic, like folk-
tales told all over Egypt, consists of what characters did and said and
100 Lila Abu-Lughod
includes little "emotion language" or the gestures and music that sub-
stitute for it in melodrama. This is not to say that one cannot find in the
cultural traditions the elaboration of sentiment. The poetic, rather than
the narrative, genres are the place to look for this. Yet I would argue
for a fundamental difference in the localizationor locatabilityof
the emotions in melodrama and poetry. For example, the ghinnaawas,
or little songs of the Awlad 'AH Bedouin that I have written about, are
short expressions of sentiment.
43
Although people recite them as part
of stories, to express the sentiments of particular characters, and other-
wise in the contexts of intimates to express their own sentiments about
particular life events, they are conventional and formulaic. They are
thus, in a sense, depersonalized. They are repeated and appropriated
by others and thus are also disembodied. Furthermore, much of the ap-
preciation of these poems, like the performed Hilali epic, comes from
the poetry of their language.
Ritual lamentation of the dead in Egypt, as in other parts of the
Arab and circum-Mediterranean world, is another highly developed
poetic art that is quintessentially emotional.
44
In Upper Egypt, where
many of the television viewers with whom I have been working live,
the 'adida, as the lament is called, is performed at the funeral by women
specialists. The mournful chanting is extremely emotional in its pre-
sentation and also evokes strong sentiment through its imagery. How-
ever, as Elizabeth Wickett has shown, despite this potent imagery,
"few references to emotional states can be found in the laments, either
ascribed to the lamenter or to the feelings of the deceased after death."
45
Laments are, she adds, "ritual texts performed in an emotional arena"
and therefore, I would argue, differ significantly from melodrama in
being limited in context and sentiment. They are specific to the ritual-
ized context of the funeral. In contrast, the emotions of melodrama
cover a wide range and are attached to individuals and embedded in
the everyday, the ordinary, and the domestic.
By establishing these contrasts, I am not trying to assert the ex-
istence of a rigid distinction between modernity and tradition, the
"folk" art inhabiting (and defining) the traditional past and the melo-
drama the contemporary present. All sorts of cross-referencing and
transformations occur, especially as "traditional" forms aggressively
enter the mass media world contemporaneous with the melodrama.
46
What I am saying is that television melodramas offer distinctive con-
structions of the world and images of persons, especially within a con-
Modern Subjects 101
text defined by "traditional" forms and "traditional ways of life" from
which modernist writers and directors are distancing themselves.
Their specificity is in the emotionalization of the quotidian world,
which in turn works to enforce a sense of the importance of the indi-
vidual subjectthe locus and source of all these strong feelings.
Heroine of Her Own Melodrama
One evening, as I sat watching television with a poor Upper Egyptian
village family in the midst of various crises, the mother joked, "We are
a soap opera!" (ihna tatnthiliyya). In this comment, one can see that
television melodrama had come to inform her perceptions of her own
life. I think this occurs on a much more intimate and individual level
as well. To illustrate how this might work, I want to discuss a person
I knew in Egypt who was deeply involved with television and radio
melodramas: an unmarried domestic servant in Cairo I call Amira.
47
She listened to her transistor radio while she cooked for her employ-
ers. When she could, she stopped to watch the noon serial on tele-
vision. She always watched the evening serials when she got home.
She was knowledgeable about the actors and actresses; she had watched
most serials and films. Intelligent and articulate, she could summarize
plots easily and remember most. She rarely watched foreign imports
although admitted that the American serial Knots Landing, which she
claimed to have been able to understand, even though she could not
read the subtitles, had been an exception.
Unmarried and with no children, she was both freer to follow
television and more dependent on it for companionship and emotional-
social involvement than most women I knew in Egypt. She was some-
what isolated socially because she lived on her own. Her mother and
brothers still lived in the countryside in Manufiyya. She had two sis-
ters in Cairo. One was married with children, and she saw her little.
Besides the people she worked for, some of whom she could not com-
municate with (they did not speak Arabic), her main contacts seemed
to be her unmarried sister, with whom, however, she had frequent
conflicts, and one friend, a single woman who also had come to Cairo
from the countryside and like her worked as a domestic servant. With
both, she watched television.
Amira was both more sentimental and more volatile than many
women I have come to know. She was often moved by the serials she
watched. When we watched television together, her explanations of
102 Lila Abu-Lughod
who particular characters were carried moral and emotional valences.
This scene, she once said of an episode of Hilmiyya Nights (a serial
she had watched several times, though it ran to more than a hundred
episodes), reveals the worthy from the unworthy. With pity, she ex-
plained to me who a character in another serial written by 'Ukasha
(Honey and Tears) was. This is a poor young man who is sickly be-
cause his mother keeps marrying and abandoning him. She puts her-
self first. When she gets divorced she takes him back; but then she
goes and marries again. This has ruined his health and made him very
sensitive. Amira had concluded her summary of the plot of this serial
with admiration for the heroine: "Zaynab is strong and willful in the
cause of right. She's not strong for an immoral end."
But this sentimentality extended to other areas. Once when we
turned on the television in 1990 and saw a clip of people in Iran cry-
ing after an earthquake, this triggered her memory of having wept
"for an hour" after the Egyptian soccer team lost the World Cup
match. She had kept herself awake until the early hours of the morn-
ing to watch the game on television. She was upset because "they
worked so hard and got so tired and then God didn't reward them."
She had wept when they lost, and then wept again when she saw the
Egyptian players crying. "It really hurt."
Amira was also often embroiled in conflicts and argumentswith
her sister, her employers, and her neighbors. She told stories about
how angry she was, how wronged she had been. Her neighbors kept a
dog on the roof who bothered her. She fought with her landlords be-
cause she had to wake up at 3:00 A.M. to fill her water cans and haul
them up to the third storey. There was no water at other times in her
building. She fought with employers who left her sitting on their
doorstep with cooked food for a party, having refused to give her
a key to their apartment and having promised to be home to receive
the food.
Although I cannot argue for a direct causal link between her in-
volvement with television serials and her emotionality I suspect there
is one. There is, however, another more obvious link between tele-
vision melodrama and the ways she constructed herself as a subject.
This link is through the ways she made herself the subject of her own
life stories. I found it striking that of all the women whose life stories I
have heard, Amira was the one whose tales took most clearly the form
of melodrama. Hers was a Manichean world with good, kind people
Modern Subjects 103
who helped her and were generous, and greedy, stingy, or cruel people
who victimized her.
One can see this in the way she constructed her story of coming to
Cairo to find a better life. A local labor contractor found her first job.
She came from a poor family and she had worked on construction
sites, hauling dirt and sand, for a daily wage. She wanted to go to
Cairo because she saw her sisters, who had gone there to find work,
coming home dressed well and wearing gold. She was nineteen when
she first went. But she lasted only a month in the first job. The family
mistreated her. They woke her up at six in the morning, they didn't
feed her, and they kept the food locked up. She was paid five or six
pounds per month (about nine dollars, at that time). She cried and
cried and finally persuaded her sister to call and say that she was
needed back at home to tend a sick relative. She found another em-
ployer and another. Each time, she would find some excuse to go
home to the village, and she would not return. Eventually, she found a
job with a good family as a cook and stayed with them for eight years.
The themes repeat: exploited and mistreated, the innocent victim es-
capes until fate deals her some kind people.
It is when she talks about her brief marriage, however, that all the
elements of drama crystallize. At thirty-seven, she realizes that she is
too old to hope for marriage. She declares herself ugly anyway"Who
would want to marry me?" But someone did, in 1985, when she was
about thirty. The marriage lasted twenty-nine days, and she had to get
her sister's husband to pay the man a thousand pounds (approximate-
ly seven hundred dollars at the time) to divorce her. She told the story
easily; perhaps it was a well-rehearsed story. He was a plumber who
saw her at work. When he asked her about the possibility of marriage,
she sent him to discuss it with her brother-in-law. They were engaged
for four months but she never went anywhere with him. When she
would suggest it, he would refuse. She claims it was because he didn't
want her to know what he was like or to know anything about him.
Once they were married he began beating her. He wanted her to
hand over her wages. She refused, saying she had a loan to pay off,
and then she planned to stay at home. A man, she explained, is sup-
posed to support his wife. He locked her in the house. All she wanted
was to be rid of him and so she got her brother-in-law, whom she held
responsible since he was supposed to have looked into the man's back-
ground, to pay him money to leave her alone. It turned out he was a
104 Lila Abu-Lughod
tough from a poor quarter. Amira is convinced that he wanted to kill
her to take her apartment.
Bitterly she added, Egyptian men are no good. Lots of men have
asked her to marry them. Men on the streets, men she meets at work.
But they all want her money. Actually, it is her apartment they want.
When they discover that she has an apartment and furniture they
know they will only have to contribute inexpensive things as a dowry.
Her husband, for example, had provided the living-room furniture
but she already had the bedroom furniture and the apartment. (Given
the severe shortage of housing, the exorbitant "key money" that must
be paid to get a rental unit, and the expenses of furnishing the apart-
ment, considered the responsibility of the groom, many young men
find it difficult to marry.) When I asked what would then happen, she
explained, "Then they'll take a second wife. Once they have the apart-
ment and money."
If we ask, as the anthropologists Ruth Behar and Laurel Kendall
have, about the narrative qualities of life stories, we see that if Behar's
Mexican informant's life story was shaped by the Christian model of
suffering and redemption, Amira conforms more closely to the model
of melodrama.
48
Like the television dramas, the themes of her story are
money, with the villain trying to cheat her out of hers, and the secret,
with the truth about her sinister husband discovered too late. The
melodramatic heroine, innocent and good, is wronged and victimized.
Seeking a better life, symbolized by her sisters' good clothes and gold,
she leaves the village and home to find herself overworked, underpaid,
and hungry in a house where the food is locked up. Seeking love, com-
panionship, or respectabilitywhatever it is that marriage is supposed
to bringshe finds herself betrayed and beaten.
49
What I think is most significant about this way of telling her life
stories, however, is that through it Amira makes herself the subject, the
melodramatic heroine, in fact, of her own life. Perhaps in part by her
love of television melodrama, she has been encouraged to see herself as
the subject of the emotions that sweep her and thus as more of an indi-
vidual. This puts her in a better position to be a modern citizen, some-
thing the television producers want from their melodramas. For Amira,
this position is reinforced by the structures of her life: her migrant sta-
tus and separation from her family, her reliance on her own labor for
survival, her private apartment with its own electricity and water bills,
and her subjection to the law and to taxation as an individual.
Modem Subjects 105
Postcolonial Differences
Yet Amira's story and her life present certain complications for a
straightforward narrative of coming to modern individual subject-
hood as we might tell it along familiar Western lines. First, Amira's
tragic story is marked by critical absences and failures. The most spe-
cific is the failure of her brother-in-law to have taken seriously his
family responsibility of protecting her from a bad marriage. More
generally, she suggests that her vulnerability is caused by the absence
of a strong family that could have supported her and kept her from
having to work as a maid. Her emptiness is related to the failure to
have married and, as most women do, to have a family of her own. In
all the life stories of domestic servants I have recorded, it is always a
rupture to the ideal of women's embeddedness in family and marriage
that accounts for their positions doing work that is both hard and not
respectable, and for their not being, in a sense, full persons.
50
Amira's
story, while told mostly in terms of herself as an individual moving
through life, evokes the ideal she cannot havethe ideal of being a
fulfilled person defined by kinship and family.
To note that kinship remains crucial for Amira is not to say that
television melodrama is not producing its effects. After all, as I noted
earlier, even while the genre conventions encourage individuality and
the political messages include citizenship and wider social belonging,
television melodramas do not overtly challenge the ideal of family so
taken for granted in Egypt. In keeping with urban middle-class ideals,
the nuclear family gets more play than the extended, but women and
most men characters are still placed within families.
However, there is something else of great importance in Amira's
day-to-day life that does not derive from television melodrama and that
in some, but not all, ways undermines the processes television encour-
ages. In part because she is cut out of family life and cannot rely on
kin to provide community, purpose, and social respectability, Amira is
attracted to the new path to individual expression and respectability
opened up to women in the last two decades by the movement to make
Islam more central to everyday life and politics. Recognizing this fur-
ther complication, along with acknowledging the continuing centrality
of kinship and the ways that Egyptian melodramas embed morality in
the social, reminds us of the difference it makes that a modern form of
drama and the forms of selfhood it encourages are being produced in a
106 Liia Abu-Lughod
postcolonial nation with its own specific history and, as Chakrabarty
has argued for Bengal, its own form of modernity.
J1
As much as work and watching television, religious practice orga-
nizes Amira's schedule, informs her sense of self, and colors her under-
standing of her world. Because mosques have flourished in the last
decade and a half, and because it has become much more accepted in
that period that women should pray in them and attend religious les-
sons, Amira's regular attendance is not uncommon for lower-class and
middle-class urban women. However, the same structural features that
make her more dependent on television and free to follow itliving
alone, being unmarried, and without childrenenable her to pray more
regularly, go to mosque on Fridays and sometimes even after work,
and to participate in the special mosque prayers of Ramadan, the
month of special devotion and fasting as well as heavy television
watching. Similarly, that she wears the higab, the modest head cover-
ing that has become a fashionable sign of piety and middle-class re-
spectability in the towns and cities, is not unusual. But Amira's regular
participation in lessons at the mosque has intensified her identity as a
Muslim and given meaning to the wearing of this item of clothing, in-
cluding a terror that the fabric of her higab might have a pattern of
crosses on it. As a result of her involvement in these religious practices
and identifications, Amira is pulled very much into a community, and
not the national community to which individual citizens are, accord-
ing to television writers, supposed to relate themselves.
52
Yet many of Amira's religious observances are self-oriented and
thus might be thought of as running along the same tracks as the indi-
vidualizing and interiorizing of television melodrama (even though
many religious authorities preach against television). This is especially
the case with the discipline of fasting, which she takes very seriously.
She fasts all the days of Ramadan, like most Egyptian Muslims, mak-
ing up later the days lost because of menstruation.
53
But she also fasts
all the other possible and recommended days of the Muslim calendar.
One can also see this concern with the self in the way she constantly
asks others to forgive her for the smallest thingslike angering some-
one or even helping herself to a piece of cake from an employer's larder.
Her references to her sinfulness and the need to cleanse it with fasting,
prayer, and asking forgiveness, were especially striking to me because
her life was so moral and proper. This obsessive concern with the self
Modem Subjects 107
is, it seems, strongly encouraged by the rhetoric of the lessons at the
mosque.
54
In a sense, television itself seems to be changing to accommodate
(not to mention appropriate for its own legitimacy) this new intensity
of religious practice and identity. There have long been religious tele-
vision serials, historical costume dramas about the early history of
Islam. These were often aired late at night and were not particularly
popular. They, like all religious programming, were segregated from the
popular evening serials, as if to compartmentalize religion. But in the
last few years, major actors participated in the big-budget religious/
historical serials broadcast during Ramadan, and major writers and
directors were suddenly called upon to produce them. These serials
were, it turned out, so popular that the newly appointed head of tele-
vision production announced that they planned to do many more seri-
als about "our Arab Islamic heritage," as he gingerly put it, over the
next few years.
The serialization of the Hilali epic broadcast during Ramadan in
the early slot that children are sure to be watching is part of this ef-
fort. Although not strictly speaking a religious serial, it gave a promi-
nent place to discourse about God, as does the oral performed epic,
since that is recited by and for people for whom being Muslim was an
important identity. Yet there is a striking difference in the forms reli-
giosity takes in the television version and the oral epic as performed
by traditional poets. This suggests how television religion, much like
Amira's, may be part of a new individualizing of religion.
In the epic, as performed in Egypt, God's power is a constant
theme. All great deeds and miraculous happenings, like the birth of
the hero Abu Zayd, are attributed to it. Poets always open their per-
formances with a praise poem to the Prophet. This praise poetry intro-
duces the themes of the segments to be recited but also, as Slyomovics
argues, has the rhetorical effect of praising the poet himself by linking
his poetic abilities and his status to that of the Prophet, whose divine
words were miraculous, as well as praising the audience for being part
of the community of Muslims.
55
The television serial also represented God's miraculous powerin
computer-generated special effects like the strong bird whose likeness
Khadra's prays for in a son. But mostly religion figures as the emo-
tionalized attitudes of characterstheir supplication, their awe, and
their gratitude. We saw this clearly when Rizq, the hero's father, waits
108 Lila Abu-Lughod
anxiously while his wife is in labor. There is a cut to a scene (perhaps
at sunrise of the same day) where he is standing by his horse, watching
the sun, his hands held up in the position of prayer. Back home, his
hands are clasped, and he asks God to keep his wife safe. When he is
told the news that he has a son, he repeats again and again, "A thou-
sand praises and thanks to you, O Lord." He faces different parts of
the room, arms up toward Heaven, thanking Bountiful God for hav-
ing generously given him a son after all these years, and for ending his
sorrows and enabling him to face the men and know that his name
would remain. He then drops to his knees, thanking God again. Later,
his wife will say she accepts her son as a gift from God. In these scenes,
it is the personal faith, rather than the power of God, that is stressed.
Piety has been made into a characteristic of the self.
Thirty years ago, the anthropologist James Peacock wrote a book
about a form of proletarian drama in Indonesia that he argued was a
"rite of modernization": it helped its participants desire and feel com-
fortable with modern actions (linear, coming to a climax) and goals
(individual achievement and nuclear families). Although his analysis
was sophisticated, he shared the confident assumptions of moderniza-
tion theorists of the time. Indonesia, like every other country, was on a
path to modernity; modernity was a singular condition whose features
could be easily outlined (rationalization, universalization, bureacrati-
zation, centralization, specialization, monetization, conjugalization);
and finally, modernity was an unalloyed good, its individualism, for
example, being a mark of increasing freedom, with no element of sub-
jection (as Foucault later cautioned).
56
My argument is different. A few years ago, in a popular Egyptian
women's magazine, Muna Hilmi, daughter of Nawal El-Saadawi, the
Egyptian feminist writer so well known in the West, wrote a paean to
the American daytime soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful, then
being broadcast on Egyptian television.
57
In an unusually sympathetic
review of a serial widely condemned by the intelligentsia, she contrast-
ed it to Egyptian serials, which she disparaged for their remorseless
attention to social and political problems. She lauded the American
soap opera for its feminism (in that it had strong women characters
who were determined to achieve what they wanted in their careers
and their lives) but most of all for its subtle exploration of the human
psyche. She could have, but did not, mention the elite's disdain for the
Modern Subjects 109
emotional hyperbole of Egyptian melodramathe disdain so clearly
reflected in the satire I described at the start of this chapter.
What I have tried to show here, though, is that the emotionality
of Egyptian melodramas and the way they thus construct individuals
in terms of vivid interior lives is the result of a local effort, developed
in the context of Egyptian genres and social circumstances, that is part
of the process of trying to produce those individual human psyches
that this educated cosmopolitan writer extols. But there is a differ-
ence. Instead of constructing these human psyches in a generalized
contentless context, as does an American soap opera like The Bold
and the Beautiful (a lack of political context that initially rendered the
serial harmless in the eyes of the Egyptian censors), producers work-
ing in a government-controlled medium and imbued with an ideology
of national development and the legacy of Arab socialist ideals insist
on placing them squarely within the social and moral national nexus.
And because of the increasing hegemony of an assertive religious iden-
tity in a society in which most people had never accepted the principle
that religious practice and morality were not part of modern everyday
lifesomething of which Muna Hilmi most likely disapprovesthe
vectors of modernity crisscross. Melodrama, and to some extent what
I would argue to be a new focus on the self in religious practice, may
be encouraging the kinds of selves a sophisticated modernist secularist
like Hilmi wants. But the enduring ties of kinship and the appealing
and modernidentity politics of Islam pull such selves in a different
direction: into communities and subject to other authorities and disci-
plines. The trajectory of modernity in Egypt, in other words, is not
predictable from the historically specific narratives of modernity in
Europe, and the trajectory of selfhood, though related through melo-
drama, cannot be told in the same terms.
Notes
For contributions to the research on which this paper depends, I am especially grateful
to Reem Saad, Omnia Shakry, Samira Muhammad, and many friends who watched
television with me and shared their insights and reactions. Fieldwork in Egypt was sup-
ported by fellowships from the American Research Center in Egypt, the ACLS/SSRC
Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East, the National Endowment for the
Humanities, and New York University. The paper was sharpened by questions from
Talal Asad, Nicholas Dirks, Timothy Mitchell, Cyan Prakash, Lisa Wideen, and other
participants in the "Questions of Modernity" conference at New York University;
Dwight Reynolds, Susan Slyomovics, Ted Swedenburg, and an anonymous reviewer for
the University of Minnesota Press; and audiences at the College of St. Catherine, Smith
110 Lila Abu-Lughod
College, Princeton University, and the Institute for the Humanities at the University of
Michigan. A John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship gave me precious time to rework it.
1. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1976).
2. Ibid., 15.
3. Ibid., n.
4. Lila Abu-Lughod, "The Objects of Soap Opera," in Worlds Apart: Modernity
through the Prism of the Local, ed. Daniel Miller (London: Routledge, 1995), 190-11;
Veena Das, "Soap Opera: What Kind of Object Is It?" ibid., 169-89; Ranggasamy
Karthigesu, "Television as a Tool for Nation-Building in the Third World," in Tele-
vision and Its Audience, ed. P. Drummond and R. Paterson (London: British Film
Institute, 1988), 306-16; Purnima Mankekar, "National Texts and Gendered Lives,"
American Ethnologist 2.0, no. 3 (1993): 543-63; and "Television Tales and a Woman's
Rage," Public Culture 5, no. 3 (1993): 469-92,.
5. Russell Merritt, "Melodrama: Postmortem for a Phantom Genre," Wide Angle
5, no. 3 (1983): 2.5-31. See also Christine Gledhill, ed., Melodrama: Stage, Picture,
Screen (London: British Film Institute, 1994).
6. Robert C. Allen, ed., To Be Continued . . . : Soap Operas around the World
(New York: Routledge, 1995), n.
7. Ana Lopez, in "Our Welcomed Guests: Telenovelas in Latin America," ibid.,
161, notes that the Mexican telenovelas are stereotypically more weepy. Clearly, the
Egyptian serials are less sophisticated, glossy, and sexually charged than the Brazilian
telenovelas, but even these have something in common: in Egypt, as in Brazil, many
television writers are serious and progressive. For Brazil, see Alma Guillermoprieto,
"Letter from Brazil: Obsessed in Rio," The New Yorker, August 16,1993, 44-55.
8. SeeTalal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University
Press, 1993), for a discussion of the idea that secularism and the notion of religion it im-
plies is a concept that developed as part of the history of Christianity in the West.
9. Lila Abu-Lughod, "Finding a Place for Islam," Public Culture 5, no. 3 (1993):
493-513; Abu-Lughod, "The Objects of Soap Opera."
10. Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," in Technologies of the Self, ed.
L. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1988), 16-49, and "About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self," Political
Theory 2.1, no. 2, (1993): 198-117.
11. See Toby Miller, The Well-Tempered Self (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1993), for an analysis that links modern forms of subjectivitythe indi-
vidual as consumer and as citizento mass-mediated cultural forms.
12. Veena Das, "The Making of Modernity: Gender and Time in Indian Cinema,"
this volume, ch. 7.
13. Sheila Petty, "Miseria: The Evolution of a Unique Melodramatic Form," Passages:
A Chronicle of the Humanities 8 (1994): 19-10; Paul Willemen, "Negotiating the Tran-
sition to Capitalism: The Case of Andaz," in Melodrama and Asian Cinema, ed. Wimal
Dissanayake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 179-88.
14. While no television serial can simply be attributed to the writer, as author, since
it involves so many stages and so many personnelfrom those in the television admin-
istration, including the censors, to those directly involved in production, including the
director, other scriptwriters, and the actorsthere is in Egypt a certain integrity to the
texts of well-known writers. When they feel excessive censorship or radical changes en-
danger their text, they protest publicly and sometimes even withdraw their texts. The
most respected writers, like 'Ukasha, are closely involved in all aspects of production.
Modem Subjects 111
Writers with less clout and standing lose control to the director and others. In most
cases, though, the germ of the plot and the themes are retained, and so I will, in the dis-
cussion that follows, treat the serials as if they were the works of authors. On a com-
parative note, Guillermoprieto, "Letter from Brazil," 49, notes that in Brazil, authors
are believed to be
u
the soul and essence of a telenovela," and Lopez, "Our Welcomed
Guests," 60-61 extends this to all Latin American contexts.
15. Interview with the author, June 15,1993.
16. Interview with the author, June 17,1993.
17. The differences are reflected even in the aesthetics or styles of the melodramas.
'Ukasha's serials, like those of Kheiry and many other progressive writers, strive for re-
alism, a style associated with socialism or the socially concerned. The moral universe,
they suggest, lies within the lives of ordinary people. Some of Abaza's serials are striking
for their exaggerated tones and lack of naturalism.
18. The secularity of the state is a complex question, of course. I say "ambivalently
secular" because Islam and Christianity are still considered valid and important aspects
of personal life and identity, even of public officials, and even beyond. Although the
relevance of religion to state policy and law may have been minimized in this century,
especially since independence, it is still given a role to play. For example, part of the re-
ligious establishment ratifies government policies and others can make trouble, and
family law continues to be Islamic. See Partha Chatterjee, "Religious Minorities and the
Secular State: Reflections on an Indian Impasse," Public Culture 8, no. i (1995): n-39,
for an argument that secularism is a Western concept that sits uneasily in other places,
like India. On the exclusion of Islamists from Egyptian television, see Lila Abu-Lughod,
"Finding a Place for Islam," and "Dramatic Reversals," in Political Islam, ed. Joel
Beinin and Joe Stork (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 269-81.
19. See Abu-Lughod, "The Objects of Soap Opera," for a discussion of the impedi-
ments nationalist programs confront in reaching subaltern audiences.
20. Jane Feuer, "Melodrama, Serial Form and Television Today," Screen 15, no. i
(1984): 4-16.
21. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination.
22. len Ang, "Melodramatic Identifications: Television Fiction and Women's Fan-
tasy," in Television and Women's Culture, ed. Mary Ellen Brown (London: Sage, 1990),
75-88, quotation at 81.
23. My hunch is that they do offer alternative models of the acceptability of emo-
tional expressionespecially of sadness or miseryto women and men like those I
knew in the Awlad 'Ali community, for whom public expression of these was culturally
restricted. See Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin
Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
24. Feminist critics have done for television soap opera what Brooks did for literary
melodramaforced a reevaluation of a genre dismissed as papas well as develop
some critical ideas about female pleasure through its serious analysis. The feminist litera-
ture on soap opera is extensive and much of it quite good. Some key texts are Robert C.
Allen, Speaking of Soap Opera {Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985);
len Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (New York:
Methuen, 1985), and "Melodramatic Identifications"; Mary Ellen Brown, ed., Television
and Women's Culture (London: Sage, 1990); Charlotte Brunsdon, "The Role of Soap
Opera in the Development of Feminist Television Scholarship," in To Be Continued...,
ed. Allen, 49-55; Feuer, "Melodrama, Serial Form and Television Today"; Christine
Geraghty, Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime-Time Soaps (Cambridge, Eng.:
Polity Press, 1991); Lynne Joyrich, "All That Television Allows: TV Melodrama,
112 Lila Abu-Lughod
Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture," in Private Screenings, ed. Lynn Spiegel and
Denise Mann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 2.17-51; Tanya
Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (Hamden,
Conn.: Archon Books, 1981); Laura Mulvey, "Melodrama In and Out of the Home," in
High Theory/Low Culture, ed. Colin McCabe (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1986), 8o-roo; Laura Stempel Mumford, Love and Ideology in the Afternoon
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Ellen Seiter et al., Remote Control:
Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power (London: Routledge, 1989). Robert Allen's
recent edited collection on the global reception of soap opera, To Be Continued. . ., is
also an excellent resource.
25. See Catherine Lutz, "Emotion, Thought, and Estrangement: Emotion as a Cul-
tural Category," Cultural Anthropology r, no. 4 (1986): 405-36.
26. Tanya Modleski, "The Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television and Women's
Work," in Regarding Television, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, American Film Institute Mono-
graph (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1983), 67-75.
27. Raymond Williams, "Drama in a Dramatised Society," in Raymond Williams
and Television, ed. A. O'Connor (London: Routledge, 1989), 3-13.
28. For critiques along these lines, see Lila Abu-Lughod, "Shifting Politics in Bedouin
Love Poetry," in Language and the Politics of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 2.4-45,
a
d Abu-Lughod and Catherine Lutz, "Introduction:
Emotion, Discourse, and the Politics of Everyday Life," ibid., 1-13.
29. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Witness to Suffering: Domestic Cruelty and the Birth
of the Modern Subject in Bengal," this volume, ch. 3.
30. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley, vol. z: The Use of
Pleasure (New York: Random House, 1985); also, "Technologies of the Self" and
"About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self."
31. Abu-Lughod, "Shifting Politics in Bedouin Love Poetry."
32. Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensa-
tionalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 6.
33. Walter Armbrust's Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1996) is a serious contribution to our understanding of mod-
ernist cinema. Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes, in Arab and African Cinema (1991),
also give some background. The background of Muhammad Fadil, Egypt's preeminent
television director, hints at the kinds of influences on those in mass media. He describes
having been exposed to theater in university and having pursued his interests through
wide reading not only at the public library in Alexandria but at the U.S. Information
Library (interview June 17, 1993). Many television writers have backgrounds in litera-
ture. For general background on radio and television in Egypt, see Anciens et nouveaux
medias en Egypte: Radio, television, cinema, video, Bulletin de CEDE] 21, premiere
semestre (1989).
34. Dwight Reynolds, Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Perfor-
mance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Susan
Slyomovics, The Merchant of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). My
experience has been that many men and women in their sixties, at least in the Awlad 'Ali
Bedouin community in Egypt's Western Desert, where I have spent the most time, can
recite verses. Men of the next generation who grew up in cities around the Arab world
have boyhood memories of listening to traveling poets reciting the tale in the coffee
shops.
35. Susan Slyomovics, "Praise of God, Praise of Self, Praise of the Islamic People:
Arab Epic Narrative in Performance," in Classical and Popular Medieval Arabic
Modem Subjects 113
Literature: A Marriage of Convenience, ed. Jareer Abu-Haidar and Farida Abu-Haidar
(London: Curzon Press, in press).
36. Susan Slyomovics, "The Death-Song of Amir Khafaji: Puns in an Oral and
Printed Episode of Sirat Bant Hilal," Journal of Arabic Literature 18 (1987): 61-78.
Dwight Reynolds argues that punning is actually quite rare in most Egyptian poets'
recitations of the epic (personal communication).
37. See Reynolds, Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes, 180-83.
38. All translations from Susan Slyomovics, "The Epic of the Bani Hilal: The Birth
of Abu Zayd: II (Southern Egypt)," in Oral Epics from Africa: Vibrant Voices from
a Vast Continent, ed. John William Johnson, Thomas A. Hale, and Stephen Belcher
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 140-51.
39. The Epic of the Bani Hilal, trans. Dwight F. Reynolds (forthcoming).
40. Ibid.
41. As Foucault puts it, "The disciplines mark the moment when the reversal of
the political axis of individualizationas one might call ittakes place. In certain
societies . . . it may be said that individualization is greatest where sovereignty is exer-
cised and in the highest echelons of power. The more one possesses power or privilege,
the more one is marked as an individual, by rituals, written accounts or visual repro-
ductions. The 'name' and the genealogy that situate one within a kinship group, the per-
formance of deeds that demonstrate superior strength and which are immortalized in
literary accounts. . . . All these are procedures of an 'ascending' individualization. In a
disciplinary regime, on the other hand, individualization is 'descending': as power be-
comes more anonymous and more functional, those on whom it is exercised tend to be
more strongly individualized" (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan
Sheridan [New York: Random House, 1978], 191-93).
42. It could be argued that the inferiority of the domestic scenes of soap opera are
metaphors of the inner life of the persons around which their plots revolve. Elsaesser, in
his classic article on cinematic melodrama has suggested, in fact, that "the space of the
home" does relate "to the inside space of human inferiority, emotions, and the uncon-
scious" (cited in Mulvey, "Melodrama In and Out of the Home," 95).
43. Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments.
44. See Lila Abu-Lughod, "Islam and the Gendered Discourses of Death," Inter-
national Journal of Middle East Studies 15 (1993): 187-105, for a discussion of some
of the literature on lamentation.
45. Elizabeth Wickett, "'For Our Destinies': The Funerary Lament of Upper Egypt,"
Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993, 166.
46. The televised version of the Hilali epic was preceded by a revival through com-
mercial audiocassette for mass consumption. Listened to in Cairo as well as back in the
Upper Egyptian villages where people had enjoyed poets' performances at weddings, it
has taken on a new and different life, entering a cultural field where it can be deployed
as a marker of the Egyptian "heritage" as well as a source of regional pride. Similarly, in
the Western Desert, the Awlad 'AH ghinnaawa has moved out of its context of the wed-
ding and the oral recitation onto the commercial cassette, in the process excluding
women reciters and being turned into a nostalgic form that marks regional or ethnic
identity and an acceptable medium for the rebellion of young men against their elders
(see Lila Abu-Lughod, "The Shifting Politics of Bedouin Love Poetry").
47. My fieldwork in Egypt, since 1990, has been carried out in two sites: Cairo,
where I have interviewed producers of television and worked with domestic servants
as television viewers, and a village in Upper Egypt. For more on rural responses to
television, see Lila Abu-Lughod, "The Interpretation of Cuiture(s) after Television,"
114 Lila Abu-Lughod
Representations 59 (1997): 109-34,
ar
> d "Television and the Virtues of Education:
Upper Egyptian Encounters with State Culture," in Directions of Change in Rural
Egypt, ed. Nicholas Hopkins and Kirsten Westergaard (Cairo: American University in
Cairo Press, 1998), 147-65. For more on domestic servants, see Lila Abu-Lughod, "The
Ambivalence of Authenticity: Making Cultural Identity on Egyptian Television in a
Transnational Age," unpublished ms.
48. Ruth Behar, "Rage and Redemption: Reading the Life Story of a Mexican
Marketing Woman," Feminist Studies 16 (1990): 113-58; Laurel Kendall, The Life and
Hard Times of a Korean Shaman (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988).
49. One could, of course, ask what the social effects of this discursive self-presentation
were intended to beespecially for a poor domestic worker telling the tale to a wealthi-
er foreigner. Certainly, Amira wanted sympathy and might have wanted to present her-
self as wronged and in need of support. The story, as I noted above, flowed easily and
sounded well rehearsed, as are many of the stories people tell about themselves and oth-
ers in cultures where storytelling is so important. And one could also ask about the per-
sonal or psychological functions, for the socially marginal Amira, of telling her own
story in this melodramatic forma form that, I have suggested, owes so much to tele-
vision and radio, with their stars and glamor.
50.1 discuss these domestic servants' stories in "Third Television: Marginal Women
and the Eroding Hegemony of Development," unpublished manuscript.
51. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Witness to Suffering," and "The Difference-Deferral
of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal," in Subaltern
Studies VIII, ed. David Arnold and David Hardiman (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1994), 50-88, reprinted in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World,
ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997), 373-405. For other ways of thinking about alternative modernities, see Arj un
Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
52. For the opposition between television and religion, see my "Dramatic Reversals"
and "Finding a Place for Islam."
53. Women cannot pray or fast while menstruating because they are not in a state of
purity.
54. For an excellent analysis of the self-cultivation encouraged in women in the
piety movement in Egypt, see Saba Mahmood, "Women's Piety and Embodied Disci-
pline: The Islamic Resurgence in Contemporary Egypt," Ph.D. diss., Stanford University,
1998.
