Session 7 - AT - Shahid Amin

I think Shahid Amin launches one of the most vociferous critiques of the Colonial judicial system. He shows the entire language of the trial is constructed in a way which allows the prosecutors to find the defendants guilty; but not only that, he shows how this narrative is based on a 'fiction' that is developed by the Approver. It is very interesting to see how Shahid Amin points out the context in which the Approver spoke and this allows us to construct a new narrative of the trial which took place.

But I think Shahid Amin's piece is pointing towards something more fundamental and one of these things we already encountered in Trouillot and that is; the notion of the 'rules of the Game'. I think Shahid Amin is able to show even when the Subaltern is allowed to speak, he has to speak in a constrained environment, governed by the rules of the Game. For example, the Approver would not have been given three weeks in the court unless he said exactly what the police and the prosecutor wanted him to say; (the fact that his preparation by the police and the prosecution should have barred him from making any testimony shows another critique of the judicial system). But I think he hints towards this that even if a person was allowed to speak in court, his speech would necessarily be constrained by the 'rules of the game'. He/She for example, would not be allowed to speak about what 'motivated' their crime, as we discussed with regards to Guha's death. Also, I think this shows how Power is involved throughout all processes of the making of the archive; in this case, the fact creation.

Another point that Shahid Amin makes is, I think of supreme value. He says that AT is read as a text that has no context. I think not only is this a critique of the judicial system but there is more here. 1. As Shahid Amin also points out, the impulse of the legal system is to make totalities out of fragments and I think that too depends on an a-contextual reading of the fragments. To my mind, power depends on taking things out of their context and to fashioning them into a narrative that favors it. For example, Trouillot points out that with regards to the Cloumbus narrative, the same thing happens. His figure is taken out of context to create a narrative; for the benefit of Americans or Spanish or the Europeans in general. The point being, perhaps one of the best ways of countering power is to simply try and contextualize the text (in the broadest sense of the word) Power ( however we understand it) is reading to makes it own narrative. 2. In the same vein, Shahid Amin also shows the value of establishing pre-history of the event for the Legal system. I think that this again shows that for power, creating one narrative which ties everything together is of utmost importance or what Amin calls the Master narrative. Perhaps, another strategy of tackling power (and now I'm responding to the question posed in the last class about strategies for recovering voices) is to simply challenge the 'Master narrative' - to show that there are breaks within it; that it is not a clean, linear story.

Lastly, I think that Trouillot is significant in understanding what is happening with the legal discourse. Amin talks about the fact that the primary act of the Judicial discourse is to make sure that the event is identified as 'criminal' and not that of a 'political nature'. Trouillot points towards the 'formulas of banalization' by use of which, the actions of people are seen as banal and not out of the ordinary - criminal rather than a political movement. The same point was also seen in Guha's 'Prose of Counter-Insurgency. I see Amin's article as showing the structural processes in action which Trouillot pointed out. This again goes back to what was said earlier; perhaps the only strategy available to the Historian is to point out that the what is classified as Banal and dismissed is in fact, not that at all.

It is also interesting to note that how across the two context in which Amin and Trouillot are writing, the operations of silencing certain voices seem to be similar if not the same. Maybe there are structural similarities as Trouillot pointed out.

Session 6: Silencing the Past

In his book, Silencing the Past, Trouillot lists in detail the limitations of history as a discipline. He uses the example of factions between the Haitian revolutionaries who ousted the French. In the nationalist narrative of the Haitian revolution, this fratricidal struggle has not just been neglected, but effectively erased. He makes an important argument for the subjectivity of every historian. History works like a narrative. If you use the vantage point of a certain person, you automatically disclude everyone else. More problematically, when you look at an event through the lens of your purpose, e.g. look at the Haitian revolution to retrieve its glory for a nationalist discourse, you automatically disclude every detail that does not serve that purpose [“Narratives are necessarily emplotted in a way life is not. (pg. 6)”]. This is perhaps the greatest limitation of the discipline of History, in my opinion.

Another important point he makes is outlining the constructivist’s approach using the example of the Holocaust. He says there should be a distinction between your political and scholarly responsibility, however, because the stakes are often so high with political responsibility, authentic scholarship loses out.

On the matter of sources, he exposes the bias of the most innocent source. He claims that we all remember things in relative importance to the trajectory our life takes. This is an extremely important idea which alludes to an inherent bias in sources, that should be dealt-with with caution. And then, to retrieve a collective memory is even more problematic because it is weighed down by methodological individualism. In relevance to writing of the subaltern and its limitation he notes that a key pitfall is linking a consciousness to the subaltern that does not exist. He says: “a strike is a strike, only if the workers think they are striking.” Furthermore, the subaltern not only has a sense of time that does not comply with modern standards, but they do not base new facts, on previously held facts, a basis of the discipline of History, and so their ‘facts’ are considered invalid.

He then uses the example of Sans Souci to demonstrate the limitations of History. His methodology is simplistic. He makes a point and explains it with examples, thereby cautioning us against a limitation, never telling us a way to work over it, perhaps because there is no way. He does not reprimand long dead writers for their lack of political correctness that conforms to our times, but cautions us against it. Slavery, in their accounts, stands for everything but slavery. Thus, Trouillot’s book is a cautionary tale of the many pitfalls a historian can fall into.

