Session 8

In this session’s reading, Chakrabarty highlights the constraints that are placed on scholarship because of the western episteme. He argues that the present in the non-west is not singular and knowable through the experience of Europe, rather that it is fragmented and contains many strands.

We have already come across the idea that history does not unfold through a series of universal stages in Chakrabarty’s work. In his analysis of the working conditions of the jute mills in Calcutta, Chakravarty showed how traditional modes of organization persisted in what would conventionally be considered a capitalist system of production. The labor force in mills was recruited and supervised by sardars; men who fulfilled the role of factory foremen but also possessed extra-economic authority that was parallel to that of a village headman. The conventional European episteme would consider the existence of such traditional authority as “pre-modern” and would predict that such “primitive” modes of organization would eventually be swept away by modernity.

Chakrabarty however, would argue that since the modern has been defined by the European experience, it would be incorrect to gauge the “progress” of a society that is not European by the concept of modernity. To be fair though, Chakrabarty himself uses the word “pre-capitalist” to refer to modes of organization in the jute mills of Calcutta and this is confusing because it suggests that these modes of organization are on their way to true capitalism.

The usage of the word “pre-captialist” however, does not signify a gap in Chakrabarty’s understanding of modernity and capitalism in Bengal, rather it points to a difficulty that Chakrabarty has highlighted in this session’s reading. . He says that “European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate…”. Because scholarship is located strictly within the western episteme, it is very difficult to describe the conditions and the experiences of the non-west using European languages. Though Chakravarty is aware that the Bengali experience is fundamentally different from the European one, he is constrained by a language which contains terms that inherently refer to the European experience.