55. Slyomovics, "Praise of God, Praise of Self, Praise of the Islamic People."
56. James Peacock, The Rites of Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966). The weakest chapter is the one in which he examines ludruk (the form of
drama) in terms of Marion Levy, Jr.'s Modernization and the Structure of Societies
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
57. Muna Hilmi, "Al-jari' wa-l-jamila: Musalsal bi-dun 'uqad dhukuriya" (The Bold
and the Beautiful: A Serial without Male Complexes), Sabah al-Khayr, February n,
1993. 59-
Five
The Thin Line of Modernity:
Some Moroccan Debates
on Subjectivity
Stefania Pandolfo
In epigraph, two unresolved stories of illness:
In March 1991 / traveled to the small community in southern
Morocco where I had lived and conducted research for a number of
years, with a young woman who was making this journey instead of
visiting a psychiatric institution. Suad had been an inpatient at a
Moroccan hospital once already in the past, and in moments of sud-
den lucidityfragments of presence snatched from the other world
into which she lapsedwas aware that she might end up there again.
Her relapse had shattered the fragile balance in her family, un-
leashed fears, and become intolerable. Fearing that a second hospitali-
zation would impose on her a permanent seal of insanity, her mother
was determined to prevent it. The mother knew that 1 kept in touch
with a fqih, a Quranic teacher and healer, in a region of the south and
asked me to accompany them to visit him. The space of our journey
was a detour of waiting, a postponed verdict, the hiatus of a dream.
This was the first time Suad had traveled south. From the point of
view of the middle-class urban neighborhood where she had been
raised, the south was almost another world. (Much later, we recall
that journey together. She explains to me what I did not understand
then, what she thought I understood, and tells me about the 'alam
akhur, the "other world" of her illness.)
115
116 Stefania Pandolfo
When we arrived at the fqih's house, Suad was out of reach. For a
long time the fqih sat there silently, as though aware that with her his
customary ritual acts would not work. Finally he asked a question.
She turned to him as if seeing him for the first time, and started to
tellstories of losses and feelings and dreams. A fqih's ritual economy
is parsimonious with words and time. I wondered how he would take
her urgent request, expressed in such a different style. He listened,
asked questions, offered advice. I felt I had no right to be there, and
left. When I returned, he was giving her his prescriptiona fragment
of Quranic writing to dilute in water and drink, another to burn.
Suad tried to follow his prescription, but failed. Later, the fqih ex-
pressed his sense of deception at the failure to help her with his meth-
ods. She did not return to see him. Yet something had happened, both
to him and to her. She had not found a cure, a resolution, a deliver-
ance, but, perhaps, for a moment, what in the language of psycho-
analysis is called an ecoutean active listening, and a recognition.
And he had found himself in a place that was novel for him, a place
where the assumptions of his ritual acts were suspended.
The second story travels in the opposite direction, from that southern
village and healer, to the walls of the psychiatric ward at the Hospital
Ibn Roshd in Casablanca. It concerns a young woman I knew well
from the village, who for several years had suffered from intermittent
seizures and absences that were attributed to the jinns through the
intervention of sorcery. Fatna had recently given birth. Her husband
telephoned from the village and asked me on her behalf to accompany
them to the psychiatric hospital in Casablanca. She wanted to go to
the hospital, talk with a psychiatrist, "sit" there.
When I met them at the bus station, Fatna did not recognize me.
She seemed not to know her husband either, or their newborn daugh-
ter, whom he carried in distress. At the hospital we sat in the lobby,
waiting to be received. She sat sunken in her state, rigid as a statue,
elsewhere. A nurse came, took her by the arm, and led her into a room
for a clinical interview. When she came back a little while later, as
though by the effectiveness of a rite, she was back to presence as her
usual self, without even a prescription for drugs. She took her daugh-
ter, gave her her breast, greeted me, and we walked back to the bus as
if nothing had happened.
The Thin Line of Modernity 117
I wondered whether the fear of institutionalization fueled in her a
desire to belong, to rejoin a community of speech. (I remembered the
face of a woman, beating the glass surface of a closed door,) I posed
the question to a psychoanalyst, the friend who had given me a letter
of introduction for the hospital. "She needed to travel," he said, "to
travel far, far from her village, and from the ties in which she was en-
tangled; she needed une autre ecoute, another listening." The walls of
the hospital, paradoxically, had served her as the opening of another
spacea space where voice could emerge and speech circulate again.
At least for the interim of a moment.
Reflecting on his own clinical experience, and on the history of psy-
chiatry in Morocco, Jalil Bennani, a Moroccan psychoanalyst, writes
that since the establishment of the first psychiatric institutions during
the colonial period, "the symptom has been increasingly addressed to
the representatives of modern science, while people are increasingly
alone with their suffering."
1
What colonial psychiatrists did not under-
stand, however, and their Moroccan successors have trouble recogniz-
ing now, he says, is that the symptom has been also deeply entangled
with an understanding of illness and its agents radically foreign to the
discourse of that science.
The term "symptom" here refers not to that of psychiatry, or at
least not just. It is not a psychopathological index to be read against
the standard configuration of an illnesshysteria, melancholia, schizo-
phrenia. It is a painful utterance, a glyph of desire; an unconscious
production that may be addressed to an audience. "The symptom is it-
self structured as a language," Lacan writes. "It is a language whose
speech is waiting to be delivered."
2
The interlocutor, Bennani says, is
increasingly modern science. The patient's unconscious request, her
speech of pain, is being expressed more and more within the medical
psychiatric code and to an institutional representative of that code. Yet,
at the same time, it digs its roots elsewhere, like a rhizome, in other
ways of experiencing selfhood and madness.
As Moroccan psychiatrists themselves acknowledge, patients fol-
low "traditional" and psychiatric cures side by side and are invested,
if partially, in both. This raises two important sets of questions: the
first concerns what happens to the symptom, to the perception and
representation of illness, and to the position and speech of the subject,
in moving from one institutional and symbolic set of references to the
118 Stefania Pandolfo
other. The second concerns the unequal power of the demonological
and the medical discourses. What does it mean, for a man diagnosed
as a schizophrenic, to spend his weekend "en permission" from the
psychiatric hospital at the house of a traditional healer, performing
the cures of the jinns? In what sense can the two institutional discours-
es, therapeutic techniques, and "experiences of madness" be said to be
commensurable?
3
Or should the symptom itself be understood as a
painful and unspeakable knot connecting discrepant and juxtaposed
experiential registers? It is a suspended utterance that does not fit the
customary interpretative frames and calls for theoretical reinvention:
a bridge between worlds, simultaneously stating their contemporanei-
ty and their distance, painfully telling the impossible.
This essay is a reflection on the possibility of speaking, listening,
and dwelling on the boundary of Moroccan modernity, that interme-
diate zone where the two stories of illness belong. It sets as its limited
aim to trace the implications of a specifically modernist Moroccan
sense of temporality, the temporality of the "cut" or the "bridge," re-
lated to the drawing of a line that separates and joins worlds experi-
enced as at once contiguous and remote.
Through the discussion of an experimental novel, an essay in the
philosophy of alienation, and a psychiatric debate around the status
of "traditional therapies," I consider three Moroccan modernist prob-
lematizations of the self and attempt to read them, as much as pos-
sible, in their own terms.
4
They are literary, philosophical, and thera-
peutical topoi, interpreting contemporary subjectivity within the visions
of modernity they present. As I follow their different vocabularies, I
raise the questions of subjectivity, emancipation, and time. What does
it mean, within each view, to be a subject in postcolonial Morocco, to
live and act in the present, to speak with one's contemporaries? What
place is there, in these debates, for the unsettled speech, the question-
ing, and the unresolved therapeutical journeys of Su'ad and Fatna?
Incommensurable Past
In 1954, two years before the independence of Morocco, Driss Chrai'bi
published Le passe simple, a controversial novel that marked a gen-
eration of Moroccan intellectuals. Written in a dismembered narrative
and temporal style, The Simple Past is the account of an epistemic
breaka traumatic cut, which carved in the subject's history a discon-
tinuity beyond return (the grammatical passe simple, the past historic
tense alluded to in the title). It is a story of fractured identities and of
The Thin Line of Modernity 119
impossible self-recognitions; and of betweenness and the practice of
loss as possible emergent modes of subjectivity.
5
As such, the novel
poetically raised a question that shaped Maghribi literature and post-
colonial critique for the following three decades. In the words of
Abdelkebir Khatibi, "Qui, nous-memes, dans la decolonisation," "Who,
ourselves, in process of decolonization?"
6
The cut, the trauma, is both the theme of the novel and the formal
principle of its construction. Staged in the disintegration of the narra-
tive body, in the fissure of the chronology, in the visual juxtaposition
of scenes, it is the rift in the life of Driss Ferdi, caught in the interval
between incommensurable worlds, unable to belong to either. "In the
interval," he says, "I am at a standstill." The French passe simple,
grammatically, is the tense of an impossible narration. Rarely used in
the first person and almost untranslatable in English (je fus, "I have
been," but in a remote past, a past forever severed from myself), the
passe simple conveys without mediation the uncanny temporality of a
cut.
7
Both coeval and incommensurable, it is comparable to the "un-
present" tense of a statement by Freud's hysteric patient Emmy Von N.:
"I am a woman dating from the last century."
8
In the interior monologue of a pseudo-autobiographical mode,
The Simple Past narrates the ambiguous and conflictual relationship
that Driss, the narrator (and author's name), entertains with his fa-
ther, le Seigneur, in a wealthy traditionalist household in rapidly mod-
ernizing Casablanca. The Lord is a vivid allegory and incarnation of
the Law, the law of God and of society, of its violence and paradoxes;
such is the father as perceived by the son. The story also narrates the
ambivalent exchanges Driss entertains with his milieu: his love-hatred
for his Arabic-speaking home, full of Quranic quotations, moral pre-
cepts, and muffled tensions always about to explode, and his diffident
attraction to his French-speaking friends and well-meaning teachers
from the metropole, active promoters of the "universal" vocabulary
of liberte, egalite, fraternite.
9
Driss tells of the cleavage of his langue fourchue, his forked
tongue,
10
split between Arabic and French, and his precarious existen-
tial stance, sitting on a jumpseat, he says, between Orient and Occident,
between tradition and modernity, unable to identify with either; each
concept gaining reality and substance from its reciprocal opposition to
the other; suspended f-l-baynat, "in the betweens," as this condition is
imaged in vernacular Moroccan Arabic. (He realizes, in the end, that
both "our" tradition and "their" modernity exist only as powerful
120 StefaniaPandolfo
rhetorical tropes: that the Seigneur, embodiment of the principle of
Islamic theocracy, is also a man tormented by doubt; and that the
French teacher is a bearer of the value of liberte only to the extent of
his bureaucratic office. It is then that, for the first time, he has a con-
versation with his father.)
Throughout the novel, Driss's predicament is expressed by a vi-
sion, a sensory hallucination, which, he says, "takes hold" of him and
by which he "escapes"; he escapes to another scene. He calls this ap-
parition "the Thin Line," la Ligne Mince: a boundary and a bar, a
slash [/], a partition and a limit between opposed terms, but also an
entre-deux, an interstitial zone, an emergent beyond, in between clas-
sificatory terms. She, the Thin Line, says to him:
You were the issue of the Orient, and through your painful past,
your imaginings, your education, you are going to triumph over the
Orient. You have never believed in Allah. You know how to dissect
the legends, you think in French, you are a reader of Voltaire and an
admirer of Kant. And yet the Occidental world for which you are
destined seems to you to be sewn with stupidities and ugliness, about
the same ugliness and stupidities you are fleeing from. Moreover,
you feel it is a hostile world. It is not going to accept you right away,
and, at the point of exchanging the box seat you now occupy for
a jumpseat, you have some setbacks. That is why I appear to you.
Since the very first day I appeared to you, you are nothing but an
open wound.
11
He, Driss, the character and author, cries out for her: "Thin Line, Thin
Line, I call out to you as a sleepless child calls a maternal lullaby...."
. . . It is the Thin Line by which I escape. It dropped into this room
like a flash.... Like the thread of a spiderweb at first, so thin, so im-
palpable, that it is unreal. The thread is a letter, a cypher, or a broken
line. It doesn't move, but I see it growing, Oh! So slowly, so softly, so
imperceptibly at first. As it grows, as it specifies itself, the letter, the
broken line, or the cypher acquires materiality, becomes concrete,
and moves, swings and dancesfaster and faster. And the Thin Line
becomes as thick as a finger, larger than an arm, and takes on the
look of an engine's piston, a plane's propeller, a rocket trajectory, it
grows as huge as a mountain, always with its shape of a letter, a
cypher, or a broken line.
12
Letter, cypher, or broken line, the Thin Line materializes the frac-
ture at the core of Driss's identity, the incision of the law, the exclu-
sion. (You are, or you are not one of us, you are no longer part of our
The Thin Line of Modernity 121
world, the Father says.) Broken line, ligne brisee: a visual translation
of the Arabic term musiba, "disaster" or trauma; the passive par-
ticiple of the verb sdba, to be right, to draw a straight line, from which
the term sawab derives, designating what is morally proper, ethics and
just behavior; in its passive form, usiba, it means to be stricken, and
connotes the interruption of the line, its fracture. The Lineso thin,
so impalpable, that it is unrealis the classificatory boundary be-
tween East and West, black and white, tradition and modernity; the
unreal limit that constitutes their reality, the limit that should not be
crossed. "You are about to cross the line; this is why I appear to you,"
she warns him.
It is the Line that cuts through Driss like a knife, that drops into
his room like a flash, and produces phantasmagoric formsdream
images and hellish nightmares, born from the breach of the cut. Like a
geological fault, a passage to the underground, the Thin Line is also
a gate, from which spurt up mechanical monsters. Engine pistons,
rocket trajectories, trains running, they are marvelous metamorphoses
of the Thin Line itself. Reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's description
of "Chthonic Paris," that mythological underworld of the modern,
the Thin Line grows into a phantasmagoric topology, disclosing with-
in itself a space of the archaic.
13
Suggesting, perhaps, a mystical dimension of that modernist space
(in the sense in which Michel de Certeau spoke of the enunciative space
of seventeenth-century European mystics as modern),
14
the Thin Line
is also a Quranic concept. It is the image of the barzakha partition,
isthmus, limit, or barrierwhich establishes a difference and which it
is forbidden to pass (Quran 23:99-100). In its Sufi interpretation, and
in the thought of Ibn Arabi in particular, the barzakh is a pivotal con-
cept: a theory of the Intermediate World of absence-presence, region
of the boundary and domain of the Imagination, in which contraries
come together, bodies are spiritualized, and spirits become manifest in
corporeal forms. Both a limit and an entre-deux, the entre-deux of the
limit, the barzakh is a thin line. Pulsating and swinging, vertiginous
and immobile, that interstitial zone is the enunciative boundary,
15
the
emergent locus of subjectivity, of Chrai'bi's book.
Modernity and Melancholia
With an existential questioning resonant of that of Driss, but in the lan-
guage of philosophical historicism and with a normative perspective
122 Stefania Pandolfo
on the "stage of modernity," Abdallah Laroui raises the question of
alienation and inauthenticity in the thought and intellectual produc-
tions of his Moroccan contemporaries. L'ideologie arabe contempo-
raine, published in Paris in 1967, thinks modernity as an imperative, a
wound, and a lure. It considers the Arab predicament to be colored by
a sense of despair.
16
For Laroui there is no easy embracing of a modernist position.
Modernity is inextricably bound with domination, and the desire for
modernity, like the desire for tradition, is the insidious way in which
domination works. Yet, he says, there is no other path. While ap-
proving of the nineteenth-century Muslim reformist Jamal ad-Din al-
Afghani (who saw the Orient's salvation in its reconciliation with rea-
son and science), Laroui warns that Arab countries "only crossed the
threshold of modern times in the pain of defeat and occupation" (31).
That, he says, cannot be overlooked. Modernity is also that wound
and that defeat, the inaugural defeat of the Arab self, the original loss,
foreclosing the possibility of return. Any dream of returning to an au-
thentic lost self only loses it further.
L'ideologie arabe contemporaine is the anguished attempt by a
militant modernist to come to terms with this realization, by unraveling
the symbolic structure of domination, which produces and reproduces
subordination. It is an assessment of the imaginary servitude in which
Arab consciousness is imprisoned without its knowing, and which
makes impossible any autonomous definition of an Arab self. The task,
difficult and uncertain, is to clear out a path toward emancipation.
In Laroui's view, the Arab servitude is twofold. On the one hand, it
is the Arabs' alienating identification with their Other, the Occident.
"It is in relation to the Other that the Arabs define themselves. The
Other is the West. Hence to describe the Arabs' quest for self means to
present, at the same time, a history of the notion of the Occident. . . .
Having started from the question, 'Who are we?' we are facing another
question, 'What is the Occident?'"
17
But servitude is also related to the
affective tie the Arabs maintain with their pasta past long dead yet
treated as present by the alienated self. Both the West and the Past are
foreign voices that speak from the vacant place of the Arab self, deter-
mining the "retard culturel" of the Arabs and hindering the emergence
of a modern self. It is in this sense, Laroui says, that the possibility of
finding a voice, a voice that is one's own, can only be the outcome of a
critical revision of "notre outillage mental," our mental tools:
The Thin Line of Modernity 123
Our world, social and mental, is steeped in influences. To think, we
make use of concepts, images, and models that are entirely drawn
from a reality other than our own. Without undertaking a rigorous
analysis of our mental tools, we can never be certain that we are ac-
tually talking about ourselves; and the testimony we sign as our own
will require interpretation by others (6).
Disavowal is the cause of alienation: a disavowal, in one sense, of
the interpenetration of the Arab world and the West (for "one is in the
other," Laroui says). Discourses of identity and cultural authenticity,
such as orientalism and nationalism, obliterate the long history of ex-
changes and transformations in the shaping of those entities that are
today called the Arab world and the West, and the fluctuation in what
now appear as fixed identities. ("So many razed cities, poisoned wells,
burned ships, before he could recognize himself in a [n Arab] Self that
seemed at first for him unbearable and opaque" [84].)
But there is a more dangerous form of disavowal: that of the
dependence of modern Arab forms of consciousness upon those of
the West. It is at this imaginary level that domination holds its grip.
As long as this is not subjected to critique, the history of exchanges
can only remain disavowed. The three paradigmatic figures of Arab
modernitythe Muslim reformist or "cleric," the political reformist,
and the "technophile"each make claims of authenticity and originali-
ty, and each is instead indebted to a borrowed European model. These
models, as an ideological remote control or Laroui says, as "shad-
ows," frame the discursive field within which Arab thinkers speak: "It
is always the Other that poses the terms of the question, draws the
boundaries of the field of research, and it is within this frame that con-
temporary Arab thought attempts to find its answers" (33).
Luring themselves to be modernity's agents, they mimic anachro-
nistic forms of Western consciousness. And this is the core of Laroui's
argument. Whether clerical, political, or technological, Arab mod-
ernists reproduce models that, in the West, are already obsolete. Arab
consciousness is shaped by "superseded forms of Western conscious-
ness," forms in which the West no longer recognizes itself. Having long
ceased to be the expression of the real "productive core of Western so-
ciety," these forms of consciousness are purely ideological (34). They
are exported, Laroui says, "in their twilight form." Arab modernity is
archaeological:
124 Stefania Pandolfo
It is as if, in the effort to make sense of itself, the Orient turned into
an archaeologist and rediscovered superseded forms of Western con-
sciousness. In as much as each time it is the West that provides the
elements of the discussion, one might be tempted to say that it con-
fuses us on purpose, by artificially keeping alive a few of its older
sloughs. This would be wrong, however, for it is clear that these
two societies, slowly interpenetrating, can only dialogue in terms of
religious consciousness at first, then political and finally technologi-
cal consciousness. . . . Yet, because of the time-lag effect [decalage
dans le temps], in contemporary Arab thought the phase of reality
for each form of consciousness is already ideological. This explains,
perhaps, the lack of freshness and the superficiality that many read-
ers, familiar with European history, feel in reading modern Arab
writings (37).
Despite the movement of interpenetration, the two societies can-
not encounter each other. "Historical distance," Laroui says, makes
recognition impossible: "contact between two societies can be in-
consequential; for one society can simply not see the other" (40).
Laroui calls this strategy of domination, based on reciprocal blind-
ing and on the "time-lag effect," a Machiavelisme objectif, a Machia-
vellian strategy of power that has to do with the structure of the situa-
tion itself (39).
At the heart of Laroui's argument, again, there is time. Temporal
decalage, or dephasage, an effect of delay in the structure of con-
sciousness, and a "falling out of synchrony" that is also out of touch,
are symptoms, and agents, of subjugation. Arab consciousness, he
says, does not live in the present. It dwells in the ambiguous region of
an anterior future, "a future already outlined elsewhere, which we are
not free to reject."
Our consciousness, in Morocco, drifts between the determinations
of the past and the call of the future. It dwells in the peculiar tempo-
ral category of an anterior future, which radically changes the mean-
ing of all other temporal parameters: neither our present, nor our
past, nor our future, are real, and can be lived as such (66).
Arab lives are determined elsewhere, where the balance of power
lies, in the industrialized West; this is how "today's humanity is really
partitioned." But, Laroui says, contemporary Arab consciousness can-
not see this, for it dwells in "another world," an "unreal" world, popu-
lated by the ghostly presences of absent interlocutors. It is a world
made of mythic forms, images, fetishes: "a condensed image of the
The Thin Line of Modernity 125
past, [the Arab] language itself becomes a fetish" (96). They are ruins,
the result of the trauma of lossthe self-defeat that is modernity it-
self. Born of a narcissistic wound, the Arab self is dupe.
Estranged from quotidian life, unable to participate in the pres-
ent, the self is "elsewhere" (ailleurs); it is "absent"in Arabic, ghartb.
Gharib, or as a noun al-gharib, is the absent and vanishing, the strange,
the uncanny. As a classical literary figure, al-gharib is the art of lexi-
cographers, the poetic knowledge of lost worlds and words; a knowl-
edge of "archaeological deposits," Laroui says.
To explain the archaeological predicament of modern Arab cul-
ture, he turns to the practice of al-gharib and to the melancholic mood
of classical Arab poetry. Ibn Shyhayd, a fifth-century Andalusian poet,
lives in a sophisticated urban society, "yet his soul, exiled from the
present, is elsewhere.... His soul does not see the stormy Andalusian
skies; it is moved, instead, in a dream, by a sand storm in a remote
world he never knew" (87). Refusing to see that exile as a rhetorical
flight and a source of poetic inspiration, Laroui condemns it as a self-
deceiving ruse, an escape from the responsibilities of real life into a
delusional search for authenticity. Similarly self-deceptive, contempo-
rary Arab culture is a "culture de la scission interieure," where mod-
ern Arabs dwell "in an hypnotic state": "Internally cleavaged, nostal-
gic man is always elsewhere, faithful to the world of his dreams, of his
myths, and his inner upheavals" (89).
Condemned to the fate of an ineluctable repetition, contemporary
Arabs do not live, Laroui says: "They re-live in the mode of melan-
choly" (49). Melancholy: an excess of black bile in Arab medicine and
Galenic humoral physiology, slowly sinking the complex body-soul
into a state of paralysis and death; or the inability to mourn and the
morbid attachment to the vanished object, which for Freud causes the
self to consume and become that loss.
18
Consumed by a loss of which
they remain unaware, modern Arabs are unable to mournto acquit
themselves from the past and move on to new forms of expression.
This, in Laroui's view, is the most insidious form of domination.
Under the gaze of melancholy, historical consciousness comes to a
halt, and history is "hypostatized," frozen in the "unpresent" tense.
Only fragmented images remain: "images, veritable incarnations of
a compressed history, are the center of gravity of the Arab soul" (81).
Arab modernity is a space of disaster.
For Laroui this is the stage of despair: "Le mort saisit le vif" (the
126 Stefania Pandolfo
corpse seizes the living) (88). Anguished and enraged by what he sees
as a predicament of subjugation and impasse, Laroui does not explore
the revolutionary possibilities of the melancholic subject he describes:
a subject born from the incorporation of loss, who creates and recre-
ates new worlds in a space of unresolvable mourning.
19
Yet it is at this
point that Laroui's theory of temporal disfunctions, unwittingly, and
from the opposite perspective, meets Walter Benjamin's reflections on
modernity, allegory, and mourning.
Laroui cannot pursue the path of melancholy, for in his view
melancholythe inability to complete the process of grievingpro-
duces myth as a delusional formation and forecloses the possibility of
emancipation. L'ideologie arabe contemporaine advocates emancipa-
tion as an overcoming, a detachment from the object of grieving and a
sublimation of the loss in "expression." Expression, the antidote of
myth, is for Laroui the direction of a possible agency: "Any work that
does not address clearly the problem of expression, which does not
aim, in other words, at sublimating our backwardness [retard] by way
of the Word, is tainted with essential inferiority" (179).
"Folklore" is Laroui's name for myth. Classical Arab culture is
folklore, for it draws its life from "the solidified expression of a de-
funct society." Contemporary oral culture and lived custom are folk-
lore, no less than their colonial and bourgeois commodification; the
nationalist search for culture is but "recuperated folklore." Like a de-
ceiving echo, they celebrate the void of the Arab self. Lived custom,
oral culture, and their colonial and bourgeois commodifications are
"folklore" because their reality is a modern European production
in its entirety. There has never been a living Arab culture. If today
culture is a commodity offered to the European gaze, "beforehand it
was only archaeological deposits of a petrified society [auparavant, il
n'etait que depots archeologiques d'une societe engourdie]" (175).
Auparavant, "beforehand," is not a temporal adverb, denoting, for
instance, precolonial times. It designates a past fallen out of reach, the
other side of a chasm; any knowledge of it is either inauthentic (the
kitsch of tourism, artisanat, arts populaires, etc.), or it has the uncan-
ny status of a traumatic memory.
Distance, then, becomes incommensurable. Not just the "histori-
cal distance" between the Arab world and the West, but that between
the critical historian and his society.
20
The Thin Line of Modernity 127
The Old Cemetery, the I, and the Present
As in the case of Driss, the protagonist of Le passe simple, Laroui's
questioning opens on the aftermath of a trauma, a rupture, which
hurled a portion of the subject's history into an incommensurable past.
In Chra'ibi's terms, it is the past of an old Muslim cemetery:
Coming here this morning, I met an American from the Military
Police. He stopped his Jeep.
You French? he asked me.
No, I answered. Arab dressed in French.
Then . . . where are the Arabs dressed as Arabs, speaking as
Arabs, and ...
I raised my hand in the direction of the old Muslim cemetery.
Over there.
He set off.
21
A product of the trauma of colonization (which for Driss is both a
wound and a gift), the modern subject is "arabe habille en framjais,"
Arab dressed in French. This is not to say that, for Chrai'bi, the Arab
self is disguised (or trapped) under the borrowed French attire but
that ill-fitting identities are all that is left. Well-fitting cultural identi-
ties, Arabs dressed as Arabs, speaking as Arabs, are "over there" (ges-
ture of the raised hand), in the old Muslim cemetery. They belong to a
remote past, a past that is neither mine nor not mine.
The image of the old cemetery, a burial site no longer in use, is a
charged one in the Maghribi popular imagination; realm of the "for-
gotten tomb" and site of magical operations, it designates a zone of
opacity beyond memory, an alterity that can only be approached
through myth. Such is the status of "our own culture," Driss says.
Unheimlisch in the Freudian sense, culture becomes the elusive place
of origin that can only be encountered in the phantasmagoric forms of
myth. An origin that inhabits the present as phantasm.
In different ways, both L'ideologie arabe contemporaine and Le
passe simple acknowledge and ponder this fact. It is in their views of
the present, rather than of the past, that they most fundamentally di-
verge. Chrai'bi's present is a state in the making, populated with mytho-
logical figures and yet compellingly real. It attempts to capture the ex-
periential reality of the break, the shattering, through the experiment
128 Stefania Pandolfo
of a composite tense, the place of a fissure and of the contemporary
encounter of discrepant temporalities. In that space the ventriloquist
subject speaks in a multiplicity of voices.
Laroui's present is a normative state, a goal to achieve. It denotes
a subjectivity (and a grammatical tense) Arabs do not have but must
acquire to overcome their temporal disfunction, their retard, if they
do not want to remain the parrots of European modernity. It is a
punctual, one-dimensional tense, defined in opposition to the past as
the self-mastery of historical consciousness. To be modern, for Laroui,
is to possess the present, such a present; to be emancipated from myth,
from mimetism, from the lingering weight of melancholic humors; to
do away with voices that are not one's own. To possess the present, in
the end, is to deal in universal values: cultural pluralism, he says, is the
last imperial ruse of the West.
Laroui's conclusion is a plea for the resolution of all cultural ties,
for the completion of mourning toward a new universal identity
the only true path, in his view, toward emancipation and agency:
"Reconnaitre 1'universel, c'est en realite se reconcilier avec soi-meme"
(recognizing universal values is the true way to be reconciled with
oneself).
22
Les Therapies Traditionnelles
At the Conference on the Psychotherapy of the Maghribi Patient, held
in Casablanca in April 1992,, two days were dedicated to a debate on
les therapies traditionnelles. The term, which was quickly becoming a
code, referred to the constellation of practices related to the care of
the body-soul complex in the vernacular understanding of illness,
with special reference to the therapies known as "cures of the jinn."
The participants in the conference were clinical psychiatrists, psycho-
analysts, psychologists, and psychotherapists from Morocco, Tunisia,
Algeria, and France. A number of panelists practiced at neighborhood
clinics in France and reported on cases of immigrant psychopathology;
others worked in public hospitals or private practices in the Maghreb.
A central question, of technique but also of professional ethics,
concerned the attitude Maghribi psychiatrists and psychoanalysts
should assume toward their patients' persistent resort to the vocabu-
lary of spirit possession, magic, and bewitchment, and their continu-
ing recourse to the parallel attention of traditional healers. Should one
refuse to listen, since any listening is a form of indirect validation, or
The Thin Line of Modernity 129
instead attempt to hear what was said in the traditional idiom? Should
one treat traditional practitioners as potential fellow psychotherapists,
or dismiss them as charlatans whose activity reproduced false beliefs,
contributing to the cultural retard of the country? Should a distinction
be drawn between old traditional cures, grounded in religious faith,
good intention, and a mystical knowledge of the cosmos, and the new
speculative growth of false thaumaturgists, dealers in societal suffer-
ing, that proliferated in the Moroccan cities? Or should it simply be
acknowledged that in formerly colonized countries like Morocco sev-
eral medical systems operated at the same time, and a part of the popu-
lation, only passively touched by the process of modernization, did
not participate in and even resisted the discourse of individual agency
and the project of a responsible subjectivitya project that could be
defined as psychiatry's and, to some extent, psychoanalysis's own?
23
I participated in the conference from the floor, as an anthropolo-
gist interested in the terms of a possible conversation between the
cures of the jinns and the psychoanalytic exploration of the uncon-
scious. I had myself worked with traditional healers on the ontologi-
cal dimension, the specificity and effectiveness, of their technique.
I was conversant with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and I
believed, at least in an abstract sense, in the ethical possibility of a
dialogue between different approaches to subjectivity and alterity
different but, in my view, commensurable ways of raising the ques-
tions of self, voice, meaning, unmeaning, and death. Yet what the con-
ference urgently made me realize was that the historicity of the different
subjective positioningsmy own includedcould not be bracketed
away. Commensurability was not just an epistemological question.
24
The conversation I sought was impossible, at least in the institutional
sphere. Attempting to understand, and question, that impossibility
meant to become attuned to a modernist passion, the desire for a new
self, and a sense of break from the past, from "culture," understood
both as a mode of colonial subjection and as the source of an identity
that is no longer one's own. An identity that inhabits the present as
phantasm.
It was in order to understand the stakes in this debate, the differ-
ent subjective positionings, norms, desires, and impossibilities, that I
sought an interpretative lead in the modernist visions of Driss Chrai'bi
and Abdallah Laroui, in their contrasting ways of thinking the
Moroccan postcolonial self. For in the course of that conference and
130 Stefania Pandolfo
other conversations that followed, two things began to emerge with
some clarity. First, unlike the case of the Brazilian Curia in Levi-
Strauss's famous comparison of shamanic and psychoanalytic cures,
in contemporary Morocco the relation between the two practices is a
fact of life, rooted in the experience of suffering, in the speech and the
therapeutic quest of countless individuals.
25
Second, in the current
situation, any discussion of that relationship or any attempt at inter-
pretation and translation situates the analyst in the midst of an ideo-
logical field, calling for his or her positioning vis-a-vis the predica-
ments of decolonization, emancipation, and the characterization of
a "modern" subject.
The status of the "cultural factor" in the symptomatology, diag-
nosis, and care of mental illness is an important knot of the debate.
Against the return of ethnopsychiatric theory and clinical practice in
France in the context of immigrant psychotherapy,
26
several Moroccan
psychiatrists point to the danger of the relativist position, arguingin
this sense like Larouifor the irreducibility of the universal structure
of the human psyche.
Variously argued in the Freudian and Lacanian vocabulary by
psychoanalysts, or in the nosological idiom by clinical psychiatrists,
the main objections to the possibility of engaging in a dialogue with
traditional therapies are two. The first is the caveat against cultural
relativism. Treating indigenous psychotherapies as a culturally specific
form of healing, and an effective one, has the risk of replicating the
colonial operation of circumscribing an indigenous mentality and
pathology as something essentially specific to a dominated race, in
this case "one's own." The racist approach of Antoine Porot and the
Algiers School of Psychiatry, or the theory of a specifically North
African psychosis christened "Paleophrenie reactionnelle," after the
primitive (paleo) nature of the violent impulses it unleashed,
27
are
the often-cited examples. The second and more crucial objection con-
cerns the assessment of traditional therapies from the point of view of
modernist norms of subjectivity. Predicated on projection, suggestion,
mimicry, and the displacement of agency onto imaginary entities (the
jinns, or other human persecutors), traditional therapies are viewed as
reproducing and reinforcing an alienated structure of the self. I will
consider both objections in some detail.
First, the question of culture. The signifier "culture" has a double
place in this debate. On the one hand, it is blurred with what during
The Thin Line of Modernity 131
the colonial period was called la mentalite indigene and as such be-
comes an emblem of what decolonization must reject. The study of
culture in general, and of "traditional therapies" in particular, is viewed
as carrying the legacy of a psychiatric rhetoric systematically seeking
in the culture, and especially in the Islamic religion, the roots of North
African psychopathology. On the other hand, in a less obvious but
perhaps more crucial sense, the sense explored in different ways by the
works of Chrai'bi and Laroui and by a generation of Maghribi literary
writers, "culture" summons mythological presences from a vanished
worldarchaeological deposits, old cemeteries.
La Psychopathologie Marocaine
"Nothing durable can be done in the field of public health if the domi-
nant mentality does not evolve," the Director of Public Health and
Hygiene in Morocco during the 19203 and 19305, Dr. Jules Colombani,
wrote in 1924. "We must take the pulse of its evolution every day. I
will only cite, as an example, the many difficulties we have encoun-
tered in our attempts to transform the regime of insanity [regime des
alienes], difficulties we have hitherto been unable to overcome."
28
Since the beginning of the century, French colonial health offi-
cers in North Africa had been confronted with the imperative of seiz-
ing the indigenous mentality, cognitive processes, and sense of self.
The proclaimed task of the Algiers School of Psychiatry, founded by
Antoine Porot in 1918 and inaugurated by his paper "Notes de psy-
chiatric musuimane," was to study "the indigenous mentality," to bet-
ter understand its pathology and make it progress effectively.
29
The
views of the School were inspired by a reductive reading of Levy-
Bruhl's theory of "primitive mentality."