Silencing the Past

Trouillot in the preface beautifully notes how how learned that "anyone anywhere with the right dosage of suspicion can formulate questions to history with no pretense that these questions themselves stand outside history". This is an important theme highlighted in session 1 that can implications for the methodology of History as a discipline. He goes on to further add that "We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be, but if we stop pretending we may gain in understanding what we lose i false innocence".
A major theme that the reading highlights is the difference between the sociohistorical process and the knowledge of that process and how the boundaries between these two are often blurred. The tripartite structure of words, concepts and theory is an interesting conceptual tool in this regard.
Trouillot quotes Tzveta Todorov suggesting that there is nothing new even in the claim that everything is an interpretation, except the euphoria that now surrounds the claim. Can the same be now said of Subaltern studies as a discipline?
"The past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here". This once again connects to the discussion in the first session regarding the project of history writing: knowing about the past to understand the present and "predictions" about how the future would be shaped.

Translating Silences

        Translation is not only the act of rendering something from one language to another. It is the act of conveying something in a way that it is comprehensible while realizing the rendition is incomplete. It is a salvaging something as well accepting its loss. It is a work of remembering and a work of mourning. But how does one translate silences—that which is untranslatable to begin with? Since silences are “inherent to the creation of sources and archives” (Trouillot), the act of writing history is taking the position of pastness to tell a story which works with archives and sometimes the “bottomless silences” within archives.

         Subaltern histories too can be seen as translating silences and thereby trying to transform them. To some degree all histories transform silences. Guha tells us of the urge “to work into the torn fabric of the past and restore it to an ideal called the full story”. But what about silenced pasts? For the subjects “do not exceed such a past: they are its contemporaries”.  The silences of the past and the subjects that are contemporaries of that past “accumulate over time to produce a unique mixture”. How does one excavate anything meaningful from this?

         This is why the task of the historian as a translator of the past is complicated and challenging. It is also the point where history as a discipline is limited in the ways in which it engages with and excavates stories from the past. Guha works with this “frustrating insatiable urge” to create “a full story” yet channels it in a way that he works within the limit of the fragment, tells a story through it and does not make any claims for grander representation. Thus, “Chandra’s Death” remembers as well as mourns.

         It is integral to understand that translating silence is not the same as unsilencing. It is also not a recovery, discovery or any such thing: such ideas aim to create the ideal of a full story and through that enact various erasures. But why is so much importance given to silences that exist within the archive or otherwise? There is a banality about silences. They seem commonplace (linked to the question of what is silenced is that of what speaks which confounds us and problematizes things at various levels.) Silences can be frustrating. 

       They make people react is various ways. The privileged young black woman remembers the slaves who jumped off slave ships. Another young black woman asks for stories of black millionaires. 

Trouillot - Silencing history - Session 6

One of the most fascinating things about Trouillot is how he conceptualizes the category of the 'past'. He talks about how 'past' or 'pastness' is inherently a relational category, even in the memory of a single individual - that there is nothing within the 'storage' to 'recover' - that everything is determined by the present. Or as he puts it; 'the past is only past because because there is a present'. In many ways, this further posits the question about the epidemiological limits of the discipline of History. Is it possible, even for an individual, to separate 'event' from the 'revelation' of the event? If it is not, as Trouillot seems to be implying, how much can we, as Historians, actually recover? He also raises questions about Nature of memory itself; how memory itself is contingent on context and thus affects history in the sense of 'what is said to have happened'. While this is not a new idea, it allows us think about how we read archives; even the 'friendly' ones. Even if the producer of the archive doesn't have an agenda, so to speak, how much can we trust his/her memory? Or is this question even relevant

But I think Trouillot's points allows us to think about alternative modes of History writing. If 'power' is exercised in the very first act of History writing, that is, in the production of facts, then 'empirical' history writing would almost always have traces of that power. Or at the very least, we would be limited by what 'power' allows us to see of the 'past'. As Trouillot himself points out, without any remains whatsoever, which would be true for somebody who doesn't have the resources to build a building or write a diary, we really have no way of hearing their voices except through what 'power' allows. Perhaps then, as part of the guild of History, our job beyond trying to recover these voices in the past is to make sure that future Historians have access to archives (of our day) that at least make an attempt to ensure that such voices are , in some way shape or form, preserved.

Trouillot's arguments about the production of ideas is also very instructive. He reiterates what Marx and Durkheim said about dependence of ideas on the material conditions. But I think Trouillot is pointing to something more fundamental than that. He asks the question of whether Western Historiography on the Haitian Revolution has "broken the iron bonds of the philosophical milieu in which it was born"? In other words, what is the afterlife of ideas which governed historiography in a certain time. Related to this question is the question of the 'impossible'. I absolutely love how Trouillot says  that it is not that they 'should have' written about or even accepted the Haitian revolution, it is that 'they couldn't'. These two thoughts taken together, allow us to better understand why Historiography of certain events is so limited. It is so refreshing to move away from the notion that the people in the 18-19th century were simply racist, which of course they were, but their intellectual paralysis ran deeper than that; they simply could not make sense of the Haitian revolution. I think it raises the broader question of what we cannot make sense of; of what is impossible for us to make sense of. One immediate thing is any event that is related to 'enchanted' view of the World; we immediately try and make sense of it in a way that is 'possible' for us.

Lastly, at the end of the Third Chapter, Trouillot moves towards identifying 'how power operates'. He identifies two ways; formulas for erasure and formulas for banalization. He goes on to say that there are structural similarities in how power operates. I think this supremely important. We can even see these structures operating in how 1971 is silenced in Pakistani Nationalist Historiography. It is also useful because it relates back to the point about the rules of the game of History writing. In a lot of ways, formulas for banalization are inherent to the rules of the game of History writing. Given this, as Historians, our added responsibility becomes to be wary of these formulas. Because if Trouillot's book reveals anything, it is that silences are not ALWAYS ideologically driven; sometimes, or most times, they are a result of structural constraints. 

