AFTER CONVERSION

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON INDIAN PASTSGeneral Editor: Saurabh Dube

Other Books in the Series:

Thomas R. TrautmannAryans and British India

A.R. VenkatachalapathyIn Th ose Days Th ere Was No Coff ee:Writings in Cultural History

David N. LorenzenWho Invented Hinduism?Essays on Religion in History

Thomas R. TrautmannLanguages and Nations:Th e Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras

Harlan O. PearsonIslamic Reform and Revival in Nineteenth-century India:Th e Tarīqah-I Muhammadīyah

Thomas R. TrautmannTh e Clash of Chronologies:Ancient India in the Modern World

David N. LorenzenTh e Scourge of the Mission:Marco della Tomba in Hindustan (Forthcoming)

Cynthia Talbot (ed.)Changing Conceptions of South Asia’s Past (Forthcoming)

AFTER CONVERSIONCultural Histories of Modern India

Saurabh Dube

Yoda Press

YODA PRESS 268 A/C Vasant Kunj New Delhi 110070 Published in India by YODA PRESS

© Saurabh Dube 2010

Th e moral rights of the author have been assertedDatabase right YODA PRESS (maker)

First Published 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of YODA PRESS, or as expressly permitted by law, or under the terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organisation. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to YODA PRESS, at the address above.

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer.

ISBN 978-81-906186-6-3

Typeset in Minion Pro 10/13By Jojy Philip, New Delhi 110 015Printed at Pauls Press, New Delhi 110 020Published by Arpita Das, YODA PRESS, New Delhi Distributed in South Asia by CUP India Pvt. Ltd. Cambridge House, 4381/4, Ansari Road Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002

For Amma and DaduUma and T.N. Madan

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations viii Preface ix

1. introduction 1 Contentious Terrains

QUESTIONS OF CONVERSION

2. after conversion 33 Colonial Registers of a Vernacular Christianity

3. spectres of conversion 64 Transformations of Caste and Sect

PERSONAL PORTRAITS

4. ties that bind 97 Tribe, Village, Nation, and S. C. Dube

5. auguring art 145 A Dalit Iconography of an Expressionist Imagination

HISTORY AND MODERNITY

6. habitations of history 1597. identity and difference 1778. epilogue 192 Modernity Again

Index 203

ILLUSTRATIONS

(following page 148)1. Dalit Couple with Om and Swastika2. Two Dalits under the Black Sun3. Dalit with Dead Cow-I4. Dalit with Dead Cow-II5. Dalit with the Lalten6. Dalit Woman with Brahmin7. Foundation of India8. Devadasi I9. Portrait of a Zen Master

PREFACE

To write a Preface—rather than provide a (series editor’s) Foreword—to this title in ‘New Perspectives on Indian Pasts’ is at once strange and satisfying. Aft er the successive thrills of commissioning and carrying important and imaginative studies in the series, I fi nally fi nd that my own work forms part of the venture. And so, I have to begin by thanking Arpita Das: fi rst, for her energy and aff ect that shore up the series, containing and conducting its spirit and substance; next, for her considering that Aft er Conversion is an adequate, even apposite, addition to the endeavour. Friendship has its rewards.

Like all my previous eff orts, this book, too, was written in several steps. Yet a common clutch of critical concerns runs through the work. At the broadest level, the issues entail the importance of carefully querying—in academic arenas and beyond them—pervasive procedures of a scholastic reason alongside aggrandizing enactments of analytical imperatives. If the former incessantly invoke how the world ‘ought’ to be in a manner that crucially disavows what the world actually ‘is’, the latter repeatedly revert to simply unmasking social terrains and readily unpicking their scholarly understandings. Hopefully, the intellectual limitations of such invasive protocols—that cut across conventionally opposed scholarly positions of the ‘Right’ and the ‘Left ’, the ‘empirical’ and the ‘theoretical’, and the ‘modern’ and the ‘postmodern’—would become clear in the pages ahead.

At the same time, my point here concerns the sheer ethical paucity—or, the immense life-denying propensity—of widespread academic postures. From those that vigorously emphasize interpretive, hermeneutical protocols in approaching social worlds yet ever resort to hyper-analytical, muscular dismissals not only of competing arguments but of complementary explanations; through to others that constantly unfurl banners of social justice only to inexorably reproduce

hierarchical authority—in institutional and everyday arenas. In distinct yet overlapping ways, such moves register the un-refl exive cult of success that ceaselessly traverses the academy, especially in our own present. I off er Aft er Conversion as expressing quiet disquiet against this insidious state of intellectual aff airs.

Th ere are many individuals who have infl uenced the arguments and emphases of this book. If the critical presence of S. C. Dube, Leela Dube, Ishita Banerjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Savi Sawarkar should be evident in the chapters, others who have also had a crucial impact on the work include Ann Gold, Ajay Skaria, Gitasree Bandopadhyay, Mrinalini Sinha, and Anupama Rao. Across the years, I have cherished the comments and criticisms—and, in several cases, the aff ective warmth—off ered by Ranajit Guha, Bernard Cohn, Craig Calhoun, Romila Th apar, Ashis Nandy, Talal Asad, Michael Herzfeld, Freddie Ribeiro, Anand Pandian, Walter Mignolo, Gautam Bhadra, William Mazzarella, Shahid Amin, Naveeda Khan, Chris Pinney, Arvind Rajagopal, David Lorenzen, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Partha Chatterjee, Uday Mehta, Grant Farred, John Hutnyk, Milind Wakankar, Jean and John Comaroff , Muzaff ar Alam, Faisal Devji, Janaki Bakhle and Nicholas Dirks, Alaka and Kaushik Basu, Bodhisattva Kar, Guillermo Zermeño, Romana Falcon and Lorenzo Meyer, Suman Ghosh, Andrés Lira, Paramita Banerjee, Chris Minkowski, Chandra Mohanty, Larry Moore, Gyanendra Pandey, Emma Tarlo, Mauricio Tenorillo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Denis Vidal, Veena and Ranen Das, and Sumit and Tanika Sarkar. All my intellectual endeavours have been sustained by the presence of engaging student-interlocutors who have also been fabulous friends (and in some cases resourceful research assistants). Considering Aft er Conversion, I must thank (among others) Mario Rufer, Atig Ghosh, Natalia Mendoza, Laura Carballido, Townsend Middleton, and Jaideep Chatterjee—who are, I am certain, all on their way to becoming distinguished academics.

Th is book is dedicated to Amma and Dadu—Uma Madan and T. N. Madan—with whom my emotional and intellectual ties aff ectively bind diff erent generations.

Aft er Conversion was completed in El Colegio de Mexico, although stays as a Visiting Professor at Cornell University (2005) and the Johns Hopkins University (2008) as well as a Fellowship (for another project) from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York

x preface

(2007–08) proved very useful for the endeavour. I gratefully acknowledge these institutions, and also extend my thanks for research assistance to Maria Fernanda Vazquez, Mario Gonzalez, and Jesus Chairez. I need to appreciate, too, the entire Yoda Press team, especially Arpita Das and Supriya Nayak.

Th e arguments and materials of this book have been presented at talks and conferences in Edinburgh, Kolkata, Oxford, Ithaca, Delhi, Minneapolis, Mexico City, University Park, Gainesville, London, Falmer/Brighton, Taipei, San Jose (Costa Rica), Guadalajara, New York, Baltimore, Chicago, Dublin, Galway and Maynooth (Ireland), Madison (Wisconsin), Puebla, Lund, Amsterdam, Washington DC, and Santa Fe de Antioquia (Colombia). I thank the organizers of the events and my interlocutors on these diff erent occasions.

Some of the chapters have seen earlier incarnations; I acknowledge their publishers, and now reproduce them in revised form. Chapter 2 had its beginnings in Saurabh Dube (ed.), Enduring Enchantments, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, 2002, pp. 807–37, published by Duke University Press; Chapter 3 appeared in Rowena Robinson and Sathianathan Clarke (eds), Religious Conversion in India: Modes, Motivations, and Meanings (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 222–54; Chapter 4 found fi rst formulation in Patricia Uberoi, Satish Deshpande, and Nandini Sundar (eds), Anthropology in the East: Founders of Indian Sociology and Anthropology (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), pp. 444–95; Chapter 6 had its beginnings in Dube (ed.), Enduring Enchantments, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, 2002, pp. 859–68, published by Duke University Press; and Chapter 7 was initiated in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2002, pp. 77–8l, published by Sameeksha Trust, Mumbai. Many thanks all.

Mexico CitySeptember 2009

preface xi

introduction 1

1INTRODUCTION

Contentious Terrains

Imaginative accounts of academic life, if they are deft ly written, tell splendid stories. Once they are critically craft ed, boldly rendered, and ethically elaborated, such compelling chronicles become challenging aff airs. Unravelling the curious conjunctions between the seductions of hierarchy and schemes of ideas within academe, they serve to further lay bare the many mix-ups between the sedimentation of habits and stipulations of order in these spaces.1 It follows that whatever the place of postmodern pastiche and postcolonial parody in posterity, the fabrication of such narratives is ever likely to be fraught with attendant risks for the journeyman scholar, even becoming a means of vocational suicide for the apprentice academic.

It is with reason that I write of these possibilities (and predicaments) and dangers (and delights) as deferred ventures. We have at hand today only intimations of what fuller accounts of academic life may look like. I speak of a novel here and a short story there, a cameo piece now and piecemeal refl ections again.2 Yet I do not bring up the disparate nature of such writing as a dismissive gesture, a disparaging move. For such fragments can reveal much about the shared complicities between the putative radical ruptures that shape novel scholarship and the presumed inherited inertia that orders older knowledge, especially by elaborating such mutual containments within the quotidian byways of academic spaces. At stake is the braiding of the playful with the serious, recognizing that just as the playful is rightfully serious endeavour so also the serious must be leavened with the playful. Th e form of the anecdote and the force of the vignette—not only as attributes of description and narrative but

2 after conversion

equally as constitutive of thought and theory—bear an enormous burden here.3 And so I would like to turn to two vignettes of my own.

But before recounting these tales, a clarifi cation warrants emphasis. Th e vignettes that follow feature two protagonists, and my observations on particular statements that they made in seminar situations. In the discussion, my orientation is toward considering the academy as a culturally and politically layered domain, rather in the manner of an ethnographic ‘fi eld’, located in time, in which academics work but also live. Th e utterances and practices of scholarly subjects, including those of the ‘observer’, in everyday academic spaces—for example, seminars, cafés, and bookshops—can be enormously revealing here. Sometimes intersecting with but oft en reaching behind the careful refl ections and considered arguments that appear in offi cial products of scholarship—books and essays, reviews and lectures—such routine words and refl ex gestures can reveal wider under-enunciated assumptions, the unsaid and under-thought of broader orientations within academic cultures.4

Revealing VignettesOver ten years ago, I was speaking at the weekly colloquia of a distinguished department in a famous university. A little apprehensive, I drew upon my wider construction of an ethnographic history of an untouchable community to raise issues of the interplay between caste and power, myth and history, and the enchantments of symbols of governance of the modern state and the fabrications of religious legalities by subaltern communities. At the end, I also cast my net somewhat wider. Digging into ethnographic and historical materials, I spelled out the implications of my analysis for the place and persistence of binary categories—of modernity and tradition, state and community, rationality and ritual, and reason and emotion—within infl uential strands of social and political theory in Western and non-Western contexts.

During the discussion that followed my presentation, critical questions were asked and key issues were raised, but there were few attempts to score points and settle scores that oft en mark seminar situations. As the session drew to a close, a distinguished scholar put a question to me in the kindest of ways. I was asked about the manner in which my work related to the study of lower-caste and untouchable groups, which was

introduction 3

(the gentle academic mildly stressed) the main area of my research. In response, I outlined some of the continuities and diff erences between my work and other studies of dalit dynamics and untouchable communities. Yet, I also stressed that the wider theoretical issues of myths and the making of modernity, orality and the construction of histories, and writing and the fashioning of traditions were equally the fi eld(s) of my research.5 It was a wholly civil exchange. I have fond memories of the entire aft ernoon (and aft erwards of dinner too). Yet, the question and my answer regarding what constitutes an area of research or a fi eld of study have stayed with me in the years since.

A few months later, I attended a large area studies conference. On the morning of the third day of the meetings, I found myself in a room featuring an array of presentations on diverse questions concerning untouchable castes and dalit groups in South Asia. I heard papers that were uniformly interesting. Yet, it is not these presentations that I bring up here. Rather, my statement concerns a discussant’s deliberations. Th is panelist said little about the three papers under discussion. Revealed instead was the discussant’s discourse on untouchables in India. Framed forthwith was the triumphant march of ‘the discipline of dalit studies’ in North America.