30
Porot borrowed from Levy-
Bruhl the hypothesis of a pre-logical cognitive function characterized
by a predominance of visual over conceptual representation, of alle-
gorical memory over logical reasoning, and of temporal simultaneity
over diachronic periodization. But Levy-BruhPs phenomenological ex-
plorations were aimed at understanding other forms of cognition in
their own terms and eventually led him to abandon the notion of a
primitive mentality altogether to pursue the hypothesis of a pre-logical
function in the philosophy of modern science. Porot's racist appro-
priation, instead, bent Levy-Bruhl's ideas toward the theory of a
pathological mind. A mentalite indigene premorbide was described in
terms of lack of the concept of time, deficiency of the critical faculty,
132 Stefania Pandolfo
and inability to think conceptually, each related to a fundamental in-
ability to symbolize and to an excessive development of the mimetic
faculty. Arabs were prisoners of the image, Porot said, and this ex-
plained the diffusion of what he called les troubles de la mimique,
mimeological disorders: contagious hysterical states, which often grew
into collective hysteria.
Echoes of this approach are found in Carl Antoine Pierson's theo-
ry of "reactive paleophrenia," developed in the 19505 from the psy-
chiatric evaluation of mentally ill patients who had committed mur-
derous criminal acts. As one considers these crimes, Pierson writes,
committed without a reason, under the influence of a sudden rage
comparable to the impulsiveness of children, "le fond des tendances
natives apparait a nu, laissant voir une immediate regression vers un
primitivisme lointain, mal deguise sous des attitudes collectives peu
solides."
31
(When I first started conducting research at the Arrazi psy-
chiatric hospital in Sale, the example of "reactive paleophrenia" was
brought up, only half jokingly, to warn me against the methodological
risks of an approach that pursued the cultural specificity of the ex-
pression of illness and healing. I studied Moroccan culture and was
married to a Moroccan man. I should then be aware that there is a
specifically Arab psychosis, paleophrenia. My husband could wake up
one night and, seized by a raptus, murder me. How did that aberra-
tion affect my methodological approach? Underpinning this question
is the position that psychiatry is a set of universal diagnostic and thera-
peutic techniques predicated on the assumption that, independent of
cultureof the cultural differences in the perception and expression
of illnessmental illness is the same everywhere, and can be detected
and treated on the basis of standardized criteria of validity and relia-
bility. This is the only insurance, the antidote, in fact, against the re-
turn of colonial aberrations.)
Toward the end of the colonial period, in the late 19405 and
19505, a new approach was developed in Morocco against the racist
orientation of the Algiers School. In an attempt to rethink the com-
plex interpenetration of cultures issued from the colonial experience,
and to understand the destabilizing psychosocial impact of moderni-
zation, the Groupe d'etude de psychologic de 1'inconscient et de
medecine psychosomatique (Research Group on the Psychology of the
Unconscious and Psychosomatic Medicine) gathered in Casablanca
several French psychiatrists and medecins militaires around the person
The Thin Line of Modernity 133
of Rene Laforgue, an expatriate French psychoanalyst, former friend
of Sigmund Freud, and former president of the Psychoanalytic Society of
Paris.
32
The position of the group was elaborated in a series of articles
published in the journal Maroc medical. The approach was empiri-
cal, research oriented, open to understanding cultural difference and
change. The contributors reflected on the attitude that French mental
health officers should assume toward indigenous medicine and age-
old beliefs, and on the responsibilities of psychiatry toward the social
traumas of modernization, urbanization, and increasing proletariza-
tion, "a true drama in the psycho-social evolution of a country whose
traditional structures are shattered, and which does not seem prepared
to quickly come up with novel institutions."
33
A crucial feature was the focus on culturethe attempt to situate
psychopathological affections within the sociocultural context in which
they were produced. The task, in the wake of "the American school of
cultural anthropology," was to formulate a theory of the Moroccan
personality structure (personalite marocaine de base). Partly conceived
in the genuine appreciation of human difference, the emphasis on cul-
ture served at the same time the purpose of identifying the areas where
sociocultural personality traits would be dysfunctional in the process
of modernization.
Maurice Igert's "Introduction a la psychopathologie marocaine"
(1955) is an articulate exposition of this approach. Opening with the
notion that "an initiation to Moroccan psychopathology should be
an invitation to journey," Igerta military physician turned psycho-
analystreflects on what it entails, for European health officers, "to
establish a contact with human beings governed by internal laws other
than our own," fundamentally different and yet so closely related in
daily commerce. ("The contact between French and Moroccan people
is no longer that of two cultures that exist as two independent reali-
ties, but that of two human societies that have a certain common his-
tory, common interests in partnership and, obviously, some areas of
friction.")
34
The idea is to identify "the cultural tensions generative of neu-
roses" specific to the Moroccan cultural milieu. Igert's text oscillates
between the desire to "journey," listening to the speech of Moroccan
patients, to the stories of possession and suffering he analyzes, often
with remarkable insight, and the project to produce a chart of socio-
cultural features with pathological potential. The detailed observation
134 Stefania Pandolfo
of Bouzoukri, a soldier admitted as a patient to the Centre Neuro-
Psychiatrique des Troupes du Maroc, includes long sections of the
man's direct narration. It is a sensitive effort at listening to a subjec-
tivity other than one's own and to the "mythical themes" of a deliri-
um, which, Igert says, are "not so foreign to us after all."
But the task of mapping the configuration of Moroccan psycho-
pathology prevails, leading Igert to diagnose the neurotic orientation of
the culture as a whole. Moroccan personality is characterized by "men-
tal plasticity," "suggestibility," and the collective alienation of a society
that cannot sanction the insanity of the mentally ill but instead shares
and validates their delusional tales of possession by the jinns. The real
obstacle preventing the possibility of emancipation and cure is there-
fore, for Igert, the "unlimited tolerance of the Moroccan social milieu
vis-a-vis mental disorders that draw their themes from the very sources
of collective belief," for "as long as the individual remains faithful to
this common source, he cannot be considered as insane [aliene]."
35
And for a cure to be possible, alienation must be recognized.
The cultural tensions in question are described as structurally con-
flictual features of the Moroccan patriarchal family, related to "the
profound impregnation of Islam" in the culture. "Psychological plas-
ticity" and the inability to take responsibility for one's acts are a con-
sequence of what Igert sees as the cultural system established by Islam.
A tyrannical cultural Super-Ego associated with the paternal configu-
ration of father-sultan-God led to an excessive identification of the
children with an all-powerful father. The impossibility of finding re-
sort in a mother hierarchically inferior and culturally devalued, and
the related inability to develop "an opposition to the father, a pivotal
factor in the acquisition of individual autonomy in Europe," deter-
mined the imbalance of the "trio father-mother-child." This caused
the absolute subordination to a despotic paternal authority, "con-
demned the son's aggressive impulses to a total repression," and in
turn led to the conversion of those impulses into numerous neurotic
symptoms. The submission made impossible the development of self-
confidence and "individual sovereignty."
36
Igert's conclusion was that "other than escaping into spirituality,
an avenue which is indeed wide open in the cultural milieu, he [the
son] will have the option only of bending. . . . Thus develops a re-
markable mental plasticity. . . . In the eyes of the psychiatrist, this
plasticity represents a simple defense mechanism encompassing a vast
The Thin Line of Modernity 135
field of reactions, ranging, according to its modalities, from utilitarian
and banal lying, to hysteria, passing through simulation and suggest-
ibility. This cultural trait marks Moroccan mental pathology with cer-
tain typical features, particularly the manifestations of individual and
collective hysteria."
37
Magical and religious practices, the belief in
spirits (and particularly the role of "castrating female spirits" such
as 'Aicha Qandisha, expressing the "occult revolt of Moroccan
women"), indigenous healing, the place of saints in the society, and
the many varieties of Sufi mysticism, were all, for Igert, coherent man-
ifestations of this neurotic personality structure.
Cultural Uncanny
At the conference forty years later, the characterizations medicine in-
digene and mentalite indigene were updated by the qualifier tradition-
al. For they now designated a domain of practice and belief specific to
a society that was the therapists' ownthat was, and yet was not, for
its tense was an archaeological past, a passe simple. The domain had a
name, le magico-religieux, a term recycled from colonial ethnological
accounts to designate the realm of what was beyond the Line. Descrip-
tions of trancing lent body and image to this space, evoking the slash-
ing of Hamadsha devotees at the Festival of Sheikh al-Kamal, or the
chaining of the insane on the columns of Buya 'Omar's sanctuary.
Most of the conference papers emphasized the need to study "tradi-
tional therapies"; some offered a classification of the range of prac-
titioners (soothsayers or Quranic scholars, talisman writers or exor-
cists) and proposed a translation of traditional symptomatology into
the Freudian vocabulary of psychoneuroses or in psychiatric nosologi-
cal terms.
The ethnographic reference was to old French accounts, such as
Edmond Doutte and Emile Dermenghem, at once criticized and in-
voked as a source of archival knowledge about the other.
38
In this
manner, at least in one sense, postcolonial psychoanalysis could de-
limit "traditional therapies" as a field of normalizing knowledge
about an Other. This was related to the development of medical struc-
tures throughout the country, and to the struggle for the control of the
"regime of insanity" and the definition of subjectivity. There was an
increasing awareness that the "modern" and the "traditional" ap-
proaches to health coexisted and were not incompatible in the eyes of
many patients who made recourse to both; and that even though the
136 Stefania Pandolfo
psychiatric hospitals were full, patients held on to their own interpre-
tations of illness.
Looked at from this angle, the situation bore a certain resem-
blance to the colonial project of seizing the mentalite indigene, all the
while enforcing a policy of public health and hygiene. For the French
Protectorate's attitude toward "indigenous medicine" had itself had
many faces. The French fascination with the realm of the magico-
religieux (Durkheim's sacree) had inspired monumental works such as
Edmond Doutte's Magie et Religion dans I'Afrique du Nord, a survey
of magico-medical beliefs and techniques based on a detailed study of
classical and vernacular Arab treatises of magical and prophetic medi-
cine. By systematizing and classifying indigenous medical knowledge,
works such as Magie et Religion gathered a dispersion of practices
and techniques into an encompassing field, creating the possibility of
indigenous medicine as a modern object of study. Yet this attitude
went hand in hand with a ban on the practice of indigenous medicine
and the militarized enforcement of what Dr. Colombani called "la
dictature sanitaire," the Dictatorship of Health.
39
Yet, beyond superficial parallels with the colonial policy of health,
what emerged from the Casablanca conference, from the silences, the
imprecisions, and the omissions in the characterization of the "tradi-
tional" realm, was a sense of malaise, an embarrassment with the ob-
ject of knowledge that is absent in the colonial discourse. The fact of
raising the subject was in itself important. It indicated a desire to
move beyond the inscription, in the patient's clinical file, of the diag-
nostic notation "delire a theme magico-religieux," "de sorcellerie,"
"de persecution par les jinns"; to move beyond the clinical practice of
listening, in the patient's speech, for the manifestation of the psycho-
pathological symptom against a background of culturally coded mate-
rial. It indicated an interest in approaching the "other life" of patients,
outside the frame of the psychiatric encounter, when they sought the
help of a fqih, visited a sanctuary, or expressed their suffering in dif-
ferent words. Yet, paradoxically, that opening had the effect of a clo-
sure. It was an assignment of places that left no space for the unsettled
and destabilizing utterances of patients. Les therapies traditionnelles
were folklore, in Laroui's sharply critical sense: an object ready-made,
to be consumed by the medical gaze. Or they remained inaccessible,
vestiges from an incommensurable past. Hence no serious compara-
tive discussion of technique seemed possible. For an encounter to be
The Thin Line of Modernity 137
possible, there must be a sense of coevalnessthe sense of sharing
within a common, if discrepant, present.
The issue was troubling, involving the subjectivity of the psychia-
trists themselves. Strategic in a different sense, the psychiatric subjec-
tive positioning vis-a-vis les therapies traditionnelles was structured by
a claim of incommensurability,
40
pertaining, rather, to a register Freud
designates as "the uncanny."
41
The disquieting unfamiliar-familiarity
of what has fallen beyond the Line, and returns as an urgent question-
ing from an archaeological beforehand: that of the fissure of one's
own/other history.
Cures of the Jinns, Mimetic Speech, and Hysteria
Beyond the issue of culture, however, the fundamental objection to the
possibility of engaging in a conversation with the "cures of the jinn"
has to do with modernist norms of subjectivity. At stake, according to
the clinical psychiatrists with whom I spoke, is the issue of personal
responsibility: responsibility for one's own acts and speech, a sense of
guilt, a sense of loss. For the psychoanalysts with whom I raised the
question, what is at stake, beyond the issue of responsibility, is the
possibility of the truth of the subject.
42
To state that one is bewitched (mshur), as patients often declare in
the psychiatric consulting room, amounts to saying "it is not me"; my
suffering comes from elsewhere, others are the cause of the harm. To
say one is possessed (majnun, mskun, mshiyyer)a statement seldom
uttered in the first person, because it is an enunciative prerogative of
the fqih and because, in a fundamental sense, it pertains to the un-
utterable of the psychiatric encounteris to be unable to assume one's
own suffering and desire, to push agency outside of the Ego. It means
to be neurotic,
43
possibly schizophrenicand, in all cases, fundamen-
tally alienated. Rather than challenging that alienation, traditional
therapists operate from within it and put it to work.
In its systematic form, the discourse of contemporary Moroccan
psychiatry and psychoanalysis about its Other is one of emancipation
not unlike that of Laroui's modernism. It revolves around the themes
of suggestion, mimetism, and hysteria, and the alienating status of
the subject's "other voice." I will outline the psychoanalytic position
on traditional therapies on the basis of conversations I had with
Moroccan psychoanalysts. These took place in the margin of ethno-
graphic work with "traditional therapists" (tdleb, fqih), centering on
138 Stefania Pandolfo
the vocabulary, the religious and philosophical horizon, and the tech-
nique of a diverse range of cures understood as 'ailaj al-jinn, "thera-
pies of the jinn," in Arabic manuals of medicine and magic.
44
1 was in-
duced into a debate with psychoanalysts both by my own interest in
the Freudian and Lacanian theories of the unconscious and because of
the realization that in contemporary Morocco, an anthropological
study of the therapies of the j inns that does not take into account
theoretically as welltheir dialogical implications with the technique
and discourse of psychoanalysis and psychiatry is fated to follow the
steps of the colonial studies of indigenous mentality.
In the eyes of the healers, two techniques are particularly signifi-
cant: the technique of as-sra, which can be translated as "eclipse," or
"annihilation," and that of al-istinzal, meaning "descent," or "appari-
tion."
45
(They are significant, too, in terms of their diffusion and
growing practice, increasingly taking root in the ever-expanding hinter-
lands of the large cities, where the bidonvilles of the 19705 have been
replaced by underserviced sprawls of illegal housing.) They are tech-
niques for "making appear," "making speak," and "bringing to trial"
the jinns, in an "other scene" where a renegotiation of the symbolic
tenets of reality becomes possible. The sra makes the demonic voice
speak through the body of the patient fallen into a deathlike "state of
absence" (one of the senses of the verb insra'); the istinzal makes the
jinns appear on the palm of a medium's hand, producing a theater that
renders the represented real. They are techniques of the self as another
where the self is that other, without symbolic mediation. In relation to
the technique of psychoanalysis, Lacanian psychoanalysis in particu-
lar, they raise a question concerning the status and the modality of the
position of subject. What does it mean to assume a subject position in
the context of the "therapies of the jinns"?
I posed this question to a number of psychoanalysts. The answer
was peremptory: from within the therapies of the jinns there can be no
access to subjectivityto a subject position in the Lacanian sense. For
the "cures of the jinns" are predicated on imitation and identification,
and allow no responsible engagement of the subject of speech. They
are comparable to the hypnotic treatment of hysteria in the prehistory
of psychoanalysis; it is on hysterical symptoms that they are most (in-
deed solely) effective.
46
As in the dedoublements of Anna O. (Josef Breuer's famous pa-
The Thin Line of Modernity 139
tient), who split into different personages that spoke languages other
than her own, the jinns speak through the person.
47
Or they make the
person speak, as in the case of the Rat Man studied by Freud, who is
afflicted by voices that tell him things he cannot recognize as his own.
But unlike psychoanalysis, which is interpretative, the cures of the
jinns operate through "suggestion" and the displacement of agency
onto imaginary entities. Freud abandoned therapy through hypnosis
and developed psychoanalysis instead, because suggestion can tem-
porarily eliminate the symptom but cannot cure. "There is the greatest
possible antithesis between suggestive and analytic technique," Freud
wrote, for one works by veiling, the other by unveiling.
48
One works
by producing illusions and adds alienation to the alienation of the ill-
ness; the other uncovers the truth of the subject.
This is essentially why contemporary Moroccan psychoanalysts,
who reformulate the problem within a Lacanian vocabulary, say that
traditional therapies remove the symptom by adding alienation to
the alienation of the illness. The therapies mimic the ailment they are
presumed to heal; the self becomes the passive recipient of demonic
action, and the "I" is lost, never to be recovered, in the lure of its
identifications. The patient never manages to take responsibility for
his or her own speech and can never rise to the position of subject.
Like a trompe-d'oeil, traditional cures operate exclusively in the reg-
ister of the Imaginary, without ever reaching the dimension of the
Symbolicthe order of responsibility and assumed subjectivity. And
since the Imaginary is the register of alienation and meconnaissance,
these therapies are said to be unable to curethat is, to free the "true
speech" of the subject and emancipate the "I" from the capture of its
identifications.
In this strategic adaptation of Lacanian concepts to a local ideo-
logical struggle, the supremacy of the Imaginary over the Symbolic is
understood as the mode of "tradition," phantasmatic imprisonment,
and the world of the magico-religieux, while the possibility of reason
under the rule of the Symbolic is associated with the technique of
psychoanalysis, the self-recollection of responsible subjects, and, im-
plicitly, with modernity itself. The Moroccan psychoanalytic assess-
ment of "traditional therapies" echoes Laroui's dis-alienating project.
But what does it mean to become independent, for a country and for
a person?
140 Stefania Pandolfo
Between Dispossession and Belonging
".. . making the world into the place, never still, always perpetually
reopened, of its own contradiction. "
49
"]e n'aime pas cette ville. Elle est mon passe et je n'aime pas
mon passe. J'ai grandi, me suis emonde. Fes s'est ratatinee, tout
simplement. Pourtant, je sais qu'a mesure que je m'y enfonce elle
m'epoigne et me fait entite, quanta, brique d'entre les briques,
lizard, poussiereet sans que j'ai besoin d'en etre conscient. "
50
Two years after writing a first version of this essay I am doing field-
work at a Moroccan psychiatric hospital.
51
A university hospital, site
of suffering and care, site of learning, where a scientific tradition is
produced and reproduced in the form of psychiatric training; but also
a site of opening, contradiction, and questioning, in an encounter with
madness that, for each party involved, raises unsettling questions. I
was led to the hospital, in part, by a desire to understand the stories of
Su'ad and Fatna, with whom I began this essay: their quest, the non-
resolution, and the way in which their journeys open and reopen a
world. The question of whether and in what sense the hospital can be
a site of speech, a boundary zone where something else, something
new, is created, shapes conversations with psychiatrists and patients.
What are the stakes in being called to reply to the therapeutic demand
of women and men for whom the hospital is a last resort, and yet a
foreign and a violent one?
For in coming to the hospital, patients and their families hand
their suffering and their story to the institution of modern science
modern science as a practice and as a symbolic position. They hand
it to a psychiatrist, the embodiment and representative of modern
science, in the presence of whom that painful utterance is at once
silenced and made possible. The psychiatrist listens, receives that gift
of pain, and attempts to identify a symptom that corresponds to a psy-
chopathological tableau. A diagnosis is made, a psychotropic treat-
ment and sometimes hospitalization are prescribed. And yet, as it of-
fers itself, as it molds itself metamorphically to address the institution
of science, that speech of pain steals itself away, reaching out for other
ways of being, speaking, imaginingways that are foreign to the dis-
course of psychiatry but remain audible in watermark. It is that com-
plex texturing of the voice between different sites of experience that,
in the cloistered area of the hospital and in the transitional space of a
transference, can be productive of subjective speech.
The Thin Line of Modernity 141
In the grassy area outside the Urgent Care building, people are sit-
ting under a tree; a woman nursing a child, men talking, children play-
ing. For patients, the tirgences are the first exposure to the hospital, an
interface between the inside and the outside, between the hospital and
the world. The building itself is located at the edge, by the wall, the
wall on the other side of which, until not long ago, traditional thera-
pists used to sit and draw magic squares with their patients, the hospi-
tal's patients.
Inside the building patients wait their turn. The attendance is
mixed, as at any public hospital; for the most part men and women
from the lower urban strata, sometimes from nearby rural areas.
Patients are accompanied by members of their family. The language
spoken is Arabic. The language of patient files and other written
records is French. It becomes clear, after witnessing a few clinical in-
terviews, that the psychiatric consultation is the last step in a thera-
peutical quest that began with the visit to a fqih and the journey to a
sanctuary. Sometimes it is a fqih who directed the patient to the hospi-
tal; the cause of illness is l-'asab, he said, the nerves, and not the jinns.
Sometimes, after visiting the hospital, the patient returns to the fqih
and follows both therapeutical paths.
What does it mean, for patients, to bring to the consulting room,
concealed or only partly disclosed, their baggage of language and
thought, their own understanding of illness, their story, and to have
that cast into the foreign language of science? And what does it mean
for a psychiatrist to listen to a speech that is both familiar and foreign,
distant and secretly close, and to draw a diagnosis on the basis of
those utterances? What is the place of culture? For "culture" only
manifests itself as such as an absence, as the result of a loss, a severing,
a coupure. Situating oneself dans la coupure, as a psychiatrist phrased
it, "in a position of break," but also, and more interestingly, "in the
space of that rift." Between dispossession and belonging. In the rift
there are possible worlds, and, perhaps, the lieu of an encounter. What
is the work of a subjectivity in the making?
Speaking of les therapies traditionnelles, les marabouts, la posses-
sion, as traits of folklore circumscribing the place of the other, is a way
to deflect the unsettling force of these questions. Yet, in the daily con-
frontation with suffering and madness, abstract positions come un-
done. Efforts to systematize and explain, even this particular one, fail
to appreciate the creative force of that undoing. The space of practice
142 Stefania Pandolfo
is one of epistemological instability. Asked about therapeutical sites of
speech, productive of subjective truths in Morocco today, a psycho-
analyst with whom I had debated the issue of suggestion in the cures
of the jinn (and whose views had shaped the interpretation I provide
in this essay), surprised me with an unexpected answer. If the alterna-
tive is a strictly nosographic approach, he said, for which the illness
and not the subject counts, then one should recognize that la parole
vraie, "true speech," a speech that tells the truth of the subject, is ut-
tered mostly, if not solely, in the presence of a fqih.
In the multiple and contradictory worlds of Moroccan modernity,
subjectivity is constructed in between sites. It is born from the incor-
poration of loss, a loss that makes the subject but that can only be en-
countered in the metamorphic forms of myth. The epistemological
"cut"the severing that defines a modernist positionis at the origin
of a double exclusion: the exclusion from "culture," and from the
sense of community associated with it, of those who have consumed
the break and situate themselves outside; and the exclusion from the
"present" of those who have not experienced that break or have expe-
rienced it in a different way.
Seeking allegorical insight I return to the works of Chrai'bi and
Laroui. Their different modernist styles exemplify for me two op-
posed, if related, ways of experiencing the space of the rift. What of
the possibility of emancipation and encounter? For Laroui there is
no possible encounter. His modernist position stresses the present as
a punctual singularity; it is the tense modern Arabs must acquire.
Emancipation is the process of freeing the speech of the subject from
all prior and external determinations, alien voices within, to which the
self is subjected. It is the severing of all ties toward a new universal
identity, to establish the possibility of thinking a "here" and a "now."
Laroui sees it as an emancipation from the image of the West within,
from the melancholic attachment to a vanished Arab past, from cul-
ture, always already lost, from phantasmatic desire, from a lingering
sense of loss. Only those who have accomplished the path of emanci-
pation are entitled to speak, have a voice in the present. All others
dwell in an incommensurable past. The patient's speech, if one were to
extrapolate from Laroui, can never be encountered in the present. It is
already, and by definition, "folklore"; it belongs to a remote past, the
archaeological past of cemeteries.
Chraibi's text, in contrast, is a narrative of encounter. It stages a
The Thin Line of Modernity 143
multidimensional present where in spite of the "cut," and in fact pre-
cisely in its place, an encounter becomes possible. A visionary materi-
alization of the rift, the Thin Line is a space of a subjectivity. Driss
Ferdi, protagonist of Le passe simple, lives his relationship with the
world dans la cassure. It is a breaking that breaks him, a source of un-
bearable suffering that inaugurates for him the possibility of speech.
Ntqta, "I am tearing," "I am being torn," a youth at the hospital ex-
plains to me, is the street term for suffering, kansufrir. The word tells
of the laceration, le manque, "the lack," the anguish of separation, the
painful sense of loss and fragmentation; it tells of the incorporation of
loss, which is also a modality of the subject.
Modernity, for Driss, is a space of unresolvable mourning. The
loss, which is modernity itself, cannot be overcome and returns as a
phantasm. And the subject, "wrenched" and "torn" in every direc-
tion, discovers in this non-resolution the possibility of speech and per-
haps the path of another emancipation.
Notes
I would like to thank the participants in the symposium Questions of Modernity, and in
particular Tim Mitchell, Talal Asad, Cyan Prakash, and Veena Das. I am also grateful
to the staff of the psychiatric hospital Arrazi in Sale. Drs. M. Paes, J. E. Ktiouet,
J. Toufic, M, Laymani, M. Zenati, and F. Benchekroun, shared with me their reflections
on madness, psychiatry, and their clinical work in Morocco. Hakima Lebbar shared an
interest in "traditional therapies" from the standpoint of her clinical work. This essay,
which is but the prolegomenon to a book still in the making, could not have been writ-
ten without their help. My thanks to Abdallah Laroui, for our discussions of his work,
in Berkeley in 1994. Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the Department
of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego, and at Berkeley. Thanks to Tanya
Lurhman, Michael Meeker, Luce Giard, Laura Nader, and Paul Rabinow, for helpful
critical comments on earlier versions. Luca D'Isanto read many versions of this paper
and was a crucial critical interlocutor. Research in Morocco in 1995-96 was funded by
the Social Science Research Council.
1. Jalil Bennani, La Psychanalyse au pays des saints (Casablanca: Le Fennec,
I99S). "3-
2. Jacques Lacan, "Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage," Ecrits (Paris:
Seuil, 1966), 147, my translation.
3. The expression "experience of madness" is Michel Foucault's, in Histoire de la
folie (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
4. On the notion of problematization of the self, see Michel Foucault, Histoire de
la sexualite, vol. i: L'usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), English trans., History
of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley, vol. 2.: The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 1986).
5. Driss Chra'ibi, Le passe simple (Paris: Denoel, 1954), English trans. The Simple
Past, trans. Hugh A. Harter (Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1990). Transla-
tions from The Simple Past are modified. All other translations from the French are my
own, except where noted.
144 Stefania Pandolfo
6. Abdelkcbir Khatibi, "Pensee autre," in Maghreb Pluriel {Paris: Denoel, 1983), 5.
7. It should be noted that the tense called "preterit," or literary preterit, in English
is in fact a literary and narrative tense, which does not convey the sense of separation
and fracture of the French passe simple. The French "simple past" is the tense of an im-
possible narration, and this is why it is never used in the first person. When in historical
writing the "je" intervenes, the grammatical tense switches to the passe compose.
S.Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria [1895],
e<
^-
anc
l trans.
James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1956), 52..
9. Chraibi, Le passe simple, 108. But the book also says on the same page: "We,
the French, are civilizing you; you, the Arabs. Badly, in bad faith and without any plea-
sure from this. Because if by chance you were to become our equals, I'm asking you: in
relation to whom or to what would we be civilized, we ourselves?"
10. The expression is from Abdelfattah Kilito, in "La langue fourchue," RE.M.M.M.
70, 1993/4, Proceedings of the Conference "Maghreb-Europe," Madrid, June 1992.,
PP- 71-75-
11. Chraibi, The Simple Past, 56, translation modified; idem, Le passe simple, 106.
12. Chraibi, Le passe simple, 63, 64, translation modified.
13. Cf. Susan Buck-Morrs, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). "The metro, where evenings the lights glow
red [. . .] shows the way down into the Hades of names: Combat, Elysee, Georges V,
Etienne Marcel, Solferino, Invalides, Vaugirard have thrown off the tasteful chain of
streets and squares, and, here in the lightening-pierced, whistle-pierced darkness, have
become misshapened sewer gods, catacomb fairies. This labyrinth conceals in its in-
nards not just one, but dozens of blind, rushing bulls, into whose jaws not once a year
one Theban virgin, but every morning thousands of anemic young cleaning women and
still sleepy salesman are forced to hurl themselves" (Walter Benjamin, Passagen-Werk,
cited ibid., 101).
14.1 am thinking here, specifically, of the work of Michel de Certeau on the
seventeenth-century European mystics as "moderns" and, in general, of his exploration
of the Baroque side of Western modernity, the side of movement and metamorphosis,
alteration and alterity (La fable mystique [Paris: Gallimard, I98z]; La possession de
Loudun [Paris: Gallimard, 1980]). In the Moroccan context, see the work of Abdelkebir
Khatibi, particularly Maghreb pluriel (Paris: Denoel, 1983); Le livre du sang (Paris:
Gallimard, 1979), and Amour bilingue (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1981).
15. Cf. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
16. Abdallah Laroui, L'ideologie arabe contemporaine: Essai critique (Paris: Maspero,
1981 [1967]}. Subsequent references to this work are given in the text.
17. Laroui, L'ideologie arabe contemporaine, 4, 42. The passage on page 42 contin-
ues: "This distancing was a necessary onethis impossibility to find ourselves through
the otherfor the empty self to be filled with bitterness and anger, and gain the front of
the stage. The place of this exhibition will be, of course, the Nation-State."
18. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia" [1917], in General Psychological
Theory: Papers on Metapsychology (New York: Macmillan, 1963).
19. Besides the work of Walter Benjamin, toward the theory of a melancholic sub-
jectivity see Giorgio Agamben, Stanze (Turin: Einaudi, 1977); Stefania Pandolfo,
Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1997); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the
Political (New York: Routledge, 1997); Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
20. It is perhaps the solitude issued from the structure of this predicament that in
The Thin Line of Modernity 145
later writings led Laroui's thought away from the concept of reason and toward a theo-
ry of the strong state. In his book Mafhum al-idyulujiyya {The Concept of Ideology)
(1984), Laroui describes the evolution of al-Ghazzali's political thought, the philoso-
pher's mistrust of the logical truth of ideas, and his advocacy of their enforcement by
power. He concludes: "Al-Ghazzali had lost faith in the possibility of convincing the be-
holder of wrong ideas, and advocated a recourse to physical force to compel him to sub-
mit to the Law, for he related the belief in wrong ideas to a cosmic conspiracy fomented
by Satan" (cited by Driss Mansouri, "A. Laroui, ou 1'obsession de la modernite," in
Penseurs maghrebins contemporains [Casablanca: Eddif, 1993], 114).
21. Chraibi, Le passe simple, 108, translation modified. The original French text
reads:
Ce matin, en me rendant ici, j'ai rencontre un Americain de la Military
Police. II arreta sa Jeep.
Toi Francais? Me demanda-t-il.
Non, repondis-je. Arabe habille en Francais.
Then . . . ou sont Arabes habilles en Arabes, parlant Arabe et. . .
J'etendis la main en direction du vieux cimetiere musulman.
Par la.
II embraya.
22. Laroui, L'ideologie arabe contemporaine, 169.
23. Franz Fanon, himself a practicing psychiatrist in Algeria, had stressed that under
colonial conditions indigenous medical practices became the locus of anti-colonial resis-
tance and the bodies of patients "the battleground for different and opposed forces"
(Franz Fanon, L'an cinq, de la revolution algerienne [Paris: Maspero, 1959], English
trans., A Dying Colonialism [New York: Grove Press, 1967], 131).
24. For a discussion of the historical production of incommensurability (and com-
mensurability) in the history of science, see M. Biagioli, "The Anthropology of Incom-
mensurability," in Studies in the History of Philosophical Sciences zi, no. z (1990):
183109. For an interesting but ahistorical textual attempt to explore the commensura-
bility of Hindu notions of consciousness, reality, and illusion with Freudian concepts
and concepts in the philosophy of science, see W. Doniger O'Flaherty, Dreams, Illusions
and Other Realities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). In a previous work I
have myself attempted to establish the terms of a dialogue between the phenomenology
of dreaming in the understanding of a Moroccan fqih and the Lacanian theory of the
subject as founded in the unconscious (Pandolfo, Impasse of the Angels).
25. Claude Levi-Strauss, "L'efficacite symbolique," Anthropologie structural, vol. i
(Paris: Plon, 1957).
26. See the writings and the ethnopsychiatric clinical practice of Tobie Nathan, for
example, Le sperme du diable (Paris: PUF, Les Champs de la Sante, 1988); La folie des
autres: Traite d'ethnopsychiatrie clinique (Paris: Dunod, 1986).
27. Carl Antoine Pierson, "Paleophenie reactionnelle: Psycho-pathologic de 1'impul-
sion morbide en milieu Nord-Africain," Maroc Medical (April 1954): 641-47.
28. "Rien a faire de durable, en matiere d'assistance publique si la mentalite am-
biante n'evolue pas, et c'est cette evolution dont il faut ausculter le degre tous les jours. Je
ne citerai, pour exemple, que les difficultes multiples auxquelles nous nous sommes
heurtes pour transformer le regime des alienes, difficultes non encore resolues" (Dr. Jules
Colombani, Le ministere de la Sante et de ['Hygiene Publique au Maroc [1914], 19).
29. A. Porot, "Notes de psychiatric musulmane," Annales Medico-psychologiques 9
146 Stefania Pandolfo
(May 1918); 377-84; see also R. Berthelier, L'Homme maghrebin dans la litterature
psychiatrique (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994); Bennani, La Psychanalyse au pays des saints;
Franchise Verges, "Monsters and Revolutionaries: The Colonial Family Romance at
Reunion Island," Ph.D. diss., Department of Political Science, University of California,
Berkeley.
30. Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les societes inferieures (Paris:
Alcan, 1910).
31. "The deepest nature of the native's inclinations becomes visible in its bare form,
showing a sudden regression towards a distant primitivism, badly disguised under a
clothing of fragile collective attitudes" (Pierson, "Paleoprenie reactionnelle," 643).
32. In much of La psychanalyse au pays des saints, Jalil Bennani analyzes the histo-
ry and legacy of Rene Laforgue's Casablanca group (Groupe d'etude de psychologic de
I'inconscient et de medecine psychosomatique). Although my discussion relies directly
on articles from Maroc Medical, I am indebted to Bennani's work for realizing the im-
portance of this work.
33. Maurice Igert, "Introduction a la psychopathologie marocaine," Maroc Medical,
no. 360(1955): 132.4.