The ‘Making’ of Silences and Unthinkable histories

While most scholars start with what they know, the information they have gathered and build their argument from what is available, Trouillot in Silencing the Past, starts with the notion of silence. This goes with the related assumption that where there is silence there must also be silencing. Between “what happened” and “what is said to have happened” is a third space comprising of what is never told. As such silences that refer to the gaps in history are not incidental- they are not just there but are ‘made to be’. This is important because not only does it shift perspective from the notion of history as comprising of what is remembered to that which is forgotten, it significantly adds a new way of thinking about the subaltern as not just an entity to be pinpointed (as we have done in the previous readings) but as a process to be identified and grappled with. Subalternity is a process that works through the creation of silences. This “creation” alludes to what I think of as a serious intentionality involved in the act of narrating history such that what we ultimately consume as history is actually a “human appropriation of the past as the past”. Trouillot identifies four processes through which silencing takes place: a) silencing in the making of sources. b) silencing in the creation of archives. c) the narrators themselves silence much d) not every narrative becomes a part of the "corpus,". I don’t know how far we can push this but I feel, these distinct modes of silencing that the author identifies suggest that we should also be thinking of subalternity as a practice.

Trouillot is concerned by the question of whether the forgotten, or more appropriately the ‘made to be forgotten’ can possibly be recovered. In other words, he thinks about ways of unsilencing, which to him is possible only through explaining those silences and engaging actively with their histories.  He does this himself in the narration of Haitian history by looking at two salient events. One is through recovering the buried story of Sans Souci. Not just the palace of Frederick the Great in Potsdam, or the palace of Henry Christophe in Haiti, but the man Sans Souci, the African-born slave and revolutionary who refused to surrender to the French, as Christophe and Jean-Jacques Dessalines had after the removal of Toussaint in 1802. This is the face lost to history: Colonel Sans Souci, was no ‘marginal rebel’, but “a high-ranking officer of Louverture’s army turned dissident.” The second incident involves uncovering the gaps in the history of Haitian revolution and thinking about why it was less talked about.

Obviously both examples are a departure from the South Asian context. However, there are parallels to be made between Trouillot’s examination of the Haitian Revolution and Sumit Sarkar’s The Kalki Avatar of Bikrampur.  In fact, my reading of Sarkar’s text is informed by Trouilot’s  concept of “unthinkable histories”.  For Trouillot the “unthinkable” is “that which one cannot conceive within the range of possible alternatives which perverts all answers because it defies the terms under which the questions are phrased” (82).  It is possible for some events to become unthinkable because they do not conform to a given conceptual framework. In a sense they are abberant.  When such happens, Trouillot argues, events are reduced to “non-events”. This, too my mind again has implications for thinking about subalternity in terms of that which cannot be comprehended or lacks a given frame of reference. It is limiting in and of itself.

Trouillot’s  conception of   the “non-event” was a good starting point to think about Sarkar’s piece  and how a ‘scandalous event’ of high import in the moment in which it occurred in Bikrampur was reduced to a non-event in historiography.  Trouillot and Sarkar’s work is separated by content, time and space. Trouillot exposes the paradox of Enlightenment thought which celebrated universal human rights and equality while oppressive institutions of slavery and racial oppression still persisted. He asserts that “colonization provided the most potent impetus for the transformation of European eurocentrism into scientific racism” where the enslavement of blacks was rationalized as a result of their inherent biological inferiority (77). It was believed that at the very bottom of this scale “enslaved Africans and their descendants could not envision freedom- let alone formulate strategies for gaining and securing such freedom” (73). Therefore, he argues that even as it happened, the Haitian Revolution was “unthinkable” as the story of the successful revolution of slaves was so disturbing to white assumptions about black inferiority and to cherished taxonomies of scientific racism that it could not be told without being recast or disfigured. Trouillot says that when the facts were undeniable much effort was expended to narrate the revolution in a manner that would neatly fit in with a European worldview and conform to its racial and cultural hierarchies.  And so he figures two “formulas of silence”: one that involves a complete erasure of the Haitian Revolution through archival omission and another that trivializes the event by ignoring its radicalism and looking at external factors outside of the role of the slaves themselves. (96). 

On the contrary,   Sarkar looks at the events at the turn of the 20^th century on a bizarre night in the life of a Bengali bhadralok family in Bikrampur where a Chandal claiming himself to be the Kalki avatar enters the household of Lalmohan and turns the domestic order upside down. . Sarkar says that “the incident became the kind of scandal that one knows but does not talk about” (3). It was silenced because it tarnished bhadralok reputation, It became an ‘unthinkable’ ‘non –event’, when filtered through Trouillot’s terminology, because it could not be articulated in the “patriotic memory of Bikrampur which was entering into an era of swadeshi upsurge”.  Sarkar and Trouillet’s works are united in their acknowledgement  of the power dynamics involved in the writing of history. In the Haitian Revolution and Kalki avatar affair, matters of prestige were equally important. “Erasure and trivialization” as Trouillout argues is not accidental. Sarkar too is conscious about limitations of the archive as he argues for textuality as a form of power: “no text is innocent”. Here the unthinkable concept is being used to question why scandalous histories never make their way into the official archive and whether they can be written about at all. Sarkar’s answer points to the power of the bhadralok discourse and its exclusivity.

