The Place of India in Postcolonial Studies: Chatterjee, Chakrabarty, Spivak

Abstract

The prominence of postcolonial studies in academia today is belied by persistent misunderstandings over its aims. The reasons for this are too various to be treated here, but what follows is a brief list of charges: that postcolonial studies caricatures Enlightenment reason; that it embraces nativism and identity politics; that it dresses political resentments in academic language; that it is a watered-down, depoliticized form of anticolonial thinking; that it is obsessed with nineteenth-century colonial institutions to the neglect of current forms of political and economic domination; that it is a tool of self-promoting immigrant academics. In this essay I do not respond directly to these allegations but will attempt to lay some of them to rest by exploring what I take to be the animating question of postcolonial studies: whether it is possible for formerly colonized or underdeveloped peoples to articulate a creative, that is, textured, response to the institutions of modernity. I argue that recent scholarly writing on India teaches us how to think about this fundamental issue, and will demonstrate that it holds valuable insights for those of us who are students of places other than India. Elaborating Indian history and cultural politics, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, and Dipesh Chakrabarty are among the most influential of those scholars who have generated the style of thinking called postcolonial. To help us understand this term as it has come to be associated with these scholars, we might begin by distinguishing post colonial from the term anticolonial Anticolonial thought refers to forms of ideology critique that expose as false the colonizer's claim that colonial values are properly enlightened or universal. Postcolonial thought is a reflection on the categories and reflexes through which anticolonial resistance takes place. Postcolonial thought asserts that anticolonial resistance tacitly reproduces the culture and values of imperialism. A good example of this, it is argued, is elite anticolonial nationalism, where native elites (for example, Nehru or Sukarno) criticized their masters while reproducing colonial norms and schemata to articulate their po litical and economic goals.