34. Ibid., 1331, 132.3.
35. Ibid., 1319.
36. Ibid., 1329,1319, 132.0.
37. Ibid., 1319, 1310, 132.1.
38. Edmond Doutte, Magie et religion dans I'Afrique du Nord (Algiers: Jourdan,
1908); mile Dermenghem, Le culte des saints dans I'Islam maghrebin (Paris: Gallimard,
1954)-
39. Dr. Jules Colombani, Le Ministere de la Sante et de I'Hygiene Publique au
Maroc (Rabat: Blanc 8c Gauthier, 1914); La Protection Sanitaire de ['Indigene au
Maroc, Conference faite aux Journees Medicates Coloniales de Paris, 1931 (Rabat:
Blanc & Gauthier, 1932.}. This is how Dr. Colombani defined the "Dictatorship of
Health": "Civil and military personnel, civil and military equipment, are in the same
hands; the entire organization of health obeys a single directing mind, all the beams of
the medical network, whose lines extend to cover Morocco in its entirety, are oriented
towards a single optical center" (Le Ministere de la Sante, 16). The aims of this all-
seeing health dictatorship are, according to Dr. Colombani, to "recognize the pathologi-
cal dangers," establish a "medical topography" through a systematic work of "recon-
naissance medicale" performed by the Groupe Sanitaire Mobile, and above all, keep
watch over the movements of population from the bled, the back country, and develop
what he called "dispositifs de disinfection," disinfection devices, both mobile and sta-
tioned at neuralgic geographical junctures, in order to "neutralize all the carriers of
errant germs, half-starved, jobless; assemble these crowds outside the city limits, and
send them back in small groups to their respective home regions" (31). While in
Dr. Colombani's view, "the stage of defense" must precede in the colonies that of pitie
humaine, the issue of indigenous mentality is central: "Our administrators must have
the better of fatalism, smiling or melancholic, both indomitable, they must have the
better of an ancient milieu, older and more crystallized in its ancient forms than our
own" (31).
40.1 use the notion of incommensurability as it is used in the history of sciences. Cf.
Biagioli, "The Anthropology of Incommensurability."
41. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" (1919), in The Standard Edition of the Com-
plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London:
Hogarth Press, 1955), vol. 17.
The Thin Line of Modernity 147
42. It should be noticed that unlike the American vernacular use according to which
the terms "psychiatrist" and "psychoanalyst" are interchangeable, in the Moroccan
use, consistent with the French and in general European use, the terms refer to very dif-
ferent therapeutical practices and bodies of knowledge. Psychiatrists are above all medi-
cal practitioners, diagnosing and treating mental illness as illnessan objective reality
that manifests itself through psychopathological symptoms that largely correspond to
the symptomatic tableau of standard illnesses. In the psychiatric style of treatment the
use of psychotropic drugs is routine, even though most practitioners recognize that it is
only an aid, a therapeutic support, in which the therapeutic effort must intervene.
Psychoanalysts (who often have a medical psychiatric background, and, in Morocco, a
Freudian-Lacanian analytical orientation) define their therapeutical practice as a trans-
ferential process of intersubjective communication, a performative act of speech, in the
course of which the patient recovers subjectivity through speech.
43. The diagnosis of hysteria is still very much in use in Morocco, where French psy-
chiatric classifications are followed along with the American DSM IV (Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). One of the objections raised by Moroccan psy-
chiatrists against the adoption of the DSM approach is the disappearance of hysteria.
44. These manuals are part of the therapeutic panoply of healers, fqihs. Printed for
popular consumption and sold at the entrances of mosques, these texts are also rooted
in the Sufi classical tradition. Their informal distribution and affordable price make this
literature the pillar of a parallel system of knowledge accessible to large sectors of the
populationa knowledge that eludes, to a large extent, institutional and educational
control.
45. A detailed theoretical discussion of these techniques, the only avenue toward a
possible dialogue with psychoanalysis, is beyond the scope of this paper. For an analyt-
ic and theoretical discussion of the technique of srd, I refer to my article "Rapt de Voix"
[The Theft/Rapture of the Voice], in Awal: Revue d'Etudes Berberes (Paris), no. 15
(April 1997): 31-50. An ethnographic discussion of the technique of the istinzal is
found in my book, Impasse of the Angels.
46. The diagnosis of hysteria is still current in French psychiatry. Even though
Moroccan psychiatrists are increasingly conversant with the American system and with
the series of DSM diagnostic manuals, the important difference with the U.S. system is
the centrality of the category of hysteria.
47. Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria.
48. Suggestion works per via di pone, as Leonardo said of painting, but analysis
per via di levare, like sculpture, for, says Freud, "it takes away from the rough stone all
that hides the statue contained in it" (Sigmund Freud, "On Psychotherapy" [1904], in
Therapy and Technique [New York: Macmillan, 1963], 67).
49. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political, 158.
50. Chraibi, Le passe simple, 74.
51. A first version of this essay was presented on April 19, 1996, at New York
University at the plenary session of the symposium "Questions of Modernity." During
the debate that followed, and particularly the discussion by Talal Asad, a question was
raised about the issue of emancipation. That question, which I could not answer at the
time, led me to a reconsideration of my argument, to a second reading of Laroui's work,
and in general to an opening as to the multiple possibilities and impossibilities of a
modernist subjectivity; to questions, my questions as well, that can find no univocal an-
swer, about the contradictory nature of experience, about desire, and about the experi-
ence of suffering. I have tried in the rewriting of the paper to convey, if partially, some
of this.
Six
The Sovereignty of History:
Culture and Modernity in the
Cinema of Satyajit Ray
Nicholas B. Dirks
After the opening credits, which flash against a glorious chandelier
that will carry the symbolic burden of the fortunes of a palace and its
royal family in modern rural Bengal, The Music Room (Jalsaghar,
1958) opens with the face of a turbaned man who, it soon becomes
clear, is a zamindar, or landlord. As the camera pans back, the image is
uncannily still, until we realize that we are looking at a photograph,
at a face frozen on paper. The scene then changes to a palace, where
we see, from behind, an old feudal retainer bringing a hookah to the
shapeless and, once again, still figure reclining in a chair. Only after
what seems an interminable time, the shape moves, the left hand reach-
ing out listlessly for the hookah, the figure acting out as if by primor-
dial habit a desire for some residual consumption of pleasure in life.
As the retainer retires, the zamindar suddenly calls out, asking what
month it is. The zamindar is still etched as if in a timeless, now some-
what frayed, photograph, in a space both outside and after history.
History, and memory, enter with the sound of a shehnai, bringing
a look of distress to the otherwise immobile features of the zamindar.
The retainer tells the zamindar that the music is in celebration of the
coming-of-age ceremony of the neighbor's son. We can already sense
that this neighbor, a moneylender and business man, has somehow
displaced the zamindar, producing the occasion for music that once
148
The Sovereignty of History 149
upon a time would only echo forth from the main palace, the sign of
the zamindar's cultural authority and ritual centrality. Now he sits
bereft in a palace, slowly revealed by the camera as decayed and empty,
listening to the sounds of a new time, a time that has shunted his own
critical role in history and culture aside. But memories of other times
come flooding back, and we are transported through flashback to
a time before, when the zamindar held the coming-of-age ceremony
for his own son, with the pomp, circumstance, and music of a genu-
inely noble age. The film, by bringing us up to the present, will allow
memory to overtake history, in order both to fill us in on the past, and
to narrate the forces with which history has now worked to obliterate
memory itself.
At one level, it is a familiar story. A prominent Bengali landlord,
beneficiary of Lord Cornwallis's preposterous idea that a permanent
settlement
1
with the feudal remnants of old India would introduce a
new managerial landed elite to the Indian countryside, an entrepre-
neurial gentry that would both replicate the best of English history
and combine stable property rights, a secure tax base, and a sedentary
lifestyle with the entrepreneurial spirit of world capitalism, undergoes
a tragic fall due to the relentless hold of the feudal past. Instead of
managing his lands, controlling the river that slowly though steadily
eats up the soil of this once-fertile deltaic region, the zamindar holds
one musical soiree after the next to satisfy his highly cultivated aes-
thetic, gives lavish gifts to his favorite musicians and dancers, and
feasts both the small number of local notables who attend his concerts
and large crowds of villagers who must still look up to him as the
bountiful king of a more glorious past. Taste seems inextricably tied up
with prestige, for while the zamindar is clearly obsessed by the plea-
sure of his music room, he is also unwilling to accept that the pleasure
of music could be produced by any other place. For him to experience
the aesthetic of cultural performance, he has to be in a position to give
the first gift, as the great benefactor, the primary mediation of all cul-
tural possibility. But of course this means that he neither pays atten-
tion to the sources of wealth that make his benefaction possible nor
concerns himself with the obvious fact that he is squandering away his
fortune and his inheritance. The story we see is one of sad ruin, in
which old India is unable to adjust to the demands as well as the op-
portunities of the new world.
In large part, this is one of the master narratives of colonial rule in
150 Nicholas B. Dirks
India. How often have we read colonial accounts of the sad betrayal
of the hopes of a once-liberal imperialism, introducing the best of the
West only to run aground against the monumental and immobile
bedrock of tradition. Even when these stories are modulated by con-
demnations of the pathological moment of late Victorian imperialism,
the primary responsibility for India's political immaturity and eco-
nomic untenability is vested in something essential to India, before the
British got there: institutions like caste, preoccupations like prestige,
histories characterized by cyclic alternations between oriental despo-
tisms and village republics. The British maintained lavish museums of
old India, in the great zamindaries of places like Bengal and in the
princely states of Rajasthan and Central India, that facilitated con-
quest at the same time they were constant reminders of the justifica-
tions of British rule. India had been unable to rule itself because its po-
litical system, commanded by grand but quarreling kings who would
shamelessly exploit their subjects in order to accumulate unlimited
wealth and prestige, had neither attended to basic principles of justice
nor concerned itself with the formation of organized administration
and stable, centralized power. First, the British walked into a vacuum,
conquering India, as the Cambridge imperial historian John Seeley
said, "in a fit of absence of mind"; then the British ruled India for the
sake of its own subjects rather than for any gain of its own.
These colonial narratives seemed exemplified by case after case in
which landlords and princes would fail to exploit the opportunities af-
forded by permanent settlement and indirect rule; theater states grew
up all over India in which issues of ceremony and prestige, hierarchy
and protocol, accumulation and expenditure, seemed of far greater
moment than either sound management or popular representation.
2
A kind of embarrassment set in, I would suggest, in which it became
difficult to point to recent history, and the vast estates and quasi-
autonomous tracts under royal control, as arguments for national
self-confidence, let alone self-rule. In cities like Calcutta, where the
elite was in large part supported by the profits that came from land-
lord rights to these same rural estates, the recognition of the power of
the West became the basis both for colonial mimicry in areas ranging
from political theory to cultural production and for the development
of forms of resistance that justified itself by the glorious past record of
India's civilizational achievement. A new vision celebrated the civiliza-
tional and spiritual achievements of old India, not the political history
The Sovereignty of History 151
of precolonial times, in what was a conspicuous silence around the
material basis of its own conditions of possibility. Partha Chatterjee has
recently argued that the inner domain of sovereignty in colonial India,
the sphere that shielded itself from the colonial gaze and provided a
certain kind of space for autonomy under and away from the weight
of cultural domination, was constructed around conceptions concern-
ing religion, spirituality, tradition, femininity, and the home.
3
India's
strength was seen to be in areas untouched by colonial rule and unaf-
fected by the mimetic deployment of Western nationalist rhetorics and
politics as the necessarily derivative basis for colonial nationalism.
Chatterjee's argument seems clearly to accept the extent to which
an Oriental construction of India set the terms for what he sees as its
own colonial autonomyterms I have argued elsewhere were critiqued
and challenged in important ways by both Tagore and Ray.
4
At the
same time, Chatterjee at some level concedes the colonial narrative of
the Indian political, in which the king, or the prince, or the zamindar
became symbols of colonial embarrassment for Indian nationalism. So
also, it would seem, does Ray, for The Music Room shows us in dra-
matic fashion all the many reasons that seemingly old forms of political
order and obsession would die out in the face of the forces of the new
colonial and capitalist order. The zamindar of the film is willing to
spend his last resources, even pawn his wife's inherited jewelry, to stage
one last jalsa, or concert. His proud refusal to accept the local money-
lender/businessman's right to host musical concerts in his estate led to
the precipitate decision to stage an event that brought the tragic deaths
of his wife and sonhurriedly called back for the concert in the middle
of a thunderous monsoon storm. The death of his family by drowning
in the river adjoining his estate becomes but an extension of the swal-
lowing up of his estate by the same river he is unable to manage and
control. The zamindar loses his furniture and possessions and, by the
end of the film, when the flashback begins, has nothing but the shell of
his old palace to remind him, and us, of his former regal glory. But the
story has made it clear that the reason for this is his stubborn and nar-
cissistic pride, his complete inattention to the political and material re-
sponsibilities of his position. His obsession with musical performance
may suggest a devotion to culture, even a kind of purity of mind, but we
now know that he is the agent of his own tragedy, gambling away his
kingdom for a few nights of glory. History might have left him behind
but that is because he refused the lessons, and burdens, of history itself.
152 Nicholas B. Dirks
And so we return to the beginning of the film, when the zamindar
is reminded of time by the sound of the shehnai drifting across his
rooftop from the house of Mr. Ganguli. Coming to his senses, he de-
cides to spend his yearly temple fund to stage one last concert, hiring
the musicians and dancer who had come to town to perform in the
moneylender's house. He opens the music room, to the dismay of his
manager, who knows that this final extravagance will consign even
the shell of the palace to bankruptcy, but to the almost delirious de-
light of the retainer, who cleans the room and polishes the mirrors and
lamps as if the clarity of his memory for the pastand of the newly
swabbed glass of the chandelierwill somehow bring back those
times of old.
Alas, the concert betrays the hollowness of royal conceit, the ex-
tent to which the position of the king had been evacuated by his weak-
ened circumstance and the accompanying rise in the position of the
merchant, the new colonial compradore. Ganguli swaggers into the
palace, very different in demeanor from the first time he came for a
concert, delighted then just to be included in the noble affair and so de-
cidedly ignorant about music, despite his professions of interest, that
his efforts to display his appreciation are shown by the camera as both
parodic and vulgar. Now Ganguli virtually usurps the zamindar's posi-
tion, though when he tries to throw a bag of money, offering the first
gift to the musicians, he is restrained by the zamindar's cane, and re-
minded that it is the perquisite of the patron to offer the first gift. And
so, what is clearly the last sack of coins in the zamindar's possession is
spent in this final gesture of mock authority. Later that night, after the
guests and musicians have departed, the zamindar staggers around the
music room, drinking glass after glass of whiskey, deliriously happy at
his victory. Talking to his palace retainer, who follows him around des-
perately trying to keep his glass full, he says, "Do you know why he
failed," himself supplying the answer: "blood." He then translates the
Bengali word rakto, and says, in English: "blood . . .," continuing in
English to say, "The blood in my veins." He looks at himself in the full-
length mirror and at the many portraits of his ancestors hanging on the
music room's walls. He toasts the portraits and says, again in English,
"To you my noble ancestors," though no sooner than he tries to drink
he sees, on the portrait of his dead son, a black spider. In a gesture like
that with which he subdued Ganguli, he takes his cane to brush the
spider aside, but this momentary victory is followed by darkness. The
The Sovereignty of History 153
lights in the chandelier begin to go out, one by one, and soon all the
lights in the palace are extinguished. He calls his servant, who enters
the completely still and darkened scene as a moving reflection in the
mirror, as if he appears through the looking glass of memory and time,
to remind his master that "lights do go out."
This penultimate scene leads directly to the denouement, when the
zamindar hears his horse neighing at the dawn and orders his riding
gear for a morning ride. But by now he is blind drunk and is thrown
from the horse as it gallops toward the bank of the river. As the retain-
er comes close to the fallen body of the zamindar, he reaches down and
cries out a single word: "blood." The camera sweeps away, finally dis-
solving into a final scene of the swinging chandelier, in the blackness
that is the end of the story of this noble tradition, this royal family.
It has often been said that Ray betrays his political conservatism
by participating in the nostalgia of the feudal lord for a past in which
palaces patronized learning and the arts. There is a sense of tragedy in
this film, which even as it appears to be brought on directly by the
landlord, has as its counterpart the sense we get of the loss of culture
and refinement. The zamindar may be a self-absorbed fool, but he does
genuinely love music and dance, in marked contrast to Ganguli, who
is depicted with palpable disdain for the new moneyed classes in India,
vulgar and uncultured. At the same time, however, the zamindar is so
clearly and so completely narcissistic and irresponsible that we feel
nostalgia much less for himwhose death comes at the end almost as
a reliefthan for the ideal of learning and culture that he seems to
have abandoned as readily as his managerial relationship to the estate
that provided the resources for cultural capital. And yet, as I men-
tioned before, this nostalgia or sense of pathos is itself modulated by
the clear message of the film that the exquisite aesthetic of the zamindar
is deeply compromised by the performative politics with which it seems
essentially linked. After all, our zamindar could only enjoy culture
when he staged it, when performance was an expression of power, an
adornment of the crown.
For Ray, the old regime seems necessarily viewed through a lens
of pathos and pathology, with the embarrassment that great cultural
achievement has been produced by structures of dominationthat,
to paraphrase Benjamin, all civilization is a sign of barbarity. Never-
theless, it is significant that Ray chooses to focus on the precise re-
lationship between creativity and corruption, rather than depicting
154 Nicholas B. Dirks
zamindars, as has been done in countless New Wave films, as simply
exploitative figures with no mitigating circumstances, no complicating
conjunctures. Ray seems intent on using this story as an allegorical ve-
hicle for negotiating both the contradictory relationship between tra-
dition and modernity, and between culture and production. Given Ray's
own difficult financial circumstances in making his films, we would be
justified in thinking that Ray is also making a rather personal state-
ment about the problems he faced in funding his own cultural work.
The Music Room was made after the box-office failure of Aparajito
(1956), and the use of a story in which music and dance would figure
prominently played an important role in his choice of this story. But
Ray is, no doubt, generalizing his predicament to question the condi-
tions under which culture can be subsidized and supported, and the
evident costs to his own modernist aesthetic ambition when the film
world was so pervasively driven by the relationship between mass
popularity and profit. In the modern age, how would specialized, ex-
quisite, elite forms of art survive, even if this question for Ray was
asked in full recognition of the serious deficiencies of the past.
So if the figure of the king, for all its perversions, nevertheless re-
called a past in which the arts could be patronized outside the growing
corruption and vulgarization of capitalism (and remember here that
Ray worked in advertising before he made films), what went so very
wrong, and how does Ray address this principal question in this
work? As noted above, Ray was sharply critical both of the particu-
larity of this zamindar and the more general system of feudal rule that
had been maintained under British colonialism. Nevertheless, Ray
wished to complicate the critique of feudalismand here he does not,
like so many others, take embarrassment as the occasion for silence
about kings. The Music Room suggests that the standard critique has
to be set alongside a similarly critical examination of the institutions
and values that were coming to replace it. Of course, the most vehe-
ment dismissals of Ray have come from those who knew he had no
Utopian socialist vision that could ultimately transform the historical
encounter between feudalism and capitalism; Ray, like Tagore before
him, was no revolutionary idealist. Rather, Ray wished to disturb the
stability of the categories that were used to think about feudalism and
capitalism, tradition and modernity, colonialism and postcolonialism.
In The Music Room, Ganguli serves only as a foil for a certain kind
of capitalist excess; in many other films, Ray takes both the growth of
The Sovereignty of History 155
capital and the rise of modernity as his fundamental theme.
5
Here,
Ray focuses, as he does in The Chess Players (and, from a different
perspective, in Devi), on tradition, and he makes it clear that for all
the glories of the past, so palpably captured in the wonderful music
and dance of those long evenings in the music rooms of old India, the
past must be left behind.
For all the recent writing about tradition, as I mentioned at the
outset, there has been almost no call for the recuperation of that part
of Indian tradition or history that recalls the vain pomp, circum-
stance, and exploitation of feudalism. However, this silence has been
accompanied by a sense that tradition needs to be defined exclusively
by those civilizational accomplishments that were untouched by India's
compromised political past. Ray does not intend his ambivalence
about the past to suggest that kingship (per se) should be reinserted in
recuperations of tradition that critique the forms of Westernized, secu-
larized modernity that seem to have gone so wrong and that constitute
so problematic a part of the postcolonial predicament in India today.
But he seems to be making the point that something important was
lost with the death of kingship, that the political did constitute an im-
portant part of India's traditional inheritance, though for him what
stands out in his reading of the past is the cultural aesthetic and pa-
tronage of the court.
However, Ray indulges in the ambivalence of nostalgia only am-
bivalently; he has no wish to return, and he condemns the past quite
passionately. At the same time, even in a film that seems so complicit
in colonial narratives, and so devoid of critical reference to colonial-
ism, Ray displays some fragmentary sense of the role colonial rule
played in the production of "traditional" politics. Remember how the
ultimate breakdown of both the king and his court invokes English-
ness through the zamindar's use of English. In that desperate dawn
after the final jalsa, the zamindar unveils his full vanity and toasts
his noble ancestors, through the translation of rakto into blood, of
genealogy into a claim about privilege that rested ultimately on the
recognition by a foreign ruler of his royal nature. Perhaps Ray is here
reminding us that the decadent disjuncture between political account-
ability and cultural taste was, in the end, a product not of precolonial
tradition but of the refashioning of this tradition under the peculiar
conditions of the permanent settlement, in which a dynamicif still
deeply flawedfeudal system was translated into a simulacrum of the
156 Nicholas B. Dirks
English gentry, with all the distortions of colonial misrecognition and
transformation.
If this reading seems to stretch Ray's intentions too far, I would
turn briefly to The Chess Players (Shatranj ke Khilari, 1977), where
Ray brings colonial rule directly into the picture, and sketches the
terms of his own ambivalence about the histories of tradition in India
rather more sharply than he does in The Music Room. Ray agonized a
great deal over the final scripting of The Chess Players, in large part
because he began with considerable disdain for the Nawabs of Oudh,
whom he felt had simply fiddled while Rome burned, virtually invit-
ing the British to conquer India through their own narcissistic he-
donism and decadence. Indeed, Ray has been criticized in The Chess
Players for doing precisely the opposite of what he did in The Music
Room. While some have said he was too soft on the old regime in The
Music Room, he was apparently too hard on it in The Chess Players.
But Ray reported that after doing considerable research on the period,
he came to take a different view; as he wrote in a letter to his collabo-
rator Shama Zaidi, "The fact that he was a great patron of music
that was one redeeming feature about this king."
6
And so, at least in
terms of the relationship between culture and production, we can see
The Chess Players as a remaking, or at the very least a rethinking, of
The Music Room.
Perhaps the most critical scene in The Chess Players comes in an
exchange between General Outram and his aide de camp, Captain
Weston. It is here that Outram elicits a kind of Orientalist reading of
Wajid Ali through his interrogation of Weston about the king's inter-
ests and accomplishments. Not only do the king's extraordinarily sub-
tle poems fail to translate powerfully into English, the life of the court
is untranslatable as well or, rather, translates only into a full condem-
nation of the old regime in India. After hearing Weston's sympathetic
view of the king, Outram expostulates that he would call Wajid far
worse than eccentric; he would say he is a "bad king. A frivolous,
effeminate, irresponsible, worthless king. . . . We've put up with this
nonsense long enough. Eunuchs, fiddlers, nautch-girls and 'muta'
wives and God knows what else. He can't rule, he has no wish to rule,
and therefore he has no business to rule." Ray has no quarrel with
part of Outram's judgment, and indeed he makes Outram into a
partly sympathetic character in order to express his full ambivalence
when contrasting the British with the Nawabs of Oudh. But in the end
The Sovereignty of History 157
his evaluation of Dalhousie is harsher than his condemnation of the
frivolity of the Lucknow court, for as much as Wajid brought his fate
upon himself, the British clearly acted against the legal charter that
justified their own high-minded rhetoric of rule.
In part, Ray wanted to use Shatranj as a story line that would pro-
vide the basis for an equal condemnation of feudalism and colonial-
ism; his sense of the complexity of human actions and political affairs
required a certain kind of symmetry to conduct his own special brand
of filmmaking. As he said himself in 1978, "I wanted to make this
condemnation interesting by bringing in certain plus points of both
the sides. . . . I knew this might result in a certain ambivalence of atti-
tude, but I didn't see Shatranj as a story where one would openly take
sides and take a stand. I saw it more as a contemplative, though un-
sparing view of the clash of two culturesone effete and ineffectual
and the other vigorous and malignant. I also took into account the
many half-shades that lie in between these two extremes of the spec-
trum. . . . You have to read this film between the lines."
7
And if I
would then attempt to read it between the lines, I would take it slight-
ly beyond Ray's sense of the need to portray both feudalism and colo-
nialism negatively, for I read it in relation to other films, where Ray so
critically probes the ambivalent problematic of modernity against the
equally problematic hold of feudal or religious pasts. From one per-
spective, Ray shows us how the effeteness of Wajid was the product of
a colonial lie, a history in which the obsessive concentration on poetry
and chess could be cultivated only with colonial connivance, only to
become the pretext for colonial conquest. In the final pathetic gesture
of submission, Wajid hands his crown to Outram. But this very crown,
which had already been sent to London for display in a colonial exhi-
bition (for which, as Ray notes at the beginning of the film, Dalhousie
lamented that he had not included his head along with the crown),
had already been hollowed of all its former power, and it sat on Wajid's
head as a prop for the theater state that was created and maintained
by the British as a symbol of colonial enlightenment and tolerance.
If Ray condemns Indian feudalism, I would suggest that he at least
allows us to see the relationship between what feudalism had become
under the Raj and the nature of British colonial intervention. Such a
framework disturbs Ray's own view that he wished only to remember
the cultural accomplishment and patronage of the precolonial world;
for by refusing to dismiss outright the kingly past, Ray does, I would
158 Nicholas B. Dirks
argue, allow us to see, through his cinematic insistence on the com-
plexity of moral choice and historical change, the hybrid nature of
the categories that frame our evaluations of tradition and modernity,
culture and politics, colonialism and postcolonialism. We sense the
pathos of the zamindar's situation even when we see him swaying
drunkenly in a scene that makes the uncultured Ganguli appear al-
most heroic; we feel the unbearable predicament of Wajid when he
hands his crown to Outram rather than resist the annexation. Ray's
uncanny evocation of loss never becomes the pretext for false nostal-
gia, as his critics have sometimes suggested, but instead sets the stage
for his own relentless interrogation of the logics and conditions of the
Indian postcolonial world in which he lived.
If Ray's depiction of the pathos of kingship is always softened by
his fundamental sympathy with the modern, he does provide extra-
ordinarily powerful ways to question the limits of modernity in colo-
nial India. Ashis Nandy has recently argued that Ray's modern com-
mitments do not prevent himor at least his unconscious filmmaking
selffrom displaying the traditional femininity of characters such as
Wajid in ways that convey a resistant strain to the choices available
within modernity itself. As Nandy writes, "It is possible to argue that,
unknown to Ray, Shatranj is an essay on the clash of two perspectives
on womanhood, power and culture. These perspectives arise not from
two irreconcilable sets of cultural categories represented by the East
and the West; they provide an element of contradiction within each of
the two confronting cultures too."
8
But in concentrating on these split
complementarities to characterize the dilemmas engaged by the British
conquest of India, the limits of Nandy's psychoanalytic interest become
clear. Nandy shows how the repression of modern forms of hyper-
masculinity and the brutality of public politics recapitulate contra-
dictions inherent to modernism, and he carefully probes the gendered
pathologies of modern life. But in so doing he fails to critique ade-
quately the construction of the categories of tradition and modernity
under colonial rule. As Said has made clear, colonial subjects were
coded feminine, and though Nandy has explored the extent to which
this coding was the product of ambivalent anxieties on the part both
of colonizer and colonized, he has also used a modern logic of the
private and personal to seek refuge from the alienation of new forms
of the public. Indeed, I would suggest that Nandy folds Wajid's dilem-
ma into the split portrayed most powerfully by the conflict between
The Sovereignty of History 159
Outram and his ADC, in which the sympathy of the ADC is read sus-
piciously, if vicariously, by Outram as a sign of possible moral weak-
ness and certain political failure. Nandy is correct to note the force of
this split for Wajid, but by collapsing the political story into a person-
al exchange, his recuperation of tradition is, in the end, far too heavily
shaded by a psychoanalytic interest in the personal and private rela-
tions of cultural and spiritual value, at the same time that it is un-
affected by the active suppression of the political power of the court
that is the primary effect of annexation.
Nandy is also correct to stress the importance of the "woman's
question" for Ray, that is, the extraordinary ways Ray has probed the
experience of women's lives to explore the contradictions of moder-
nity in many of his most effective films. But Nandy also separates the
problem of women, manifestly not part of the story either in Jalsagkar
or Shatranj, from the larger colonial problem of femininity, which is
fundamental to both films. Indeed, Nandy writes that "even in this
century, some men have subverted the ideology of masculinity more
successfully than most women have, and some women in turn have
been very imperfect carriers of the feminine qualities."
9
What Nandy
argues for is a return to a traditional position from which the values
of masculinity might be resisted, in which the androgynous possibili-
ties both of self-fashioning and of public responsibility be addressed
and recuperated, even at the risk, as was the case with Gandhi's stress
on the feminine at the expense of the masculine, "of sounding mysti-
cal or romantic." Nandy has sketched out his insightful and compel-
ling argument before, characteristically including colonizing subjects
(Kipling, Outram, etc.) within the province of his general analysis.
10
But his invocation of tradition as the authorizing referent for his
psychoanalytic reading is deeply problematic, not to mention part of
what Veena Das astutely recognizes as fundamentally a function of
"the nostalgia that one encounters in the midst of the new, the transi-
tory and the fleeting, for an area of life that would remain untouched
by the newness of modernity" (see chapter 7). Granting his polemical
interests, I would nevertheless argue here that his concern about dif-
ferent kinds of selves rather than alternative forms of politics seems
particularly out of place, and is especially limiting in the context of
films about such historical figures as Wajid Ali. And it is here we can
discern the extraordinary complexity of Ray's films. Ray, as concerned
as Nandy about both the predicament of women and the gendered
360 Nicholas B. Dirks
confusion brought on for men and women in the modern age, and for
all his apparent aversion to political analysis and solution, clearly de-
picts the colonial character of suppression and recognizes how other
selves are constructed through cultural forms that are dependent upon
the exteriority of the court. The pathos of both the zamindar and the
Nawab is deeply implicated within the manifest relations of sover-
eignty and patronage that, however much they may too be part of a
politics of impossibility, must be engaged with all their multiple con-
tradictions if history is to provide any lessons at all.
Nandy's position is similar in some ways to that of Partha Chat-
terjee, who, as I mentioned above, argued that resistance to colo-
nialism became signally inscribed within arenas of domesticity where
women, and essential features of Indian civilization, reigned supreme.
However, Chatterjee's interest is not psychoanalytic; he is much more
interested in the politics of tradition (and its explicit rejection of the
political) than Nandy. And Chatterjee's sense of history is compli-
cated, his recognition that tradition is endlessly reconstructed in the
dialectic movement of history subtle and nuanced. Chatterjee does
see the feminine as a vestigial vehicle for those parts of tradition that,
even as they became confined within new domestic forms under colo-
nial rule, managed also to maintain some essential truths of an un-
contaminated Indian civilization. Chatterjee is right when he demon-
strates how in the nineteenth century tradition increasingly became
defined by the home, the female, the spiritual, and the religious. But
only in recent formulations, as in this volume (see chapter 2.), does he
stress sufficiently the extent to which this traditional formation is new,
dependent largely upon colonial modernity, including both trans-
lations and inversions of European bourgeois domesticity. Indeed, it
could be argued that women (and the domestic sphere itself) become
the privileged site in which the contradictions of modernity, in par-
ticular of the development of the modern subject, are worked out.
11
Chatterjee's argument suggests the possibilities of an historical imagi-
nary in which tradition might be recuperated as a strategy of resis-
tance, but as his current writing makes clear, the arena in which these
kinds of invocations of tradition are made today is imbued with the
possibilities of political distortion and appropriation, which banish
complexity from the moral denunciation of modernity and afford
only one kind of reading of the past. When these appropriations take
rightist political turns, as they so often do in these troubled times, they
The Sovereignty of History 161
represent the apotheosis of modernity, neither its opposite nor its pre-
colonial predecessor.
As an experiment in exploring an historical imaginary that might
work to illustrate further the uses of tradition for critiques of moder-
nity, as well as to recuperate not only the androgynous and domestic
subversions but also the sovereign politics of the past, I turn in con-
clusion, if with some trepidation, to the writing of Georges Bataille.
Here I return to my earlier concern that India's political past is
dropped in most current considerations of tradition (whether by Ray,
Chatterjee, Nandy, or other critics), in what seems at least in part
an unfortunate internalization of the civilizational embarrassment
produced in the first instance by colonial denunciations of India's po-
litical history. My point here is neither to argue for the return or justi-
fication of a feudal form of kingship, nor to limit myself to an histori-
cist consideration of the politics of kingly rule. Rather, let us recall the
pathos of both the zamindar and Nawab, two figures who have been
overtaken by colonialism and modernity, by rationality and utility.
Neither of our feudal heroes are much concerned with production;
they are, rather, obsessively committed to consumption, to conspicu-
ous stagings of poetry and music. Both figures become marked as
signs of the decadence of India's political past, devoted as it was to ex-
traction and expenditure, demonstrating its incompetence in the face
of modern demands for fiscal accountability and managerial atten-
tion. The Indian colonial situation makes clear the extent to which
these arguments about utility are linked to the higher utility of colo-
nial accumulation; the measures of capitalist logic were used to dis-
franchise rulers of old but not to empower Indian capitalists, whose
activities were severely limited and carefully linked to the expanding
interests of British entrepreneurial capital in and colonial control over
the Indian subcontinent. Capitalism in India was first and foremost a
rhetoric of disparagement and denunciation, a logic demarcating deca-
dence and progress, a language used to justify and celebrate the great
gift of colonial modernity in Asia.
Aside from Marx, perhaps no Western theorist has argued more
strenuously against the logic of capitalism than Georges Bataille.
Bataille railed in particular against the naturalization of production as
the foundational category of modern social and economic life. Devel-
oping Marcel Mauss's exposition of the gift, Bataille explored the pos-
sibility of what Mauss had simply used as an ideal category, the pure
162 Nicholas B. Dirks
gift, the gift without obligation or expectation. Arguing passionately
for the resacralization of society, Bataille writes about carnival, sacri-
fice, eroticism, even death, in order to loosen the bonds of utilitarian
rationality on the concerns of philosophical and aesthetic discourse.
For our purposes here, Bataille called upon the reader to appreciate
"the quality of sovereignty" implied in the gift as "profitless expendi-
ture." His favorite example was the potlatch, that blowout of gen-
erosity that could not easily be recuperated by utility logics applied to
honor and prestige. In the potlatch, Bataille observed the overwhelm-
ing power of generosity, that form of excessive expenditure and giving
that took on a logic, or illogic, of its own. As he wrote, "Ultimately it
was the one who overdid who prevailed and whose sovereign charac-
ter compelled respect."
12
Bataille's writing is so provocative, so mischievous, and indeed so
dangerous, that it is difficult to know how far to allow oneself to be
seduced by his powerful critique. His call for a return to another world
was taken by some as an apology for fascism, despite his strenuous
criticisms of the fascist state and his careful contrast of fascist power
with the state of sovereignty he used as the key metaphor for a logic of
heterogeneity and depense (expenditure). For Bataille, the king was
significant precisely because his power (as sovereign rather than sym-
bol) could not be harnessed to the apparatuses of state power, al-
though his critique of liberal democracy seemed as ill timed in the
France of the 19305 as Nandy's critique of secularism might seem in
the India of the 19905. But Bataille used the notion of sovereignty for
his critique of the idea that production is naturally linked to need (i.e.,
that need produces the need for production) and to develop his extra-
ordinary reading of consumption and transgression. And it is here that
Bataille's polemic helps me to rethink the historical imaginary of king-
ship in precolonial India. He allows me to view the self-destructiveness
of the Nawab and the zamindar neither as mere signs of feudal decay
nor as vestigial remnants of precolonial glory but rather as transgres-
sive rebellion against the colonial/capitalist regime. I can now view the
precise commitments of these figures to expenditure and consumption
not only as measures of a world in which prestige is more important
than profit but also as windows through which to see certain forms
of excess as direct challenges to the self-legitimating masquerades of
colonial order (in the case of Outram) and capitalist economy (in the
case of Ganguli). In condemning the effective domination of new forms
The Sovereignty of History 163
of oppression in modern India, I need not attempt to celebrate the pre-
colonial political as either exemplary or recuperable, even as I do not
need to disparage the incapacity of this system to make accommoda-
tions with the new. Indeed, the potlatches of Jalsaghar and Shatranj
are implicated precisely within colonial capitalism, the implosion of
the old's impossibility within the new.