Was there anything remarkable about this? What struck me about this respondent’s remarks concerned their a priori assumption of a basic unity and an essential novelty of the diff erent presentations of that morning. Th ere was no attempt to unravel the common strands that ran through these clearly engaging but somewhat disparate papers. Th ere was no eff ort to establish what defi ned the novelty of these interesting but distinct presentations. Where was the need? Th e one-ness and the fi rst-ness of the papers—as part of a larger unifi ed and novel project—came to be proclaimed and secured through invocations of ‘our discipline of dalit studies’.

I admit that the term ‘discipline’ was used only twice, although in the space of a bare twelve minutes. I concede, too, that the application of ‘discipline’ as a word could have been the result of a hasty choice among available alternatives, though hardly a slip of the tongue. At the same time, a rapid rehearsal of the proper nouns of ‘dalit studies’—call it a fi eld or an area, a discipline or a domain—by the determined discussant served to further stage the fundamental singularity of this endeavour. Strung next

4 after conversion

to each other in the narrow space of two sentences, the names of diff erent scholars who animate ‘dalit studies’ served to foreground and foreclose an academic arena with distinct emphases and defi nite boundaries. Once again, I have happy recollections of the deliberations that morning (and of the conference too). And yet issues of the presumed unity and the putative novelty of studies of subordinate groups have continued to agitate me.

In these tales, it is important to distinguish between the fi rst statement and the second intervention. Th e kind query of the distinguished scholar some years ago was in the nature of a hint to a younger academic, a warning about the possible pitfalls and analytical dangers of generalizing on wider theoretical issues from within a seemingly limited fi eld. On the other hand, the closing remarks of the intrepid respondent some time back were of the order of celebration of a singular venture. Put simply, they constituted a tribute to engaged scholarship whose moral solidarity and intellectual achievements derived from the fact of its being part of the study of subaltern people(s), a self-contained ethical project and a self-realizing political knowledge.

What I wish to emphasize, however, is that these distinct refl ections and separate remarks are also bound to each other through a common presupposition and a shared oversight. Th ese have wide resonance, which extends far beyond the limits and possibilities of studies of dalits or subalterns, although the vignettes I have chosen carry urgency considering the privileged place of alterity and diff erence in academic worlds today.6 Th e refl ections and remarks assume that in the humanist disciplines and the social sciences the ostensible object of inquiry is the main arbiter and the key determinant of the theoretical and political possibilities of bodies of knowledge. Th ey underplay the fact that the problems and potentialities of humanist endeavours and social scientifi c practice can lie not only with what is studied but equally (and sometimes more) with what we question, how we cast our inquiries, and the ways in which we write.

Indeed, in diff erent ways these positions are rooted in an epistemological claim that once embarked upon aft er being self-consciously chosen, the subject of knowledge is already in place, always a given. If the fi rst instance posits studies of untouchables (and other subaltern subjects) as an inherent condition of limits for wider theoretical

introduction 5

inquiry, the second case renders ‘dalit studies’ (and similar writings on subordinate communities) as a suffi cient realm of possibilities for an essentially ethical and a necessarily novel scholarship. A singular mutual logic governs these rather dissimilar statements that are oft en echoed in distinct ways in diverse reaches of the academy.

I remain unconvinced by this logic, but three clarifi cations are in order. First, my arguments constitute more than mere refutations of positions that hold that objects of inquiry descend upon scholarship as already given entities and fully fabricated artifacts. Today only endemic empiricists will deny that social reality is ‘concept-dependent’, and none but puritanical positivists will dispute that objects of inquiry are shaped by—even as they critically infl uence—the social and historical processes of knowledge construction. Specifi cally, the statements of the two interlocutors discussed above do not insinuate any such pure, unreconstructed verities. Tilting critical swords at imaginary analytical windmills has little to contribute to the issues at hand.

Second, mine is not a proposal regarding the wholly singular and radically individuated nature of knowledge construction, which underplays the manifold eff ects of disciplinary imaginings upon this process. Yet, I am also not endorsing positions—deemed ‘conventionalist’ and ‘super-idealist’ in typologies of philosophy—that totally deny the existence of social reality outside of scholarly conceptual conventions and academic disciplinary discourses.7 Turning to the statements of our two protagonists, I agree with their claims that subaltern dynamics—and the fi eld(s) of their study—exist. Similarly, I also concur with their implied suggestion that the brute realities of this existence act upon the analyses of subaltern communities and subordinate groups, analyses that in turn ought to communicate with each other.

Finally, mine is not yet another plea for the increasing disenchantment and progressive control of an unprocessed, pristine world through legislative reason. Th e point is worth emphasis since such implicit and explicit proclamations abound in our present. At the same time, it is also the case that overweening critiques of a reifi ed West, themselves positing a singular modern, continue to enthrall and enchant the here and now. Before the uses of disenchantment and beyond the ruses of reifi cation, two possibilities become palpable. On the one hand, I look toward recognizing the monumental magic of the modern and registering the

6 after conversion

enduring enchantments of modernity.8 Such moves entail procedures that do not simply demystify or pointedly unmask histories and subjects but seek rather to carefully question, critically affi rm, prudently unravel, and ethically articulate social worlds and their academic expressions.9 On the other hand, I consider it important to think through propositions regarding the ways in which ‘the consciousness of being exposed to the labors of history precedes the objectifi cations of documentary historiography’.10 Such emphases underscore protocols suggesting the conceit of adjudicatory reason and the limits of disciplinary history.11 Th ese are questions to which I will return in diff erent ways.

Th e point is that in Aft er Conversion I write against the grain of understandings that (oft en implicitly) seize upon the apparent objects of intellectual inquiry, setting them up as the singular yardstick for judging the scholarly novelty and the theoretical validity of intellectual endeavours. I suspect that these moves might have something to do with a broader context of acute academic overproduction, saturated seminar schedules, and severe limitations of time upon scholars. But let me cast aside such idle speculation to return once more to the statements that have led to these deliberations.

In the vignettes that I have recounted, it is important to recognize that there is nothing intrinsic to accounts of subaltern subjects that prevents them from elaborating wider theoretical issues beyond the proximate fi eld(s) of studies of subalterns. Yet, it is also crucial to realize the limits of celebrating writings on subordinate groups as a domain that inherently generates ethical inquiries into marginality and inexorably engenders critical knowledge of the dispossessed.12 And the instance of subaltern subjects is just that, an example. For I hope it is clear that these twin considerations hold true as well for other areas of humanist inquiry and diff erent arenas of social scientifi c endeavour.

In each case, much depends on the questions posed, the truths unlearnt, the concepts invoked, the verities undone, the categories evoked, and the narratives brought into play. Th e questions and concepts—and the unlearning of truths—shape the objects of inquiry, framing the larger sets of relationships and the wider matrices of interconnections in which they are embedded. Th e categories and narratives—and the undoing of verities—can also lead to the objects (of a singular consciousness) being rendered as subjects (with a diff erent consciousness), involving the

introduction 7

revision of self-same, univocal analyses and the elaboration of distinct-diff erent, plural understandings.

Reading/WritingIt is in this spirit that I approach research and writing, their specifi c impulses, broader movements, and diff erent dimensions. An important role here is played by my attempts to bring together diverse readings and distinct perspectives. Aft er Conversion is no exception. Th e book explores several pathways by undertaking diff erent journeys. Yet the travels constituting the work have been shaped by a shared set of critical considerations, and their purposes are marked by mutual procedures of reading and writing.

Together, this book attempts to eschew widely present intellectual habits, which acutely intimate the business-as-usual of the academy. Th ese routine gestures delight in academic dismissal and revel in scholarly scandal, especially concerning contending terms of thought and theory, adversarial strains of the empirical and the analytical. Here, no instances and vignettes are needed to prove my point. If we only care to look and remember, examples and anecdotes abound, including in our own everyday encounters. It might appear that I am sermonizing too much. But recall that my refl ections on intellectual arenas and social worlds rest on weaving together the playful with the serious. Besides, I intend to practise what I preach.

In Aft er Conversion, my eff ort is to set up critical interchanges and productive associations among distinct perspectives in the task of academic endeavour. As would become clear, I seek to braid together salient suggestions of ethnographies of art with newer understandings of state and modernity, while contrapuntally conjoining crucial emphases of historical anthropologies with postcolonial propositions concerning the West and the nation. Here are to be found, too, attempts to critically combine signifi cant submissions of the history of anthropology, important insights of social theory, and key considerations of the ‘everyday’ as expressing broad networks of meaning and power. By casting all these tendencies in mutual dialogue, each one engaging but also extending the other, the various interchanges are directed at rethinking the past and the present, especially highlighting the imaginative pathways and the ragged

8 after conversion

networks of meaning and practice. Th is is to say that Aft er Conversion approaches reading and writing as inextricably conjoined endeavours, animated and articulated by diff erent perspectives, which support yet probe each other.

Simply put, I seek to articulate critical-affi rmative modes of reading/writing that avoid hasty dismissals and rushed rebuttals of contending perspectives, while equally eschewing eclectic, quick-fi x endorsements of distinct, oft en incommensurable, arguments. At stake are eff orts to query formative presuppositions of infl uential understandings while attempting to recuperate their critical possibilities.13 In diff erent ways, the point has been made many, many times before, not least in the actual craft ing of histories and ethnographies.14 Here let me specify more concretely such twin protocols of reading/writing that prudently probe contending theoretical/political propositions but only while rigorously attending to the spirit of these proposals as well as, where possible, critically affi rming their potentialities.

Articulating ModernityTh ere are diff erent ways in which this task can be taken up. My wager concerns the submission that one of these ways can consist of engaging the terms, stipulations, and horizons of modernity, which defi ne the worlds in which we think and live. Later in this book, I will discuss modernity not only as Western idea and ideology but as wider historical practice and process. Th is would suggest the salience of examining the interplay between modernity and empire and the signifi cance of distinguishing between the modern subject and the subject of modernity.15 Th e question now is: Why should provisos of modernity feature in this Introduction as part of a discussion concerning critical-affi rmative protocols of reading/writing?

At the most basic level, issues of modernity run through the book, indicated as well in its subtitle, all of which calls for clarifying some of these here. Yet there is more to the picture. For a very long time now, the world has abounded in both: aggressive imaginings that privilege an imaginary Europe/West as the centrepiece of modernity, history, and democracy; and several façile strains of anti-Enlightenment rhetoric that oft en mirror the representations of a bloated and singular modernity.16

introduction 9

It is important to simultaneously, carefully query the one and the other, the urgent dimensions of the task deriving from how such cabalistic conceptions characterize multiple terrains, from the fi rst world through to the fourth world.

Indeed, the conceptions and terrains require understanding and not dismissal. Now, I have already indicated enough regarding my disposition toward impatient critiques of modernity, history, and reason. It is only appropriate, therefore, that I turn to seminal writings that authoritatively endorse modernity. My critical engagements are premised on two further recognitions. Th e fi rst involves the need to go beyond the key limits of postcolonial discourses today. Without putting too fi ne a point on the matter, several exercises in the fi eld display an alarming tendency to refer insularly, primarily to work within their own allegedly cutting-edge yet much too neatly demarcated fi eld. Th us, such writings only take inevitably limited pot-shots against their ‘Eurocentric’ academic adversaries without seeking to enter the protocols of the latter’s arguments. Th e second concerns the critical salience within scholarly practice of carefully considering the assumptions and entities that shore up our worlds, in this case those turning on modernity. Here are to be found dispositions and protocols that combine the rethinking and acknowledgement of categories and worlds of the past with the querying and affi rmation of concepts and entities in the present.

Let us begin, then, with some of the concerns and questions bearing on modernity and its discussions raised by the work of the remarkable, tireless philosopher Jürgen Habermas. In taking up the task, I am aware of course that Habermas is not necessarily a terribly popular fi gure in scholarship on South Asia. Consider that Christopher Bayly once irreverently and delightfully described Habermas’s notion of the public sphere as being ‘at root … a scientifi c version of Whig modernization theory’.17 And so also the work of the philosopher has been chiefl y ignored in infl uential bodies of critical and historical writing concerning the subcontinent.18

Yet, it hardly warrants emphasis that Habermas has played a key role in extending the democratic horizons of the ‘unfi nished’ Enlightenment project, especially through his elaborations of reason as ‘communicative action’ and a self-critical modernity.19 Conversely, in reproducing the ineluctable conjunction of modernity with Europe, Habermas’ writings

10 after conversion

have played a thoroughly ethnocentric tune—or, if one must, reproduced an entirely Eurocentric refrain—within ‘classical’ thought and ‘critical’ theory.20 Together, my point concerns the requirement of staying longer with these twin dimensions, conjoint dispositions, in the thought of Habermas.

