January 19, 2003

Ranajit Guha’s contributions to historiography and historical research are beyond dispute. His essays on subaltern history have opened up new horizons and created a sub-field that is both critical, inspired and inspiring. His lectures in New York published in this book will now establish him as a postmodern philosopher of history as well.

It is to Guha’s credit that he chooses to confront an intellectual giant of Hegel’s stature in order to present an alternative to world history. Guha’s rigorous critique of Hegel is all the more impressive as he leads us through a fascinating deconstruction (and ultimately destruction) of ‘... the representation of the colonial past held in thrall by a narrowly defined politics of statism’.

A further fascinating aspect of Guha’s treatment is his contrast between Hegel’s approach and the approaches developed in South Asia. He draws upon several important sources from the South Asian antiquity — Ramayana, Mahabharata and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad in particular. He also draws from Tagore and by extension from a critical understanding of the imposed colonial modernity in the Indian subcontinent under the British rule.

Long before his death, in various essays on history and biography (on Rammohan Roy, Bhaaratbarsher Itihaash etc. among other pieces) Tagore had already expressed his profound dissatisfaction with the standard histories and historiography. In his poem “Bhaasha o Chondo” (Language and prosody) he has the sage Narada advise the awestruck poet Valmiki who is instructed to compose the epic Ramayana:

Shei shotto ja rochibe tumi/ ghote ja ta shob shotto nohe.

(What you compose will be true/ not everything that happens is true)

Guha focuses on a different text, but the position he ascribes to Tagore was an aspect (among others that were at times contradictory) that seems to have been present consistently throughout his mature creative life. Tagore’s critique of the state-centric historiography and thus by implication the Hegelian “prose of history” could not have been more original, sincere or apt.

Guha’s presentation of this facet of Tagore to the English language readers is, in itself, a great service to critical understanding of the “East” and to the self-reflection and self-understanding of the colonial and post-colonial subject.

Another figure whom Guha does not discuss, but who through his life, political acts and poetry projects the same revolt — only at times even more forcefully than Tagore — is Nazrul Islam. The songs of Bauls such as Lalan Fakir, and of mystics such as Kabir, also can be viewed as a rather direct, soulful and spontaneous expression of a native historicality in everyday life.

Thus many sources in South Asian tradition support Guha’s position. Their very subjectivity and directness transcend the ignorant profundities of the Hegelian world history.

Guha’s third lecture has the dual title, “The prose of history, or the invention of world history”. The word invention, the Hegelian distinction between historia rerum gestae and res gestae, and Hegel’s claim that the two meanings unite in the German word Geschichte, reveal the cunning steps by which world history finally emerges at the hand of the old master.

In his fourth lecture, Guha also points to European novelization as the narrative of experience and contrasts its claims to “realism and vraisemblance” with the listener-initiated ‘tales within tales, relays of many voices’ in the Mahabharata. The setting of the telling of this tale, the interaction between the narrator and the audience leads one gradually to a conversational exercise where the kathaayoga proceeds as the main connoisseurs act as interlocutors and an explicit dialogical principle seems to be at work.

It is thus that provenance makes for a clear distinction between the two paradigms: in the west the narrative issues from the narrator’s initiative, in South Asia from the listener’s. This corresponds to yet another set of distinctions that bear critically upon the question of experience. Its primacy in the long European tradition of storytelling from the Hellenic history to the modern novel is conspicuous by its absence in the Indian case. Here it is a certain distance between the narrator and the event rather than the immediacy of any personal experience that makes up the story for Itihaasa.

Closely related to the Indian narratology (or rather an anti-narratology) is the idea of wonder. By identifying Itihaasa with a heightened sense of wonder Guha brings to light the capacity of the “...language to illuminate what is unusual about the usual in everyday life.” Thus he finally manages to establish the historicality of everyday life. The playfulness and contentment of the tale of wonder is contrasted with the seriousness and heroic strivings of world history.

Not appreciating this crucial difference, many colonial subjects themselves may have been misled into a futile deconstructive gesture of privileging the other side, as Derrida claimed could and should be done. Perhaps in a tragi-comic repetition of neurotic compulsions, “historicality has shrewdly assimilated itself to the [world history’s] mode of self-representation as historiography”. Such compulsions have constrained the intellectuals of the “peoples without history” who had only recently been admitted to world history, to emulate the statism of their European mentors.

These European mentors were all men whose mentality was one of imperial superiority towards the colonized. As W.E.B. Dubois so insightfully remarked once in the African context that relationship is also one of a male-centred white world looking at the subjugated “feminine” coloured people. Tagore’s own attitude has been described as feminine by some perceptive critics. His valourization of everyday experience certainly reveals a domestic quality that paradoxically can give a freer play to the imagination than the male-dominated statist historical fantasies of Hegelian inspiration.

Therefore, the prose of history and historiography turn out to be really ‘his story’ — a “rational” reconstruction of male fantasies, myths, delusions of grandeur and illusions of heroism. The heroic mode, on the other hand, is the kind of ‘his story’ that leads many a young man to his doom.

Guha’s expression, “the pathos of exclusion” is exactly right, as is his spirit of autocritique. At the end, the book stands out as an honest attempt to come to terms with the logic and pathos of such exclusion. Like a nightmare from which we, the colonial subjects are trying to awaken, history stands as both a trap and a bridge.

Tagore’s own solution was to individualize everyday events through an exercise of one’s own (feminine) creative spirit. That road is still open to us. But what are the political-social-economic conditions under which this becomes a possibility for all? It is perhaps not just naive romanticism to think that only through authentic acts of intellectual and political revolts — individually and collectively — we make ourselves historically human. This means asserting our creative spirit against the dead hand of oppression. Guha has been one of those rare creative spirits whose works continue to light our path towards this common historical humanity by honestly exploring our historical differences.

History at the limit of world-history
By Ranajit Guha
Columbia University Press, New York
ISBN 023112418X
x+116pp. $13.50

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