I thus use Bataille to attempt to understand the form of Nandy's
reading of tradition against the grain of modernity. At the same time,
Bataille allows me to keep the focus on kingship, sovereignty, and is-
sues of politics more generally. The sovereignty depicted within these
films need not be collapsed into authentic tradition but rather seen
to point to the historicist transformations of the political realm that
made politics as usual simultaneously transgressive and implosive.
Nevertheless, my invocation of Bataille is still situated within the
framework of my larger historicist argument that the forms of king-
ship cultivated by the British were designed precisely to showcase
Indian tradition as the opposite of the new. Colonialism was complicit
in the production of the charade of colonial kingship; the crowns of
kings were rendered hollow simulacra of royal power.
13
The so-called
impotence of the Nawab and narcissism of the zamindar would not
have sustained their power in earlier days; the extravagance of their
expenditure, the display of their consumption, was in fact a symptom
of the destruction of the old by colonialism and capitalism. But the
portrayal of these sovereign figures both referenced earlier forms of
sovereignty and refused new forms of state and economy. And in the
power of their dramatic demise, the new cannot be said to have tri-
umphed completely.
Ray might not have sanctioned this reading of his films, mod-
ernist realist and rationalist that he was. But he too was aware of the
need simultaneously to attempt historical accuracy and take some kind
of position on the past in relation to the present. And in Jalsaghar and
Shatranj, Ray took on the seductiveness of the past in terms of the
contradictory relationship between irresponsible consumption and en-
lightened patronage. Ray's historical ambivalence here, I have argued,
was centered on his despair at the capacity of the new to support the
sublime, his fear that the market would drive the serious filmmaker
into an embrace with the devil. Perhaps he did feel a vicarious nostal-
gia for the depense of the Nawab's court and the tarnished music room
of the zamindar's palace. And perhaps in the very impossibility of the
164 Nicholas B. Dirks
past, Ray found the solace necessary to carry on, from low-budget
film to film, from the fantasy of his cinematic dreams to the quotidian
perfection of his aesthetic craft. His celebration of an older aesthetic
was thus irrevocably linked to his deep suspicion of the modern "cul-
ture industry," in terms that conjure Adorno's critique of modern mass
culture. Ray's reluctance to join the chorus of bellicose denunciation
of India's feudal past and present thus might be seen as something
altogether different from the usual dismissal of his politics as reac-
tionary: a critique in other registers, politics by other means.
We might use Ray's abiding interest in the politics of history and
in the history of politics to remind us of the vacuum created when the
political is either ignored or seen as an altogether new phenomenon in
South Asia. Partha Chatterjee's delineation of a domain of political
society (chapter z), problematizing the relationship between the state's
construction of the people as population and the nation's commitment
to democracy, provides a starting point for a theorization of the
Indian modern that moves beyond the reactiveness of many contem-
porary critiques and their stubborn erasure of the political past. Given
Chatterjee's recognition of the elite provenance of many earlier discus-
sions of the problems of the Indian modern, circumscribed in large
part by the colonially constituted spaces of civil society, it seems all
the more necessary to reinvest the modern and its attendant genealo-
gies of tradition with all the ambivalence of the political. For this pur-
pose, these two films by Ray, with their consummate expression of the
weight of colonial contradictions on the one hand and the fraught re-
lationship between artistic production and political modernity on the
other, seem especially critical places to begin. One lesson here is the
need to write other political histories, positioned against and outside
the colonial categories that produce both shame and embarrassment.
As I have suggested elsewhere, we might then predicate an interroga-
tion of modernity and tradition on histories that have the means to
escape the colonial incarceration of political forms and imaginings,
forms that, alas, resurface far too often even in the most promising ar-
guments of contemporary postcolonial theory.
Notes
1. See Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Per-
manent Settlement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
2.1 use Clifford Geertz's phrase "theater state," from his Negara: The Theater
The Sovereignty of History 165
State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), with a
twist, as discussed in the final chapter of my The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an
Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
3. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
4. See my "Home and the World: The Invention of Modernity in Colonial India,"
in Revisioning History, ed. Robert Rosenstone (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
I995)-
5.1 refer to films such as Mahanagar (1963) and Company Limited (1971).
6. Quoted in Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1989), 243.
7. Quoted ibid., 251.
8. Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud: And Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable
Selves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), iiz.
9. Ibid., 215.
10. See Ashis Nandy, At the Edge of Psychology (Delhi: Oxford University Press
1980), The Intimate Enemy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
11. As has been argued, in different forms, by a number of powerful feminist analy-
ses. See, for example, Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Indian Women:
Essays in Colonial History (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989).
12. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 3: Sovereignty
(New York: Zone Books, 1988), 347.
13. See my introduction to the new edition of The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of
an Indian Kingdom (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994).
Seven
The Making of Modernity:
Gender and Time in Indian Cinema
Veena Das
In his essay on the painter of modern life, Charles Baudelaire stated
that modernity is "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the
half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable."
1
This
particular intuition about modernity, that it has to do with the fleet-
ing, the transitory, the contingent, and that its privileged time is that
of the eternal present, has led several scholars such as Charles Taylor
and Alasdair Mclntyre to look at the stable and the immutable as the
characteristic of tradition.
2
Yet the past few decades, when the idea
of multiple modernities was presented in the writings of scholars
such as Eisenstadt, is also the period when the notion of stability of
tradition was brought into question and the constructed character
of traditionthe many ways in which it could be "invented"was
brought into sharp relief.
3
It may be pertinent to ask here whether
so-called traditional societies have their own ways of constructing
modernity. May we then speak of alternative modernities or alterna-
tive histories of modernity when we come to regard non-Western
sites as equally the sites of modernity?
4
How does a tradition (or tra-
ditions) make itself knowable to the world and to itself in the medium
of the modern?
As a way of addressing these questions I explore the imaginary
institution of time and the construction of gender in Indian cinema,
166
The Making of Modernity 167
through which I claim that the notion of modernity is addressed. Since
time is not the overt object of cinematic construction, I address the
question of modernity through the construction (and de-construction)
of masculinity and femininity. Simultaneously, there is also the con-
stant address to the question of what kind of past the cinema as a
modern medium in India can acquire.
In one obvious sense one cannot speak about Indian cinema, any
more than one can speak about Indian literature. An art form is, after
all, not constrained or defined by politically defined territories. How-
ever, cinema in India makes the claim for itself as "Indian" through
several cinematic devices. For instance, sometimes the device is used
whereby the map of India appears onscreen and speaks to the people
of India, as in Mughal e Azam (the Great Mughal), or the workers
unite to form the outline of the map of India, as in the song sequence
of Sathi Haath Badhana (Hold out Your Hand, Oh Friend) in Naya
Daur (The New Dispensation). In an important sense, then, the cine-
ma in India may claim that it has produced the disposition of an
Indianness and not only represented it. But Indian cinema has not al-
ways been complicit with the aims of the state. Rather, in its enuncia-
tion of Indianness, we find such questions as the nature of the present,
the production of the male subject, the desperate attempts by the fe-
male protagonist to make herself known, and a genealogy for cinema
itself articulated.
5
As Robert Smith has remarked, perhaps we can
think of the media as a form through which the nation produces its
autobiography.
6
In the analysis that follows I take certain encounters between tra-
dition and modernity as providing the context within which the insti-
tution of time and the transformation of the subject take place in the
cinema. I find it useful to think of these encounters in the following
way: (1) tradition as the pretension of an inner space that fortifies
Indian society against the wounds of modernitythe seduction of tra-
dition; (2) tradition as it is claimed by the modern project of nation
building and the claims of cinema as the monumental expression of
that claim; (3) tradition as the "past present" that has become rotten,
toward which the subject experiences a fierce nostalgia and a moun-
tainous sense of loss, yet fidelity to the present requires its violent re-
nunciation; and (4) tradition as the natural, and modernity as a jour-
ney of the self into an unknown future.
168 VeenaDas
Tradition as Inner Space
In selecting the metropolis as the focal point for the analysis of moder-
nity, the transitory character of the social relations struck Georg
Simmel and the dominance of technological values (Simmel's objective
culture) over personal values (his subjective culture) in the life of the
metropolis.
7
But just as Baudelaire conceived of eternity as the other
half of the fugitive, fleeting character of modern art, so Simmel thought
of the interior of houses as the counterpart of the public spaces of the
metropolis.
8
This interior, he said, was filled with furniture that had
the character of fortification against the outside world and its transi-
tory nature. This theme of the exterior, whose nature has become prob-
lematic, and an interior that is conceived almost as a protest against
the passage of time may be found in both the social-science literature
in India and various forms of representation, such as popular art and
cinema.
In recent writings on nationalism, several social historians see the
birth of the idea of the Indian nation as also the moment when the na-
ture of modernity was problematized in Indian intellectual discourse.
In a recent statement on the issue, Ashis Nandy has argued that an
analysis of the distribution of male and female characters in the novels
of Rabindranath Tagore would show that nationalism was an inau-
thentic response of the male subject attempting to overcome his loss of
masculinity at the hands of colonial powers. The authentic recovery of
the self, he says, required the male subject to get in touch with his femi-
nine self again.
9
In this reading of that moment when colonialism and
modernity came as twins into Indian society, Nandy argues that the
authentic ways of being male were lost to the Indian man under the
conditions of modernity. His tongue was penetrated by a foreign lan-
guage; his dress codes altered to suit the new role of the babu (clerk,
as opposed to sahib, the white officer); and his English education cut
him off not only from his past but also from the more authentic ways
of being Indian, by a sharp divide between the home and the world.
Against this penetration of the male subject by the colonialist dis-
courses, many social scientists (especially those studying Bengal) argue
that the sphere of the home was the feminine sphere, in which the con-
tinuities of tradition were maintained effortlessly by women. Thus
Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj have both argued in different
ways that the use of vernacular, the maintenance of traditions of fe-
The Making of Modernity 169
male modesty, the code of dress, and the ritual encoding of tradition
found their natural habitat in the home, which became the sphere in
which Indian identity was protected from the colonial onslaught.
10
For Nandy, the pathologies of modernity were evident in an aggressive
nationalism, which used the same framework of ideas and techniques
that the colonial aggressor had used to defeat the Indian male.
11
Commenting on the male protagonists of Tagore's three well-
known novels, Gora, Char Adhyaya, and Chore Baire, Nandy says:
The apparent robustness of Sandip, Indranath, and the Hindu na-
tionalist Gora, derives from the denial of aspects of their culture and
self that are identified with effeminacy, especially maternity. The
strongest resistance to them, too, finally turns out to come from
women; they are the psychological barricade that the culture puts up
to protect its svadharma.
12
Thus, in Nandy's interpretation of Tagore, the svadharma, or the code
of conduct that the culture confesses as its "own," is under assault
from colonialism, which also stands for the dharma, the code of con-
duct, of modernity. This code of conduct for Nandy is one that val-
orizes hypermasculinity, devalues diversity, and worships homogene-
ity. The Indian male's capitulation to this project of modernizing India
by purifying it of its "caste-ridden, superstitious, idolatrous tradi-
tions," as Nandy puts it, is essentially a project in which the male, cas-
trated by colonial domination, tries to recover his masculinity. Thus,
he comes to reject the feminine, both in the culture and in himself.
Nandy forms an equation between womanliness and the spirit of
India and, on the reverse side, masculinity and the potent, cosmopoli-
tan image of male authority that is found in the modern project of na-
tionalism. The following example speaks in this vein.
Gora senses that Anandmayi represents in her womanliness, the
spirit of India, more fully than his pure, disinfected, masculine ver-
sion of Indian nationalism and Hinduism.
One guesses that Anandmayi is the prototype of the character that in
the later novels develops into the splintered personalities of Bimala
and Ela. It is Anandmayi's authenticity that is being engineered, by
Sandip in one instance and Indranath in another, in the cause of na-
tionalism. This engineering breaks down the barrier between the pri-
vate and the public by giving absolute priority to conjugality over ma-
ternality, and it erects a new barrier between the home and the world,
170 VeenaDas
one that does not permit feminine values in the domestic space to in-
vade or spill over into public life.
13
Nandy's analysis of the appropria-
tion of the authenticity of the female characters by the male characters
in the cause of nation building is a truly insightful reading of Tagore's
novels. There are more threads in the weave, however, as far as the
transfiguration of the woman in the projects of modernity is con-
cerned. Nandy evokes the feminine as the value in which the "spirit"
of India lives. In his understanding, it acts as a kind of natural barrier
against the values of hypermasculinity. I take this as the nostalgia one
encounters in the midst of the new, the transitory, and the fleeting, for
an area of life that would remain untouched by the newness of moder-
nity. Nandy invests this desire for stable frameworks of life in the
spheres of femininity, a guarantee given to the male who is caught
in the flow of the modern that continuity with the past is "naturally"
assured in the way women live their lives. Thus modernity is experi-
enced as a loss of authenticity and the male subject becomes devoid of
an Anteriority due to this lossthe hidden presence of women in the
interior is the only guarantee that the civilization has of an inner life
of the spirit. But is the story of the woman to be told only through the
male engineering of her self?
Finding Her Voice:
Male and Female Subjects in Popular Film
As a counterpoint to the view expressed by Nandy, let me evoke the
production of the male and female subject under the conditions of
modernity in one of the early films made after independence. Mahal
(Palace) was an enormously successful Hindi-Urdu film produced in
1949 by Bombay Talkies, with which the director Kamal Amrohi made
his debut in Hindi films. The famed Kathak dancer, Lacchu Maharaj,
choreographed the film, and Dilip Kumar and Madhu Bala played the
major roles. The story goes like this.
The Plot
Shankar (played by Ashok Kumar), the male protagonist, comes to an
abandoned palace accompanied by a friend (a lawyer) because both
have heard rumors that the palace is haunted by the spirit of a woman
whose lover, the erstwhile young ruler of the palace, had died in an
accident. The woman is said to have killed herself in grief over her
lover's death.
The Making of Modernity 171
Our first visual relation to Shankar happens on the screen as he
looks at the portrait of the dead ruler and is immediately struck by its
resemblance to himself. Was the story of the feudal prince his own story
in an earlier existence? As Shankar gazes at the portrait, he is himself
being watched by a woman, who later announces herself to be the wan-
dering spirit of Kamini, the woman who had loved the man in the por-
trait. Shankar becomes infatuated by this spirit. His lawyer friend, who
appears here as the rationalist, tries hard to break this infatuation with
a dead past but does not succeed. How, then, can the lovers unite when
one inhabits the world of the living and the other the world of the dead?
Shankar follows the spirit into the secrets of the palace, mesmer-
ized by her presence, almost without possession of himself. Kamini
suggests to him one day that while the distance between them must re-
main as long as she is a spirit, she could come into the world of the pre-
sent if she could inhabit the body of a living woman. She implores him
to kill Asha, the gardener's daughter, through a ruse. Then at the
moment of her death she (Kamini) would enter Asha's body so that
Shankar can be reunited with her, though in another body. Asha has al-
ways appeared veiled to Shankar: he does not even know what she
looks like but is willing to kill her, as Kamini suggests. When he actual-
ly tries to strangle Asha, however, catching her unaware while she lays
his tea on the table, he is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of his
friend in the room. Disheartened, he returns with his friend to the city.
Back in the city, Shankar's friend relates the strange story to Shan-
kar's father, who threatens to kill himself unless Shankar agrees to
break out of his infatuation with Kamini. Desperate, Shankar agrees
to marry Ranjana, with whom his marriage had been earlier arranged.
He has every intention of consummating the marriage but fails be-
cause he hears the strains of a song, the leitmotif of the spirit, who
calls him toward her. He decides to escape with his wife into the
wilderness, but however far he goes, the song haunts him. His wife be-
gins to suspect that he is betraying her with another woman. Heart-
broken, she comes to the city and kills herself. To avenge herself, she
leaves a letter for the police implicating Shankar in her murder.
The case against Shankar is tried in court. Did he kill his wife for
the love of a spirit? Asha makes a surprise appearance in court. In the
witness stand, as she lifts her veil, Shankar (and the spectators) receive
a visual shock, for Asha and Kamini appear to be the same person.
Asha reveals that it was she who had masqueraded as the spirit of
172 VeenaDas
Kamini. As we hear her story, we learn that the daughter of the hum-
ble gardener had fallen in love with the portrait of the young ruler.
Living her life of fantasy, she began to haunt the palace, imagining
herself to be Kamini. But then she saw Shankar: was he the incarna-
tion of the man she had imagined as her lover? But could she, a gar-
dener's daughter, dare to love such a man? She thought her only hope
of seducing Shankar into marrying her was to persuade him that she
was the spirit of Kamini, As Shankar became bewitched by this haunt-
ing spirit she hoped that she would be able to reveal her true identity
to him without jeopardizing their love.
The court finds Shankar guilty of the murder of his wife and sen-
tences him to death by hanging. Shankar is now persuaded that Asha
is indeed the reincarnation of the lost Kamini. He tells his friend that
Kamini and he are fated to be separated. If one inhabits the world of
the living, the other inhabits the world of the dead. The only way to
bridge this distance between a past and the present is for Shankar to
invite wounds on himself in this life: only through suffering would he
be able to purify his soul and be reunited with Kamini in his future
life. He begs his friend (the rationalist lawyer!) to marry Kamini so
that Shankar can suffer these wounds on his soul.
In the final scenes we see wedding guests departing after the cere-
mony in which Shankar's friend and his beloved Kamini/Asha are
married. In the prison, the noose is being prepared. But then a letter
written by Shankar's wife to her friend (a confession that she is com-
mitting suicide) is found in the dead-letter post office. Two policemen
roar away on motorbikes to retrieve it, and the letter reaches the judge
just in time for a reprieve. Shankar makes his way back and finds his
friend and his beloved in bridal clothes. He is again out of joint with
time. His friend plans to kill himself so as to free his wife to marry her
lover, but Shankar has already consumed poison. In the closing shots
the screen is split, with Shankar's dead body, sprawled on a chair, oc-
cupying the middle. On either side are two doors. His friend departs
from one and his beloved from another, both turning away from each
other and from the audience. The last visual is of Shankar and the ir-
resolution of his desire.
The Multiplicity of Registers
It is commonplace to say that cinema is experienced on a multiplicity
of registers. There is not only the story but also the movement of im-
The Making of Modernity 173
ages, the soundtrack, the multiplicity of visions, and in the case of
Hindi cinema, the special place of the song sequences. In Mahal, the
woman remains mute, struggling to find a narrative occasion on
which she could find her voice, to reveal herself (that is, to reveal who
she is). The inability of the male protagonist to see her except as he
has fantasized her (always as Kamini, never as Asha) appears to me to
be an allegory in cinematic language of the maleness of the dispersed
public that makes up the viewing nation but is unable to see the
woman for who she is. Let us dwell on some of the moments in which
the complex visual encounters take place.
In the first encounter Shankar has with his portrait in this aban-
doned palace, he is being watched through the latticework of a win-
dow by Kamini. The portrait functions as a mirror, but in this whole
transaction between the rational self and a forgotten self that inhabits
the past, the visual field is defined by the gaze of Kamini. As she looks
at this visitor who is both unknown and deeply known, the complicity
between the spectators who are looking at the image on the cinematic
screen and her eye through which the transaction is witnessed is estab-
lished. Initially, it seems that her eye is the same as the eye of the cam-
era. Her vision enables us to see the making of the male subject.
Through this device the woman announces herself as a cinematic ob-
ject. Her name, Kamini, refers to the desiring one. The complicity be-
tween her gaze, the gaze of the camera, the gaze of the spectator, as
well as the not-too-hidden code of naming, makes the cinema a space
on which desire of the spectator may be materialized. Unlike the rec-
tangular frame of a painting, which is designed to keep the world out,
the cinematic screen acts like a weaver's mold that weaves this desire
into the images on the screen.
Already, there is a multiplicity of positions from which we may
view this encounter. The male protagonist is looking at a portrait,
which is a barely disguised mirror. Here is an analogy of the cinematic
screen as a mirror for the spectator. The irony of knowing and not
knowing is exquisitely portrayed. While initially it is the male protag-
onist who is in a state of non-knowledge about himself, as the story
develops, it is the female protagonist whose attempts to make herself
known are consistently foiled. She functions as a sign of a lost spirit,
much as the woman functions in Nandy's narrative, but is always un-
able to tell her story truthfully.
Shankar is an educated man. Yet, he becomes fascinated by a ghost
174 VeettaDas
convinced that the call of this past must be answered. His friend de-
vises a strategy to counter this fascination. He contracts two sisters,
famous courtesans, to lure him away from the spirit that haunts him.
The scene of seduction is completely the opposite of domestic sexu-
ality. It is not a scene of monogamy, or even of fidelity to one woman.
Gori-Sanwari (the fair and the dark), as the sisters are called in their
self-description, are like the day and the night (again, a haunting
analogy of the play of light and shadow on the screen), like two eyes
but a single gaze. As they sing and dance in a moonlit courtyard to the
strains of an invitation, ye root phir na ayegi (this night will not come
back again), Shankar hears the song of the wandering spirit calling
him to her. He gets up as if in a trance and leaves.
The scene of marital sexuality fares no better. As Shankar is about
to lift the veil on his bride's face he hears the clock strike twelve and
the strains of the song. He walks toward the door but is hit by a hang-
ing cage in which a parrot is imprisoned. He thanks the parrot for
reminding him that, like the parrot, he is a prisoner of the demands of
a rational social order.
Unable to consummate his marriage within the known spaces of a
house, Shankar decides to take his wife into the wilderness. However,
the sound of the clock striking midnight and the song of the spirit do
not permit him to consummate his marriage. His wife, too, decides
that she will not lift the veil from her face unless he decides to unveil
her. Right to the end, Shankar is unable to lift this veil. The theme of
the unknowability of the woman is repeated, it seems to me, in a minor
register.
In one scene Shankar and his wife, Ranjana, witness a tribal ritu-
al.
14
A man has accused his wife of infidelity. To prove her innocence
she has to dance before the image of a tribal god, and the priest has
to throw a knife four times in her direction. If she escapes the knife,
she is innocent. Unfortunately for her, the fourth throw of the knife
proves to be fatal, and the woman dies. Ranjana faints at this scene.
The appearance of a tribal community, especially in a dance sequence,
is an important icon in Hindi cinema. It is a device here for the per-
mission to express a desire that is taboo. The respectable middle-class
hero cannot be seen to wish his wife dead by cinema's own norms of
censorship in this period.
15
Hence, the scene of the woman's death en-
acted on a "primitive" community allows the cinematic realization of
this desire.
The Making of Modernity 175
Finally, I will comment on the court scene. Shankar's criminal de-
sire for the death of his wife and the reclaiming of his past love that
had been enacted in the scene of the tribal ritual is now enacted in a
diametrically opposed settinga court of law. What appeared as mys-
terious, haunting, a tale of reincarnation, is shown to be part of a plot.
But the moment that the veil is lifted from the face of the gardener's
daughter, Shankar is certain of her identity, not as Asha, the gardener's
daughter, but as Kamini, his lost love of past lives. The narration of
the story in a modern rationalist mode by the gardener's daughter is
played against a counterpoint, the psychic reality of Kamini's (and not
Asha's) presence. The woman's story, when told in the iconic space for
truth-telling in Hindi cinema, still remains unheard. Even the engage-
ment with the audience is terminated in the final scene by the charac-
ters' turning their backs away from the spectators, retreating into lives
not witnessed by the dispersed public, which has failed to hear the
story of the woman.
The Subjunctive Mood
While the theme of reincarnation might appear at first reading as
Hindi film's close alliance with mythology in an attempt to acquire a
past, the frequent devices of using the portrait as a mirror; the veil as
the cinematic screen on which desire may be materialized; the clock
announcing not the passage of time but the return to the scene of the
past; the choreography that makes the movement of both protagonists
closer to movements in a dream than in lifeall these point to the
subjunctive mood in which the film is created.
The motif of reincarnation in the film is not so much about re-
incarnation as about cinema's capacity to materialize the desire for a
life that the male could lead, as if in a different existence. The deep
wounds of modernity are portrayed through the imprisoning meta-
phor. But the past does not offer a resolution either. The male is
shown as incapable of mastering the past as part of the present. The
wandering spirit through whose eyes we saw the movement of the film
turns her face away from us. If the film is the realization of a wish, the
wish of the modern Indian male to claim the past as his own, his wish
is not resolved. In fact, the mise-en-scene in which an unconscious or
dead male occupies the screen as the female protagonist is shown to
disappear, away from the eyes of the spectator, is found in other films.
The masculine self will awake to a different world from which the
176 VeenaDas
feminine has been expelled. At an obvious level, the theme of the dis-
appearance of the woman signals her inability to find a place for her
story in the making of the modern nation. However, if my reading that
the female appears here as a materialization of the male wish is cor-
rect, then her disappearance signals not only the loss of the woman's
voice but also that of the man's feminine voice. This interpretation
amplifies Nandy's formulation of the male subject under conditions of
modernity as one who has lost touch with his femininity but touches
on a different key of the imagination.
The women who inhabit the screen seem at first sight to be the de-
siring subjects, as in the case of Kamini. But I hope my interpretation
shows that they are much better understood as the materialization of
a male wishthe wish for an unfettered relation to the past, the wish
to encounter the woman never as a creature of flesh and blood but as
a haunting spirit. Women are marked by their disappearances: in
Mahal there is first the disappearance of the wife and then of the lover,
Acquiring a Past: Mughal-e-Azam
The nation as an imagined community may be itself historically shal-
low as a modern entity but there is a vast repertoire of images and sto-
ries from which it may acquire a deep past. One example is the fa-
mous historical melodrama Mughal-e-Azam, made in 1960, which
tells the story of the Emperor Akbar's son, Salim, and his love affair
with the courtesan Anarkali, in defiance of the emperor and the queen,
his mother.
The film opens with a map of India speaking to the spectators
about the legends of the past through which the history of this great
nation is created and which is about to be narrated.
16
Since the map
hangs like a screen, we can see that the impressions we are about
to receive are cinema's claim to taking up and molding the project of
nationhood. The film is famous not only for the stunning images of
Dilip Kumar and Madhubala, who act as Salim and Anarkali, but also
for Kamal Amrohi's dialogues, which are frontally shot and remind
one very much of the theatrical enactment of Prithvi theaters. Note
that the following scenes selected for my theme are not consecutive.
Scene one: The homecoming of Salim after a fierce battle that he has
won. A famous sculptor who has refused all royal patronage is per-
suaded to make a statue of a beautiful woman with whom the prince
The Making of Modernity 177
would fall in love at first sight. He makes a living sculpture of the
beautiful Nadira (again played by Madhubala). Salim witnesses this
"statue" and is challenged to pierce the veil with his arrow. The statue
does not flinch from the incoming arrow. As a reward for her beauty
and her courage, Nadira receives from the emperor the honorific title
of Anarkali (the bud of the pomegranate flower) and is given a special
position as a royal courtesan. Salim falls in love with her.
Scene two: The emperor learns of Salim's love for Anarkali. Enraged,
he goes to the prince's palace. Anarkali is with Salim. When she hears
of the emperor's approach, she flees in absolute terror. In her blind
flight she sees Akbar approach and, in a reflex action, runs back into
Salim's arms. Salim holds on to her and faces Akbar defiantly. For
anyone schooled in the Indian aesthetic tradition, the analogy of this
voiceless, scared woman with a deer fleeing from the hunter is imme-
diately evoked. The exchange of glances between Akbar and Salim
that passes over the frightened woman also indicates a contest that is,
to be sure, over her but that ironically excludes her voice completely.
Scene three: Under dire royal threats of imprisonment and death,
Anarkali's mother promises that they will leave the palace. Salim hears
of this and contemptuously insults Anarkali, saying that she does not
know the meaning of fidelity. That very night Anarkali dances in the
royal palace, the Sheesh Mahal. Defiantly she sings, "jab pyar kiya to
darna kya," when one has dared to love what is it then to fear? As
Salim's eyes meet the angry gaze of Akbar, we see Anarkali reflected in
the mirrorwork that forms the ceiling and the walls of the palace. Her
image is refracted all around Akbar as he hears her sing defiantly. The
contrast between the silent frightened girl in the earlier scene and this
woman who has found her voice through song is explicit. I simply
note here for later comment that it is in the transformation of speech
into song that desire is articulated and finds a means for resisting the
threats of power. This is true, though, only for the transfiguration of
the woman. The place of song in relation to the making of the male
self is a different story, one that I cannot tell here.
Scene four: A dialogue takes place between Jodha Devi, the queen, and
her son, Salim.
178 VeenaDas
JODHA DEVI: The map of India is not your heart on which a courte-
san can rule.
SALIM: My heart is also not the map of India on which the command
of the Emperor can rule.
Scene five: Salim declares his rebellion against his father, saying that
his command infringed the customary right of all Mughal princes to
choose their wives according to their hearts' desire. In the ensuing bat-
tle Salim is defeated and is sentenced to death. Anarkali bargains for
his life with her own life. But she has one condition. Let us recreate
the final dialogue between her and Akbar, a dialogue that the map
later tells us is not part of recorded history.
ANARKALI: I will leave the prince forever but on one condition, that
I be allowed to become the Queen of India for one night.
AKBAR: Even when you are facing death, the desire to become the
queen of the country does not leave you.
ANARKALI: The prince had promised this slave that he would marry
her and she would be his queen. I do not want the future Emperor of
India to be ashamed for not having kept his word to a mere slave.
Akbar places the crown on her head.
AKBAR: You know the condition. At the end of the night you must
give this drug to the prince and leave as he falls in a swoon.
ANARKALI: You will have no cause for disappointment. In return for
your favors, this slave courtesan forgives you her murder. Now the
corpse may be given permission to leave.
Scene six: This is toward the end of the film. It is a scene of celebration
after the marriage of Salim and Anarkali. Women are singing auspi-
cious songs. As dawn approaches, Anarkali puts the drug in Salim's
wine and he falls in a swoon. The soldiers arrive to take away
Anarkali. The farewell song is heard on the soundtrack: "We are leav-
ing you, world. Arise and accept our greeting." The visual shows the
prince slumped in slumber as the figure of the female disappears, com-
pletely disengaged from the spectator.
The folk legend of Anarkali says that she was buried alive but in
the film she wins a reprieve, although the spectators know that she will
never speak again. The final scene again shows the map of India, which
tells us that it alone knows these hidden stories about India's history.
I have drawn attention to the map of India in this film as an ex-
The Making of Modernity 179
plicit signifier for the cinematic screen. Thus, the narrative construction
of a past for the nation is also cinema's reflections on itself. I am not
suggesting that this act of declaring itself as cinema within the genre of
popular cinema compares with the sophisticated self-reflexivity of the
medium in the hands of such creative directors as Ritwik Ghatak or
Kumar Shahani. But I nevertheless feel that in this particular case, the
idea of the cinematic screen not only revealing a certain past but bury-
ing it, distinguishes it from the banal "special effects" or the appear-
ance of a self-reflexive device such as the camera in a host of other
Bombay films. In any case, one may surely regard this at least as a
shadow of the (more aesthetically satisfying) ways in which cinema
is able to make such declarations in what is popularly called "art cine-
ma" in India.
Given this positioning of the map, what does the exchange be-
tween Salim and Jodha Bai on the analogy between the heart and the
map signify? It is in his moment of defiance that Salim is able to de-
clare his privacy against the dominance exercised by the state. There is
an intriguing contrast here between the way in which Madhubala de-
clares her defiance through the medium of the film, the magnification
of her image in the hundreds of mirrors literally proclaiming her pres-
ence to the camera and to the spectator, and Dilip Kumar claiming
that his heart is not the map of India, thus hiding himself from the
gaze of the viewers. I call this contrast intriguing because one domi-
nant way in which this question of the gaze has been posed with re-
spect to cinema is to position the camera as the device that subjects
the woman to the unreciprocated gaze of men. It is instructive for me,
then, to look at how women may look back or even instruct the cam-
era on how to look at them while men may need to hide their subjec-
tivity, so that their stories also cannot be simply appropriated by the
act of looking.
Anarkali's decisive transformation happens, as we saw, in the
scene of her dance in the palace of glasses, when she responds to
Akbar's threat not through dialogue but through song. The freedom
of her body, the song, and her image refracted in the hundreds of mir-
rors seem to instruct the camera on how she may be seen at this mo-
ment. The sense of excess is created through the manifoldness of her
presence in the song and the dance sequence. The glamorous courte-
san is simultaneously registered in the eye of the spectator as a "star,"
a category that is the creation of modern cinema. Thus, the visual
180 VeenaDas
magnification displays her presence in a spectacular manner at the
level of the image but ironically fails to let her find a voice that is ordi-
nary or, say, her voice in the ordinariness of life.
In the case of Mahal, we saw the inability of the woman to tell her
story so that the cinematic transformation of the woman into image
(spirit?) was read as the materialization of the male fantasy of the
woman as inhabiting a time that was different from his own time. In
Mughal-e-Azam, the problem presents itself as a problem of naming.
Nadira is the "ordinary," "homely" name of the sign under which
we first encounter Madhubala in this film. Her first appearance in the
court is in the form of a veiled statue. She is rewarded for not uttering
a sound when Salim directs an arrow toward her, which will pierce her
veil. The price of her being elevated to the position of a court dancer
(to a star?) is not only that she must be revealed but also that she
must pawn her voice. The reward, in the form of an honorific name,
is earned through her silence or, at any rate, through a disavowal of
her voice.
It is when Salim falls in love with her that we see the beginning of
a second transformation. Initially, she who had not flinched from the
piercing arrow now runs like a frightened deer from the angry, menac-
ing advance of the Emperor Akbar. Then another transformation be-
gins to happen. Her love for Salim gives her the voice to defy the
power of the emperor and to overcome her terror of him. The irony is
that the first defiance takes place in the context of a spectacle. She can
sing her defiance but she cannot, at this point, speak it.
When the second defiance happens she has taken the power to
name herself. She is the queen of the young prince, even if for a day,
and correctly names herself as a corpse. Only in the last scene, when
her mother wins a reprieve for her so that she may not be buried alive,
do we hear her name as Nadira again. The movement is from the ordi-
nariness of her name to be spoken only among women, to the glamor
of a star name bestowed by the emperor and used by men to name
her either as a realization of their fantasies of power (Akbar), or love
(Salim), to the moment when she can herself name herself as both
queen and corpse. It appears that naming, misnaming, the right to
claim a name (Queen) and to name it correctly (corpse) provide one of
the codas through which the problem of how the woman is to be con-
structed in cinema is presented to the viewer. The map of India pro-
claims at the end that the generosity of the emperor in forgiving
The Making of Modernity 181
Anarkali is completely unrecorded but that it (the map, the cinematic
screen) alone knows these buried stories. Yet the voice-over cannot
deafen us to the last spoken words of Anarkali, to the effect that she
forgives the emperor her murder. The history of male connections is
forged over the forgiveness of women as over their disappearance
from the male world. Salim will wake to a world in which he will suc-
ceed his father as emperor but in which the woman as the courtesan,
the one who brought him to his manhood, will have disappeared. The
film places these questions within a story that is traditional or histori-
cal, but the cinematic devices signal the positioning of this tradition as
an allegory for the construction of gender under the sign of modernity.