Avoiding yet another exegesis of Habermas’ writings—recall that both full-blown commentaries and half-hearted discussions of his work abound in the academy—I would like to seize upon a somewhat unusual, personal statement concerning the work of the philosopher by a fellow thinker. Signifi cantly, the critical avowal comes not from an intricately wrought philosophical discussion but from the rough and ready words that form part of an interview given by the social and political theorist, Zygmunt Bauman. Here is what Bauman says regarding the ‘power of argument’ in the world according to Habermas:

I think what attracted me to Habermas, really, was his ideal of a society shaped aft er the pattern of a sociology seminar; that is, there are only participants and the one thing which matters is the power of argument.... So, I liked this as a utopian focus imaginarius, somewhat like the idea of the ideal experiment, which is of course never achieved, but unless you have it, you can’t experiment at all. Now, I liked this horizon, this prospect, as the organizing, directing factor in our eff orts—where we should aim at.21

Th e short statement carries immense import.Th e salience and shortfalls of the ‘power of argument’ in Habermas’s

thought concern what they can teach us regarding the limits and potentialities of thinking about modernity as well as cultures of conversation. But this is possible only when such learning and unlearning is predicated on our own eff orts to bind the determination to carefully question with the desire to critically affi rm in the labour of intellectual understanding. Once more, the issue involves affi rming and questioning analytical (and everyday) categories and heterogeneous (yet overlapping) worlds.

Two points are pertinent. On the one hand, Habermas’ emphasis on the ‘power of argument’ appears crucially connected with the possibilities and containments underlying his positing of reason as ‘communicative action’. Th ese protocols at once displace a merely subject-centred rationality and underscore the ‘counter-discourse’ of modernity.22

introduction 11

Together, they announce issues of an inter-subjective rationality as well as an obligation to the other in deliberation, but they also indicate the manner in which such proposals appear circumscribed by ‘scholastic reason’.23 On the other hand, it is worth considering if Habermas’ precise projections of society along the ‘patterns of a sociology seminar’ are linked, in distinct ways, with his ‘idealized history’ that presents the past in terms of modular temporal schemes, involving attenuated stages of succession.24 As a corollary to this, there is the issue of facing up to the fact of what is to be done when argument fails (even in a situation such as a sociology seminar or academic discussion): the moment when, despite its power and persuasion, argument faces its utter refusal in a resolutely reluctant interlocutor or an apparently incommensurable other. Confronting these questions, I would like to suggest in necessarily broad strokes three particular moves to question and affi rm in acts of reading and writing.

First, it is vital to probe Habermas’ ethnocentric framing of rationality, which itself rests upon his representations of modernity as an entirely internally self-generated, European phenomenon, occluding any linkages with empire or non-Western worlds. But it is also crucial to take up such endeavour while simultaneously thinking through the philosopher’s proposal of the counter-discourse of modernity. Th is involves especially staying with the manner in which Habermas explores the primary crossroads of this counter-discourse in order to point toward a ‘path open but not taken: the construal of reason in terms of a non-coercive intersubjectivity of mutual understanding and reciprocal recognition’.25 Here are formulations that see reason as ineluctably situated, that is to say ‘as concretized in history, society, body, and language’; view its potential as requiring realization in the ‘communicative practice of ordinary, everyday life’; and, against totalized critiques of reason, emphasize its capacity to be critical.26

At the same time, before being carried away by Habermas’ own ‘power of argument’, it is worth considering how such propositions come with their own problems. On the one hand, they reduce political power relations to relations of communication, which ‘surreptitiously throws the political back onto the terrain of ethics’. On the other hand, they suppress visceral registers of being and diff erence to a telos of language that provides the model for practical, rational discourse, which ever

12 after conversion

tends toward consensus.27 Now, the reading I am proposing can open up the mostly neatly packaged nature of Habermas’ thought to reveal—at the very least on my own, distinct, critical registers—its contending tendencies, which contain limitations and potentialities

All of this entails departing from the oft en exclusive, at moments a priori, and unsteadily depoliticizing cast of the philosopher’s promulgations on communication and consensus, the inter-subjective and the non-coercive, and language and reason. It also means learning from yet looking beyond strains and sensibilities of anti-foundational thought that primarily posit the other of reason. Such lessons critically draw on yet do not readily succumb to Habermas’ wide-ranging critique of such traditions. Lastly, propelled by such protocols, the reading at stake involves affi rming the important horizons that Habermas’ thought points toward in considering the situated and critical nature of rationality. Th is is especially the case since the philosopher’s projections of the ‘power of argument’ have now been sieved against their own conceits.

Let me, then, close the fi rst set of my proposals toward a critical-affi rmative reading of Habermas with a question: Can the distinct measures and particular procedures that I have outlined allow the notion of the counter-discourse of modernity to be brought into productive tensions with diff erent, alternative imaginings of modernity/modernities, politics, and democracy? (I certainly hope so, but let us also not fool ourselves that any of this could be much more than a matter of academic conversation.)

Second, it is salient to query Habermas’ a priori elision of modernity with Europe—each appearing as historical fact, theoretical metaphor, and analytical abstraction—especially by tracking not only the way the West is rehearsed as modernity but the manner in which modernity is staged ‘as the West’.28 At the same time, far from simply pointing fi ngers toward or merely pigeonholing Habermas’ writing as Eurocentric, such eff orts equally entail entering the protocols of his thought where not simply an excision of the non-West but a patterned, attenuated, idealized history of Europe itself shores up a critical theory of modernity. I have already provided an example in a note concerning the philosopher's schematic stipulations and stagist statements—or, innately developmental projections of succesions of historical stages and civilizational steps—about the emergence and predicaments of the (Western) nation. Th e issue

introduction 13

is only taken forward by the critical theoretical and historical discussions of Habermas’ infl uential account of the public sphere. Here, an important line of criticism has focused on how the Habermasian conception of the liberal public sphere presents an idealized history of liberal bourgeois public spheres. Th us, the philosopher’s account refuses to admit to the plural traditions of reasoned exchanges that marked eighteenth-century Western Europe. It ignores how the bourgeois public appropriated and marginalized such more inclusive notions of public participation and discussion by strategically closing off the range of possible discussants in the arena.29

Th e point is that it is not enough to merely lament and simply criticize the absence in classical theory of the non-West and empire. Such endless assertions and ready rebuttals crucially circumscribe critical readings of European thought. Th e more important task is to pose questions concerning the larger subordination of history to theory. I am referring to queries considering how aggrandizing and authoritative pronouncements of theory/philosophy cannibalize and expropriate dense and heterogeneous entanglements of the past/history, not only treating the latter as merely illustrative case material but schematically recasting them through resolutely modular grids. Far from blaming Habermas for a one-off oddity in thought and theory, I am suggesting that a critical appreciation of his work brings such pervasive issues on the horizon of a recuperative reading, registering unequal exchanges between the here-and-now and history. Such exchanges incessantly, assuredly, indolently substitute the ‘ought’ for the ‘is’ in projections of the past and the present, and carry wide implications for academic apprehensions and scholarly commonsense.30

Th ird and fi nally, turning specifi cally to issues of intellectual interchange, I consider it essential to engage and extend Habermas’ emphasis on a community of dialogue—including his stress upon the salience of ‘argument’—within the terms of scholarly debate. Once more, it is possible to register overlapping yet distinct dispositions in the philosopher’s emphases. To begin with, Habermas clearly endorses how in deliberation the utterance of the other places an obligation on the self. Yet, ‘this is typically overshadowed by the excessively precise normative character of the obligation’ he fi nds the self as incurring, a move that is itself connected to the philosopher’s belief in eventual consensus.31 Moreover, Habermas insightfully acknowledges the unpredictable,

14 after conversion

potentially disruptive attributes of the utterance in everyday life, arguing further for the disclosure of particularity that makes it possible for the (de-centred) subject to ‘bear witness to the possibility of no-saying’ to the identity s/he has projected on the other, despite the subject’s investments in the latter’s identity.32 Lastly, as suggested earlier, Habermas’ wider proposals regarding the other and argument cannot remain untouched by his ‘underlying claim that an orientation to consensus is built into the telos of language’.33

Taken together, I would suggest, it is important to combine the learning and unlearning from the problems and possibilities of Habermas’ propositions regarding intellectual interchange with Richard Rorty’s exhortation to work with the ‘strategy of using narrative [or stories] where argument fails’ in the shape of scholarly exchange. Here is Rorty explaining the importance of telling stories:

stories about why we talk as we do and how we might avoid continuing to talk that way. When you fi nd yourself at an impasse, baffl ed by your opponent’s refusal to stop asking questions which you really should not have to answer, you can always shift the ground by raising questions about the vocabulary he or she is using. [Th us,] historical narratives [make it possible to] show why the issue previously discussed is moot and why it needs to be reformulated in terms which are, alas, not yet available.34

Th e point is not only that otherwise, as it appears to me, conviction ceases and conversation stops.35 It is also that such conjoint tasks themselves bid us to ask: Don’t we need to attend at once to the means of cultivating reasonable conversation and of inculcating tactics before the loss of rational grounds, in order to work through the potential of both in intellectual interchange?

Am I providing a prepared solution to assess and apprehend the work of Habermas? Far from it. (And while we are with this question let me readily confess to my larger inability to even adequately summarize his extensive oeuvre, although this does not mean that I cannot critically engage its constitutive propositions discussed above). Does my point simply concern the utility of Habermas’ writings for the historian? Of course, as we have seen, the work of the philosopher has found diverse, contending uses in historical writing. Here the wide horizons and specifi c insights of Habermas’ thought have been imaginatively extended,

introduction 15

especially when the historian has sieved these through the grids of critical histories and particular pasts.36 Yet my eff orts entail somewhat distinct considerations. Am I mainly implying that it is important to attend to the truly signifi cant work of scholars while criticizing their evident blind-spots, assertions that can also be made regarding the writings of other intellectuals? Well, not quite.

To reiterate, I am indicating instead procedures of reading/writing that critically and carefully query the constitutive presumptions of intellectual undertakings while cautiously, critically affi rming their formative possibilities. Th is means resisting the temptation to pointedly unmask the core contradictions of a study and/or to readily demystify its attendant ambivalences. Rather, it involves tracking how the contending strains of an essay or a book—and, indeed, of an edited collection or a wider corpus—can comprise the exact conditions of its possibility. Th is is to say that far from endlessly insinuating analytical errors, the braiding of simultaneous discourses in separate tongues in a work can in fact reveal its key confi nes and critical promises, each upholding but also upbraiding the other.37 It is crucial to take up the challenge of thinking through such contradictions and contentions.

Let me concretize these proposals by staying just a little longer with another infl uential discussion of modernity, which articulates distinct apprehensions of the category-entity. I refer to a signifi cant essay in intellectual history by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, a contribution that is at its best when discussing the complex pasts of the term ‘modern’ but that also takes up questions of modernity.38 Indeed, imaginatively intervening in a semantically and analytically loaded fi eld, the German intellectual historian sensitively tracks the ‘conceptual history’ of the word ‘modern’ in Western Europe. Specifi cally, he unravels intricate articulations of the word and notion of the ‘modern’ with other terms and traditions such as those of the ‘ancient’, the ‘classical’, and the ‘romantic’ in European intellectual constellations over the past few centuries. Implicitly, at the very least, these arguments and materials reveal that the break with the past implied by the idea of modernity is exceeded, even undercut, by the contentious expressions of its intimate etymological and conceptual cousin, the ‘modern’.

Yet it would not do to stop here. For, while registering the strengths of Gumbrecht’s work, it is equally important to prudently probe the

16 after conversion

moment in his understanding when the concept ‘modern’ yields to the category ‘modernity’. Now it becomes clear fairly quickly that Gumbrecht’s account of the concept of ‘modernity’ remains entirely ‘internal’ to Europe. Th is need not necessarily be a problem in itself—aft er all, we are considering the work of a historian of Western Europe—but for the fact that the purely internal nature of the argument also betokens its ineluctably exclusive cast. Th us, Gumbrecht’s history of the category of modernity not only overlooks the multiple hierarchies of this metaphor-entity, which have been variously played out on conceptual as well as historical registers. It also actively participates in the staging of modernity ‘as the West’, implicitly endorsing and explicitly expressing the hierarchies, oppositions, and hierarchical oppositions of an exclusive modernity. Unsurprisingly, now an imaginary and distended yet palpable and pervasive Europe/West is reifi ed and hypostatized into history, modernity, and destiny—for each society, any culture, and every people.39

Am I exaggerating? Here is Gumbrecht’s tiny, unambiguously alone, concession to the non-Western world. He writes: ‘From our [European/Euro-American/Western] perspective at least, modernization in the underdeveloped countries is ... taking place somewhere between decolonization and our own present.’40 Th e statement speaks for itself, acutely announcing its own complicities. But my case does not rest. (And, since we are with this issue, let me repeat that it is not guilt or innocence that I am aft er, in any case). As I have suggested, it would be much too simple to endorse Gumbrecht’s genealogy of the term ‘modern’ while upbraiding his ‘stagist’ presumptions concerning modernity. Th e more challenging task—one that I have been trying to indicate through my own reading/writing—is to track the formidable interleaving of these contending tendencies that not only shore up the text but defi ne the fact that it was written at all.