Silencing the Past is a hopeful text: while it cautions us of the silences that allude to unthinkable facets of history, it never suggests that these histories are irretrievable. There is a movement towards making the unthinkable Sans Souci and Haitian revolution thinkable in Silencing the Past. Similarly, Sarkar and even Guha do the same where they analyse fragments of information about past events. If we question in what sense histories can be made thinkable then each author argues for the need to understand events in their own terms. One way of doing this is to think of the agency embodied by the characters. For example Prasanna’s actions involve a series of inversions: a chandal appropriates mythic traditions that exalt proper caste and gender hierarchies, and uses them to humiliate upper castes. This agency then turns into a caste based encounter.  But how does the subaltern perceive his own agency? To that end, Prasanna claims that the burning of the Lanka had been planned by the Thakur (Kalachand) and  Lalmohan (22). Again we fall back on the complexity of agency. A second way would be to place the event within the Kali yuga myth and the coming of the Kalki avatar at the end of the 20^th century which allows us to look at conceptions of mythical time in contrast to secular time and the advent of colonial modernity. The culture surrounding Kali Yuga and its popular reception is also central because in part the event is linked to a particular consumption and “re­-enactment” of certain stories and myths. In one way we are dealing with the afterlife of the Kali yuga theme that goes back to the Mahabharata and is later taken up by different puranic texts.  The essay talks about the evolution of the theme and how it was received in different historical contexts. As such, it was a significant part of the cultural imagination with certain recurrent motifs that had ossified by the turn of the century. 

But more so, the event can be understood in light of emerging definitions of family and household in colonial Bengal and the construction of the authority of the Karta or male head of the household vis a vis the women. The women’s narrative in the event signals another mode of comprehension. For the woman who kicked her husband, where does her agency derive itself from? How do we understand the act of stripping women and making them touch a fire. What were the women thinking? Did they believe that Prasanna was the Kalki Avatar? Why did Prasanna make them perform these acts? The article suggests  the inadequacy of colonial judicial discourse to interpret these actions in terms of a “madness” whereas Sarkar argues that we need to be conscious of the way the Doyhata affair was actually filtered through and legitimized by certain “belief structures” that were “transgressively imported” into the bhadralok household that night. By offering various means of explaining the event, Sarkar illuminates upon the multiple silences in the official narration in the Dacca Prakash and KM pamphlet as well as the realization that the Doyhata affair was not “unimportant”. By thinking of these possibilities of comprehension, we are actually not only looking into other realms of the unthinkable but at the same time trying to make such an event of a “carnivalesque” nature thinkable-trying to reclaim it from its hitherto position as a “non-event”.

Session 6

       I really enjoyed this week’s text by Trouillot as a healthy critique/analysis of “history” as a discipline, as practice and as a process. I refer to it as a healthy critique because although the author highlights that silencing is an inherent part of history – both as a process and narrative - he does so in a manner that doesn’t leave the reader with a sense that nothing can be said at all, or worse that there is no point in speaking. In our previous classes, we repeatedly discussed how silences are inevitable, however Trouillot demonstrates that silencing is not an inherently negative process. If we understand silencing as a relational concept, then complete unsilencing would simultaneously destroy the possibility of speaking/comprehensive as well – speaking and silences are flip sides of the same coin. Given this fact, I find that it is more important to be aware of the silences that we are creating, and the limitations of our stories than to present those narrations as a self-evident/given/truth. Acknowledging our silences means that we acknowledge the process of selection that we engage in as historians. It does however beg the question - to what extent can we be aware of our limitation/silences at any given time. 

                Building upon the previous point, Trouillot’s text is also important because it expands our understanding of the process of silencing. Trouillot highlights that silencing is not simply a one-dimensional passive act of absence. Trouillot explains that it is an “an active and transitive process” – the very speaking of one thing silences another. Furthermore, although we have dealt with the layers of silencing in class, as well as the fact that not all silences are equal, Trouillot’s text has much to offer analytically regarding the various stages at which it happens. I found it interesting how he moves beyond the silencing of the archives, and beings with the silencing that exists in the very facts that we deal with, and how they too have their inborn silences. This is important because it implies that greater empirical knowledge/uncovering will not ultimately lead to a more truthful history.

               Although, silencing is a major theme in this text, Trouillot touches upon a lot of other important points. Firstly, throughout the text he emphasizes that our practice of history is based on a number philosophical presuppositions regarding time, knowledge, memory, and even man that we need to be aware of. These presuppositions create certain possibilities/limitations in the present and the future. Trouillot’s discussion on the unthinkable/irrational/impossible in history indeed leads us to perhaps a new way of understanding who is the subaltern – as may be that which stands outside current possibility. As that which doesn’t fit in our current categories, and hence lies within the unknown. Indeed, this is precisely why in Colonial India and in Haiti, the revolution/insurgency was either denied, or regarded as being pushed by outsiders - the unknown/impossible had to immediately fit in the world of the known/possible.  Secondly, it also begs the question of whether certain events can also be subaltern in nature  - the Haiti Revolution - and lastly how subalternity is not static, but part of a process that changes as the world of possibilities expands.  

                 

              Lastly, I would like delve into Trouillot's methodology. It is clearly evident that he is trying to move beyond dominant trends/dichotomies. He is attempting to move beyond the agency/structure divide, the symbolic/practical divide, the objective/subjective divide and is attempting to develop relational logic. I think the importance of this text lies in a simple shift in focus from what history is, to how it works. In this way, may be we too could ask how subalternity works, rather than what is.

 

Session 5

Before I begin, these readings were an absolute delight after previous sessions were historiography, and not history were discussed. It was a chance to point out and identify the methodologies, and subtleties learnt in previous readings, all whilst enjoying some good old history.