Tradition and Fierce Regret: Ritwik Ghatak
Tradition emerges as predatory, much as modernity appears as a site
of violence, in the films of Ritwik Ghatak, who made films on Bengal,
but from the subject position of an exile. Ritwik Ghatak was a prod-
uct of the Indian People's Theatre Association, which was the cultural
front of the Communist Movement in pre-independence India. In the
description of Ghatak's project, Geeta Kapur writes, "he provided the
impetus to see the Indian tradition turned inside out" and questioned
the nurturing potential of perennial symbols by "confronting them
with a historically framed subjectivity."
17
His last film, Jukti Takko
Aar Gappo, made in 1974, is an autobiographical rendering of the
simultaneous dissolution of the radical dream of India and Ghatak's
own nightmarish descent into alcoholism. In the final scene of the film,
Neelkantha, the protagonist, played by Ghatak himself, is caught in
the midst of a crossfire and says, "One has to do something." This is a
direct quote from a short story of Manik Bandopadhyay, in which a
destitute weaver who is unable to get any thread for weaving contin-
ues to work on the loom, saying, "One has to do something." But be-
fore this wounding image of the suggested empty loom were Ghatak's
films of the sixties, Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-Capped Star) and
Subarnarekha (literally, The Golden Line, the name of a river that
flows along the border between India and Bangladesh).
Geeta Kapur considers Meghe Dhaka Tara to be the finest ex-
ample of the "tradition turned inside out." The story portrays the life
of a displaced family from East Bengal that has been made destitute and
its transformation into "respectability" by the sacrifices it imposes on
the eldest daughter, Neeta. Each member of the family (except the
182 VeenaDas
father) exploits her labor for his or her ends. She cannot permit herself
to get married to the man she loves, as this would deprive her family
of her income. Neeta's younger sister, with the tacit compliance of her
mother, seduces her lover. She is now considered to be the more ap-
propriate receptacle for the man's love. Exhausted by the constant de-
mands being put on her by the family and the demands of her work,
Neeta sinks into devastating disease (tuberculosis) and unbearable
sorrow. Her brother becomes a famous singer; the man she had imag-
ined as her lover marries her younger sister and the parents are saved
from the devastation of poverty. All this is built on the money she has
earned. Toward the end of the film, the family shrinks from this dis-
eased daughter, fearing that she will contaminate them by her illness
and her sorrow. Her brother takes her to a sanatorium in the hills.
In the last few shots, the brother has come to visit her in the sana-
torium. Brother and sister together occupy the center of the frame. As
the camera stands laterally to him, the brother describes the "normali-
ty" that the family has achievedtheir two-storied house, her sister's
son who is learning to walk; then the camera foregrounds the face of
the sister as it pictures her top down, turned toward her brother, who
is outside the frame. Her voice takes over and she says, "Dada, I
wanted to live," and then she repeats, again and again, in a lament,
"Dada, I will live." In the last frame of their togetherness, her sorrow
has a supportshe is leaning over the shoulder of her brother. Then
Ghatak's camera moves to take panoramic shots of the beauty and
splendor of the sky, the hills, and the majestic trees. The human faces
disappear from view. Only the cry "Dada, I will live" is heard, press-
ing its desperate demand on the viewer. The camera continues to move
away, capturing the beauty of nature and its complete indifference to
human suffering. At this point the soundtrack plays the refrain from
At go Uma Kole loi (Come, Uma, child, let me take you into my arms).
This song, in the voice of the mother of the mythic Menaka to her
daughter Uma, who had suffered the hardships of a terrible penance,
is used at several places in the film to announce Ghatak's presence in
the film. It seems to say that nature and society may be indifferent to
you, but I (Ghatak) hear you, I take you in my arms as if you were a
little girl though I know you have suffered the same hardship as the
mythical Uma.
18
Ghatak's visuals are wounding in a way that I cannot compare
with the work of any other filmmaker in India. The suffocation of
The Making of Modernity 183
Nita's voice is buried in the scenes of everyday life. It is not as if there
are any dramatic moments of confrontation as in the popular films I
analyzed earlier. It is simply that every time Neeta wishes to speak of
her desire, she is suffocated by a small demand for money by the sister
for a cosmetic, by the mother for buying vegetables to cook, or by the
brother for an outing with his friends.
19
It is not even that there is no
affection in these encounters but simply that the immediacy of their
demands does not allow her voice to appear. In the case of Mahal, a
flesh-and-blood woman moved around among the living in the guise
of a spirit. In the case of Nita, her existence, her corporeality, her
voice are unseen, unacknowledged. Only twice is she able to find her
voice. The first time is when the rituals to prepare the bride (Nita's
younger sister) for the wedding are taking place. Nita is urged by her
brother to sing with her, and the two sing together marking their ca-
maraderie but also, in that very moment, making it appear as already
an event of the past. The second time is Nita's insistence that she wants
to live, her voice rising in the wilderness to which neither nature nor
society is able to respond. In Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, all that the film-
maker could say was "One has to do something," while in Meghe
Dhaka Tara it seems to be cinema's statement about itself that it alone
is able to hear the voice of the woman. Simultaneously, the cinema in
this rendering is the eye that registers the horror of the predatory so-
ciety. I conclude this section with the climax reached in the relation
between a brother and a sister in Subarnarekha to illustrate this man-
ner of showing what cannot be said.
The story of Subarnarekha also unfolds in the context of the par-
tition of Bengal. A man who has lost his home in the eastern part of
Bengal (Ghatak's own lost home) has escaped with his young sister
and another young boy, an orphan, to West Bengal. As his sister and
the young orphan grow into adulthood they fall in love with each
other. But because the boy is of a lower caste, the brother does not
consent to their marriage. They nevertheless get married and move to
Calcutta. A few years later the sister's husband dies in an accident and
she is left destitute with a young child of her own to support. I am not
offering a detailed analysis of this film. I offer instead a vignette of the
last shots.
The destitute sister has been broken into agreeing to receive a cus-
tomer by a kindly neighbor, who is an elderly woman and perhaps
knows that there is no easy way for the young woman to make her
184 VeenaDas
livelihood in the city. As she reluctantly awaits the man, her eye regis-
ters the face of the customer. It is her brother, who in a bizarre se-
quence of events has been persuaded by his friends after a drunken
evening to visit a prostitute. The camera makes of the eye a surface on
which terrifying images move as the girl in slow motion drives a dag-
ger into her heart. The eye, enlarged to fill the screen, becomes the
surface on which we can see the horror as it registers on the brother's
face. In both these films, the woman's story becomes brutally abbrevi-
ated because the natal family refuses to acknowledge her desire. The
scene of the everyday is itself then a scene of mourning for Ghatak,
and cinema a text in which this mourning is buried. Unlike the idea of
women as the natural barriers against the onslaught of modernity, it
is they who become most vulnerabe to the violence of a modernity
under which tradition is turned inside out.
The Continuous Unfolding of Tradition: Satyajit Ray
The theme of the present as having been born of the past and the cor-
ruption of the present as a temporary "forgetting" of origins is wide-
spread in the representations of modernity. One of its best expressions
is to be found in the oeuvre of Satyajit Ray. In his famous " Apu" trilo-
gy, based on a two-part novel by Bhibuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay,
Ray gives a subtle rendering of the movement from the rural, tradi-
tional setting to the anonymity of the urban setting, although the
movement is not a once-for-all linear movement; it plays with a series
of departures, returns, and re-entries. Geeta Kapur reads this trilogy
as an ethnographic allegory, infused with a lyrical mood through
which Ray claims both the Bengali literary and aesthetic tradition,
and a place in a film lineage of the realist movement signaled by Jean
Renoir and Vittorio de Sica, which influenced Indian filmmakers in a
decisive manner.
Geeta Kapur picks up the motif of the journey in the Ray trilogy
to argue that this motif is suggested in a way that the journeys of
countless young men in independent India become allegorized as the
national storythe rites of passage for the modernizing young men.
Thus, she sees this journey prefigured in the way that Apu emerges
from the shadows of his elder sister, Durga. For instance, in one of the
early scenes of their childhood, she is combing his hair, holding on to
his chin, turning his face this way and that. When she turns his face to
make him look at the mirror, we realize that it is within her field of
The Making of Modernity 185
vision that he looks at himself. Durga is the spirit of the wilderness,
epitomized not only in her name but also in her rain dance and in the
movements of her body. That Apu is to grow out of these shadows is
epitomized in the shot of a train cutting through the countryside as
Apu runs in excitement to watch it. The train as the classic icon of
modernity and of journey into modernity is transformed from its
cliched image by its reflections in Apu's eyes and the sense of mystery
it holds for him.
Ray's treatment of tradition and its intimacy with nature is also
portrayed with great tenderness through the figure of the old grand-
mother, as if she were the waif of tradition, and through the visuals of
the childhood desires of Durga and her ecstatic monsoon dance. The
death of the grandmother and of Durga are like the gentle leaving be-
hind of the tradition and the rural childlike innocence from which
Apu frees himself toward the path of freedom and sovereignty of the
self. The movement of the family to the city, his father's death, his sud-
den and unexpected marriage to the daughter of a zamindar (land-
lord), and the subsequent death of his own wife in childbirth, mark
his entry into adulthood through a series of separations.
More than in the narrative, it is in the image as presence that the
journey of the self is portrayed. Let us look at the last episode in the
third film of the trilogy, Apur Sansar (Apu's World). Apu had earlier
refused to go to his wife's natal village, where she had died in child-
birth. So wounded was he by her death that he had refused to even see
his son. Now he has gone to the village and for the first time has en-
countered his son Kajal, who is now three years old. Kajal, not unex-
pectedly, completely rejects his overtures. So here is Apu, an adult,
inhabiting the world in a kind of mourning. He had been almost com-
pelled to marry a woman to save her from an arranged marriage in
which the prospective groom had turned out to be a lunatic. Miracu-
lously, they had been able to find love even in this hurriedly arranged
marriage and then she had betrayed him by dying, or so it appears to
his wounded self. Now when he is ready to go on with his world, his
son rejects him. Dejected and beyond words, he walks away from the
village.
As he walks away, Kajal is shown running after him. He turns
round, is surprised, and then in one decisive movement hoists Kajal on
his shoulders. The last scene depicts Apu walking with his son perched
on his shoulders. The past of the village is behind him. The female
186 VeenaDas
presence in his life has been finally renounced. A male alliance toward
a future is forged. In this last frame Apu and Kajal, made into a single
vertical presence, occupy the extreme left of the frame, while the fad-
ing picture of pastoral serenity in the form of a pictorial composition
of the green fields, the river, and the boat are on the right, almost
touching Apu but claiming him no more. The dialogue between father
and son constructs the future even as they walk facing the spectators,
hence not withdrawing into a private world.
KAJAL: Do you know my father?
APU: Yes.
KAJAL: Will you take me to him?
APU: I shall try.
Geeta Kapur has critiqued Ray's position as characteristic of a subjec-
tivity that is suffused with romantic nostalgia in which value is only
in the past, while it resides in the present only as private sensibility.
Hence, although Apu authenticates the modern and redeems himself
by claiming his son, she feels there is an insufficient engagement with
the present. In my interpretation I have tried to juxtapose the visuals
with the dialogue that I feel change the meaning of the present. Even
though Apu doubts that he can take his son to selfhood through the
claiming of a paternal genealogy, he promises to try. For the Apu who
had completely turned away from life, this gesture of forgiveness to-
ward the woman whose death had devastated him so completely is an
important promise of re-engagement with life and with the present,
whatever the bruises it has given.
Concluding Comments
I have examined four different configurations of how cinema places
the question of the gendered subject in the context of the advent of
modernity in India. I am struck by the fact that the possibilities of
cinema, especially that the woman may be simultaneously concealed
and magnified, or that what is seen through the camera may be offset
by a counterimage of what is said on the soundtrack, provide a differ-
ent language with which to speak of the creation of the male and the
female under conditions of modernity. Instead of a neat division be-
tween tradition and modernity as providing sure signs of where to place
the woman in relation to the man, I have attempted to tell a compli-
The Making of Modernity 187
cated story about the making and remaking of men and women in the
medium of the cinema. To the extent that this is a different story from
the one told about similar questions in popular cinema in the West,
I submit that there would have to be not one but several histories of
modernity.
Notes
1. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans, and
ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), 13.
2. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modem Identity (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue: A Study in
Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
3. S. N. Eisenstadt, Democracy and Modernity (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991); Eric
Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, ed., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1983).
4. For the relation between locality and modernity, see Arjun Appadurai, Moder-
nity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minnesota: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1997).
5. For the purpose of this essay I am not making a distinction between "popular
cinema" and "art cinema," nor am I defining a particular genre. My idea is to map the
differences in the way that questions of tradition, modernity, creation of gender, and
time are entangled in different configurations.
6. Smith writes, "Every day a nation's media, for example, will write the ongoing
autobiographies of that nation. If the sense of 'autobiography' may be stretched in these
ways, the nation represents itself to itself" (Derrida and Autobiography [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 1995], 6z). Useful as this analogy with the self is, it does
not tell us whether the media is specially privileged to do this telling.
7. Georg Simmel, "Die Grossstadte und das Geistesleben," in Die Grossstadt,
Vortrage und Aufsatz zur Stadteausstellung, by K. Biicher, E Ratzel, G. von Mayr,
H. Waentig, G. Simmel, Th. Petermann, and D. Shafer; Jahrbuch der Gehe-Stiftung zu
Dresden, vol. 9 (Dresden: von Zahn and Jaensch, 1903), English trans., "The Metropolis
and Mental Life," trans. H. H. Gerth with the assistance of C. Wright Mills, The
Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolf (New York: Free Press, 1950), 409-24.
8. Georg Simmel, "Soziologie des Raumes," in Simmel, Soziologie (Berlin: Dunker
and Humbolt, 1908), 460-516.
9. Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the
Politics of Self (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994).
10. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), and Sudipta Kaviraj, The Un-
happy Consciousness: Bankimchandra and the Making of a Nationalist Consciousness
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
11. Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism, 80-90.
12. Ibid., 49.
13. Ibid., 41.
14. We are concerned here not with the political questions of indigenous groups but
with the generic symbol of the tribal person that acts as an icon in literary and cinematic
texts.
15. The anti-hero did not emerge in Indian cinema until the 19808. The norms for
188 VeenaDas
representing what was permissible sexuality of the hero and the heroine were very strict
in this period. Criminal desire could only be portrayed in the villain or the vamp. The
"tribal" dance was thus an important cinematic device for expressing forbidden desire
in the protagonist.
16. This film has been seen as popular cinema's narration of the nation, especially in
the account given by Sumita Chakravarty, who finds that images of landscapes, maps,
charts, and particular forms of dress are used to evoke feelings of identification (see
Sumita S. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987 [Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1993]).
17. Geeta Kapur, "Cultural Creativity in the First Decade: The Example of Satyajit
Ray," Journal of Arts and Ideas 4 (1993): 18-47.
18. There is still a further layer of interpretation that could be offered. Nita is being
identified in song as Uma; her brother's name is Shankar, the mythic husband of Uma.
The sibling pair signals the incestuous desire that cannot be transformed into domes-
ticity in both of Ghatak's films, yet there is the longing for the suffering daughter or sis-
ter to be magically returned to childhood.
19. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willeman suggest that the film language here
opens the story to a mythic dimension and the evocation of a parallel narrative in the
Bengali legends of the goddess Durga (Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willeman, Ency-
clopedia of Indian Cinema [Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994]).
Eight
Body Politic in Colonial India
Cyan Prakash
January 10,1836, was a special day in Calcutta. As Pandit Madhusudan
Gupta, a student at the newly established Medical College, plunged his
knife into a human body, a taboo was broken, Indians, it was said, had
finally risen "superior to the prejudices of their earlier education and
thus boldly flung open the gates of modern medical science to their
countrymen." Fort William celebrated modern medicine's assault on
the body and its onward march by firing a gun salute. A century later,
Mahatma Gandhi referred to another kind of assault on the body by
writing frankly about his unsuccessful efforts to conquer desire. De-
scribing his condition in 1936 in Bombay, where he was convalescing,
he wrote that whereas all "my discharges so far had occurred in
dreams. . . . The experience in Bombay occurred while I was fully
awake and had a sudden desire for intercourse."
1
For Gandhi, the con-
quest of sexual desire was an important part of his philosophy of self-
control directed at the body. He believed that brahmacharya, or the
practice of celibacy, was crucial for the maintenance of healthy bodies.
2
Between Fort William's gun salute to modern medicine and
Gandhi's failed effort to control the body through the suppression of
desire, we can identify the emergence of what Michel Foucault called
"biopower." By biopower, Foucault means a political technology whose
ultimate concern was with the body of human beings as a species, over
189
190 GyanPrakash
which the exercise of mastery had to be secured at the level of the
processes of life itself.
3
But whereas Foucault identifies the formula-
tion of biopower in modern medical knowledge and tactics, Gandhi
saw modern medicine as evil. Yet, the two discourses were also con-
nected; they shared a concern with the disciplines of the body, with its
materialization in knowledges and tactics. If the combination of the
knife, the dissected human body, the broken taboo, and the gun salute
brings to mind Foucault's analysis of modern disciplines of the body
as a form of war, Gandhi too saw himself engaged in a war; his was a
battle against desire, a struggle to produce an Indian self located in a
body organized and ordered by sexual discipline. Between the two dis-
courses, then, there lies the history of the subjection of Indians to a
new form of surveillance and control, their constitution as modern
subjects.
If this appears to confirm Foucault's analysis, it also calls for
bringing to light what remains hidden in his description of biopower,
namely the functioning of the new political technology through colo-
nial distortions and displacements. For what the colonial location of
biopower brings into view are effects produced by the need to formu-
late and apply the species knowledge of the colonized body, a body
perched precipitously between colonialist and nationalist projects of
hegemony. What emerges in practices ranging from the colonial man-
agement of the health of the population to nationalist claims over the
Indian self is a form of biopower formed in an embattled field of tac-
tics, practices, and institutions of dominance. Colonial modernity was
never simply a "tropicalization" of the Western form but its funda-
mental displacement, its essential violation. Utilitarian theorists from
Jeremy Bentham to Fitjames Stephen, including James and John Stuart
Mill, had maintained that British rule in India must necessarily violate
the metropolitan norm: only despotic rule could institute good gov-
ernment in India; only a Leviathan unhindered by a Demos could in-
troduce and sustain the rule of law in the colony. Produced at the
point of such an estrangement of Western rule in despotism, colonial
rule represented a peculiar construct, radically discontinuous with the
metropolitan norm whose violation had given rise to it.
Foucault's concept of biopower, however, as Ann Laura Stoler
points out, remains resolutely blind to its imperial frame, disconcert-
ingly silent about the articulation of European sexuality in the man-
agement of colonial bodies.
4
His historical account acquires an unmis-
Body Politic in Colonial India 191
takable whiggish drift as he defines modern biopower as the resolution
of the centuries-old confrontation between biology and history. Ac-
cording to him, the French Revolution marked the beginning of the
end of "thousands of years" of the pressure exerted by the biological
on the historical: "Western man was gradually learning what it meant
to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of ex-
istence, probabilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces
that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed
in an optimal manner."
5
Signifying society's threshold of modernity,
biopower established its full presence in the West, while the non-
Western world remained vulnerable to famine and biological risks to
the species. In this perspective, the colonies, marked by their failure to
achieve the "threshold of modernity," can only appear as pale copies
of their metropolitan original. Given Foucault's Eurocentric view that
biopower was constituted fully within the borders of the modern West,
its career in the colonies can only be seen as a dim reflection of its full-
blooded form in the metropole. But this was not the case. If anything,
colonies witnessed an unrivaled application of the political technology
of the body. According to David Arnold, colonial India demonstrates,
"in a manner unparalleled in Western societies, the exceptional impor-
tance of medicine in the cultural and political constitution of its sub-
jects."
6
With an extraordinary involvement of state medicine, the body
was colonized, that is, it was inserted in a new field of tactics and insti-
tutions aimed at achieving mastery over life.
The "colonization of the body," however, requires another speci-
fication if we are to fully explore the colonial workings of biopower.
Arnold is right to stress the extraordinary importance of state medi-
cine in British India in the production and subordination of subjects,
but to understand the nature and the field of knowledges and prac-
tices opened by Western therapeutics, we must ask: What was colonial
about the colonization of the body? How was the materialization of
the body in institutions and tactics affected by conditions of alien rule,
by the dislocations with which colonialism was compelled to operate?
7
These questions point to the disjunctive articulation of modernity in
the colonies, to its obligation to occupy two positions at once, Western
and Indian; they bring into view the body's embattled history as it
emerges between the war to regulate the life processes of the aggregate
population through modern medicine and the battle to discipline the
sexual life of the Indian self through rules of continence.
192 GyanPrakash
The disjunctive history of modern biopower in British India must
be sought in its functioning as an aspect of the governmentalization of
the colonial state, that is, as a part of the development of that state
rationality which located the exercise of power in the application of
strategies to secure the welfare of the colonized population. Such an
understanding of the rationality of the colonial state draws on Foucault,
who distinguishes governmentality from sovereignitywhich is con-
cerned with territory, legitimacy, and obedience to lawand from dis-
ciplineswhich are elaborated in such institutions as prisons, schools,
armies, manufactories, and hospitals. Locating modern power in a
sovereignty-discipline-government triangle, he defines governmentali-
ty as a mode of "pastoral power" aimed at the welfare of each and all;
which functions by applying economy, by setting up "economy at the
level of the entire state, which means exercising towards its inhabi-
tants, and the wealth and behavior of each and all, a form of surveil-
lance and control as attentive as that of a head of a family over his
household and his goods."
8
The application of economy at the level of
the state was rendered possible by the appearance of population as a
category. Population, with "its own regularities, its own rates of deaths
and diseases, its cycles of scarcity, etc.,"
9
was irreducible to family and
became the object of schemes to promote its health and wealth. There
emerged "a sort of complex composed of men and things . . . men in
their relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things
which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with
its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility . . . in their relation to
that other kind of things, customs, habits, ways of acting and think-
ing ... in their relation to that other kind of things, accidents and mis-
fortunes such as famine, epidemics, death, etc."
10
Governmentality in British India also developed in response to the
outbreak of epidemics, death, and famines, and represented an effort
to act on the population, to nurture its health and cultivate its re-
sources. But British India was marked by the absence of the elegant
sovereignty-discipline-government triangle that Foucault identifies in
Europe. Fundamentally irreconcilable with the development of a civil
society, the colonial state was structurally denied the opportunity to
mobilize the capillary forms of power. Thus, colonial governmentality
developed in violation of the liberal conception that the government
was part of a complex domain of dense, opaque, and autonomous
interests that it only harmonized and secured with law and liberty.
11
Body Politic in Colonial India 193
This violation, however, should be regarded as a productive breach,
not a restrictive liability; it initiated a generative dislocation, not a
paralyzing limitation. For what it set into motion was a powerful pro-
cess of bureaucratic expansion and rationalization under which the
population's economic, demographic, and epidemiological properties
were surveyed, enumerated, measured, and reconstituted so as to bring
into existence a colonial "complex of men and things," that is, a popu-
lation constituted as subordinated subjects, whose health, resources,
productivity, and regularities were the objects of governance. Emerging
as a part of the colonial complex of "men and things," the body, then,
was a materialization of institutions and practices with which colonial
power was resituated and exercised as colonial governmentality.
The appearance of the body as an aspect and effect of govern-
mentality represented the rise of a new field of power, a new zone of
contention and constitution of subjects. Colonial institutions and
knowledges dominated and defined this field, but it was an arena of
contention. For, although colonial knowledge and colonial regulation
could never function as self-knowledge and self-regulation, this was
precisely what governmentality required and attempted to accomplish.
The British enacted sanitary measures and regulations, established
Western medical therapeutics and institutions, and inaugurated cam-
paigns against epidemics. If these materialized the body in a grid of
knowledge and tactics, this grid was always haunted by the stereo-
typical images of Indians as diseased, unhealthy, unhygienic, super-
stitious, and unscientific. Because such stereotypes justified colonial
power, they could never be eliminated. The body rendered knowable
by physiology, pathology, and surgery, and visible in diseases, epidem-
ics, and deaths, therefore, could never be fully instituted in the ghostly,
precolonial body of colonial representations. Coercion, failure, partial
and fragmentary success always punctuated the operation of tactics
and effects in which medicalized bodies appeared.
It was at the site of this predicament that British India witnessed
other contending strategies that restaged colonial medicine and colo-
nial governmentality. These projects struggled to define an Indian sub-
ject by acting upon the body materialized by the colonial network of
power, by restaging indigenous knowledges, customs, habits, living
patterns, and cultural values as disciplines for the production of mod-
ern, self-subjecting individuals. It was in this struggle to develop as-
cetics or tactics of self-governance for a body brought into existence
194 GyanPrakash
by colonial governance that the nationalists developed the notion of
the uncolonized, "inner" domain of culture and tradition.
12
But the
"inner" and "spiritual" domain of the nation, its cultural "essence,"
were, in fact, produced by the application of disciplines, by subjecting
them to the pressure and procedures of the "outer" domain of colo-
nial science. The nationalist resistance, its construction of an uncolo-
nized domain of self-constitution, represented negotiations of the terms
of governance. It resituated the knowledges and tactics of governance
to include indigenous principles, recoded and redesignated the materi-
alized body as Hindu and male, thereby marshaling a strategy of self-
subjection that colonial governmentality could never deploy effective-
ly. The nationalist discourse arose squarely within historical power
relations, not outside the field of colonial modernity, and it intervened
in the same arena to deflect governmentality along different lines.
Colonial Institutions and the Emergence of the Body
While medicine and colonial power were linked together soon after the
establishment of British rule, it was not until the late nineteenth cen-
tury that this relationship produced the native body as an object and
effect of medical attention.
13
It was then that the effort to control and
contain the alien environment of India, to regulate and reform the
"tropics," where the unhealthy climate combined with the fevered ir-
rationality of the people to unleash virulent outbreaks of sickness and
death, gave rise to a new network of knowledge and tactics. This emer-
gent regime of knowledge produced the image of an anterior and spec-
tral body composed of unhygienic habits and superstitious beliefs upon
which modern knowledge and tactics were to be applied in order to
reform it, to restore its health and well-being. Similarly, indigenous
knowledge and materia medica, previously incorporated as inferior
but useful supplements to Western therapeutics,
14
appeared as a collec-
tion of unscientific and inaccurate beliefs under whose misrepresenta-
tions there lurked a real body. The reading of indigenous therapeutics
as mistaken and imprecise signs of the existence of the body as a real
object justified the application of strategies that materialized the body
in a different set of institutions and effects; it posited the body as an a
priori object, as an entity whose existence preceded the discourse with-
in which it appeared as a matter of medical scrutiny and regulation.
Predictably, it was the anxiety about the security of the empire
that aroused interest in the health of the population. Initially, this in-
Body Politic in Colonial India 195
terest focused on the army, whose indispensability for the mainte-
nance of the colonial order had been driven home by the 1857 revolt.
Shaken to its foundation by the upheavals of 1857, the British govern-
ment became concerned about the well-being of its army. The British
troops in India had experienced a death rate of 69 per 1,000 (three
times the rate in Britain), and epidemics had severely affected the con-
duct of military operations during the Mutiny.
15
With sanitation and
hygiene in the military placed under the spotlight by the Crimean
War, the bleak record of sickness and death in the British army in
India caused alarm. Under the pressure of Florence Nightingale's reso-
lute campaign, the British Parliament appointed a royal commission
in 1859 to inquire into the sanitary state of the British army in India.
16
The commission issued its report in 1863, stating that fevers, dysen-
teries, diseases of the liver, and epidemic cholera were the most injuri-
ous diseases in India for British soldiers and that science could offer
no relief because it had been unable to determine their cause. But a
"rational mode of inquiry" had discovered, the commission declared,
that improved drainage and sanitary conditions could counteract the
intensity of the transmission of diseases. A meticulous attention to hy-
giene, habitation, and habits could protect Europeans from the risk of
epidemics in a place like India, where the unhealthy effects of heat and
moisture had to be assumed and where malaria was an ever-present
danger.
17
The magnified attention to sanitation represented a shift in the
colonial medical discourse that occurred as part of the victory of the
"anglicists" over the "orientalists" in the 18305. The triumph of the lib-
eral imperialist vision had opened the floodgates of contempt for
Indian beliefs and knowledges, and had led to the replacement of the
Native Medical Institution with the Calcutta Medical College in
1835. The emergent discourse broke with the Anglo-Indian medical
tradition of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that had
shared much with the humoral pathology of ayurvedic and yunani
medical systems and had found them useful, if not altogether correct.
By the mid-nineteenth century, however, while the belief in India's
distinct disease environment was not abandoned, the possibility of in-
corporating indigenous practices into Western therapeutics and accli-
matizing European constitutions to Indian medico-topographical con-
ditions were ruled out.
18
Both the Indian environment and Indian
knowledges appeared so utterly alien and unremittingly perilous to
196 GyanPrakash
health that only their containment and suppression could preserve the
well-being of the colonial order. The discourse of sanitation both con-
tributed to and reflected this change insofar as it, unlike climatologi-
cal determinism, brought into existence objects over which control
could be exercised.
Sanitation represented a new order of knowledge and power.
Florence Nightingale articulated its specificity when she enthusiastical-
ly described the sanitary inspectors' reports as "bringing to light what
is the real social state of the mass of Indian peoples." These reports had
removed "the veil of romance woven by poets over Hindostan," she
added, and revealed "peoples to be numbered by tens of millions living
under social and domestic conditions quite other than paradisiacal."
They lived "amidst their own filth, infecting the air with it, poisoning
the ground with it, and polluting the water they drink with it," and
"some even think it a holy thing to drink filth."
19
This description was
consistent with the prevalent theory of climatological determinism, ac-
cording to which soil and air produced miasmas that caused and com-
municated diseases, but it also marked a departure insofar as it ren-
dered human habits and habitation into objects of medical attention
and regulation. Filthy cities, open drains, decomposing animal carcass-
es, rotting vegetable matter, irrational beliefs, and unscientific thera-
peutics appeared as errors that signified the truth of the Indian body.
The "real social state of the mass of Indian peoples," after all, was re-
vealed by the disclosure that Indians, "numbered by tens of millions,"
"lived amidst their own filth," trapped by their unhygienic habits and
beliefs. Muck and misunderstanding were read as signs that pointed to
the existence of the body as an object prior to the dirt, disease, and
dogma in which it was buried and independent of the discourse that
brought it into view. Such a positioning of the truth of the Indian body,
as a specter of filth and error, set the stage for the sanitary policing
and regulation of the population. The British appointed sanitary com-
missioners in Bengal, Bombay, and Madras Presidencies, and in the
provinces of Punjab, Burma, United Provinces, and Central Provinces,
and charged them with the responsibility of preparing monthly and an-
nual returns on diseases and of drawing up plans for the sanitary regu-
lation of the population.
20
The establishment and expansion of munici-
palities followed, the state apparatus grew, and the sanitary policing of
the population became regularized.
Sanitary policing in India followed a design different from the met-
Body Politic in Colonial India 197
ropolitan pattern. Considering the model of the English municipal in-
stitution "unsuitable and inefficient" for India, the British stressed cen-
tralized control rather than local self-government. Inspector-generals
were to preside over local sanitary inspections which, unlike in Britain,
were to be carried out by low-level "lay" inspectors, not well-paid
medical officers of health, and they were "to see to the abatement of
nuisances and to the bringing of cases of nuisance before the magis-
trates."
21
Administering a system designed and controlled by the cen-
ter, local sanitary officers in India, again unlike in Britain, did not
work in just an advisory capacity; instead, they operated as executive
officers with vast powers and responsibilities. They supervised the
conservancy work, controlled a large subordinate staff and laborers,
administered the registration of births and deaths, investigated the
causes of deaths and epidemics, addressed public complaints, and ad-
vised on sanitary requirements of buildings.
22
A bureaucratic machine
was found necessary for sanitary work because the state considered
the colonized to be incapable of self-governance. As Nightingale put it,
the state in India had to accomplish single-handedly what was achieved
in Britain in conjunction with the "habits of self-government."
23
When
Lord Ripon, the Viceroy of India, did introduce local self-government
in 1882, his Gladstonian liberalism made sure that it was extended
only to Europeans and a small group of wealthy Indians.
24
The limits
of local self-government in India meant not only an enlarged role but
also an altogether different positioning of the state as it sought to make
up for the effacement of the colonized. In this regard, Nightingale's
bold declaration that "Government is everything in India" neatly cap-
tured the ineluctably colonial nature of the governmentalization of the
state in India.
25
Sanitation in colonial India functioned as the knowledge and
regulation of the Other; it was deployed as a Western discipline for
the governance of indigenous habits and habitation. In the first in-
stance, this produced a discriminatory sanitary order that constituted
Indians and the Indian environment as sources of diseases from which
Europeans had to be protected. Descriptions of filth figured promi-
nently in colonial investigations of "fevers" in Indian cities.
26
The
focus on unsanitary conditions itself was understandable in view of
Sir Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition of the La-
bouring Population of Great Britain (1842,), which had placed cities
under the spotlight as centers of squalor and disease in Britain.
27
But
198 GyanPrakash
whereas Chadwick's work had highlighted unsanitary conditions in
relation to the Industrial Revolution and the conditions of the work-
ing class, colonial reports projected dirt and disease as signs of India's
otherness. Thus, when the sanitary commissioner described Calcutta
in 1864 as a "scandal and disgrace" to the "civilized Government," he
blamed the native population as a whole, not just the "poorer class-
es."
28
Colonial officials returned repeatedly to remark on the open
and clogged drains, on the stench of the night soil and its ugly sight
that greeted the unfortunate visitor to the "black towns," on the
gut-churning piles of garbage heaped in bazaars, on the crowded, ill-
ventilated, haphazardly designed native houses. Not just colonial preju-
dice was at work in these denunciations but a language of governance,
a knowledge and discipline of the other. These representations justi-
fied the creation of European enclaves of hygienic havens located in
military cantonments, "civil lines," and "hill stations," separated from
swampy, "malarial" grounds and the native population, and governed
by sanitary standards prevalent in Britain.
29
Such hygienic enclaves
were expected to reduce the threat to European health posed by
Indians, but the British also recognized that their sanitary protection
could not be fully secure unless Indian habitations were also regulat-
ed.
30
So, as municipal authorities favored the civil lines and canton-
ments inhabited by Europeans, they also realized the necessity of ex-
tending sanitary regulations to "black towns," which had acquired a
menacing meaning since the Mutiny.
31
As colonial officials set out to control the recurrent outbreak of
epidemics during the second half of the nineteenth century, statistics
came to occupy a prominent position in the developing medical pro-
file of the indigenous population. The use of statistics was not peculiar
to India. By the mid-nineteenth century, as Ian Hacking has shown,
Europe had already witnessed statistics acquiring an important role in
understanding reality, in making the world apprehendable in terms of
statistical laws.
32
Statistical data and laws rendered chance appear less
capricious; they discerned order and regularities in such indeterminate
events as epidemics, thereby offering a mode of understanding and
controlling natural and social processes. Such a conception of statis-
tics had become widespread and was endorsed by Edmund Parkes's
A Manual of Practical Hygiene (1864),tne standard medical text for
British officials in India. Writing of the government's duty to maintain
"watchful care over the health of the people, and a due regulation of
Body Politic in Colonial India 199
matters which concern their health," he had recommended the use of
"figures which admit no denial."
33
In British India, however, colonial-
ism shaped such figures because they were produced in the exercise of
alien power. Not surprisingly, the government's "watchful care" in
India produced a colonial knowledge of the population. The data on
the outbreak of epidemics was organized to show their differential ef-
fects on Europeans and Indians. These revealed a disturbingly high
rate of mortality of European soldiers in India compared to Indian
sepoys, leading to the appointment of a royal commission that never
visited India but pored over the statistical data to understand the con-
dition of army sanitation and to make its recommendations.