Such entanglements reveal how a hermeneutic impulse within varieties of ‘historicism’ that challenges schematic projections of the word ‘modern’ crucially crisscrosses with a developmental ‘historicism’ that now presents ‘modernity’ through stagist stipulations. On the one hand, staying with the intertwining of the two historicisms can serve to open up the debate on the nature of historicism. Th is is to explore in focused ways the hermeneutic impulses, developmental imperatives,

introduction 17

analytical implications, and their incessant enmeshments at the core of historicism.41 On the other hand, our own protocols of approaching Gumbrecht’s essay need to eschew the desire to tear asunder its seemingly seamlessly stitched together material. Rather, they need to trace the text’s unevenly sutured, irregularly tattered, texture. Th is is to unravel how the stitches binding together the text almost split at the seams and yet how the weaves of the work somehow hold together in the middle, which is not unlike the contentious entwining of heterogeneous temporalities in fabrics of modernity.

To take up these tasks is also to attend to the contradictory and contingent interlacing of social worlds and their academic apprehensions, especially as part and parcel of regimes of modernity. Recall that Gumbrecht’s hermeneutical unfolding of the term ‘modern’ rests on an untangling of the ‘details’. Such details not only defy being gathered unto ready schemes of social sciences but also constitute social facts bearing immense import in everyday arenas. Conversely, the stagist presumptions shaping Gumbrecht’s understanding of modernity are, at once, attributes of scholarly wisdom, aspects of quotidian commonsense, and their endless interplay.

I am aware that this somewhat strenuous excursus into the work of two important thinkers of modernity would not have been to the liking of some readers. Aft er all, scholars and students have distinct dispositions toward theory, which are closely linked to the ways in which we read and write. Some wilfully bury themselves under the cover of theory, while others simply shake off its unbearable burden. Some strategically deploy theory to argue against, while others instrumentally choose the particular proposals that it off ers. Some use theory as a positively framing device but chiefl y at the beginning of an account, while others, including myself, seek to weave its considerations and contestations into the texture of narratives.

At the same time, my point concerns the acute limits of procedures of reading/writing that fi nd instrumentalist uses for theory. Such endeavours are oft en founded on an intellectual refusal to attend to the terms and textures of the arguments of their interlocutor-enemies; characterized by an utter lack of generosity concerning the possibilities of contending scholarship; and marked by an acute excision of the requirement to examine their own presuppositions. Indeed, to readily

18 after conversion

dismiss interlocutor-enemies is easy, in fact terminally addictive. To critically affi rm contending arguments entails eff ort, engendering lively conversations. Th ese are not mere platitudes. And so it follows that my eff orts to indicate particular procedures of reading/writing by thinking through contentious questions of modernity/modernities carry other, critical implications.

What is in a Name?Th e implications exactly entail the concepts and narratives, analyses and descriptions that run through Aft er Conversion. Th is is to say that while shoring up the Introduction and the Epilogue, the categories and narratives no less bind and sustain the work’s three main sections titled, ‘Questions of Conversion’, ‘Personal Portraits’, and ‘Modernity and History’, with each containing two chapters.

In the fi rst section, I think through questions of conversion by examining colonial writings of a vernacular Christianity and by tracking the transformations of caste and sect in South Asia. Both these chapters draw on historical and ethnographic materials from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to query two overlapping problems at the core of authoritative academic conceptions and pervasive everyday understandings of conversion. On the one hand, such apprehensions remain grounded, albeit in diff erent ways, in commonsense Western connotations of the category; and, on the other, they discretely turn conversion into a self-contained analytical apparatus and a self-generative descriptive domain. Together, this renders conversion as too limited a concept and too large an arena. In front of these designs, there emerge challenges for approaching and understanding the temporalities, terms, and textures of evangelical entanglements and caste-sect formations.

In the next section of the work, I turn to personal portraits. Here I write not only of an artist friend but of my anthropologist father. At the same time, by focusing primarily, critically on their work, I let my closeness to the two appear only between the lines. Indeed, my bids here seek to conjoin crucial concerns of histories of anthropology with those of an ethnographic biography of a subject of anthropology; and to combine critical considerations of ethnographies of art with those of an anthropological history of a dalit imagination. All this is done in order to

introduction 19

convey something of the dense sensuousness and moving contradictions of social worlds.

Th e third and fi nal section presents a contemporary event in the shape of a critical commentary and a cyber conversation in the form of an interview before turning in an Epilogue to some of the ways in which questions of modernity have been discussed in scholarship on South Asia. Th rough such measures, I consider the mutual requirements of history, theory, and anthropology especially in order to understand the stipulations and seductions of the modern and modernity. Yet, my eff orts equally entail outlining the ways in which these disciplines, categories, and entities can shore up but also cast doubt on each other.

All of this leads me to the title of the work, Aft er Conversion. What does the title signify? Does it intimate the critical emphases of the study? Of course, Aft er Conversion takes aft er the title of its lead chapter. As indicated above, this chapter itself seeks to query pervasive understandings of conversion as unremitting rupture from prior faith. It does this by tracking the making and moulding of identities, understandings, practices, and meaning that unravel aft er conversion as event in order to highlight that the concept-entity of conversion is better understood as a historical process rather than as a one-time, singular change of religion. And such emphases are only elaborated in the next chapter considering the transformations of caste-sect in the light of regarding conversions as processes.

Th e point is that in Aft er Conversion, the aft er operates on three overlapping registers. First, the aft er as suggesting conversion to be a long-term process and not just a one-off event; second, the aft er as in the sense of a pursuit, to be aft er conversion in the manner of unravelling the concept-entity and tracking its processes; and, third and fi nally, the aft er as intimating that such an orientation surpasses and unsettles prior conceptions of conversion. All of this further intimates wider sensibilities toward categories and worlds that run through the book, an issue to which I now turn.

Indeed, there is still another sense in which the title, Aft er Conversion, might be understood. Th is refers to my own conversion—also gradual, very much a process—to the procedures of an anthropological history. At stake here have not only been combinations of distinct methodologies and disciplinary techniques, drawing in the conjunction of fi eld work and archival research. Rather my conversion to anthropological history

20 after conversion

has equally entailed the rethinking of its constituent disciplines. Such reconsiderations of anthropology, history, and their entanglements have turned on specifi c sensibilities toward academic arenas and social worlds, the past and the present. Th ese reside in particular procedures of analysis and explanation and narration and description.42

Th e terms and protocols of narrative and theory off ered in Aft er Conversion are far from being an entirely cerebral endeavour, an endlessly analytical aff air. Rather, such dispositions and procedures participate in a wider questioning of what Pierre Bourdieu has called ‘scholastic reason’. Th is is the pervasive perspective entailing, ‘(active or passive) ignorance not only of what happens in the world of practice … but also of what it is to exist, quite simply, in the world.’43 Here, it is important to recognize that Bourdieu put his fi nger on how these terribly widespread inclinations oft en bracket their own conditions of possibility.

At stake are key characteristics of scholastic orientations. First, they very insuffi ciently probe their own presuppositions, entirely inadequately querying the premises and presumptions that make them possible in the fi rst place. Second, they engage with social and political terrains in terms of their own ‘ought’ only to disavow each contentious ‘is’—in the academy as in the world. Finally, they argue through apparently ‘ethical’ imperatives that continually condemn the ‘concrete’ for its murkiness, indeed its everyday-ness, since the contingency, contention, and contradiction of social worlds can only appear as distortion and lack when envisioned against the immaculate images they off er. Together, this means, too, that such perspectives assiduously insinuate what Johaness Fabian has called, the ‘progressive disembodiment of reason and knowledge’, which frequently rests upon an ‘ascetic withdrawal from the world’ as experienced through the senses. Th is is to say, a ‘sense-less’ science.44

In Aft er Conversion, my procedures actively engage proposals such as those of Bourdieu and Fabian toward particular purposes. First, the concepts and narratives elaborated in the book query persistent projections of the disembodied vision from nowhere that becomes the palpable perspective for everywhere. Second, I attempt to articulate the questioning (and self-questioning) of premises and propositions of knowledge(s) and worlds(s), precisely as part of the practice of historical anthropology. Th ird and fi nally, my eff ort is to weave the crucially sensuous attributes and the densely embodied aspects of thought and life

introduction 21

into the fabrics of narrative and theory. Each of these measures attempts to entwine hermeneutic impulses with critical considerations. Here, careful questionings of social worlds and their academic understandings can emerge interlaced with intimate accounts of the diversity and distinction of these terrains.45

Notes1. Here, I am extending David Scott’s call for the twin, continuous tasks of

an ‘internal labor of criticism’, and the questioning of ‘privilege’ by actively ‘unlearning’ it, within critical academic endeavour. David Scott, ‘Th eory and post-colonial claims on anthropological disciplinarity’, Critique of Anthropology, 12, 4, 1992, p. 388.

2. My brief indicative inventory will include the novels of David Lodge, particularly Small World; Paul Rabinow’s refl ections on a high-powered conference in France; vignettes in the writings of Greg Denning and Renato Rosaldo; and especially the critical concerns of ‘anecdotal theory’ in the work of Jane Gallop. Th is list specifi cally excludes navel-gazing exercises, whether they emerge from strains of experimental ethnography or stresses of cultural studies, and also the sociological formalism, for example, of Pierre Bourdieu’s studies of academic reproduction, which may all constitute valuable work in other respects. David Lodge, Small World: An Academic Romance (New York: Penguin, 1995); Paul Rabinow, Essays in the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Greg Dening, Performances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: Th e Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); Jane Gallop, Anecdotal Th eory (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002); Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

3. See especially, Gallop, Anecdotal Th eory.4. Needless to say, the playful yet critical spirit that I am invoking should not

become a cover for infl icting intellectual injury and conducting scholarly vendetta, mere variations on the familiar theme of academic dismissal and professional gossip.

5. See, for example, Saurabh Dube, Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780-1950 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998).

6. Questions of diff erence and power, alterity and authority, are discussed later in this Introduction, and run through the book.

22 after conversion

7. A remarkable review essay by George Steinmetz provides a succinct discussion of the key questions at stake in the bitter division between the ‘social constructivist’ and ‘positivist realist’ epistemological and ontological positions. Especially signifi cant here is the manner in which he disaggregates these ‘artifi cial groupings’ in order to clarify the terms of debate that are important for history and anthropology. I also fi nd Rosemary Coombe’s orientation toward the politics of representations in relation to such issues both salient and salutary. In her ethnography of the ‘social life of intellectual properties’, which can be considered as ‘postmodern in sensibility’, Coombe clarifi es that she is ‘not content to formally evoke a world of fl oating signifi cation, a hyperreality of texts’. Rather, she assiduously seeks to ‘delineate the social worlds in which such practices have political meaning, contexts in which social actors with specifi c interests, agendas, histories, and social positionings voice their aspirations and irritations, identifi cations and affi liations, reverences and resentments....’ George Steinmetz, ‘Critical realism and historical sociology’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40, 1, 1998, 170–86, citations from 170–71; Rosemary Coombe, Th e Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 38.

8. Such emphases are refl ected and elaborated in distinct ways in, for example, Simon During, Modern Enchantments: Th e Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Edward LiPuma, Encompassing Others: Th e Magic of Modernity in Melanesia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (eds.), Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (eds.), Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Alex Owen, Th e Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Fernando Coronil, Th e Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Michael Taussig, Th e Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Saurabh Dube (ed.), Enduring Enchantments, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, 2002. See also, Norman Brown, Life Against Death: Th e Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959); John Comaroff and Jean

introduction 23

Comaroff , Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder: Westview, 1992); Michael Taussig, Th e Magic of the State (London: Routledge, 1997); and the discussion in Chapter 7 below.

9. Th e procedures at stake form part of what I have called a ‘history without warranty’, and are discussed later in this Introduction and elaborated in the book as a whole. See, especially, Saurabh Dube, Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). See also Saurabh Dube, ‘Modernity and its enchantments: An introduction’, in Dube (ed.), Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization (New Delhi: Routledge, 2009).

10. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. ix–x. But see also, Jürgen Habermas, Th e Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures Trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: Th e MIT Press, 1987), pp. 131–60.