Now, Gyan Pandey created an interesting picture of peasant rebellions of Audh using very interesting sources. His use of Gandhi’s rules for the peasant movements as a source of the way Indian nationalists looked at the peasantry is very creative, albeit slightly presumptuous. It builds too much on very little, and puts that out as the belief of the Indian nationalists. It is fair to assume that the primary goal of Indian nationalists was to end imperialism, but to think Gandhi’s rules were meant to take away agency from the peasant and manipulate them seems a little harsh. An important linkage pointed out in this account was between the Zamindars and Indian nationalists, where the Zamindars were benefactors of the Indian nationalists which lays credence to the hypothesis that the two were colluding with each other. According to the picture drawn by Pandey, the peasants were on one side of the battlefield, fighting for their just, traditional right, while the British, Zemindars, and Indian nationalists were on the other side. All three worked together to suppress the voice of the peasantry, and that was the tragedy at hand. His account portrays the peasant with limited awareness, based on his own traditional outlook. He, like many others, such as EP Thompson, points out the peasantries’ desire for only limited emancipation, so as long as their subsistence needs were being met. There is some evolution shown in the thoughts of the peasantry in the agenda of the Kisan movements where before they would not dream of opposing the Thakur directly, but later said that they would oppose any ‘’bedakhli.’

Where it is interesting to see some evolution in the thoughts of the peasantry, I would like to see literature of evolution of peasant thought beyond subsistence. This, by no means, looks down on the awareness of the peasant in his own terms, which is obviously legitimate, but a hope to see the needs of the peasantry breathe air to bigger dreams than mere subsistence.

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work provided us with another interesting source to gauge the sensibilities of Colonial Government of India, in light of Marx’s work. His analysis of intelligence officer reports gives us a perspective on the motivations behind rules and regulations for Indian workers. Like the rules and regulations in Britain, here too, the rules served the capitalist agenda instead of promoting worker rights. They were driven by a need to make the workers more efficient, structure their time, keep them safe from diseases, and give them the illusion that the government cared about them. Where this analysis provides a grim view of a colonial government which always strived to project itself as benevolent, it does not do so without legitimate pretext.

Reading Fragments

Upon reading Gautam Bhadra’s article “Four Rebels of Eighteen Fifty Seven”, one needs to question, first, why the author chooses to talk about the 1857 Revolt?  What is to be gained from reading about the role of four individuals (distinct on their own terms) in the event?  One way to think about this Is to say that Bhadra is writing one possible ‘way of knowing’ 1857 and he thinks not so much on what happened than on who was involved. There is an acknowledgment in his work of the presence of other accounts but those historiographies  are what he contests for giving an elitist character to 1857 by suggesting that it was the class of landlords,  taluqdars and Zamindars who were the ‘natural leaders’ responsible for organizing and leading the revolt. For Bhadra nationalist and radical, Marxist histories have failed in making this assumption, which has also now become what I would think of as the dominant mode of remembering this episode in history. The tension between event and representation is then an underlying theme of his work and it feeds into a politics of collective remembrance. What Bhadra seems to be doing is undercutting existing historical imaginations through the intervention of the ordinary person as the rebel.

What I found interesting was the very distinct nature of the rebel narratives-- that they somehow cannot be compared. The lives of Gonoo, Shah Mal, Maulvi and Devi Singh operate in spaces different to each other and the breadth of their activities are also limited except for the Maulvi. They are also separated by their social and economic conditions and for Bhadra these differences impact the nature of their leadership and mobilization. If there is anything that links them is the fact that they “were pitted against the same enemy at the same historical moment”. For me, this raises the question of how one should read these narratives?  For one, the fact that these narratives cannot be joined and are fragmented in the nature of their representation says something about the question that is almost always mentioned in class: “where does one locate the subaltern”. Here is the part where we begin to think about the gaps in history keeping in mind that these gaps have their histories too. Secondly, these different narratives say something about methodology and the question of how a particular event is to be ordered and written about. Can these narratives be ordered in any way?  Perhaps one ordering could be to link them through the specificity that comes with a particular historical time in which they are functioning. Another could be to think of the agentive capacities of these rebels or perhaps sources of their leadership.  For instance, the Maulvi anchors his leadership in religion.  The article mentions that his popularity had much to do with the fact that people thought of him as an “inspired prophet”and he claimed to be “an Incarnation of the Diety”.  But then if the Maulvi’s consciousness is inspired by religious rhetoric, it is not the same for the other rebels whose consciousness is rooted in other factors.  Another way could be to think of these narratives in terms of how they contribute to the theme of a ‘the making of the subaltern’. From each of the sketches one gets the sense that these men were products of their time. Bhadra writes “they asserted themselves through the act of insurgency and took the initiative denied to them by the dominant classes” He says that their “consciousness had been formed through everyday experience”.  Yet as we try to arrange these fragments we encounter limitations of integrating them into a complete picture.  It is for this reason that Bhadra suggests that the only way to read these narratives is to be aware of the “multiple elements of conscious leadership” and the "variations" in them. 

This is a point to be made aside that it seems very easy to think of 1857 as a nationalist and/or anti-colonialist movement. I think the difference in the two terminologies needs to be maintained even when one feels compelled to merge the two.  Is anti-colonialism necessarily nationalism, especially when thought of in terms of the 1857 episode? Were these rebels nationalists? I think this is a problem arising out of the ways in which 1857 has been labeled such as the ‘war of Independence’ that give it a very nationalist bent. There is a politics attached to naming the event itself that excludes the possibility of other histories. Bhadra never names the event. He just calls it 1857 which is interesting too, because simply the date comes to signify a number of histories embedded in it. Nationalism I believe was a late nineteenth and early twentieth century term and the notion of national self-determination was adopted quite later in the subcontinent. When one interprets the narratives the rebels, we should be conscious of the fact that we are looking at perhaps a pre-ideological configuration or collection of sentiments.  If nationalism was a ‘modern phenomenon’ then in this case are we dealing with a kind of a proto-national movement?  To my mind, this is important because it is tied very closely to the way we understand these rebels and their participation in the event. If we think of them as nationalists then what are we missing out on? In fact can they be configured in any national or proto-national narrative at all? 