34
The re-
liance on statistics grew and became more complex and sophisticated
in the late nineteenth century as the British were called upon to cope
with the ravages of cholera, smallpox, plague, and enteric fevers vast-
ly aggravated by urban crowding, rapid and increased communication
facilitated by railroads, and the malarial environment bred by irriga-
tion works.
35
Colonial officials collected detailed numerical informa-
tion on sickness and fatalities; they investigated the relation between
the outbreak of cholera and plague with race, region, climate, and
habitation; they measured the success of vaccination versus inocu-
lation in resisting smallpox; they assessed the rate of mortality of
Europeans and Indians in hospitals and clinics; and they hungered for
more accurate data in order to enhance the "taming of chance" in the
alien and hostile environment of India.
36
The desire to bring diseases and deaths under the statistical gaze
represented an effort to relocate the indigenous population, to bring it
under the colonial "complex of men and things," where its regulari-
ties in relation to the climate, topography, habits, and habitation could
be observed and acted upon. Government officials searched for agen-
cies that reached down to the village in order to collect vital informa-
tion on births and deaths, and complained that inaccurate diagnoses
and medical treatments provided by indigenous practitioners enabled
sickness and mortality to escape the net of statistics.
37
The volume and
complexity of statistical information grew with the regularization of
the collection of mortality figures of the civil population and the insti-
tutionalization of the decennial census in the iSyos. These, together
with systematic metereological records kept by the government, ex-
tended the reach of the colonial establishment and enabled the formu-
lation of a discursive formation that represented the body in different
200 Cyan Prakash
combinations and correlations of diverse statistical series. The body
was firmly located in India and yet scientifically observable only
through the knowledges and practices of colonial medicine, which de-
veloped different and conflicting ideas about diseases and their treat-
ment. Thus, as cholera raged, so did debates between the proponents
of climatological determinism and the contagion theory, both of whom
drew on statistical information to build their respective arguments.
The theory that miasmas caused and communicated cholera received
powerful support from J. M. Cunningham, the sanitary commissioner
of India from 1868 to 1884, and was elaborated in a number of
monographs that used and generated data that situated bodies and
diseases in relation to climate and topography.
38
The opposing con-
tagion theory, expressed originally in John Snow's On Continuous
Molecular Changes, More Particularly in their Relation to Epidemic
Disease (1853), found less support in India, but it was also elaborated
with the help of statistical data.
39
Disagreeing over the understanding
of the etiology of cholera and methods of prevention, both theories
used statistics to dislodge the body from indigenous beliefs and prac-
tices and materialize it in a new set of knowledges and tactics.
Statistics constituted an element of the wider discourse concerned
with the medical specification of India's difference. This concern gen-
erated debates and theories, but the state's "watchful care" remained
focused on formulating knowledges and identifying objects of gover-
nance. Thus, when the colonial government finally accepted the con-
tagion theory in the mid-18905a decade after Robert Koch, the
German bacteriologist, had discovered the cholera bacillus in a Calcutta
tank in 1884the Indian environment did not drop out of focus. "In
their insistence upon the physical or climatic idiosyncrasies of India,"
Arnold remarks, "the environmentalist school was in curious accord
with its contagionist opponents with their eyes firmly fixed not on
the heavens or the soil, but on pilgrim hordes."
40
The International
Sanitary Conference at Constantinople in 1866 had placed its sharp
attention on Hindu pilgrims as sources of cholera epidemics, causing
great embarrassment to the British. But the government itself feared
the large collection of Indians at religious fairs and pilgrim sites. An
official report attributed the cholera epidemic in northern India in
1867 to the Kumbh fair in Hardwar, attended by three million people,
a number swelled by the recent introduction of railways. The adminis-
tration made sanitary arrangements, including the disastrous one to
Body Politic in Colonial India 201
bury the night soil from the latrines in the banks of the Ganges River.
As pilgrims bathed in the river, they transmitted cholera to others,
killing more than a hundred thousand.
41
To combat the epidemic, the
government prohibited fairs, sanitary cordons of police were formed,
cholera hospitals and camps were established, the bodies of the dead
were cremated or buried as soon as possible, and the clothing of vic-
tims was destroyed. The returning pilgrims were diverted from large
towns and detained in quarantine camps for as long as five days, and
they were obliged to wash and have their clothes fumigated before
being allowed to re-enter their villages and towns.
42
Cholera broke
out again during the fair in 1891, in spite of elaborate sanitary ar-
rangements made by the administration, leading the government to
disperse the pilgrims, empty the lodging houses, and prevent dips in
the holy waters of the Ganges. These measures helped prevent the
spread of the disease and positioned the colonial state as a form of
"pastoral power" under whose "watchful care" indigenous religious
observances were regulated in "secular," medical terms.
43
Even more so than cholera, the outbreak of smallpox and plague
epidemics sparked the development of knowledges and practices to
seize the body from its indigenous cultural location. Unlike cholera,
smallpox brought the British face to face with a traditional method of
treatment, that is, variolation, which entailed inoculation with live
smallpox matter in order to induce a more manageable presence of the
disease in the body.
44
Reports demonstrated to the government that
while areas "notorious for their crowded, filthy, ill-ventilated and ill-
condition were the chief receptacles and hotbeds of this contagion and
disease," variolation was as destructive and prolific as the natural oc-
currence of smallpox.
45
The government's investigation disclosed that
the Hindus practiced variolation as a religious duty, prompting the
circulation of questionnaires to Hindu pundits to determine its textual
status. The replies by pundits were equivocal, suggesting that law
books did not enjoin variolation specifically but included it as part of
religious ceremonies recommended for those struck by smallpox.
46
In
British eyes, however, variolation was not a harmless religious cere-
mony but a "murderous trade"; it was not prescribed by "Hindoo
Law and Theology" but perpetrated because there was no shortage
of "bigots to mislead the ignorant Hindoos, and to prejudice their
credulous and simple minds, against whatever may be falsely repre-
sented to them as an innovation, or an interference with their religious
202 Cyan Prakash
privileges."
47
As Arnold shows, a battle ensued to suppress variola-
tion and replace it with vaccination. Co-opting the inoculators (the
tikadars) as vaccinators, the government steadily increased the num-
ber of vaccinations in British India from 350,000 annually in 1850 to
8 million by the end of the century.
48
This did not happen without re-
sistance. The opposition was provoked by the arm-to-arm method,
which remained the predominant form of vaccination in British India
until World War I, when it was replaced by the cowpox vaccine.
Unlike inoculation, this method involved the transferral of body fluids
from one individual to another, causing higher castes to fear that they
would be ritually polluted by the bodily matter of lower castes.
Undeterred by this resistance, and following the recommendation of
the smallpox commission, the British outlawed variolation and enact-
ed laws for compulsory vaccination.
The process of removing the body from areas "notorious for their
filthy, ill-ventilated and ill-condition," and freeing it from "ignorant
and simple minds" achieved an exceptional dimension during the
bubonic plague epidemics of the late nineteenth century. As Arnold
points out, plague brought to the fore an unparalleled state interven-
tion because the disease "was specifically identified with the human
body and thus occasioned an unprecedented assault upon the body of
the colonized."
49
The list of instructions that Waldemar Haffkine, the
Russian bacteriologist, prepared for the use of municipal authorities
to identify the disease required the examination of the body for fever,
trembling limbs, pain and swelling of glands, delirium, constipation,
and diarrhea. To diagnose whether or not these were plague symp-
toms, the skin over the gland was to be washed with carbolic lotion
and pricked with a needle to reach the gland. The gland was then to
be pressed to squeeze out a whitish substance, which was then to be
placed under the microscope.
50
Because only the physical examination
of the body could identify the disease, the interdiction of the body be-
came necessary for understanding and controlling the disease. Thus,
the outbreak of the 1896-97 epidemic in Bombay prompted the mu-
nicipal commissioner to issue a notification claiming the right to enter
any building to disinfect it and remove any item, to remove any per-
son suffering from the disease to a hospital, and to isolate any house in
which the disease existed.
51
The British authorities examined passen-
gers at railway stations to detect if the fleeing residents of the plague-
stricken areas were carrying the disease, segregated and hospitalized
Body Politic in Colonial India 203
plague victims, and carried out extensive cleaning and disinfection of
drains. Such interventions sparked widespread opposition, particular-
ly in Pune, where the military carried out much of the house-to-house
inspection to detect if plague victims had been shielded from hospitali-
zation.
52
B. G. Tilak, the Maratha nationalist leader, portrayed the
plague operations as an unacceptable interference in Indian life, and
the fervent hostility to the government's policies led to the assassina-
tion of W. C. Rand, the chairman of the plague committee, in 1897.
Elsewhere, the government's "assault on the body," as Arnold puts it,
did not provoke assassinations, but the practice of seizing plague vic-
tims from their relatives and hospitalizing them met with violent op-
position.
53
Faced with sustained opposition, the British had to moder-
ate their draconian policies, and eventually they were able to win the
support of educated Indians.
Inspection, segregation, vaccination, and hospitalization drama-
tized both the general process of the elaboration of the state's concern
with the governance of Indians and its colonial nature. On the one
hand, the urgent need to combat epidemics mobilized and brought
into play a range of knowledges and techniquessanitary laws and
tactics, studies of diseases and strategies of control based on statistics,
vaccination, quarantine, hospitalization, municipal governmentthat
had been developing in a variety of locations over several decades.
The epidemic victims in hospitals and clinics furnished details on the
pathology of diseases, their symptoms and treatment, and these were
combined with sanitary and statistical facts and laws to render the
body as an organism, as a constellation of functions, designations,
symptoms, ailments, immunities, vulnerabilities, and therapies. On
the other hand, epidemics also brought to a flashpoint the confronta-
tion entailed in tearing colonized bodies away from the specter of na-
tive habits and habitation and materializing them in disciplines and
technologies of colonial governance. The development of governmen-
tality as the knowledge of the Other could not but position the ap-
plication of disciplines as a battle. P. C. H. Snow, the municipal com-
missioner of Bombay, wrote: "The people would not believe that the
hopeless condition of their own dark, damp, filthy, overcrowded
houses was their real danger, they raved about the sewers and became
phrenzied if a scavenger was remiss . . . every form of obstruction
was resorted to when the Municipality attempted to deal with their
dwellings." The municipal employees had to carry out their work "in
204 Cyan Prakash
the face of hostile, and sometimes violent crowds, and almost invari-
ably in the teeth of sullen, if passive opposition."
54
Colonial officials
attributed such hostility and indifference to ignorance, misinforma-
tion, and the "hopeless inability" of Indians to appreciate the value of
sanitation and scientific therapeutics. The British officials told each
other that Indians were driven to opposition by the rumor that hospi-
tals killed the patients, took out their hearts, and sent them to Queen
Victoria to appease the wrath aroused by the disfigurement of her
statue in Bombay; that they distrusted hospitals because a large num-
ber of patients, having been brought at a moribund stage, died soon
after being admitted; that they misconstrued the subcutaneous injec-
tion used to resuscitate patients as an attempt to kill them to prevent
the spread of the disease.
55
If such retellings of rumors underscored
the unavailability of capillary forms of power to the colonial state,
they also reinforced the British resolve to continue with the impossible
task of re-forming Indians as self-governing subjects in spite of their
will. The irreducible difference of Indians both limited and empow-
ered the development of colonial governmentality; if "rumors" and
"misconceptions" bedeviled the application of disciplines, they also
justified the effort to place Indian bodies in the colonial grid of knowl-
edges and practices.
Body and Therapeutics
The British were fully aware that they ruled as an alien power and
that their therapeutics functioned as an alien discipline. But they also
exercised power and applied disciplines as if these could bridge the
unbridgeable gap between the colonizer and the colonized, as if the ab-
solute otherness of Indians was also knowable. This effort to achieve
what was structurally impossible produced an embattled zone of gov-
ernance, a space of practices created but not contained by the state.
This sphere of governance was a peculiarly colonial space of political
practice created by sanitary regulations, measures to control epidem-
ics, the statistical representation and organization of the population,
and medical knowledge and tactics. Here, it is pertinent to refer to
Partha Chatterjee's essay in this volume and his concept of the "politi-
cal society," which he defines as a mediating space between the people
and the state. This mediating space is created by governmentality and
is founded on the idea of a population that, unlike civil society, is an
empirical and descriptive, not a normative, category. In British India,
Body Politic in Colonial India 205
the concept of population permitted the application of modern tech-
nologies on inhabitants who were otherwise seen as unfit for and in-
capable of reason and progress, thereby creating a space for practices
connecting the state and the people.
56
The Western-educated Indian elite was quick to recognize this
new space of mediation and sought to intervene by placing itself as an
agent of modern transformation. This was true even of those who
largely shared colonial representations of Indians such as Dr. S. G.
Chuckerbutty (Chakrabarty), a professor at the Calcutta Medical
College, and a respected figure in the bhadralok milieu. Speaking at
the Bethune Society in 1852 on the issue of sanitation in Calcutta, he
placed the entire mode of Indian living under scrutiny. Food, drink,
cooking, clothing, housing, drainage, sports, leisure activities, and in-
tellectual pursuitsall were examined from a sanitary point of view.
From this examination, he concluded that unlike Europeans, "East
Indians" were living examples of "the passive exercise of bodily and
mental powers." He illustrated these "passive" East Indians and their
"diseased habits" with pictures of the idle, "fat Zemindar," philoso-
phers so given to mental culture that they neglected even the most ele-
mentary bodily exercise, the half-clad Brahmin without gloves or
stockings, the dirty and damp dwellings, the open gutters and sew-
ers.
57
Such representations were directed at providing more reliable
and authentic information to facilitate the state's planning and imple-
mentation of sanitary policing of the population. They did not differ
in content from colonial disciplines, but insofar as they were descrip-
tions of "our countrymen" by Indians, they posited that the Western-
educated man would act as a mediating force between the state and
the people, that the elite would diffuse knowledges and practices with
which Indians would constitute themselves as modern subjects. Dis-
tancing itself from the "fat zemindar" and the ill-clad Brahmin, the
elite represented itself as an agent of modern transformation, as a
force that would assist the state and educate the people in the regula-
tion and improvement of the health of the population. When small-
pox, cholera, and plague epidemics raged between the iSyos and the
18908 in United Provinces and in Bombay and Madras Presidencies,
the elite swung into action to offer advice and relief.
58
The focus of its
effort centered on the body brought to light by colonial knowledge,
that is, a body manifested in filth, statistics, unhygienic habits, and su-
perstitious beliefs.
59
The elite incessantly highlighted and criticized the
206 Cyan Prakash
Indians' allegedly characteristic neglect of their bodies and their sup-
posed fatalism in order to diffuse "a knowledge of the laws of health"
without which municipal laws and sanitary reforms could not combat
epidemics.
60
The attempt to educate the "public" in health and hygiene, to dis-
seminate colonial disciplines as self-disciplines, however, could not
avoid the question of difference. Indeed, colonial governmentality was
founded on the notion that the body in India was a peculiarly complex
effect of the environment, habits, beliefs, and knowledges. The disci-
pline of "tropical hygiene" had arisen on the basis of this recognition;
British medicine in India, as Arnold suggests, was not simply the prac-
tice of Western therapeutics in a non-Western location but a peculiarly
colonial discursive formation.
61
The attempt to address Indian differ-
ence opened Western medicine to revision and reformulation, and a
debate broke out on the status of Western medicine in India. Dr. U. N.
Mukerji, a Bengali doctor, published a pamphlet in 1907, calling for
the establishment of a system of national medicine. Offering a tren-
chant critique of the practice of medicine in Bengal, Dr. Mukerji stated
that he was tempted to put an advertisement in the daily papers ask-
ing: "Wanted urgently a treatise on medicine, for treatment of Indians,
written by an Indian." Why was an Indian treatise needed? He ac-
knowledged that the "question may be asked if it is really necessary to
have medical books written by Indian doctors, seeing specially . . .
that a disease is a disease all over the world and remedy is a remedy
everywhere, just as a man is physically at least a man wherever he
is found." Declaring that "the truth lies exactly the other way,"
Dr. Mukerji went on to outline a number of differences between an
Englishman and a Bengali. Whereas the average pulse beat of an
English adult is 72. per minute, it is 80 for a Bengali; whereas the liver
of an Englishman commences two inches below the right nipple, the
Bengali's liver lies three and a half inches below. If such a Bengali were
to be examined in Britain, the diagnosis would be that he was suffer-
ing from the contraction of the organ.
62
Diseases differed, as did the
functions of organs in India. But colonial medicine, according to Dr.
Mukerji, failed to take this difference into account. Medical colleges
and English books in India produced an "endless regurgitation about
eastern apathy, dirty habits, and oriental custom and oriental preju-
dice."
63
These did not teach Indians medicine but trained them to
function as a class of medical subordinates to the British. Expressing
Body Politic in Colonial India 207
similar sentiments, Jadu Nath Ganguli's A National System of Medi-
cine in India (1911) described the Indian practitioner of Western medi-
cine as a "foreigner in his own land." He was aware of the limitations
of Western medicine, but he had no knowledge of either the medicinal
properties of plants in India or of ayurveda, which for centuries had
cured millions.
64
This is why India needed its own medical system,
which, unlike colonial therapeutics, could take into account the par-
ticular conditions and resources of the country.
The concept of "national medicine," however, emerged under the
shadow of colonial medicine's authority, and it sought to act upon a
body brought to the surface by the knowledges and practices of colo-
nial governmentality. For these reasons, it operated as a strategy of
reinscription, not rejection, of colonial therapeutics. Thus, Jadu Nath
Ganguli, in specifying a "system of medicine on national lines," did
not rule out allopathy but proposed its combination with homeopa-
thy, ayurveda, and yunani. While the call to include ayurveda and yu-
nani was an attempt to invoke Indian cultural resources, the enthusi-
asm for homeopathy challenged the supremacy of colonial medicine.
Both Western-trained doctors and non-medical men in cities took to
homeopathy, and pitted it against allopathic medicine. Its initial strong-
hold was in Calcutta, where its endorsement by Mahendralal Sircar in
the i86os engulfed medical practioners in a bruising debate. The con-
troversy was all the more fierce because Sircar had been trained in
Western medicine and was a well-known doctor and public figure in
Calcutta. Sircar did not reject Western medicine but held that because
the body was subject to different laws and conditions, the mode of
treatment must also be multiple.
65
But this did not satisfy his critics
in the colonial medical establishment, who saw his defense of home-
opathy as a betrayal and bitterly attacked him and his new cause.
Homeopathy overcame this bitter attack and struck roots among the
educated elite, profiting from the fact that its practice did not require
institutional apprenticeship and certification. Thus, educated middle-
class men, with varying degrees of training and expertise, took up the
practice of homeopathy either as full-time practioners or as part-time
charitable work. When epidemics broke out, they combined home-
opathy with ayurveda and Western medicine to formulate a system
that reinscribed colonial therapeutics.
66
Journals and newspapers pub-
lished health columns offering advice on topics ranging from epi-
demics to pregnancy and childcare.
208 Cyan Prakash
The reform of households, particularly women, received a promi-
nent place in the reinscription of colonial governmentality. In this
arena, the Arya Samaj was the most conspicuous in north India. From
its very inception, this religious and social reform movement had fo-
cused on women, setting them up as symbols of Vedic virtues and the
Hindu nation and establishing a regulatory ideal of conduct for them.
In addition to promoting female education, it published journals aimed
at women and directed at applying medicalized disciplines. One such
important journal aimed at women was Panchal Pandita, which start-
ed in 1897 as a bilingual English and Hindi periodical but became an
exclusively Hindi publication in 1901. It focused on diffusing modern
knowledge authorized by the invocation of the Vedas and regularly
published articles on healthy diet, cleanliness and hygiene, the care of
children, the follies of astrology, and other such topics.
67
This project to assemble a code of action for women extended be-
yond the Arya Samaj. Middle-class women themselves participated
actively in this project. An example was Yashoda Devi of Allahabad,
who ran an ayurvedic clinic along with her husband and was a prolif-
ic writer and publisher. She started a journal for women in 1908, fol-
lowed it up with two more in 1910, and started yet another in 1930.
68
She published a book in 192.4 that gives an ample sense of the nature
of governance aimed at women.
69
It concerned food and offered direc-
tions on cooking based on rules of health and hygiene, not taste. She
established the justification for the rules of health and hygiene by nar-
rating a fictional tale of a man who comes very close to death because
he took his meal at an improper time. The man's near-death provides
the basis for a dialogue between two women who, drawing lessons
from this incident, discuss the nutritional qualities of different kinds
of food and the rules to follow in cooking and managing the house-
hold. This dialogue on ill health caused by ignorance becomes the
grounds for outlining what constitutes proper Indian womanhood.
The boundaries between health, hygiene, morals, and social institu-
tions blur as instructions on preparing healthy food lead to the injunc-
tion that women must take full responsibility for maintaining the
health of the household. A responsible Indian woman, the text sug-
gests, rises early and takes charge of the household, prepares food ac-
cording to the laws of nature and season. She must not depend on the
servant who has no knowledge of the rules to be followed. In fact, the
servant's services should be dispensed with because these encourage
Body Politic in Colonial India 209
indolence and distract women from their responsibility. Disciplined
living requires total devotion of women to their responsibilities. No
sleeping late, no lazing about, no gossiping with neighbors after the
husband leaves for work and children have gone to school; make
the bed, bathe, cook the food appropriate for the season, look over
the household accounts, and perform other household chores. The
evening routine is more of the samecook, manage, and facilitate the
running of the household.
70
Yashoda Devi produced this extraordinary prescription for women
by seizing on the near-death of a Hindu male caused by the neglect of
the rules for nutrition by his wife. Curing the body, however, served
as the ruse for the formulation of rules and routines calculated to ren-
der the body useful, healthy, and productive. It was in this network of
rules and tactics directed at the body that there emerged a project to
reform the Hindu wife, to reproduce the gender hierarchy. As the
scrutiny and subjection of the body redeployed and renewed the fami-
ly, the medical gaze became inseparable from gender. The boundaries
between the two were crossed, and transgression became the site for
transforming both body and gender relations. There appeared a blue-
print for a modern middle-class Hindu family, imprinted on a body
anchored in gender hierarchy and disciplined by an economy autho-
rized by science.
What shaped the language and provided an arena for the reconsti-
tution of gender relation was the attention to governance, the concern
with the health of the population that developed during the second
half of the nineteenth century. The middle class debated the status and
relevance of Western medicine, homeopathy, ayurveda, and yunani
in its search to define what was appropriate for India. In this search,
a range of therapeuticssome new and some old and of different
provenancefound eager enthusiasts concerned to produce disci-
plined bodies. These included chromopathy (a system of therapeutics
based on colors), mesmerism, hypnotism, and mechanotherapy, and
were circulated widely among the middle class through the nineteenth-
century print culture.
71
Books, pamphlets, and newspapers frequently
advertised and discussed these systems, and the efficacy of different
patent medicines were items of urban middle-class conversations.
Such discussions were not always systematic and learned, and they did
not seriously threaten the dominance of Western medicine. But they
point to the importance the elite attached to defining an appropriate
210 GyanPrakash
therapeutics for India. For at issue in this definition was the body ma-
terialized by state institutions. Insofar as the body was produced as an
effect of knowledges and tactics, attempts to reinscribe colonial thera-
peutics were efforts to intervene in the relationship between the state
and the population. Nothing succeeded like excess as the elite pro-
duced a surfeit of therapies that exceeded and estranged colonial sci-
ence to delineate its own intervention on the body. These excesses and
transgressions did not negate colonial domination but sought to rene-
gotiate its terms to administer a nationalist remedy.
Sexuality and Ascetics
The strategy of receding colonial therapeutics could not stop at the
level of national medicine. To the extent that therapeutics formed part
of a set of practices concerned with specifying and regulating "India,"
the strategy of reinscription had to bring under its purview the entire
process of subject-formation. This meant not only interventions in the
field of medicine to outline medical knowledge and hygiene along
"national lines" but also the assimilation of indigenous forms of self-
subjection into the field of governmentality. Since the object was to
produce a national subject that was different at once from both the
"superstitious" and "ignorant" masses and "the foreigner in his own
land," the elite sought to identify an "Indian" rationality of gover-
nance. It was in this context that elite nationalism produced what
Milind Wakankar calls a "Hindu nationalist ascetics." At the center of
this effort to outline an "Indian" modality of governmentality was a
claim that one possessed a self, defined oneself in a body placed to
serve the nation.
72
The possibility for this strategic combination of the
"body-as-self" and "nation-as-ascesis" was produced by colonial gov-
ernmentality, but what elite nationalism attempted to identify was a
"national" mode of the governmental relationship between the body
and the body social. In this process, there emerged the idea of the
Hindu origin of the nation, expressed by men ranging from such
prominent nationalist writers as Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya in
Bengal to such powerful religious reformers like Swami Dayanand in
north India.
A sense of the "lack" of fullness in the nation's present animated
the notion of the origin. This lack was all too evident in colonial sub-
jugation, in the enfeebled state of the body, in its diseased condition
and unhygienic surroundings. An acute awareness of this deep chasm
Body Politic in Colonial India 211
drove the nationalists to search for a past when the nation was fully
present, when disciplines of self-subjection trained the body in the
service of the nation. But the "origin" erupted; it did not evolve into
the present. This structure of the origin as a "before" of the nation's
present permitted the assimilation of archaic Hindu disciplines of self-
subjection into the logic of modern governmentality; it enabled the
translation of the "inner," uncolonized space of tradition in the "outer"
language of colonial modernity. For the same reason, however, the
representation of the contemporary national self in the differential
sign of return and repetition of another time introduced a profound
uncertainty in the language of the mythic past and the organic Hindu
nation. The Hindu ascetics were always under pressure from "corrup-
tion" and error, always embattled and struggling to "restore" the
body to its "original" Hindu-national condition. It was through such
a pulsating, mobile, displacing deployment of Hindu signs that elite
nationalism acted on the medicalized, "corrupt," and enfeebled body
to render it healthy and Hindu-national.
The preoccupation with sexuality developed in the attempt to ex-
plain the weak state of the national body. The Western-educated elite
internalized the colonial representation of Indians as effete weaklings.
It was to transform this weak, disease-prone body that Gandhi had se-
cretly experimented with eating meat during his youth.
73
A body cul-
ture developed that was aimed at sculpting strong, vigorous physiques
and brought within its ambit traditional arenas of wrestling, gymnas-
tics, and sports.
74
Attention also turned to sexuality as several Indian
intellectuals argued India had fallen to foreign rulers because Indians
had been rendered weak and passive by their self-indulgence and by
their vulnerability to the seductions of sensual and materialist enjoy-
ment. Sharing these views, prominent late-nineteenth-century religious
reformers like Swami Vivekanand and Swami Dayanand advocated
the practice of sexual discipline as a means of national regeneration.
75
Relocating the texts and practices of Hindu traditions to act upon the
body, to sketch the disciplines of its self-constitution as a national sub-
ject, such prescriptions were widely disseminated in the middle-class
culture.
Consider, for example, the Hindi pamphlet, Arogya Vidhdn: Vid-
ydrthijivan1929), a book of advice focusing on sexual discipline. Its
author was Yashoda Devi, the woman we have met before as the au-
thor of journals and books directed at women. Aside from being an
212 GyanPrakash
author, she also ran a flourishing ayurvedic practice in Allahabad that
included a small hospital, with branches in Banaras, Patna, Muzaffar-
pur, and Gaya. While the practice specialized in the treatment of infer-
tility, her books and journals dealt with bodies gone awry because of
the neglect and loss of principles that she presented as scientific and
Hindu, and the purpose of these texts was to promote a nationalist
discipline of the body in order to restore its health. Like her middle-
class contemporaries, she was also troubled by the physical weakness
of Indians, by their self-indulgence and vulnerability to the seductions
of modern life. The text on sexual discipline was addressed to students
and offered advice on how to maintain healthy bodies and disposi-
tions. It began with a depiction of the physical weakness and sexual
diseases that she enountered commonly in her patients. Her female
patients complained of their husbands' weakness, of the lack of their
sexual desire and prowess.
76
The cause was masturbation, a practice
the men picked up as students when they read "dirty literature" and
fell into bad company. Such men not only produced weak offspring
but also infected their wives with venereal diseases. In addition to
hearing accounts of such men and treating them, she also encountered
the debilitating effects of this habit among young men. A twenty-year-
old son of a wealthy man wrote her that he had become forgetful, suf-
fered from dizziness, body ache, backache, and constipation. When she
began treating him, she learned that he had been masturbating since
the age of ten, not missing a single day. In addition, he often had wet
dreams, rendering him so weak that he dare not go near a woman.
This was a widespread condition among the youth, she argued. Many
young men had become so diseased by the habit that they no longer
had the capacity to be even near a woman, let alone have intercourse
with her. She combined the denunciation of masturbation with a blis-
tering condemnation of homosexuality, noting with regret that even
women had become victims to the habits of masturbation and homo-
sexuality.
77
Lost in sexual pleasure, Indians had destroyed themselves,
she declared.
This tirade against masturbation, homosexuality, and sensuality
was followed by the recommendation that young men follow bram-
hacharya. By bramhacharya she did not mean prohibition of sexual
intercourse but the preservation of sperm; men could have intercourse
for procreation, but they should not destroy their strength in mastur-
bation. The text proposed a set of rules to guide young men: Do not
Body Politic in Colonial India 213
think of women; do not listen to accounts of their beauty; do not try
to meet women, certainly not alone; do not read books that describe
women or recount love stories; do not consume garlic, onions, and
spices excessively, or smoke cigarettes because they contaminate the
sperm. The function of these rules of sociability and dietetics was to
teach young men to conserve their semen, to develop a celibate dispo-
sition.
78
The production of such a disposition was not a matter of just
the corporeal; it involved thoughts, reading, speech, and social rela-
tionships. Only when the relationship between men and women was
governed by bramhacharya, only when the strength of the corporeal
body was controlled and redeployed by the will of the spirit, could the
nation cease to destroy itself.
It is tempting to read the recommendation on brahmacharya as
the resurgence of tradition, and indeed Yashoda Devi extols it as a
practice authorized by traditions. Unlike classical texts, however, the
regimen of brahmacharya she proposed did not concern the religious
status or the life-cycle of the celibate, or his relations with the ritual
world of the community; rather, she posed brahmacharya in terms of
health.
79
Brahmacharya was dislocated from its classical context and
"repeated." In this process, tradition was made to speak the language
of health and treat the body as a constellation of not just ritual and re-
ligious signs but also medical facts.
This was also the case with Gandhi, who posited brahmacharya
as a matter of health: "Many are the keys to health, and they are
all quite essential; but one thing needful, above all others, is Brah-
macharya."'
80
This is not to say that he was unaware of the religious
significance of brahmacharya. On the contrary, he considered it a
practice necessary for spiritual self-control and self-realization that re-
stored human beings to their god-given natural state. But he also re-
garded sexual intercourse that did not have procreation as its aim as
deeply injurious to health. Sexual pleasure itself was evil. The differ-
ence of opinion among doctors over whether or not "young men and
women need ever let their vital fluid escape," according to him, could
not be used to j ustify sensual enjoyment. "I can affirm, without the
slightest hesitation, from my own experience as well as that of others,
that sexual enjoyment is not only not necessary for the preservation of
health, but is positively detrimental to it."
81
Brahmacharya signified
the purity of thought, a spiritual cleanliness that was just as essential
for the maintenance of health as clean air and water. This conception
214 Cyan Prakash
of health did not endorse modern Western medicine. Gandhi was a
well-known and outspoken opponent of modern Western therapeu-
tics, including vaccination and inoculation, and he advocated "natu-
ral" forms of treatment. But the regimen of sexual and dietary behav-
ior he proposed assumed the existence of the body as a site of medical
facts and tactics. Within this body, sexuality existed as an instinct.
Bhikhu Parekh notes perceptively that Gandhi viewed sexuality as an
impulse, not as a relationship, and had no conception of love that in-
cluded passion and sensuality.
82
Desire appeared as a physical instinct,
and brahmacharya represented the triumph of spiritual discipline, of
soul over "animal passion."
83
The suppression of sexual desire as a strategy for the recupera-
tion of enfeebled bodies applied to both men and women, but it was
profoundly masculinist. While women were also asked to restrain
their sexuality, the ideology of brahmacharya identified energy and
strength in the semen alone, and its discipline of restraints was de-
signed to conserve the vitality that the male body contained. Men
were to husband their semen with rigid self-discipline and transmit
it into energy and power.
84
Such a perspective had no conception of
sexual desire, let alone of women's sexuality. Despite Gandhi's wish to
overcome the male/female distinction and his self-representation as
"half a woman," he could not recognize female sexuality. He repre-
sented women in the desexualized image; they appeared only as moth-
ers, sisters, and wives whose pure conduct was to serve as a model for
men who possessed the "animal passion" for sex.
85
The feminine vir-
tues of chastity and purity were to be used in controlling the virile
male bodies, in conserving semen and transforming it into a source of
power and energy, and in achieving the self-control that Gandhi asso-
ciated with freedom. This set up a normative and regulatory bodily
discipline that excluded all but procreative sex as ideal.
This discourse represented the body in a "traditional" frame of
cultural intelligibility. Its attribution of power to semen and the rec-
ommendation of sexual restraints as a means of spiritual control and
energy reiterated ideas and norms contained in such ancient and au-
thoritative sources as Manu. These ideas on semen and the practice of
brahmacharya were formulated originally in a Brahminical context
and referred specifically to the lifecycle of Brahmin students. The
modern discourse of brahmacharya departed from this specific con-
cern with Brahmin students and generalized the practice of chastity as
Body Politic in Colonial India 215
a strategy for all Indians. Projecting Brahminical ideals as normative
principles for all Indians, it implied a deeply hierarchical vision of sexu-
ality, society, and religions. Importantly, this projection operated as a
strategy of receding the body, of reconfiguring governmentality along
national lines. We have to view this discourse in the same field as sani-
tation, hygiene, statistics, and therapeutics because, like them, it also
functioned as a tactic for forcing together the body-as-self and body
social. Like them, this discourse also fastened on the body as the locus
of the Indian self, found it weak, vulnerable, oversexed, and decaying,
and advanced the conservation of semen as the strategic national goal.
Body and Colonial/National Governmentality
To identify a certain intimacy between the plunge of Madhusudan
Gupta's knife and Gandhi's confessions of the flesh is to push Fou-
cault's concept of biopower beyond its Eurocentric frame and to rec-
ognize that the formation of modern subjects in the colonies was
necessarily embattled. Distortion and displacement, revision and rein-
scription were central to the political technology of the body because
it was obliged to operate in and rearticulate the colonial divide.
Thus, the operation of biopower in British India from the very be-
ginning was based on a strong sense of Indian difference and on a
deep awareness of the unbridgeable gap between the state and the
people. It was to bridge this unbridgeable gulf, to appropriate the
otherness of Indians that the British were driven to erect an elaborate
grid of knowledges and practices that sought to produce a colonial
complex of "men and things." Through sanitary regulations, statisti-
cal enumeration and representation, measures to control epidemics,
and colonial therapeutics, the state opened a vast new field of prac-
tices connecting it to the population. This field treated the body as a
complex configuration of effects of habits, habitation, race, climate,
topography, religious beliefs and cultural dispositions. Western medi-
cine, established in British India through such a combination of
knowledges and practices, achieved power and exercised influence on
the lives of the people, but there remained always an uncloseable gap
between state medicine and the colonized population. The necessary
failure of the British to achieve the object of producing self-subjecting
individuals incited Indian elites to intervene in this field. Mediating
between the people and the state, the elite sought to develop an
"Indian" modality of governance. This was never a matter of simple
216 GyanPrakash
negation of colonial governmentality, but its reinscription. Although
the nationalists represented their efforts as resistance to colonial domi-
nation, these are better understood as strategies of survival and hege-
mony that operated on the very body that colonial governmentality
made available. Through subtle practices of displacement, dislocation,
and repetition, through a contradictory combination of transgres-
sion and subordination, not demotic resistance, nationalism subverted
colonial governmentality and pursued its own program of the "wel-
fare of the population." Acting squarely within historical power rela-
tions, in the field of colonial modernity, the nationalist discourse inter-
vened in the same arena to deflect governmentality along different
lines. Such deflections took a range of forms, rendering the category
"India" uncertain and unstable. This was inevitable, for the elites at-
tempted to render India in terms that were alien; the "inner" sphere of
the nation was constituted in the shadow of the "outer." As the na-
tionalists advocated ayurveda, yunani, and brahmacharya as "Indian"
disciplines, they brought these into the field of operation created by
colonial governmentality. There, the nationalists, like the colonialists,
were confronted with objects that always threatened to slip out of
control, forever vulnerable to filth, "dirty literature," lust, and igno-
rance. Its disciplines of self-subjectification, therefore, were always
deeply hierarchical; they were poised constantly to identify and elimi-
nate the enemies of the nation. Formed on the borderlines of such po-
litical, social, and cultural differences, "India" emerged as a nation
fabricated at the site of its fissures, at once embattled and expansive.