11. Th e emphases fi nd powerful expression in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Th ought and Historical Diff erence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). See also Chapters 6 and 7 and the Epilogue below. A somewhat shame-faced confession is in order here. Concerning the diff erent questions I have raised—from the limits of a legislative reason to the magic of the modern—I have yet to fully consider the implications of the work of Paul Rabinow that powerfully seeks to ‘exoticize’ the West by holding a mirror up to its own assumptions.

12. For my prior discussion of such questions see, for example, Saurabh Dube ‘Entangled endeavours’, in Dube (ed.), Postcolonial Passages: Contemporary History-writing on India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also, Dube, Untouchable Pasts.

13. Clearly, such simultaneous work of interrogation and recuperation learns from but departs with anti-foundational exercises that expose the ‘metaphysics of presence’ of canonical texts and recover diff erence in discursive arenas. In such endeavour, the problems stem from the ways in which interrogation dominates over affi rmation and alterities oft en appear as ‘unrecuperated particulars’. John McGowan, Postmodernism and its Critics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Dube, Stitches on Time; and Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affi rmation: Th e Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Th eory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

14. Concerning my own work consider, for example, Saurabh Dube, Sujetos subalternos: Capítulos de una historia antropólogica, trans. Germán Franco and Arí Bartra (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2001); and Dube, Stitches on Time.

15. Consider especially the discussion in the last section of the book.

24 after conversion

16. For my earlier formulation of these questions, see, for example, Dube, Untouchable Pasts.; and for my more recent understanding see, for instance, Dube, Stitches on Time; and Dube (ed.), Enduring Enchantments. Th e latter works in particular explore dualisms not as mere analytical phantasms but rather as bearing profound worldly attributes. Here I wish to gratefully acknowledge Dipesh Chakrabarty’s important insights, including concerning my work, which have helped such changes of disposition. A few years ago, in wintry, cold Chicago, Dipesh gently admonished me that instead of attempting to aggressively dismantle oppositions, one is better off thinking through them. A few weeks later, with the fi rst signs of spring lurking on the horizons of the windy city, in the course of another conversation, Dipesh’s careful, critical comments on the paucity of simply demystifying concepts and entities, especially through the means of a combative anti-essentialism, made his prior remarks resonate even more. Of course, instead of appearing as blazing revelations, it took me a few years to actually digest and critically elaborate Dipesh’s suggestions. Th is has been particularly true of my realization that to think through oppositions is more than just to think them through.

17. Bayly’s quip is quoted by Sanjay Subrahmanyam. To the best of my knowledge, it has not found place in print in Bayly’s discussion of the ‘Indian ecumene’. In the discussion, Bayly fi nds analogues—as well as distinctions—between the north Indian ecumene and Habermas’ modern public sphere. As regards such a discussion, I broadly agree with Subrahmanyam’s contention that it ‘seems somewhat fruitless to search for the equivalent in empirical materials for a formulation developed by social philosophers, whose very training precludes an openness to non-Western situations’. But I equally suggest that there are other terms of engagement with Habermas, where there is more at stake than issues of scholarly ‘training’. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Hearing voices: Vignettes of early modernity in South Asia, 1400–1750’, Daedalus, 127, 3, (Summer) 1998, p. 93; C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chapter 5.

18. Of course, there are exceptions, which extend beyond primarily instrumental uses of Habermas’ work. See, for example, Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). See also, Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). In recent years, Sumit Sarkar has invoked the writings of Habermas in diff erent ways. Here I am troubled by the innocence that Sarkar seems to assume regarding Habermas’ formulations of the problem-solving capacities of language,

introduction 25

an assumption of innocence that overlooks the formidable telos that governs the philosopher’s presuppositions regarding the fi nal destination of language and communication. Th e latter issue is discussed below. Sumit Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames: Recasting Postmodernism, Hindutva, History (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002), particularly p. 166.

19. For example, Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.20. Ibid. As is well known, criticisms of the Eurocentric nature of modern

knowledge abound in the academy today. Th erefore, I indicate here only a few works that explicitly served to point my thinking toward, and have since helped it unfold along, the tracks of considering the ethnocentric attributes of much classical and critical theory—in the case at hand concerning the European privileges of modernity and the concomitant exorcism of empire, but in reality extending far further into the entrails of liberal, conservative, and radical thought involving the nation and history, the state and democracy, and the West and the rest. Such critical studies include: Catherine Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and their Challenge to Western Th eory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff , Ethnography and the Historical Imagination; Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the artifi ce of history: Who speaks for ‘Indian’ pasts?’ Representations 37, winter 1992, 1–26; Coronil, Th e Magical State; Walter Mignolo, Th e Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); and Enrique Dussel, ‘Eurocentrism and modernity’, Boundary 2, 20, 1993, 65–76. At the same time, I have understood the emphases of such writings in rather particular ways. For example, I have taken from Enrique Dussel’s writings the need to critically question the Eurocentric foundations of the philosophical discourse on modernity, and to draw from his work (as well as from that of Walter Mignolo) the salience of keeping in view not only the modernity of the Enlightenment (and its critical connections with British and French colonialisms) but also the modernity of the Renaissance (and its intimate interleaving with the empires spawned by Spain and Portugal). Yet, I also seek to think through Dussel’s and Mignolo’s attribution of a priori alterity and innate purity to subaltern and non-Western worlds. Similar distinctions mark my submissions regarding the signifi cance of combining the will to carefully question with the impulse to critically affi rm concepts and entities in intellectual endeavour. But I recognize, too, that something similar is afoot, for example, in Dussel’s reading of Emmanuel Levinas and in Mignolo’s recent critical takes on non-Western knowledge(s). Th is

26 after conversion

further clarifi es that in each case the lessons I have learned have entailed not just blind submission but critical engagement. On the terms of such debate and discussion see, for example, Enrique Dussel, ‘World-system and “trans”-modernity’, in Saurabh Dube, Ishita Banerjee-Dube, and Edgardo Lander (eds.), Critical Conjunctions: Foundations of Colony and Formations of Modernity, a special issue of Nepantla: Views from South, 3, 2, 2002, 221–44; Walter Mignolo, ‘Th e enduring enchantment (Or the epistemic privilege of modernity and where to go from here)’, in Dube (ed.), Enduring Enchantments; Saurabh Dube, ‘Introduction: Colonialism, modernity, colonial modernities’, in Dube, Banerjee-Dube, and Lander (eds.), Critical Conjunctions; and Dube, ‘Modernity and its enchantments’. See also Chapters 6 and 7 below.

21. Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity. 22. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity; and Habermas, Th e Th eory

of Communicative Action, trans. T. McCarthy, 2 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). See also, Habermas, Postmetaphysical Th inking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, Mass.: Th e MIT Press, 1992); and Th omas McCarthy, ‘Introduction’, in Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, vii–xvii.

23. On the notion of ‘scholastic reason’ see Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

24. Here is Craig Calhoun commenting on Habermas’ idealized history concerning the nation. He begins by quoting from the philosopher’s text, Th e Inclusion of the Other:

Th e nation-state owes its historical successes to the fact that it substituted relations of solidarity between the citizens for the disintegrating corporative ties of early modern society. But this republican achievement is endangered when, conversely, the integrative force of the nation of citizen is traced back to the pre-political fact of a quasi-natural people, that is, to something independent of and prior to the political opinion- and will-formation of the citizens themselves.

Having quoted from the text, Calhoun, the critical Habermasian, continues, But pause here and notice the temporal order implied in this passage. First there were

local communities, guilds, religious bodies, and other ‘corporative bonds’. Th en there was republican citizenship with its emphasis on the civic identity of each citizen. Th en this was undermined by ethnonationalism. What this misses is the extent to which each of these ways of organizing social life existed simultaneously with the others, sometimes in struggle and sometimes symbiotically. New ‘corporative ties’ have been created, for example, notably in the labour movement and in religious communities. Conversely, there was no ‘pure republican’ moment when ideas of nationality did not inform the image of the republic and the constitution of its boundaries.

introduction 27

Craig Calhoun, ‘Th e class-consciousness of frequent travelers: Toward a critique of actually existing cosmopolitanism’, in Dube (ed.), Enduring Enchantments, p. 878, emphasis in the original.

25. McCarthy, ‘Introduction’, p. xvi.26. Ibid., pp. xvi–xvii.27. See here Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. Shapiro

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1971); and Habermas, Th eory of Communicative Action. Th e critical quotations derive, respectively, from Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 66 and White, Sustaining Affi rmation, pp. 36, 138. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).

28. Timothy Mitchell, “Th e stage of modernity”, in Mitchell (ed.), Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) p. 15, emphasis in the original.

29. See Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). Consider also Bourdieu’s suggestion that

the representation of political life that Habermas proposes on the basis of the description of the emergence of the ‘public sphere’ … obscures and represses the question of the economic and social conditions that would have to be fulfi lled in order to allow the public deliberation capable of leading to a rational consensus, that is, a debate in which the competing particular interests would receive the same consideration and in which the participants, conforming to an ideal notion of ‘communicative action’, would seek to understand the points of view of the others and to give them the same weight as their own.

Linking this obscuring and repression concerning apprehensions of the past to how scholastic worlds excise the grounding of their own cognitive interests in strategic social interests—and even exorcise the presence of domination in social relations of communication—Bourdieu points to the ‘epistemocentric illusion which leads Habermas to make the universality of reason and the existence of universalizable interests the basis of rational consensus ….’ Bourdieu continues that in Habermasian thought all of this is itself based on an ‘unawareness (or repression) of the conditions of access to the political sphere and of the factors of discrimination (such as sex, education or income) which limits the chances of access not only, as is oft en said, especially with reference to women, to positions in the political fi eld, but, more profoundly, to articulated political opinion …and consequently to the political fi eld.’ Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, pp. 65–67, emphasis in the original.

30. Concerning such questions, I have elsewhere discussed the active inter-change between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’, the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’, especially

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in relation to propositions of the secularization of the world. Th e point is that instead of considering either as a mere straw-fi gure, it is the interlacing of these propositional forms that underlie social worlds and their everyday and academic understandings. Dube, ‘Introduction: Enchantments of modernity’.

31. Consider the following statement of Habermas: ‘Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech.’ White, Sustaining Affi rmation, p. 36; Habermas, Th eory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 287; Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 314; Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 311.

32 White, Sustaining Affi rmation, p. 37; Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, pp. 321–26; Habermas, Th eory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, p. 399.

33. White, Sustaining Affi rmation, p. 36. Consider now another statement of Habermas: ‘…the use of language with an orientation to reaching understanding is the original mode of language use, upon which indirect understanding, giving something to understand or letting something be understood, and the instrumental use of language in general, are parasitic.’ Habermas, Th eory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 288, emphasis in the original.

34. Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy without principles’, in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Against Th eory: Literary Studies and New Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 135 (132–38). At the same time, the emphases here possibly need to be brought into conversation with the importance of attending to how in social worlds the ‘unimaginable’ is ‘imagined’, an issue raised later in the Introduction. Th is fact registered, none of the above is to ignore the diffi culties that can attend Rorty’s wider reduction of the epistemological to the political. See, for instance, Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, pp. 110–11.

35. Beyond hubris, consider a ‘class-act’ involving students of multiple and distinct academic/political orientations within a graduate seminar.

36. See, for example, G. Eley, ‘Nations, publics and political culture: Placing Habermas in the nineteenth century’, in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere; and Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere. In fact, both these studies register aspects of the critical yet recuperative spirit in reading/writing that I have been advancing.

37. I discuss such issues concretely in relation to the work of Ranajit Guha—and the subaltern studies project, more generally—in Dube, Stitches on Time. Consider also the emphases of Chapter 4 below.

introduction 29

38. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘A history of the concept “modern”’, in Gumbrecht, Making Sense in Life and Literature, trans. Glen Burns (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). It is possibly signifi cant that Habermas himself cites Gumbrecht in his opening considerations of modernity’s consciousness of time in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 8.

39. Clearly, this pervasive, ‘metageographical’ projection has appeared elaborated in several ways, from the evidently aggressive to the seemingly benign, embedded of course in ‘modernization’ theory, yet also long lodged within the interstices of Western social and political thought. As I discuss in Chapter 6, the projection also fi nds contradictory articulations within discrete expressions of ‘tradition’ that question ‘modernity’ by reversing the moral import of its constitutive hierarchies and oppositions. To rigorously reconsider modernity is to think through such oppositions, hierarchies, and elisions. See, for example, Anthony Giddens, Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.

