The Modern, the Untimely, and the Planetary

Abstract

This essay is a critical homage to Ranajit Guha, who passed away recently in his hundredth year. Through a rereading of Guha's bilingual oeuvre—including his later writings in Bengali—the essay explores Guha's rethinking of time as he started with Marxism, moved to a critique of historicism, then to a disavowal of history, on to postcolonial criticism, and ultimately to a cosmopolitical stance. It suggests that Guha's most important contribution to global critical theory is not his historiographical achievements but his unique phenomenology of time. Mobilizing both modern and nonmodern semiotic, grammatological, and aesthetic traditions, Guha reconceived time as a function of the limits and possibilities of human language and argued that common lives and subaltern subjects could not be accessed without admitting to the heterogenous temporal constitution—“time-knots” as he would call them—of the contemporary. Thinking with Guha helps us make the general argument that emancipatory politics demands a radical reopening of the question of time and a stepping aside of the framework of modernity—an argument that other erstwhile Subaltern Studies authors such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee have recently made. The essay understands Guha's century-long political and intellectual journey as a metonym for our times, marked by an agonistic and unpredictable interplay of multiple pasts, losses, emergences, and futures.