Session 5

What is interesting about this week's readings is that they finally talk about the Subaltern itself, rather than just the discipline of Subaltern Studies. However, even within this discussion of the Subaltern, so much is about what is not known. There is an acknowledgement that what is reconstructed about the Subaltern is from colonial or nationalist writings. This ties in with several of the themes from the last class, and throughout the course about the limits of knowing.

In speaking of the layers of Subalternity, we have discussed peasants, workers and women (in class discussions). But if we are to admit that in some circles, even the powerful cannot speak, can we also think of the divide within colonial India along race? Yes, the elite were better off, and yes, their histories are written, they have spoken of themselves, but in their nationalist attempts, are they, too, attempting to give voice to a people which has been subjugated and oppressed?

It is interesting that we have discussed at length about whether or not we can qualify the peasants as political but we didn't really discuss what we really mean by political. Is it about  some obscure political consciousness? Class consciousness? Or is it just about power- in the different forms it exists in? Or the awareness of different power dynamics that influence people's lives? Because if that is the case, then maybe we can focus on smaller acts of resistance (despite what Guha says about collective acts in the face of power) as political as well.

We also perhaps need a more nuanced understanding of violence, who wields it, and why. What do we categorize as violence? The peasants were creative in their non-violent ways of opposition (lying down on train tracks, for instance) before Gandhi came along. Yet, even with those ways, they resort to rioting, because the means available to them are limited. Even if they manage to invert symbols, as Guha has written, could they really have gained attention if not for the kind of revolt these authors recount? Gandhi advocating non-violence to the peasants seems easier to do from his position. But even he only addressed them AFTER there were revolts all over India. Is violence instrumental then? Or can we state that the violence on the part of the insurgent is fundamentally different from its use as a means of control (both physical and mental) by the oppressor?

This also raises the question: do we only look at those groups which revolt? Chakrabarty states that the colonial enterprise, as well as the Industrialists only looked seriously at the workers when they began to revolt. Can we apply that to the discipline of Subaltern Studies? Is the reason these readings focus primarily on peasants and workers because they are the ones who revolted, and it is to them that humanity/subjectivity must be returned? What of the others who we never hear of? Is the Subaltern one who cannot speak, or the one whose actions we don't see as well, who gets hidden somewhere amidst one mass explanation/ideology or the other?

And if that is true, how is it that we proceed? In the scarcity of sources that exist, perhaps it is only possible to define in terms of negatives. If what we have are official records, then maybe we do need to rely on "imaginative leaps" to try to provide alternatives, to try, even if it is an almost impossible task, to give voice and narrative to the silenced.

Chakarbarty

Broader Argument

In this article, Chakarbarty looks at one particular working class history – the workers of the Calcutta Jute Mill (1890-1940) However, he delves into that history within the context of knowledge production and modes of subordination. Chakarbarty’s broad argument is that they way in which subordination and supervision is carried out leads to the creation of a particular type of knowledge production, or lack of it. Throughout the reading Chakarbarty sheds light on a number of important sub-themes such as:

1)       The relationship between domination/authority and knowledge production

Capitalist authority operated by forming a ‘body of knowledge’ about its subjects. Discipline required supervision, and supervision required documentation.

2)      The relationship between representation and knowledge production

The government of India had a very different perception of the role of the worker, and that perception led them to focus on certain aspects of knowledge production compared with the British government – one side saw the worker and his role in creating efficiency, and the other focused more labor supply and law/order. The difference in perception can be seen in the different types of knowledge created.

3)      The relationship between historical context and how that leads to emphasis on particular aspect about the worker

Knowledge cannot be divorced from the time period in which it was created, and the importance of conditions/interests of those involved in that creation -the desire for knowledge production by the British government was not matched by the same desire by the Bengal government.

4)      Relationship between power and culture

Authority is only properly legitimized when those upon whom authority recognized see themselves as subjects, and recognize within the person who dominates them – authority is therefore based on certain cultural formations.  Furthermore, outwardly the workers in England and Calcutta may seem to be doing the same work but cultural meaning attached to those works was very different – religious symbolism.

5)      Working Class seen as collective with a particular nature

Pandey

Whereas in Chakarbarty’s article, the Colonial government recognizes that the labor force has capacity for its own organization, we find that for the peasant movement, the government believes that they can only be organized from the outside. We thus see how the colonial government had different representations of different groups, and how Gandhi and those in the Congress also held to those perceptions. Once again, because of the peasantry is seen as a collective which has an inert/passive quality, and in line with that quality has a particular role to play – maintaining peace. It is also interesting to note that despite dealing with the same dates (early 20^th century), the government was treating the working class in one particular way, and the peasants in another way. The role of the peasant was seen as essentially about maintain peace, and the peasantry was essentially inert. However, some recognition that the workforce has agency – and its role in the industrial development. Despite these different perceptions, the Colonial government saw both as 1) collectivities 2) they had a particular role to play based on their nature.

In this reading Pandey attempts to demonstrate that the peasantry had agency, and that it wasn’t the Congress who made their movement. Indeed, according to him, it was they who initiated, and set off the debate. Furthermore, he calls attention to the fact that these were not spontaneous uprisings but properly organized. Furthermore, he argues that it isn’t enough to acknowledge their actions as independent but actually see them as properly political. 