40. Gumbrecht, ‘A history of the concept “modern”’, p. 108.41. For a wide-ranging discussion of the intertwining of hermeneutics,

philosophy, and historicism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries see Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). An acute critique of what I am calling developmental historicism with its beginnings in the nineteenth century is contained in Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Th e point is that these powerful arguments regarding the nature of historicism have talked past one another: a study such as that of Gumbrecht, since it braids together distinct historicist impulses, can make possible a dialogue on the diff erent, contending yet overlapping articulations of historicism.

42. Such protocols of approaching and understanding scholarly terrains, everyday arenas, and their interplay are crucially encapsulated in the manner in which Aft er Conversion explores issues of power and diff erence, the dominant and the subaltern, especially through procedures of a ‘history without warranty’. Put very briefl y, the terms of a history without warranty call into question the guarantees of progress under regimes of modernity, especially thinking through the projections and presuppositions and the scandals and schemes that it produces and sustains. Here are to be found procedures of careful questioning and critical affi rmation of scholarly terrain and social worlds. Th ese are issues discussed in Dube, Stitches on Time.

43. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 15.

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44. Johannes Fabian, Out of our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. xii–xiii.

45. All of this implies, too, the salience of staying with Elizabeth Povinelli’s suggestion to critically reaffi rm, ‘a sociological science of the ought in order to develop an ethnography [or understandings] not simply of existing states of mood and modality, of propositionality and obligation, and of moral possibility and necessity, but also of the conditions of their emergence and transformation’—registering, especially, that in social worlds ‘the unimaginable is imagined’. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Th e Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 31.

introduction 31

QUESTIONS OF CONVERSION

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after conversion 33

2AFTER CONVERSION

Colonial Registers of a VernacularChristianity

A few years ago, while working on missionary records kept at a small repository in Missouri, I came across a 250-page manuscript and two shorter pieces, written in central India between 1908 and 1913 by ‘native’ evangelical workers, designated as catechists. I skimmed over the longer manuscript, reading the author’s recounting of the strange and the familiar as he preached the Word in towns and villages. Here people told the catechist (and each other) that ‘Jesus is only some kind of an English incarnation.’ Others ‘joked about such bad things’—libidinous and earthy comments about the Immaculate Conception—that he just ‘could not write’. Not surprisingly, this lowly Indian evangelist turned down an invitation to attend a village festival declaring that it was impossible for him to ‘take part in such wicked things for God hates idol worship, hence famine is now raging’. Long before I reached the end of the manuscript, a question had begun to agitate me. How was I to read these texts?

In this chapter, I discuss issues of colonial conversion and questions of vernacular translation, which lie embedded within processes of evangelical enmeshments between Euro-American missionaries and non-Western peoples, focusing on writings of ‘native soldiers of Christ’, the Indian catechists. Forged as ‘diaries’ or ‘daybooks’ that recount the dissemination of the Book in ‘heathen’ spaces and ‘primitive’ places, the catechists’ accounts appear in tune yet out of tenor with missionary stipulation. Th ey describe the everyday encounters and extraordinary experiences of the catechists, accessing and exceeding missionary determination. Here I would like to explore how these writings constitute

34 after conversion

salient registers of evangelical involvements, critically articulating vernacular idioms, evangelical authority, and a colonial modernity.1

OvertureIn 1868, the Reverend Oscar Lohr of the German Evangelical Mission Society initiated missionary work in Chhattisgarh, a large region in central India. Lohr and his evangelical brethren toiled the fi eld, sowing the seeds of faith.2 Conversions to Christianity in the region progressed hesitantly, haltingly through ties of kinship, oft en within the confi nes of the paternalist economy of mission stations. Soon the missionary enterprise expanded.3 Th e converts to Christianity in the region—and central Indian folk, more broadly—continued to apprehend missionary injunctions and evangelical truths through the grids of quotidian cultures. Drawing in the energies of the Euro-American evangelist as witting accomplice and hapless victim, these peoples participated in the making of a vernacular and a colonial Christianity. By the fi rst decade of the twentieth century, when the catechists wrote their accounts, the script of the civilizing mission was in place in central India. Yet, the black ink, the red letters, and the purple passages of this script, never secure, became rather the measures and means of other writing. Th e catechists’ chronicles register the stipulation and the sabotage of this script—of civilization and the Saviour.

Other RegistersHow are we to understand evangelical entanglements? And how might such considerations bear upon the catechists’ chronicles? Once upon a time, competing caricatures of the missionary as tainted agent of empire and as loft y benefactor of the native dominated historical and anthropological debate. Even as these phantasms have returned to haunt the terrain of cultural politics and political cultures, especially in India today, critical considerations have thought through instrumentalist understandings of power, unravelling key linkages between the cultural forms and the political implications of the mission project. First, acute analyses of the ‘tensions of empire’ have laid bare the deep divisions between the models of colonization of imperial administrators and the

after conversion 35

images of empire of the missionaries.4 Second, astute acknowledgements of the contradictions at the heart of evangelical endeavours have underscored that missionary projections of civilization, modernity, and progress elaborated and questioned imperial power in frontier sites and metropolitan locations.5 Th ird and fi nally, such processes of contention and contradiction, lying at the core of colonial cultures, further shaped patterns of vernacular Christianity in distinct contexts, another critical concern in the historical anthropology of conversion and colonialism.6 Taken together, such writings highlight that at the heart of evangelical entanglements lay the complex making and unmaking of historical forms, social identities, ritual practices, and mythic meanings, enacted over time.7 All of this suggests critical possibilities for discussing narratives such as the writings of catechists, themselves usefully understood as operating upon distinct registers.

First, shaped as an integral part of the mapping of colonial cultures and the making of a vernacular Christianity, the writings of the catechists did not record these processes in a passive voice. Rather, these accounts imbued the twin processes with their own salience. It is not only that the very nature and the particular construction of such texts set them apart in the historical study and ethnographic exploration of evangelical embroilments.8 It is also that the precise processes of translation embodied by these writings point toward critical attributes of evangelical encounters.

Second, in these chronicles the catechists recounted their encounters and experiences as they spoke of the Word, the Book, and the Saviour in everyday arenas. As ‘diaries’ or ‘daybooks’ recorded on a daily basis, they combine in themselves an alongside-the-event tone and an aft er-the-event texture. If the witness in a legal trial recalled the key elements of a critical event in the past to produce a testimony for the present, in the witness of the catechist each encounter was a salient story on the cusp of the past and the present. Th is is to say that the catechists’ writings bear the traces of an ongoing past and follow the tracks of a receding present.

Finally, the daybooks constitute a motivated and an interested writing in their own fashion. Here the structure of interests and the calculus of motivations had at least two sets of determinations. Th ey were derived from the missionary desire that the catechists maintain a

36 after conversion

written record in English of their designated vocation of spreading the Word, texts presented to and perused by the Euro-American evangelist at the end of each month. And they followed from the catechists’ work upon missionary stipulations, colonial imaginings, vernacular idioms, and the English language in order to narrate the triumphs and travails of their everyday enactment of evangelism, a job and a life. Th e former proff ered a tangible statement of success and failure in the employment of the Book. Th e latter off ered discrete narratives of lives and routines in the work of the Word. Th e two neither propose innocent union nor presuppose clear separation. Th e one folding into the other, each distinct and ever conjoint, together they moulded the motivations and inscribed the interests that traverse the catechists’ accounts.

When read upon these diff erent registers, the catechists’ writings point toward critical considerations not only of evangelical tangles, but also of the enduring enchantments of tradition and community, colony and modernity. Moreover, they proclaim a particular Christianity—historically contingent, distinctly Indian. Instead of constituting an abstract a priori syncretism, the precise contention and disjunctive detail of these accounts reveal the mixed-up stipulations of a vernacular Christianity in concrete specifi city—history without warranty

History without WarrantyMy readings of the catechists’ chronicles do not recall a heroic subaltern subject or an autonomous vernacular Christianity, split apart from the work of power.9 Rather, my purpose is to trace the manner whereby the catechists simultaneously thought through colonial categories and vernacular idioms. Deploying literal readings of the Scripture and producing a surplus of faith in the Word, they conceptually translated the terms of evangelical Christianity and Western civilization. Put diff erently, these writings register the everyday life of colonial power and evangelical authority—processes where subaltern subjects worked upon crucial distinctions of empire and evangelism, saturated with dominance, to instate such representations, while making them bear unsanctioned and recalcitrant meanings. Here was a struggle for construing meanings of the past and the present through dominant categories and apprehensions of the Bible, through vernacular frames and their distinct uses, ever

after conversion 37

bound to the one and the other. Before scholarly niceties of ‘agency’ and ‘resistance’, it is these terms of struggle and such making of meanings that are terribly important.

Yet none of this should be surprising. Evangelical involvements in central India involved two simultaneous and overlapping processes: the constitution of a vernacular Christianity, and the making of colonial cultures of rule, both in a quotidian key. Th ese twin processes did not involve a clear division of labour between Indians in the fi rst terrain and Euro-Americans in the latter domain. Rather, what we have are common but contradictory, mutual but mixed-up processes in these discrete but overlaying arenas. Th e writings of the catechists register and rework both the attributes of colonial cultures and the forms of a vernacular Christianity, including their constitutive contradictions, challenges, and instability, their formative ambivalences, distinctions, and novelty.

Of course, the catechists emerge as supporting empire. Nevertheless, what conceit rules that the work of natives under empire consisted of endlessly resisting colonialism? Clearly, this was not the case in practice, nationalist verities notwithstanding. Instead, what matters in each case are the terms of support for colonial rule. Here, even in the work of public evangelism and in their explicit defence of colonial governance, the catechists muddled the very stipulations seeking their consent. Is it not important to trace such processes where support for empire and evangelism was seemingly secured, but colonial domination and Christian truth were ever confi gured in distinct ways? Is it not salient to unravel the manner whereby the catechists held a mirror up to the incessant unsaid within the routine utterances of the missionary and the offi cial? What does this tell us about colonial power? What does this tell us about subaltern pasts?

It is not only that my emphases attempt to think through the disabling dichotomies between power and resistance, authority and agency, while carefully querying assertions on behalf of the contradictory and the ambivalent subaltern—that such subjects in one instance complied with domination, and at another moment challenged power. Th e trouble with such propositions inheres in their eff orts to restore to the subalterns/natives their voice/agency, which can veer toward occluding the conditions of power that make meaning and practice possible. It is also that I am not complying with infl uential positions that hold in place

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the singular sway of power and its productivity—whether as engendering ‘mimesis’ or as constitutive of ‘hybridity’ with the mimetic fi gure and the hybrid form further fracturing power. Specifi cally, mimicry or hybridity do not capture the distinction(s) of the catechists’ practice. Rather, these categories frequently predicate discourse and action upon an exclusively envisioned productivity of power.10 It is important to struggle against such conjuring of power as a totalized terrain and a fetishized force, an abstract aesthetic and a dystopic totality. Quite simply, I wish to trace at the same time two inseparable movements: the place of diff erence within relationships, processes, and strategies of power; and the presence of power in the enactments, practices, and confi gurations of diff erence.

Th e catechists’ writings are measures of these movements. At the same time, the characteristic logic and salience of these texts becomes apparent in their singularity, in what Michel de Certeau has called the ‘details’.11 It is easy to discount such details as mere ‘nuance’, strictly subordinate to the dramatic divisions instituted by historical knowledge and social science. Yet if we stick to their distinctions, these details and such singularity defy familiar frames of history and politics, variously escaping and exceeding the business-as-usual of categories and expectations. Th e catechists’ accounts register a curious and contradictory amalgam of acting on the world as it was given to them and improvizing on what they learned. Here are religion and politics that are not easily digested. Yet the catechists did have their interlocutors; and it is exactly the strangeness and singularity of their conversations that makes these fi gures important. If very few of the pronouncements and practices of the catechists meet our own tastes and judgements, this is precisely the challenge of reading their writings.

Stipulations of TranslationWe have noted that the toil and the production of the catechists’ accounts hinge upon translation. Th is is true in discrete senses, since in these writings the task of translation occurred upon diff erent registers. To begin with, the catechists rendered to themselves the teachings and truths of the Euro-American missionary and the texts and tools of a pedagogical provenance, both constitutive of the evangelical enterprise. Next, in transacting the business of evangelism, they presented in oral translation the work of their witness—in the medium of the vernacular, Hindi

after conversion 39

and Chhattisgarhi. Further, the catechists transcribed these encounters into their logs, translating the details of their witness into the English language, their own record occasionally read by the missionary. Finally, traversing these diff erent registers were the catechists’ translations of the Word of God, their enactment of the history of the Bible, which is itself a history of translation. Analytically separable into distinct moments, these discrete registers fi nd conjoint expression in the description and the detail of the catechists’ writings. In other words, the terms, tones, and textures of the accounts of the catechists provide their own import to the notion of simultaneous translation, as phrase and practice.