Produced in the establishment of a governmental relationship between
the state and the people, a process in which nationalism shared a
proximity with colonialism, its modernity was disjunctive; it was
obliged to emerge both in the firing of the gun salute at Fort William
in 1835 and in Gandhi's century-later confession that he had failed to
conquer sexual desire. Between the two incommensurable framing
events, then, there arose a mode of governmentality that located the
modern Indian subject in the body and that formulated its norms by
normalizing alterity.
Notes
I am grateful to the participants at the conference on "Questions of Modernity" at New
York University, where this paper was first presented. In particular, I am thankful to
Uday Mehta, Timothy Mitchell, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Veena Das. I have also benefited
Body Politic in Colonial India 217
from criticisms and suggestions received at its subsequent presentation at Harvard
University, where Pratap Mehta, as usual, offered incisive and imaginative comments.
Milind Wakankar generously offered unusually detailed and thoughtful suggestions.
My colleague Gerald Geison's expert and vast knowledge of the history of medicine has
been invaluable. This is a slightly revised version of chapter 5, "Body and Govern-
mentality" in my book Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
1. M. K. Gandhi, Collected Works ofMahattna Gandhi (Ahmedabad: Navajivan,
1958), vol. 6^, 418 ff. Cited in David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and
Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 6.
2. Mahatma Gandhi, A Guide to Health, trans. A. Rama Iyer (Madras: S. Ganesan,
1930), 64-65.
3. Michel Foucauit, The History of Sexuality, vol. i: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 139-43-
4. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of
Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
5. Foucauit, The History of Sexuality, 142.
6. Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 9.
7. In specifying the history of Western medicine in British India, Arnold goes on to
suggest, correctly, that the colonial construction of the body entailed negotiation with
appropriated knowledges and subjects; the body as a site of power witnessed a range
of Indian responsesresistance, accommodation, participation, and appropriation
(Colonizing the Body, 10). But negotiations can hardly be said to have been restricted to
colonial locations; contestation and accommodation also characterized the history of
medicine in Western societies.
8. Michel Foucauit, "Governmentality," in The Foucauit Effect: Studies in Govern-
mentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991), 91.
9. Ibid., 99.
10. Ibid., 93.
11. Partha Chatterjee has called this displacement of liberal principles "the rule of
colonial difference." See his The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 18. David Scott's otherwise fine
essay, "Colonial Governmentality," Social Text, 43 (1995) ignores this peculiarity of
colonial governmentality, viewing it merely as the mode of the universalization of
modernity.
12. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 6-13.
13. During the early part of the nineteenth century, the British treated Indians as
part of the landscape, as creatures of its soil, drainage, water, climate, and diseases,
which they surveyed and distributed into distinct medico-topographical regions. Ani-
mated by the idea that India represented a unique environment, the colonial medical es-
tablishment concentrated its focus on identifying distinct health and disease regimes.
For further details, see Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 14-43.
14. Beginning with the late eighteenth-century Orientalist researches, the British
studied and translated classical texts, and investigated indigenous medical practices in an
effort to incorporate both indigenous medical knowledge and materia medica into
Western medicine. Although these were never considered equal to Western medicine, the
British believed that the examination of indigenous medical ideas, practices, and drugs,
conducted under their superior eyes, could yield elements useful for the development of
a therapeutic system suitable for India (see Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 43-50).
218 GyanPrakash
15. Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medi-
cine, 1859-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 61.
16. Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, vol. 19, pt. i, sess. 1863, Report of the
Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Sanitary State of the Army in India. On
the appointment and the work of this royal commission, see Arnold, Colonizing the
Body, 67-98, and Harrison, Public Health in British India, 60-66.
17. Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Sanitary State of the
Army in India, xxx, xxxii.
18. Typical in this respect was James Ranald Martin, a surgeon who became the
president of the East India Company's Medical Board and served as a member of the
Royal Commission on army sanitation. A proponent of climatological determinism,
he wrote bitingly about the sanitary habits of Indians and poured scorn on their medical
practices. See his Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta (Calcutta: Huttman,
1837), 24-18, 60, and The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions,
Including Practical Observations on the Nature and Treatment of the Diseases of
Europeans on their Return from Tropical Climates (London: Churchill, 1856).
19. Cited in Great Britain, Report on Measures Adopted for Sanitary Improvements
in India, from June 1869 to June 1870; Together with Abstracts of Sanitary Reports for
1868 forwarded from Bengal, Madras, and Bombay (London: HMSO, 1870), 40.
20. Initially, sanitary commissioners were responsible for the army and the civilian
population, but they were relieved of the charge for military hygiene after 1867. For
further details, see Harrison, Public Health in India, 9, 23-2.9, 76-82; Radhika
Ramasubban, "Imperial Health in British India, 1857-1900," in Disease, Medicine,
and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European
Expansion, ed. Roy Macleod and Milton Lewis (New York: Routledge, 1988), 38-60.
21. "Abstract of Report of Sanitary Commissioner for 1864," in Great Britain,
Memorandum on Measures Adopted for Sanitary Improvements in India up to the end
of 1867, 42.
22. J. A. Turner and B. K. Goldsmith, Sanitation in India, 2nd ed. (Bombay: Times
of India, 1917), 985-87.
23. Quoted in Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Sanitary
State of the Army in India, 370.
24. H. R. Tinker, The Foundations of Local Self-Government in India, Pakistan and
Burma (London, 1954), 74-75-
25. Cited in Edmund A. Parkes, A Manual of Practical Hygiene (London: Churchill,
1864), 563.
26. The Calcutta Fever Hospital and Municipal Enquiry Committee (1836-47), for
example, had drawn a grim picture of the sanitary state of Calcutta. The disposal of
night soil, for instance, involved its collection from private privies by mehtars, who
were responsible for conveying it to depots, from where it was taken to boats and car-
ried downstream and thrown into the river. An educated Bengali complained to the
committee that the mehtars "walk through the streets and high roads with baskets full
of stink on their heads" and that "when it happens to the lot of a person, who has j ust
made a hearty meal, to face before any one of these mehtars, it is needless to say how it
is felt by him" (cited in S. W. Goode, Municipal Calcutta: Its Institutions in their Origin
and Growth [Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1916], 169). In fact, only a small pro-
portion of the city's night soil was ever transported to boats; 90 per cent was thrown
into public drains.
27. See W. F. Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 71-77.
Body Politic in Colonial India 219
28. "Abstract of the Report of Sanitary Commissioner for 1864," 'n Great Britain,
Memorandum on Measures Adopted for Sanitary Improvements in India up to the end
of 1867, 41.
29. Following the commission's recommendation and the prevailing medical opin-
ion, nearly a sixth of British troops were relocated to the "hill stations" by the 18705,
and barracks were reconstructed to protect them from the effects of India's weather
(Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 78-79). The government followed these steps to isolate
and protect the troops from the supposedly diseased environment with others, such as
rationing the consumption of alcohol and enacting the Contagious Diseases Act in 1868
to permit the medical inspection, detention, and treatment of prostitutes (see Harrison,
Public Health in India, 71-76, and K. Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj:
Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics [London: Weidenfield and Nicolson,
1980], chs. 2 and 3).
30. Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Sanitary State of the
Army in India, 371; Great Britain, Memorandum on Measures Adopted for Sanitary
Improvements in India up to the end of 18671 together with Abstracts of the Sani-
tary Reports hitherto forwarded from Bengal, Madras, and Bombay (London: HMSO,
1868), 2.
31. Veena Oldenberg's The Making off Colonial Lucknow (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984), ch. 4, contains a persuasive account of the application of sani-
tary measures as an instrument of colonial control. She argues that unlike Britain,
where pauperism and squalor were viewed as the root cause of disease, the municipal
authorities in India paid scant attention to poverty; afflicted by a "curious myopia," the
British were never able to develop "a comprehensive long-range plan to drain and
cleanse the city" (142-43). Cf. J. B. Harrison, "Allahabad: A Sanitary History," in The
City in South Asia: Pre-Modern and Modern, ed. Kenneth Ballhatchet and John Harri-
son (London: Curzon Press, 1980), 167-95.
32. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990).
33. Parkes, A Manual of Practical Hygiene, xviii.
34. Notable in this respect was Joseph Ewart's A Digest of Vital Statistics of the
European and Native Armies in India (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1859). For an
analysis of Ewart's figures, see Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 67-68.
35. Cf. Ira Klein, "Death in India," Journal of Asian Studies 32 (1973), 632-59, and
"Urban Development and Death: Bombay City, 1870-1914," Modern Asian Studies,
20 (1986): 725-54.
36. The use of statistics is too widely present in colonial records to be singled out.
But, for some examples, see Government of India, Report of the Commissioners ap-
pointed to Inquire into the Cholera Epidemic of 1861 in North India (Calcutta, 1862);
"Abstract of Bengal Sanitary Report for 1865," in Memorandum of Measures Adopted
for the Sanitary Improvements in India up to 1867; the series Government of Bengal,
Report on the Calcutta Medical Institutions for the year 1871 . . . ; and Government
of Bengal, Report of the Commisioners Appointed under Section 28 of Act IV (B.C.) of
1876 to Enquire into Certain Matters connected with the Sanitation of the Town of
Calcutta (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1885).
37. Government of India, Proceedings of the First All-India Sanitary Conference
(Calcutta: Government Printing, 1912), Apps. n, 12, and 13.
38. For example, see James L. Bryden's Epidemic Cholera in the Bengal Presidency:
A Report on the Cholera of 1866-68, and Its Relation to the Cholera of Previous
Epidemics (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1869). Bryden, a surgeon
220 Cyan Prakash
in the army, served in the office of the sanitary commissioner. See also T. R. Lewis and
D. D. Cunningham, Cholera in Relation to Certain Physical Phenomena (Calcutta:
Superintendent of Government Printing, 1878).
39. The Report of the Commisioners appointed to Inquire into the Cholera
Epidemic of 1861 in North India used figures on meteorology, topography, and cholera
epidemics to argue that while there was an undeniable relationship between the disease
and the season of the year, cholera was neither caused nor communicated by the atmos-
phere; rather, human intercourse, it suggested, was responsible for the transmission of
the disease (199-205). For details on the struggle between miasma and contagion theo-
ries, see Harrison, Public Health in British India, 51-61, 99-116, and Arnold, Coloniz-
ing the Body, 189-98.
40. Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 195. Thus, Sir Leonard Rogers wrote two mono-
graphs that traced the connection between climate and epidemics, using the accumulat-
ed records on meteorology and diseases to formulate a system for predicting the out-
break of diseases. See his Small-Pox and Climate in India (London: HMSO, 1926), and
The Incidence and Spread of Cholera in India; Forecasting and Control of Epidemics
(Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1918).
41. Katherine Prior, "The Angry Pandas: Hindu Priests and the Colonial Govern-
ment in the Dispersal of the Hardwar Mela in 1892," South Asia 16, no. i (1993): 40.
42. "Abstract of the Fourth Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner with the
Government of India, 1867," in Report on Measures Adopted for Sanitary Improve-
ments in India during the year 1868, and up to the month of June 1869; together with
Abstracts of Sanitary Reports for 1867 forwarded from Bengal, Madras, and Bombay
(London: HMSO, 1869), 11-30.
43. Katherine Prior, "The Angry Pandas," 40-42. Prior argues that this intervention
was part of a larger transformation of religious fairs that occurred as a result of the
British conquest. The British disarmed the warrior ascetics, took over the policing du-
ties of the fair, and assumed its civil government, so that by the 18305 and the 18405 the
fair was "a shadow of its eighteenth-century self." Ironically, such measures eliminated
the cultural and political aspects of the Hardwar fair and rendered it into a purely reli-
gious event (2.6-32).
44. For more on the British confrontation with indigenous treatments of smallpox,
see Arnold, Colonizing the Body, ch. 3.
45. Government of Bengal, Report of the Smallpox Commissioners (Calcutta: Mili-
tary Orphan Press, 1850), 5,18, 31.
46. Ibid., 28-30, appendix, xxii.
47. Ibid., 54-55.
48. Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 141.
49. Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 202-03.
50. M. E. Couchman, Account of Plague Administration in the Bombay Presidency
from September 1896 until May 1897 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1897),
15-16.
51. Ibid., 5.
52. Government of Bombay, Supplement to the Account of Plague Administration
in the Bombay Presidency from September 1896 till May 1897, 5~9-
53. Aside from the famous Arthur Road Hospital incident in 1896, when nearly a
thousand mill workers attacked the hospital, "street tumults" were frequent because
Indians viewed quarantine and hospitalization with suspicion (P. C. H. Snow, Report on
the Outbreak of Bubonic Plague in Bombay, 1896-97 [Bombay: Times of India, 1897],
18). See also Arnold, Colonizing the Body, ch. 5, and I. J. Catanach, "Plague and the
Body Politic in Colonial India 221
Tensions of Empire: India, 1896-1918," in Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies,
ed. David Arnold (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 149-71.
54. Snow, Report on the Outbreak of Bubonic Plague, 18-19.
55. Ibid., 2.13.
56. Partha Chatterjee, "Two Poets and Death: On Civil and Political Society in the
Non-Christian World," this volume, ch. 2.
57. "A Discourse on the Sanitary Improvement of Calcutta, By Dr. Chuckerbutty,"
in Selections from the Bethune Society's Papers (Calcutta: P. S. O'Rozario and Co.,
1854), 52-53. Kanny Loll Dey (Kanai Lai Dey), also a doctor and a teacher at the
Calcutta Medical College, struck a similar theme in describing the Hindu body housed
in dwellings that were not far from being "little black holes," crowded, unclean, and
full of noxious air. See his Hindu Social Laws and Habits Viewed in Relation to Health
(Calcutta: R. C. Lepage and Co., 1866).
58. Gobind Chunder Dhur, The Plague: Being a Reprint of Letters Published in the
Indian Mirror for Allaying Popular Alarm and Conciliating the People to the Action of
the Authorities (Calcutta: Sanyal and Co., 1898), for example, advised the government
to practice moderation in its policies of segregating and hospitalizing plague victims
while asking "my own countrymen" to follow the advice of the health officer (2).
59. Thus, M. A. Mulraj's A Sanitary Primer: Being an Elementary Treatise on Per-
sonal Hygiene, For the Use of Indian Schools and General Public (Allahabad: Victoria
Press, 1879), one of several pamphlets of its kind, extolled the virtues of sanitary sci-
ence based on accurate facts on the population derived from the registration of births
and deaths (2).
60. M. L. Dhingra, The Science of Health for the Public in India showing how
health may be preserved, disease prevented, and life prolonged (Allahabad: Pioneer
Press, 1900), ii.
61. Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 9. On tropical hygiene, see Harrison, Public
Health in India, ch. z. Harish Naraindas' "Poisons, Putrescence and the Weather: A
Genealogy of the Advent of Tropical Medicine," Contributions to Indian Sociology
(n.s.), 30, no. i (1996): 1-35, is a particularly sharp study of tropical medicine, which
makes the important point that its colonial genealogy has to be understood in relation
to its rise after the acceptance of the germ theory.
62. U. N. Mukerj i, Medical Practice in Bengal (Calcutta: S. Lahiri and Co., 1907),
2-7.
63. Ibid., 38.
64. Jadu Nath Ganguli, A National System of Medicine for India (Calcutta: Beni
Madhav Ganguli, 1911), 2-3.
65. Mahendralal Sircar, A Sketch of the Treatment of Cholera (Calcutta: Anglo-
Sanskrit Press, 1870), iv. On Sircar's account of his conversion to homeopathy and the
controversy it generated, see Reminiscences and Anecdotes of Great Men of India, ed.
Ramgopal Sanyal (1894; rpr. Calcutta: Riddhi-India, 1984), 55-56.
66. For example, Prem Bihari Mathur's Plague-Panacea or a Pamphlet on Plague
and its Remedies (Agra: Damodar Printing Works, 1907) recounts how the author es-
tablished a dispensary to treat plague victims, using "Greek, Indian, and Homeopathic
systems of treatment" (46-56). Unlike state-sponsored sanitary primers, such as J. M.
Cunningham's A Sanitary Primer for Indian Schools (Lahore: Arya Press, 1882),
Indians commonly invoked homeopathy, ayurveda, and yunani. See B. B. BiswasHalf-
Hour with Plague (Calcutta: n.p., 1907), and Rai Bahadur Lala Baijnath, The Plague in
India: Its Causes, Prevention and Cure (Meerut: Vaishya Hitkari Office, 1905).
67. See, for examples, Panchal Pandita 4, no. i (November 15, 1900): 4; no. 3
222 Cyan Prakash
(January 15, 1901): 4; no. 4 (February 15, 1901): 4; no. 6 (April 15, 1901): 4; no. 7
(May 15,1901).
68. These are noted in Shaligram Srivastava, Praydg Pradeep (in Hindi) (Allahabad:
Hindustani Academy, 1937), 161.
69. Yashoda Devi, Grihini Kartayvashdstra, Arogyashdstra arthdt Pdkshastra (in
Hindi), 3rd ed. (Allahabad: Hitaishi Yantr laya, 1924).
70. Ibid., 47-66, passim.
71. Pandit Jwala Prasad Jha, Chrotnopathy or the Science of Healing Diseases by
Colours (Madras: Theosophical Book-Depot, 1912).
72. Milind Wakankar, "Body, Crowd, Identity: Genealogy of a Hindu Nationalist
Ascetics," Social Text 45 (Winter 1995): 46.
73. M. K. Gandhi, Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans.
Mahadev Desai (New York: Dover, 1983), 16-20.
74. John Roseselli, "The Self-image of Effeteness: Physical Education and National-
ism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal," Past and Present 86 (February 1980): 121-48.
75. Dayanand Sarawati, Satydrth Prakash, 44-45, 58-68.
76. Yashoda Devi, Arogya Vidhdn: Vidydrthi Jivan (Allahabad: Stree Aushadhalaya
Press), 2-4.
77. Yashoda Devi, Arogya Vidhdn, 17-18, 21-23.
78. Ibid., 43-47.
79. On the medicalization of brahmacharya, cf. Joseph S. Alter, "Celibacy, Sexu-
ality, and the Transformation of Gender into Nationalism in North India," Journal of
Asian Studies 53, no. i (February 1994): 45-66.
80. Mahatma Gandhi, A Guide to Health, 64.
81. Ibid., 70.
82. Bhikhu Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi's
Political Discourse (New Delhi: Sage, 1989), 183.
83. M. K. Gandhi, Self-Restraint v. Self-Indulgence (Navjivan: Ahmedabad, 1947),
63. This quotation comes from Gandhi's article in Gujarati published originally in 1924
and translated and republished in this collection.
84. Mahatma Gandhi, A Guide to Health, 65.
85. Cf. Bhikhu Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, 179-80, 182.
Contributors
Lila Abu-Lughod is professor of anthropology and gender studies at
Columbia University. She is the author of Remaking Women: Femi-
nism and Modernity in the Middle East and Writing Women's Worlds:
Bedouin Stories.
Dipesb Chakrabarty is professor of history and South Asian languages
and civilizations and a member of the Committee for the History of
Culture at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Rethinking
Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 and Provincializing Eu-
rope: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.
Partha Chatterjee is the director of the Centre for Studies in Social
Sciences, Calcutta. He is the author of, among other books, Nation-
alist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minne-
sota, 1986) and The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-
colonial Histories, and the editor of Texts of Power: Emerging
Disciplines in Colonial Bengal and Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of
the Indian Nation-State.
Veena Das is professor of sociology at the University of Delhi. She
is the author of Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on
223
224 Contributors
Contemporary India and Structure and Cognition: Aspects of Hindu
Caste and Ritual.
Nicholas B. Dirks is professor of anthropology and history and chair
of the anthropology department at Columbia University. He is the au-
thor of The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom and
the forthcoming Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Mod-
ern India and editor of Colonialism and Culture and In Near Ruins:
Cultural Theory at the End of the Century (Minnesota, 1998).
Timothy Mitchell is associate professor of politics and director of the
Hagop Kevorkian Center at New York University. He is the author of
Democracy and the State in the Arab World, Egypt in American
Discourse, and Colonising Egypt.
Stefania Pandolfo is associate professor of anthropology at the Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Impasse of the Angels:
Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory.
Cyan Prakash is professor of history at Princeton University. He is the
author of Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colo-
nial India and Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of
Modern India.
Index
Abdel-Malek, Anouar, 30 n.31
Abu-Lughod, Janet, 2
Abu-Lughod, Lila, 77, 87-114
Agency, 65
Algiers School: racism of, 132
Ambivalence: and modernity, 157
Amin, Samir 2, 27 n.2
Anderson, Benedict, 14, 15, 18-19, 29
n.17
Anderson, Perry, 4, 6
Appadurai, Arj un, 7, 17
Apu trilogy, 184-86
Arnold, David, 191, 217 n.l
Arrighi, Giovanni, 27 n.3
Babu, 168
Bairoch, Paul, 31 n.37
Barzakh, III
Bataille, Georges, 165 n.12; and capital-
ism, 161-63
Baudelaire, Charles, 166
Baudrillard, Jean, 5, 16
Bell, Daniel, 30 n.28
Benjamin, Walter, 14,126,153
Bennani, Jalil, 117
Bentham, Jeremy, 3, 29 n.l8
Bergson, Henri, 14
Berman, Marshall, 30 n.28
Bhabha, Homi, 13,15-16
Biography: contradiction in, 61; and
pedagogy, 60-61; representation of
compassion in, 57-58
Blackburn, Robin, 8
Blaut,J.M.,31n.37
Bloch, Ernst, 31 n.41
Body, 25-26, 190; colonization of, 191;
and desire, 189; and governmentality,
193, 215-16; history of, in India,
194-204; and modernity, in Bengal,
70; of the widow, 65-66
Bourgeois society: as civil society, 42
Brenner, Robert, 31 n.37
Brooks, Peter, 88
Capitalism: Caribbean origins of, 2, 8;
and colonialism, 161; and non-West,
2-3, 5, 8-12; and slavery, 3
Caste: in India, 150
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 49-86
Chatterjee, Partha, 35-48,165 n.3,168,
217 n.l 1; critique of, 151; concept of
political society, 164, 204; on domes-
ticity, 160
Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra, 35
225
226 Index
Chess Players (Shatranj ke Khilari), 156
Chraibi, Driss, 118-21,127,142-43
Cinema: experience of, 172-75; and
identity, 167,176; and modernity,
166-87
Civil society: concept of, 41, 42; and
modernity, 40, 42; and nationalism,
44; outside of, 43
Clifford, James, 30 n.33
Colas, Santiago, 29 n.25
Colombani, Dr. Jules, 131,136
Colonialism, 82; and biopower, 190-91;
and capitalism, 9-11; in films of
Satyajit Ray, 155-58; identity and race,
5; and kingship, in India, 163; and
modernity, 168; and sanitation,
195-98; and widowhood, 50
Colonial modernity, 82,190,191: in
Bengal, 62, 70-75, 82; and civil society,
44; in India, 164
Commensurability, 129
Commodities: as representations, 21-22
Compassion: and personhood, 60; and
subject of Enlightenment, 51-56; in
writings of Rammohun Roy, 54
Connolly, William, 63
Cooper, Fred, 30 n. 34
Crawford, Robert, 28 n.13
Creoles, 4
Critics, feminist, 111 n.24
Culture: estrangement from, 125-26;
nostalgia for, 153; and traditional
therapy, 130-37
Das, Veena, 166-88
Datta, Kalyani, 49, 62, 79
De Certeau, Michel, 144 n.14
Derrida, Jacques, 12,21, 32 n.51, 33
n.78
Desire: in Bengali literature, 71; and do-
mesticity, impossibility of, 188 n. 18;
and gender, in cinema, 175-76
Devi, Yashoda, 208-9,211-12,213,222
nn.69, 76
Dews, Peter, 34 n.80
Difference: and interpretations of sympa-
thy, 60; and modernity, 23-24, 26; two
registers of, 26
Dirks, Nicholas B., 148-65
Dirlik, Arif, 32 n.50
Disavowal: of the West, 123
Domesticity: in Bengal, 65
Domination: and culture, 153
Drescher, Seymour 31 n.37
Economy, the, 19
Emotion, 92, 97; and epic, 99; and indi-
vidual subject, 101; and television, 89
Empire: security and public health,
194-98
Epic: of Abu Zayd al-Hilali, 97-100,
107-8. See also Narrative, popular
Epidemics: and colonialism, 200-204
Family: concept of, 41, 43; in India, 43;
and widows, 80
Femininity: and modernity, 167; spheres
of, 170
Feminists, 90, 94
Feudalism: in films of Satyajit Ray,
157-58
Fiction: and subjectivity, 74
Film, popular: and female voice, 170-76
Foucault, Michel, 3, 7,110 n.10,113
n.41, 217 nn.3, 8; and biopower,
189-91; and colonial modernity, 13;
critique of, 5-6; and genealogy, 82; and
governmentality, 192; and non-West,
15-16; and population, 43; and repres-
sive hypothesis, 77; and technologies
of self, 95
Frank, Andre Gunder, 2, 8
Gandhi, Mahatma, 217 nn.l, 2, 222
n.73: and desire, 189; and self-control,
213; and sexuality, 214
Gaze, the: and cinema, 173,179
Gender: and cinema, 166-87; and nation-
alism, 168; and the veil, 174; and
voice, in cinema, 183. See also Women
Genre, 92, 97
Ghatak, Ritwik, 179; and modernity,
181-84
Gibson-Graham, J. K., 31 n.49
Gilroy, Paul, 3
Governmentality: and the colonial state,
192-94
Gran, Peter, 27 n.4
Greatness: humanization of, 40
Grief: as sacred, 36
Index 227
Hacking, Ian, 198, 219 n.32
Harvey, David, 5, 22
Heidegger, Martin, 33 n.70
Hero: middle class, in cinema, 174
Hilmiyya Nights, 90
Historicity, 129
History: concept of, 7-12,15; and
memory, 148-49
Hobsbawm, Eric, 29 n.19
Hodgson, Marshall, 7, 30 n.35
Home: and tradition, 168-70
Hospital: psychiatric, in Morocco, 140-42
Hriday (heart): and compassion, 57
Hume, David, 52; and definition of pity,
56
Hysteria: diagnosis of, 147 n.43
Identity, 118-19; of Arab self, 122-23;
religious, 90
Igert, Maurice, 133-35
India: political history of, 149,161; and
political theory, 41-46
Indian National Congress, 46
Individual: construction of, 89; and inte-
riority, 63; and melodrama, 94, 99;
and personhood, 95. See also Subject
Interiority: representation of, in litera-
ture, 66-75; representation of, in soap
operas, 99; and specificity, 109
International, the: as concept, 4
Islam: and television, 107
Jameson, Fredric, 5, 16,29 n.25
Kapur, Geeta, 181, 184: critique of
SatyajitRay, 186
Kaviraj, Sudipta, 168-69
Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 119
Kheiry, Wafiyya, 90
Kinship, 92,105: and modernization, 96;
and sentiment, 81
Krtrimatd (artificiality), 36-37
Lacan, Jacques, 117
Laclau, Ernesto, 11, 31 n.49
Laforgue, Rene, 133
Laqueur, Thomas, 84 n.37
Laroui, Abdallah, 122-28,142
Latour, Bruno, 34 n.79
Lefebvre, Henri, 22
Le passe simple, 118-21,127
Les therapies traditionnelles, 128-31
Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 131
Lewis, Martin W., 30 n.35
Liberalism: history of, 3,4
L'ideologie arabe contetnporaine, 122-28
Life stories: and melodramas, 102-4
Literature: and expression of suffering,
66-75
Love, romantic: in literature, 67-75
Lutz, Catherine, 112 n.25
Lyotard, Jean-Franc.ois, 5
Macpherson, C. B., 63
Mahal (Palace): reading of, 170-76
Mani, Lata, 82 n.3
Manuals: Arabic, on medicine and magic,
138,147 n.44
Map: use of, in cinema, 176,179,
180-81
Marx, Karl, 2,4; and citizenship, 63;
concept of commodity in, 21; and his-
tory, 9-12; and idea of force, 10-11;
on origins of capitalism, 9-12
Masculinity: and modernity, 167; views
of Ashis Nandy on, 159
Mass media, 21
Mauss, Marcel, 161
Medicine, colonial, 3, 25; and Indian
elite, 205-7; Indian responses to, 217
n.7
Mehta, Uday, 3
Melancholia: and modernity, 121-26,
143,170
Melodrama, 92; and emotion, 92-96;
identifying with, 101-4; and mo-
dernity, 88-89, 92, 96; and self-
construction, 102
Memmi, Albert, 30 n.31
Memory, 77
Metropolis: and modernity, 168
Mimicry, colonial, 150
Mintz, Sidney, 2, 8
Mitchell, Timothy, xi-xxvii, 1-34, 64
Modernism: concept of, 6
Modernity, 24, 64,158; alternative, 24,
166; Baudelaire's definition of, 166;
and gender, 169,181,186; and non-
West, 23-24, 27, 47,166; and peda-
gogy, 38; and representation, 16-24,
228 Index
27; and space, 13-16, 22, 26-27; stag-
ing of, 23, 26; wounds of, 175. See
also Colonial modernity
Modleski, Tania, 95
Morality, 91, 92; and melodramas, 90;
and television, 89
Mourning, 128; for the past, 125-26
Mufti, Aamir, 30 n.31
Mughal-e-Azam: reading of, 176-81
Music Room (Jalsaghar), 148,151
Naming: and gender, in cinema, 180
Nandy, Ashis, 165 nn.8, 10; and gender,
158-59,168-70
Narrative, popular, 96. See also Epic
Nation, 91, 92; and autobiography, 167,
187 n.6; citizenship and kinship, 89;
and community, 90, 106, 176
Nationalism, 4, 93; and the body, 210-15;
as elite discourse, 45; and Hindu as-
cetics, 210-15; and modernity, 168
Nightingale, Florence, 196,197
Nostalgia: ambivalence of, 155; in films
of Satyajit Ray, 163
Novel: and depiction of widows, 66
O'Hanlon, Rosalind, 32 n.50
Pandolfo, Stefania, 115-47
Past: cinematic construction of, 179; and
memories of widowhood, 51
Patronage: history of, 149
Peacock, James, 108
Personhood, 93; and interiority, 94; and
kinship, 96; and modernity, 20-21, 90,
95. See also Subjectivity
Physical culture: emergence of, in India,
211
Pierson, Carl Antoine, 132
Poetry, 96, 97; and emotion, 100
Political society, 41; definition of, 43; as
site of mediation, 46
Population: and civil society, 44; concept
of, 43, 204-5
Porot, Antoine, 131
Postmodernism: concept of, 1, 6,16,17,
19-20
Practices: of the self, 81-82
Prakash, Cyan, 3, 25, 30 n.32,189-222
Psychoanalysis, 129; and the modern
subject, 63; postcolonial, 135-37, 139
Public, the: in writings of Rabindranath
Tagore, 37-38
Public health: resistance to, 203
Public sphere, 39
Purity: problem of, 66-75
Rabinow, Paul, 28 n.9
Race: and modernity, 13
Rakto (blood), 152
Ray, Satyajit, 151; conservatism of, 153;
and modernity, 184-86; re-reading of,
154-60
Reality: effect of, 17-18, 33 n.79
Reason: and compassion, 54, 56; and
general suffering, 52; universal-public,
63
Recognition: and suffering, 52
Religion, 92; and citizenship, 63; and
Islam, 91, 92,105,106; and modern
subjectivity, 79; and secularism, 111
n. 18; and self, 106
Representation, 25; and modernity,
16-24
Respectability: middle class, Bengali, 65
Roy, Rammohun: and social reform,
52-55
Rule, colonial: master narratives of,
149-57. See also Colonialism
Said, Edward, 3
Sati, 54-55
Science, medical: in India, 189. See also
Medicine, colonial
Self. See Subject; Individual
Sen, Nabinchandra, 35-36, 48: and pub-
lic sphere, 39
Sexuality, 75: critique of Foucault,
190-91; and governmentality, 210-15
Simmel, Georg, 168
Slavery: and capitalism, 8
Smith, Adam, 52; and theory of sympa-
thy, 56
Smith, Robert, 167
Soap opera, 89,108
Social sciences: logic of, 79
Society: and compassion, 54; and the
individual, 37
Index 229
Sovereignty: and Bataille, 162; and pa-
tronage, 160
Spivak, Gayatri, 5, 29 n.27, 31 n.49
State: and governmental technologies, 46;
in India, 45; and welfare, 46-47
Statistics: and colonialism, 198-200
Stoler, Ann, 4, 7, 13, 30 n.34, 217 n.4:
critique of Foucault, 5-6, 190
Subject, 62, 95, 190; Arab, 127, 128;
archive of, 75-82; Bengali, of moder-
nity, 81; collective, of Bengali-modern,
77-78; constitution of, through melo-
dramas, 104; disembodied, history of,
63-64; postcolonial, in Morocco,
129-30. See also Individual
Subjectivity: in Egypt, 96; and nostalgia,
186; postcolonial, 105-9; and reason,
56-57, 64; and traditional therapy,
137, 138
Suffering: and the disembodied subject,
52; and modernity, 49; and psychiatry,
140-43; of widows, 49-50
Sugar production, 2, 8
Sympathy: man's capacity for, 52; as gen-
eralized principle, 59. See also
Compassion
Tagore, Rabindranath, 35, 36, 67,151;
deification of, 47-48; and
Enlightenment, 44; and gender, 168;
and public sphere, 37-39
Taylor, Charles, 40
Technology: of the self, 89
Television: Egypt, 87-114
Temporality, 143; of modernity, 7-8; per-
spectives on,128
Theory, postcolonial, 164
Therapy, traditional: dialogue with,
130-37
Time: as ghost of space, 14; and Indian
cinema, 166-87; lag, in Arab con-
sciousness, 124; and memory, 152. See
also Temporality
Tradition, 166; and civil-social institu-
tions, 45; and critiques of modernity,
161; in films of Satyajit Ray, 155-58;
as interiority, 168-70
Trouillot, Rolph, 13
'Ukasha, Usama Anwar, 90
Vidyasagar, Iswarchandra: and social
reform, 52, 55-56
Violence: and modernity, 184
Viswanathan, Gauri, 28 n.13
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 2
Washbrook, David, 32 n.50
Widow: figure of, in Bengal, 49; as mod-
ern subject, 62, 64-66
Wigen, Karen E., 30 n.35
Williams, Eric, 30 n.37
Williams, Raymond, 94,112 n.27
Winichakul, Thongchai, 26
Women: disappearance of, 176,181; in
films of Satyajit Ray, 159; and govern-
mentality, 208-9; and soap operas, 95.
See also Gender
Work, cultural: financing, 154. See also
Patronage: history of
World-as-picture, 18-19
Writing: practices of, in Bengal, 76
Zamindar: representations of, 48