Session 5 - Pandey, Chakrabarty and Badra

Reading Chakrabarty and Pandey's paper on the Peasant movements and the working class reveals a lot about 'layers' of power as they existed within South Asia. This allows us to move forward from simple, un-examined categories of colonizer-colonized, oppressor-oppressed, bourgeoisie-proletariat. They reveal how power is divided and distributed not in clean, clear categories but along messy relationships. This, in some ways, begs the question of how we conceptualize relations when writing/reading history. Is there really a term for the Sardar as he appears in Chakrabarty's work? Or for that matter the 'Labor' as it appears in his work? In fact, while one can argue that Chakrabarty's paper pushes the idea of the difference between India and Britain to the point where he seems to imply that no similarities between English and the Indian 'working class' can exist, there is value in understanding the 'culture' of the working class. It not only has implications of Labor history within India but also modern day Labor politics. How does organization happen in a group which builds mosques in honor of its instrument of oppression?  Many of the factors which Chakrabarty points remain true even today; almost unlimited supply of Labor, experiential training, poor working conditions, some sort of Sardar etc. How then, can we begin to understand the potential of consciousness? Perhaps, one starting point could be Aasim Sajjad's paper on 'Politics of common-sense' which shows how the things which are normally conceptualized as 'corruption' are seen as 'common-sense' and the workers/peasants understand that to work within the system, they need to work with this 'common-sense'. However, admittedly, this scarcely explains the veneration of the Sardar.  Perhaps, another hint can be found in Pandey's paper on Peasant movement and the Nationalist movement; he shows how old system of Zamindari was accepted but not the new one of Nazrana.

While Chakrabarty's paper was definitely interesting, two objections can be raised; one has already been raised by Saniya about the investigation of the European context. The second is about the relationship between the Mill owners and the Sardars. In his paper, it almost seems as if the mill owners very innocently realized that it was in 'capital's interest' to let the Sardar as he does. Perhaps, we also need to investigate the role of Mill owner in ensuring that the power of the Sardar is maintained.

 In addition to this, Pandey's work allows us to better understand the role of the Nationalist movement. In many ways, we can go back to the 'provocative' question that was posed in session 2 about the extent to which we can consider Nationalist movements as radical; this paper reveals that the objection against Nationalist movement is not that they were not radical enough, but rather that their role was, in at least this particular instance, to ensure the continued subjugation of the peasants. As Pandey points out, perhaps the most important thing to do when studying anti-imperialist movement is not to forget relations of class within the anti-imperialist movement; clearly, the leaders of the Nationalist movement didn't.

The three papers also raise the important question of consciousness - how do we understand consciousness in these contexts? Particularly, how do we understand consciousness as it appears in 'Encounters and Calamities'? Ali Hassan, regards a particular administrator as a 'great men' because he used to call good marsiya khuwan during the Muharram procession. How can we even begin to understand this? Pre-political; non-political; idiotic? Other instances in other articles also hint towards something of the same sort; for example, the fact that Ghandhi's name continued to have power even after he had effectively sent instructions which would have all but destroyed the peasant movement?

In terms of archives, Pandey warns us against reading colonial archives 'with the grain'; but he does more than that; he shows exactly how the narrative in the archive is biased when he quotes the documents prepared by the colonial administration. In addition to this, the focus on absences within the archive which Chakrabarty points out is useful for us. In effect, he is able to construct the entire story by simply looking at what is 'not' there. We can learn a lot from this technique but at the same time, almost all papers point towards an element of unknown which simply cannot be recovered. For example, as both Pandey and Chakrabarty point out, in most cases, the archive simply does not exist. (Pandey counts himself lucky that he could get his hands on a diary entry) This again points out that even with the Subaltern methodology, the extent to which we can recover 'a' voice is limited, let alone an 'authentic' voice. 

On Methodology

              Gautam Bhadra writes a history of 1857 based on particular stories of four rebels whose “ordinariness” constituted “their distinction”. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s history of jute workers of late nineteenth century Calcutta is informed by, if not based on, the premise that like “knowledge has a history” similarly “gaps have a history too”. Gyan Pandey re-examines “a small part of colonial history” (and to some extend colonial historiography) by engaging with an Urdu historical chronicle called Waqeat-o-Hadesat: Qasba Mubarakpur. In his article on peasant revolt in Awadh, Pandey engages with contemporary responses to the peasant revolt in Awadh and how historians have understood what he calls “the view of better-educated and more vocal participants”. At the heart of all these histories is a recognition of the “woefully incomplete” record of those who are a part of “faceless elements in an omnibus category called ‘the people’”.  What does one do to recover their histories? Recovering the histories of this ‘omnibus category’ is a very ambitious project. If we rephrase this question then it becomes slightly more understandable: how does one write a history of the people which problematizes this category of ‘the people’ when historical records and archives are “woefully incomplete”? This is where methodology comes in, front and center. These histories too are very conscious of the methodology that is used to construct them but are they reflexive?

            Bhadra talks of four rebels of 1857: Shal Mal, Gonoo, Devi Singh and Maulvi. He says that while “they did not know each other” yet they were “pitted against the same enemy” at “the same historical moment”. This is why the narrative that Bhadra writes is “fragmentary and episodic”. Collective memory, shared history, clan feelings loom large in his analysis of why the figures that he chose were able to mobilize people. Dipesh Chakrabarty identifies the history of jute mill workers of Calcutta as a “history both of our knowledge and our ignorance”. His analysis offers explanations that are economic as well as “cultural”. Again there is a sense of diversity when it comes to cultural explanation: manager’s authority, religious consciousness, literacy etc. There emerges a sense of a collective experience in terms of those who worked under the manager’s supervision, sacrificed  goats at the power-machine at the time of Diwali (To be fair, it is a collective too that gets drunk and goes to brothels in E.P Thompson).