Th e subject of translation is a vexed issue. Prominent for long in discussions of literary transactions across languages, the ‘oldest question’ in translation theory concerns the very possibility of translation. Repeatedly this question has presupposed ‘a perfect reproduction of the source text by a translator who has made a perfect reading of the source and has delivered that reading to a perfect reader’.12 Time aft er time, the query, based upon such premises, has elicited the same answer: no, translation is impossible. Without denying the importance of this singular question and the exclusive answer to it, it is worth considering that here both inquiry and response rest upon presuppositions that ‘are not of our world, or should not be, although they are commonly assumed to persist and dominate’.13 At any rate, as George Steiner’s ‘abundant, vulgar fact’, translation is possible because it happens.14 Indeed, translation abounds—peoples and communities, states and nations, cultures and religions have lived by its apprehensions and misapprehensions, its fallible knowledge and infallible wisdom.

It is precisely the routine performance and the quotidian practice of translation, rather than its pristine purity, that have found critical considerations in recent times. First, in debates on the scholarly and disciplinary conduct of cultural translation there has been keen recognition of what Talal Asad has described as the ‘inequality of languages’.15 Such inequality also implies inequity, the two together constituting a resource and forming a conduit for the inscription and re-insertion of asymmetries of languages and idioms, knowledge and power in the name of neutral science and in the guise of authoritative translation. It follows that distinctive bids toward a critical-creative practice of translation—in the reading of history and in the writing of

40 after conversion

culture—have pointed toward the task of translation as the production of ‘the partly opaque relationship we call “diff erence”’ out of apparently incommensurable forms of knowledge. At stake in such yield of diff erence (and not equivalence) is the production of palpable ‘translucence’ (rather than perfect ‘transparency’) in the relation between dominating categories and dominated knowledges.16 Second, critical histories have emphasized that processes of translation were central to the elaboration of colonial cultures, instituting distinct forms of colonizing power and eliciting diverse practices of colonized subjects.17 Indeed, in the articulation of Christianity and colonialism, by ‘setting languages in motion, translation tended to cast intentions adrift , now laying, now subverting the ideological grounds of colonial hegemony’.18 Here was dialogue and distinction, which secured and scrambled colonial power and missionary authority by construing these through familiar referents and unfamiliar premises. In the context of the present chapter, the second set of propositions on translation bear close connection with my readings of the catechists’ chronicles, yet the fi rst congeries of considerations on the subject are also signifi cant to my arguments.

At this point, it is important to clarify my use of the category vernacular translation. I turn to Vicente Rafael’s imaginative discussion of colonial and Christian translation in his seminal work Contracting Colonialism, which provides a means for highlighting my own emphases. Rafael discusses the associations between conquest, translation, and conversion by considering the Spanish clerical-colonial translation of the Christian doctrine into the ‘native vernacular’ of Tagalog, and the Tagalog peoples’ responses to and apprehensions of these processes, between the late sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries. Here, clerical ‘translation prescribed just as it proscribed the language with which the natives were to receive and return God’s Word’, and by thus ‘making conceivable the transfer of meaning and intention between colonizer and colonized’ laid the basis for the main terms of the subjugation of the Tagalog. At the same time, such translation ‘also resulted in the ineluctable separation between the original message of Christianity (which was itself about the proper nature of origins as such) and its rhetorical formulation in the vernacular’. Th ereby, it ‘constrained the universalizing assumptions and totalizing impulses of a colonial-Christian order’, alternately supporting and defl ecting the exercise of Spanish power.19 In sum, understood ‘as

after conversion 41

both an aesthetic and a politic of communication, translation not only discloses the ideological structure of colonial rule; it also illuminates those residual but recurrent aspects of Tagalog history ... which set it apart from the received notions of cultural syncretism and historical synthesis.’20

Keeping in view the variance between Spanish and British colonial endeavours—the former fundamentally Catholic and bearing a veritable identity between conversion and colonialism, the latter shaped by Protestant premises and betraying ambivalent distinctions between evangelization and empire—there is nonetheless much that I have learnt from Rafael’s wide-ranging analyses. Actually, I also broadly concur with the crucial terms and key arguments of Contracting Colonialism. Yet, there are diff erences. For Rafael, translation refers to those certifi ed practices that entailed Spanish clerical-colonial renderings of the Word and its attendant tools and texts into the vernacular. He describes the Tagalog ‘response’ to such processes as ‘vernacularization’.21 In contrast, my own focus concerns non-certifi ed procedures of translation set in motion among Indian Christians in the wake of evangelization and translation initiated by the Euro-American missionary. It is such procedures that I call vernacular translation.

Is the distinction that I am making little more than terminological quibbling? I think not. While my diff erences with Rafael’s propositions are mainly matters of emphases, they also imply a salient shift in perspective. In this chapter, vernacular translation does not simply indicate the linguistic rendering of texts and works from the English language into vernacular idioms. Rather, it equally refers to procedures of the transmutation of distinct categories and discrete concepts. Th ese procedures lay betwixt the interplay (and inequality) of languages, between the exchange (and inequity) of idioms, ever on the cusp of English and the vernacular(s), incessantly straddling and scrambling the boundaries and horizons of the original and the translation.22

Understood in this fashion, the practices of vernacular translation that underlie the catechists’ accounts occupied the gap, or, more precisely, inhabited the interstices, brought into existence by the ‘ineluctable separation between the original message of Christianity ... and its rhetorical formulation in the vernacular’ by missionaries in colonial India. It follows that insinuating more than ‘residual but recurrent’ aspects

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of the past, procedures of vernacular translation indicate emergent and immanent attributes of history. Such practices ‘constrained the universalizing assumptions ... of the colonial-Christian order’ in British India, precisely by carrying forward its ‘totalizing impulses’ but imbuing these with an excess of literalism, a surplus of faith. In other words, vernacular translation ‘discloses the ideological structure of colonial rule’ but in a manner distinct from missionary translation. It illuminates native renderings of Christianity and empire but not simply as a ‘response’ to the Euro-American evangelist and colonial power. All told, my focus on vernacular translation discretely extends Vicente Rafael’s well-founded suspicion of ‘received notions of cultural syncretism and historical synthesis’.

Such processes and accents fi nd particular confi gurations in the short but signifi cant example to which I now turn.23 Here is a catechist writing of an encounter in the small village of Khaira.

24 Monday [January 1908] Khaira. Kondu Gond. At the time of preaching, I saw a kid which was intended for sacrifi ce. I explained to him the object of sacrifi ce in ancient times and that he was right to off er a kid to appease his god for his sins but it was a symbol of Jesus Christ who would become incarnate and shed his blood for all mankind...6 [people were] present.24

Th is brief passage bears an enormous burden. Early in his vocation of disseminating the Word in central India—and around the time he fi rst initiates his chronicle—the catechist encounters Kondu Gond, an adivasi who is about to sacrifi ce a kid, a baby goat. Yet, the native evangelist does not disabuse Kondu of the superstitious nature and the heathen character of this action. Rather, he is transported back to the density of descriptions of sacrifi ce in the Book, particularly the Old Testament, concerning, for example, the Mosaic sacrifi ce and the Lamb of God, the sacrifi ce of Abraham and the Lamb of Paschal. Th e catechist explains to Kondu the ‘object of sacrifi ce in ancient times’, linking this to the sacrifi ce of Christ.

Here it can be argued that the catechist is doing little more than elaborating a key tenet of Christianity, contrasting the variety and ineffi cacy of the Mosaic bloody sacrifi ces with the uniqueness and effi cacy of the sacrifi ce of Christ for the forgiveness of sins. Th is idea poignantly appears, for instance, in the Epistle to the Hebrews:

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Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained redemption for us. For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifi eth to the purifying of the fl esh; How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit off ered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?25

Yet this is not quite the catechist’s intention, nor is it his representation. Rather, drawing a parallel between the sacrifi ces preceding Christ ‘in ancient times’ and Kondu’s sacrifi ce of the kid in early twentieth-century Chhattisgarh, he fi nds in both actions a prefi guring of the sacrifi ce of Christ. ‘I explained to him [Kondu] the object of sacrifi ce in ancient times and that he was right to off er a kid to appease his god for his sins but it was a symbol of Jesus Christ....’ Th is is remarkable. Christianity recognizes but one sacrifi ce, the sacrifi ce once off ered by Christ in a bloody manner on the tree of the Cross. Yet, mixing together fi gures of the past and forms of the present, the catechist is claiming that Kondu is correct in appeasing his god through the sacrifi ce of the kid, so long as there is clear recognition of what the goat and the sacrifi ce symbolize.

Of course, it is important to remember that the Redeemer Himself instituted the sacrifi ce of the Holy Mass so that the bloody sacrifi ce of Calvary could be continued and represented in an un-bloody manner. It was in this fashion that the merits of redemption won by the sacrifi ce of the Cross were to apply, once and forever, to individuals in sacrifi cial form, through constant sacrifi ce. At the same time, as a Protestant, the catechist did not argue from such grounds of Eucharistic sacrifi ce and its relation to the sacrifi ce on the Cross. Far from it: ‘I explained to him the object of sacrifi ce in ancient times and that he was right to off er a kid to appease his god for his sins but it was a symbol of Jesus Christ who would become incarnate and shed his blood for all mankind.’

Th rough an ambivalence of verb tense and an uncertainty of subject (kid or Christ?), conjoining the past of the ancients and the present of evangelism, the catechist uniquely proposed that there was to be another incarnation and another sacrifi ce for the redemption of humankind. Of the kid or of the Christ, we cannot be sure. Of the stipulations of the King and the Cross (in the labour of sacrifi ce and the work of redemption), we do not know. Th rough excess of application to the Book, out of surplus

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of application of the Word, the catechist produced a supplementary narrative on the subjects of kid and Christ, sacrifi ce and redemption. Th e very literalism of his procedures—bringing to mind Walter Benjamin’s advocacy of literalism in the task of translation—were defi nitional of practices of vernacular translation. Had the catechist read the Word in English, in the original? Had he read the Book in Hindi, in translation (itself carried out by missionaries)? Had he read the Bible in both, in original and in translation?26 Th e catechist had rendered God’s Word in Hindi and reported on his labour in English, enacting procedures of translation that yielded diff erence rather than equivalence.

Terms of WitnessFrom the very beginnings of the evangelical endeavour, the catechists played a critical role in the articulation of the mission project. Th e early Euro-American evangelists were pressed for time and strapped for money. Th ey were hesitant in the primary language, Hindi. Th ey were unsure of the regional vernacular, Chhattisgarhi. In each case, trained native Christians provided the solution, the way forward for missionary agendas, the means to extend the evangelical enterprise. Yet, in order to reach their goals, the Euro-American missionaries also had to accept that their Indian subordinates worked toward evangelical ends in their own ways. Here the perceptions and practices of the Indian evangelical workers could also exceed the norms and expectations of the missionaries. All this served to shape the patterns of evangelical entanglements, including the designs of a vernacular Christianity.

Consider the rules governing the fi rst Christian communities in the Chhattisgarh region. Th e missionary in consultation with the ‘native leaders’ among the converts, namely the overlapping ranks of schoolteachers and catechists, drew up these regulations.27 On the one hand, the rules reveal that the institution of marriage stood shaped by signifi cant continuities between principles of caste-sect and the community of Christian converts in the region.28 On the other hand, the concerns of purity and pollution informed the practices of the church, and the organization of the early congregations rested upon the institutions of village life in central India, recast and rearranged within a new matrix. Th e catechists played a key role here.

