Contesting Universals

Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe emphasizes the historian's need to acknowledge the contradiction between the post-colonial experience and the persistence of Western categories in scholarly explanations of post-colonial modernity. As he points out: "European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations, and provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this thought … may be renewed from and for the margins." Europe for him, is not only a geographical region, but also a body of scholarship that defines how academics view the world. This body of scholarship sees itself as universal and global. Chakrabarty’s concern is with contesting this idea of a universal form of knowledge through which he wishes to return Europe to its rightful place as one world region amongst many, without the privilege that it has continued to hold in academic circle. That is to say that Europe should no longer be considered as the template for modernity, as it is only one expression of this transition. In his introduction Chakrabarty says that  “universal categories that have arisen out of European thought are “indispensable and inadequate in representing this particular case of  non European modernity”.  Another point he raises is that of European knowledge being based on ‘rough translations’ that do not take into account  particularities and “plural genealogies”. A third factor that I found appealing was Chakrabarty’s inclination towards the “hermeneutic tradition” as a mode of engaging and understanding particularities. Hermeneutics as being acts of interpretation undercuts the idea of universal because interpretations differ within different contexts and once again bring us to focus on specificity. With that in mind, how does the chapter on Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Subject become relevant to Chakrabarty’s ideas? In this essay Chakrabarty takes the subject who observes and documents the suffering of widows as a point of analysis to think about how one would write a history of a modern Bengali subject of compassion from outside of European mode of thinking and seeing. By comparing the biographies of  Rammohun and Vidyasagar with what they themselves wrote, one finds different answers to the question of what made them compassionate. They themselves espoused a natural theory of compassion, the idea that compassion was a sentiment universally present in something called “human nature,”. But Chakrabarty argues that Bengali history cannot unproblematically be mapped onto  Enlightenment modes of thinking. Bengali biographies point to this fact whereby Rammohun Roy or Vidyasagar’s was due to their heart. There were thus two separate and unconnected theoretical ways of looking at compassion and personhood. One was the European-derived natural theory of sentiments. The other was derived from Indian aesthetics, inscribed in Bengali words used to describe the capacity for sympathy . They represented a different hermeneutic that ‘supplemented’ the European Enlightenment one. Chakrabarty argues that the modern Bengali subject who demonstrates a will to witness and document suffering is a “multiple” being. So Kalyani Datta can be understood  as a citizen subject but at the same time her work can be read as part of the history of the Bengali Bhadramahila. A third way of reading her act of  documenting suffering can be to think of “other ways of being civil and humane”. The modern post-colonial self exists in a multiplicity. But if this subject arises in opposition to what it is not- the modern subject of Enlightenment thought. If this subject too can only be realized by placing it in opposition to the European subject of modernity the knowledge of which becomes important to make the difference, then my question is how far can we think outside of European episteme? What is the utility of contesting universals, as Chakrabarty does when it is needed to understand the particular?