            Pandey’s article about the history of Mubarakpur compares approaches to history writing. It reminds one of Haydon White’s capitalized alphabets in terms of what a historian chooses to emphasize on. It contains examples that tells us how time, events and what is considered history is viewed by the chronicler of Waqaet as opposed to colonial historiographers. The collective does emerge here too but in many different ways where the events presented in the Waqaet tell us about particular individuals and the community. Pandey isn’t over-interested in “bringing forth the collective experience” (Badhra) that he ultimately does. Similarly, his methodology in the article on peasant revolt is such that he tells us of the contemporary views of the political events in Awadh in 1921-22 which frames his analysis. How is this any different from what the others are doing?

            To my mind, there is an honesty (as well as cleverness) in claiming that source X says such about this and I am going to engage with that representation of the event as opposed to the actual event. To some extend Bhadra and Chakrabarty do this too, because it is a necessity based on the limitations of the archives that they work with. Yet it is arguably more explicit in Pandey’s writings especially the one on Mubarakpur as opposed to the others’ writings. Why is this important one would ask? Methodology is central because it is the premise on which subaltern historiography distinguishes itself from others. To sum it up: it’s about creatively reading the archives, especially the gaps and silences within archives and representing them. Critically engaging with the ways in which other sources within the archive represent a particular event that has been silenced might be useful to rewrite silences and construct histories. 

Session 5

What I find interesting in today's reading is the continuation of the theme of agency that the peasants have. From Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah who says that his orders are coming from God to the peasants in Awadh who use the symbolism of Gandhi's name to push their agenda, the many layers of agency are highlighted. Badra seems to imply that the peasants are not aware of the wider context when he says that 'the rebel had yet not found his way to his own world' but this view seems to be challenged by Pandey who mentions how the peasants were using instruments of resisting that the nationalist movement had not thought of. There is of course geographical and time difference between these two readings but still a more nuanced approach seems to be the key.

The question of the 'enemy' is also one I find it worthwhile to explore. In Encounters and Calamities, the problems seem to evolve from Sunni-Shia conflict to a Hindu-Muslim conflict. In others, the enemy is the British Raj or the taluqdars. I just wonder that if we look into the individual struggles and find that people are struggling against different forms of oppression, is it possible to term these as part of a single process or movement at all?

Two minor points of interest were the question of the criminal becoming the leader and the question of gender. It does seem to show that the idea of who the state has branded a criminal needs to be questioned. Even the question of morality and someone having a 'bad character' is driven from state sanctioned ideas of the morality. In Pandey's article, it is mentioned that when Gandhi's instructions were sent to the peasants, one of them was that they would treat all women like their mother or sisters. To my mind, it brings the question of why was it necessary to send this instruction? Were there any instances of women being harassed or attacked that prompted this instruction and if they were, how come they are not mentioned at all? 

Session 5

In "Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism" the 'politicising' of the peasantry in Awadh is highlighted. The role of the Indian National Congress and the urban elites was particularly interesting. The different layers of authority and the competing interests of various sections of the Indian society are usually clustered as a unified entity resisting British 'imperialism'. Swaraj, self rule, is popularly understood as a movement directed against the British. However, amongst the Awadh peasantry this "movement" was first and foremost directed against the taluqdars and not against Government officials (Kisan Sabha phase). Gyan Pandey highlights how this self-rule should rather be understood as the attempts by the peasantry to free themselves from exploitation- not from the British, but from the oppressive feudal and social system instituted by the landlords and taluqdars.
"Gandhi" was understood in very different terms by the Awadh peasantry. More often than not, he symbolised a concept, not just an individual. Another very interesting aspect of this reading was how the Indian political elite itself "created" the subaltern by assigning them a 'pre-political' status.

In "Conditions of Knowledge for working class conditions", the conditions of the jute mill workers of Calcutta are analysed in light of Marx's writings on the condition of the European working classes. How these two sets of conditions varied shows the limitations of generalising similiar trejectories of the working classes in Europe and South Asia.
The question of the documentation of conditions of work within a factory was linked to the problem of 'disciplinary authority' and that in turn was linked to the question of working-class culture. This culture, termed as "pre-capitalist culture" depended on traditional structures of authority that was much more complex and nuanced than a simple employee-employer relationship. The referance to this culture as "pre-capital" makes me wonder if a capitalist culture necessarily excludes such traditional links and linkages as existing in 20th century Calcutta? Is it really (for example, in the European context) solely based on a culture of maximising profits and unrestrained exploitation?
In the conclusion Chatterjee mentions how knowledge has a history as well as gaps and these gaps in themselves have a history. The history of such gaps seems very exciting; it is perhaps in these gaps that one can find the subaltern.

The 'uncertainty', the 'sense of disequilibrium and disorientation' found in the population of Mubarakupur and other such towns by the end of the colonial rule highlights the perceptions and responses of the locals to the interaction of existing social and economic structures with the establishment and consolidation of a centralised colonial power, the representation of a powerful manufacturing nation. The sources, however, of probing this are limited and needless to say, often one-sided. In contrast to the official colonial records, the paper on "The History of a North Indian Qasba" provides us with an alternative elite perception- one that is closer to the ground. It is important to note that this too is an elite's account who felt his position in political, economical as well as cultural domains, threatened. Even though glimpses are provided of how the ordinary laboring people spoke and acted but this too is from the vantage point of a particular privileged class. This underscores the essential feature of subaltern historiography- ''reading against the grain".
    The impact of the economic linkages of Mubarakpur on power relations within the qasba and the consciousness of its people is highlighted through a comparison of the records according to the Waqaet-i-Hadesat and the official records. Both highlight religious symbols as a proof of the essential irrationality and fanaticism of the local people who could only be managed by the British. However, a detailed analysis of these records shows how a process of "making history" was underway- it was different in its own way but at the same time, it was in favor of the British. Such instances bear huge implications of historiography of South Asia, and perhaps on the histories of all former colonies.