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Th e fi rst catechists in Chhattisgarh were hardly the products of a seminary. Most were barely trained in a school. Arising from the ranks of the original converts to Christianity in the region, the missionaries taught and trained them toward their labour, a scheme that was adopted at all missionary stations.29 For the work of evangelism, the other means of acquiring catechists consisted of engaging employees of missions outside Chhattisgarh. Either way, the trouble was that there were not enough catechists to go round. For example, in the mid-1890s the German Evangelical Mission had only about a dozen catechists in active service. Besides, it was increasingly felt by missionaries in the fi eld that the catechists from Chhattisgarh were in need of better training. In 1897, the Home Board of the German Evangelical Mission Society in the United States authorized the establishment of a training school, which formally opened in Raipur a little over a year later, drawing an initial enrolment of seven students. Here aspiring catechists underwent a three-year course, instructed by the missionaries in the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Life of Christ, Church History, and selected Epistles, also being introduced to Exegesis, Homiletics, Dogmatics, and the principles of non-Christian religions. Alongside, the students gained practical experience by witnessing in neighbouring villages, occasionally accompanying the missionaries on preaching tours.30

In designing the structure of the syllabi and the shape of the school, similar missionary institutions in north India provided the model. Of the writings recounted in this book, the authors of the two shorter accounts studied in the school in Raipur, and the writer of the detailed daybook trained in a Methodist institution for catechists in the United Provinces in north India. Th ese three catechists chiefl y conducted their work around the town of Mahasamund, particularly in the ‘many large villages whose markets attract many people’.31 Here they encountered everyday Hinduism and Islam, quotidian practices of caste and sect, and a population ‘sparse and backward consisting principally of the simple aboriginal tribes’.32 In such encounters, the place of colonial buildings and architecture, the building of imperial roads and railroads, and the provisions of government offi ce and authority—variously signifying Christian civilization and Western progress—constituted an important presence in the discourse of the catechists and their interlocutors. Finally, now and again, the catechists undertook journeys further a-fi eld, travelling long distances

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from Mahasamund and its environs, covering a terrain uncharted by evangelism, almost half of these territories consisting of ‘hill and forest.’33

Engaging CatechistsTh e catechists are elusive creatures. Th ey stalk the past and traverse the present bound by their texts. Outside of these accounts, we know very little about them. My pursuit of the catechists has been lengthy, if scrambled. Th e fi eld has yielded little; the archives even less. Much of this information, I have recounted already. Our ignorance of the catechists is not for want of my trying.34

To track the catechists, then, is to turn to their writing. Yet there can be false starts here. In the beginning, the catechists’ accounts appear to betoken an exclusive register, the endless reiteration of Christian verity as a passive process, a static story.

In [village] B the Hindus raised this question: you Christians say that Jesus is Almighty Saviour of all, why then does he not draw all Hindus and all castes to His sect and give them salvation? My answer: Suppose that among your grown up children some are rascals and murder someone in their freedom from parental authority, why you not bring them back into the family-fold and according to your wish make them good? Th ey answer: because they want to remain in their freedom as we do. I remark: so does God leave us in our foolish freedom; as your boys do not want to walk in your better ways, so you will not walk in the way of Jesus. But in a few days your boys will believe [in] Jesus.35

22 Saturday [January 1908] Mahasamund. Th e tailor Mohammad Din affi rmed that Jesus is also a true prophet and demands high honour from all Muslims, but he is inferior to Mohammad as the latter was the last prophet. To make the matter more clear I explained to him that one man is dressed in white and has black spots upon his clothes which he cannot hide before others and other man is also dressed in white clothes but has no spots upon his clothes. [I said] which one looks better, he said the man who bears no spot upon his garment. [I said] Th is is quite true of Mohammad and Jesus. Mohammad says that he is sinful and seeks pardon from God, on the other hand Jesus was sinless and the Quran bears that he was a sinless prophet. I told him that it is better to be a follower of a sinless prophet instead of a sinful prophet, then he kept silence. 2 present.36

Each time and at every step, the catechists clinch an issue from their adversaries in argument and disputants in discourse through the veracity

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of the Saviour. Th e thrill of discovery was squarely behind me. Searching for the evenly heretical and the oddly dramatic in the catechists’ accounts I was disappointed, time aft er time. Such beginnings regularly drew repetitive ends.

Th ese scripts entail other readings, implying other disclosures. Th e catechists enlist themselves and enter their accounts as agents and attributes of everyday evangelism. Such are the stipulations of their stories, the reason for their writing. Th eir tales traverse routine worlds, rhymes and rhythms of labour and leisure in central India. Th e catechists entertain old women with bhajans (devotional songs) about the only Saviour. Th ey captivate curious children with pictures of a Christian provenance. Th ey talk with labourers at work and workers at rest regarding travails of the time. Th ey argue with shopkeepers in villages and village proprietors in towns about the terms of truth. At the same time, in each case, the lives and legends of the catechists appear woven into pathways of the Word and passages of the Book, into the terms of Christian governance and the provisos of evangelical progress. Th is is to say that the distinctions of these texts precisely lie in their everyday attributes.

To attend to the quotidian confi gurations of the catechists’ chronicles, to think through their routine details, is to engage the possibilities of a history without warranty. Now the terminal tones and the tendentious terms of these texts appear as more than dead certainties, revealing rather the creation and contention, the distinction and dynamic, and the silence and salience of the word and the world of the catechist. Equally, the catechists and their chronicles do not simply reach dead ends, intimating instead disjunctive verities and divergent veracities —of the providence of colony and the provenance of faith, of colonial provisions and vernacular prowess. Here I develop these considerations by focusing on the ways in which the catechists broached the critical distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’.

Discussing the articulation of Christianity and colonialism, we have noted the importance of attending to contradictions at the heart of the mission project and of recognizing distinctions between Euro-American evangelists and other agents of empire. Elsewhere I have shown that in the context of central India, three overlapping, contradictory movements at the level of missionary precepts and practices crucially conjoined the purpose of evangelism and the project of empire.37 First,

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to the missionaries, the Indian converts, as Christians, were equals in the ‘Kingdom of God’. Yet, these evangelists also repeatedly emphasized the ‘satanic travesties’ and the ‘savage customs’ of the ‘sons of wilderness’. Second, until the 1930s, time aft er time, the missionaries and colonial government, working together, appear as the twin bearers of the light of the ‘Western lamp’ in evangelical depictions. Such representations had much to do with linkages between the missionaries’ stated commitment to the complementary nature of spiritual and temporal power with the post-1857 policy of British administration to eff ect a separation between religion and politics, which critically augmented colonial power. Finally, the Euro-American evangelists invoked the precept of individual self-determination and the spiritual spectacle of the witnessing of Christ to argue for the religious freedom of the convert: but they simultaneously regarded these converts like children, struggling to grasp rational objective thought. Within the interstices of these overlapping and tension-ridden movements, the missionaries participated, wittingly and unwittingly, in the construction of colonial mythologies of racial supremacy, the establishment of structures of paternalist authority, and the reinforcement of the legitimacy of colonial rule.

Th e catechists enacted their labour within this context, but their representations also confounded this structure. As I will show, the catechists could critically acknowledge the racial prejudice of the offi cial and the missionary, while working upon the categorical instability of ‘politics’ and the conceptual ruse of ‘religion’. Such witness straddled and subverted the distinctions that were critical to the European evangelist and the British administrator, also holding a mirror up to the implicit terms of offi cial and missionary practices. Secured by the dense literalism of the catechists’ faith in the Bible, each of these instances engendered a striking surplus around distinctions between the spiritual and the temporal, religion and politics. Inexorably, as it were, the catechists came to posit a critical hierarchy between Christian governance based upon evangelical order and Indian misrule orchestrated by Hindu disorder, while sharply distinguishing between (Christian) religion and (Hindu) politics.38

Let me begin with a somewhat unexpected encounter—for quite as repetition betokens plenitude in these itineraries of faith, so also curiosity meets novelty in the witness of the catechists.

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30 Saturday [September 1911] Mahasamund. Post Master. Th is man said that although the American Government is a Christian government yet the white people persecute the black people, this is a proof that the [American Christian] Government has no care for the natives of the country who have settled down there. In reply I said that the law is administered to all alike but in many cases where people are rebels and do not submit to the authority of the rulers the law is enforced to subdue them, this is only a political matter. In former times when Indian rulers were Hindus, Brahmins had the ascendancy in the empire and these Brahmins exercised unlimited authority over the low castes whom they trampled under their feet just as some one does with animals. Still there are proofs of it in many parts of India where people have no right[s] and are counted as little better than animals. You can see in the courts [of law in India] that except the Deputy Commissioner all are native offi cials who spoil the case of those from whom they do not expect bribes or some other gain. So there is nothing wrong in the American Government, either the people are rebels for whom several laws have [been] passed or there may be some wicked offi cials who do this [persecute the black people]. A Christian Government is better than a heathen government where there is always maladministration. You can see in the Protected [Native] States [that] thousands of people are unjustly treated by those who are above them and no one hears their complaint. [Th e] Bible is the foundation of Christian Governments. If you take away the Bible everything will be wrong and badly governed, therefore the Bible is the source of all good blessings and Government.39

In this striking interchange regarding the politics of race in the United States, the Hindu Postmaster of Mahasamund put a question mark on the good faith of the American missionaries by pointing to the hypocrisy of their Christian government at home. Th is also issued a veiled critique of colonial policies in India. Th e catechist’s response operated upon twin registers of comparison: the identity of politics and the distinction of religion, which are closely bound, the one with the other, pulling in discrete directions to produce a hierarchical juxtaposition within a singular argument.

Th e native evangelist zeroes in on what he construes as a fundamental principle of the political realm, that in the act of governance the law treats everyone alike. Here the exceptions that prove the rule are rebellious and recalcitrant peoples, the law subduing and suppressing their illegal orientations and unlawful actions. Th ere is a second exception too. Namely, corrupt offi cials, such as those in the law courts of British India,

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‘who spoil the case of those from whom they do not expect bribes or some other gain’. Th is is the native evangelist’s folk rendering of the principles of the rule of law and of equality before the law, a structure of argument that holds together the following, parallel proposition. For, according to the catechist, in past times and prior places, when rulers were Hindu and where Brahmans were ascendant, the forms of governance constituted the reverse of the law, always merciless and already arbitrary, crushing the peoples under their jurisdiction. Nor was this true only of a distant history: the proof of these politics in the present lay in practices of native rule in Indian states at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Taken together, the catechist defended the American government, since ‘either the [black] people are rebels for whom several laws have [been] passed or there may be some wicked offi cials who do this [persecute the black people]’. Alongside, the analogy with British rule secured the principal identity of such practice of the law, which was ‘only a political matter’, apart from religious discrimination and social oppression, if occasionally defl ected by corrupt offi cials. So far, we are close to the familiar story of a civilizing Christianity guiding the modern state, twin harbingers of progress. Yet, the catechist’s disclosure gave a distinct twist to this known tale. For, in response to the Postmaster’s criticism, the catechist ever proclaimed the fundamentally Christian nature of the American government and British rule over India, collapsing together the Word of God and the law of the state. Indeed, precisely in order for a domain of pure politics to come into play, for the presence of the law ‘as only a political matter’, the catechist’s arguments posited the presence of religious distinction, betokening an ineluctable hierarchy between Hindu rule and Christian governance. Heathen states could not but be mal-administered, while Christian Governments, founded on the Bible, inevitably stood for lands of law and justice.

Th e very literalism of the catechist’s faith in the Bible as the ‘source of all good blessings and Government’ produced a surplus in relation to issues of politics and religion, the secular and the sacral, Western governance and Hindu rule, and Christian order and heathen disorder. Bound to an unstable category of the ‘political’ and distinct ruses of ‘religion’, this excess acutely concerned two simultaneous spillovers.40 First, as noted above, it scrambled and subverted the offi cial stipulations of the colonial administrator and Euro-American missionary regarding the

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formal separation of religion and politics, the sacral and the temporal in the work of empire and the labour of evangelism. Second, it held a mirror up to the hierarchies of heathen disorder and Christian order, Western rule and Indian misrule that ceaselessly circulated in the discourse and practice of the offi cial and the evangelist.

Th is catechist’s basic belief in the Word also found other confi gura-tions, seeking its way between the fi gures of Western authority and the demands of Indian nationalism.

1 Friday [October 1909] Ganesh Chhatri a man of education met on the road to Kharora [village]. He was going to Raipur [town] with some other men, as he saw me, he thinking me that I was a Hindu began to talk about the Swadeshi Movement and deeply lamented the Government rule in India on account of many grievances the people have.41 In reply I said that I am a Christian and have not concern with Swadeshi Movement because it is not carried on right principles, but to be a real Swadeshi [of one’s own country/nation] is not bad in itself if there is no cause to complain against the Government. He said that you Christians are not on right lines [—] although you are born in this country, you always side with the rulers. I said it is good for us because the Government defends us and you also with regard to religious liberty, if there were no Government such as this, you would try to exterminate the name of Christians from this land and Christians do not expect the least help from you. Th ey are considered as an outcast by all who are not Christians, [although] only Christianity teaches the brotherhood of mankind. Your religion is not good for us while Christianity is good to all nations of the world. He said, look at the civil offi cers and the Missionaries, there is no diff erence between them, but a vast diff erence exists between you and them. You are not allowed to have guns nor any other weapons of defence, if a war broke out, you will not be helped by them, they will care for their European brethren whether Missionaries or not but they will not care at all for you. [What was the catechist’s response?] I admit the racial diff erence and the prejudice they have for us. I do not look for an example to them. I know what you mean. I look to the teachings of the Bible. It does teach the brotherhood of mankind and where this is not there is war. Th ose who profess to be Christians whether rulers or the ruled, if they do not [rise] up to the Word of God and do not practice it daily in their lives, are simply like a sounding vessel making great noise and doing nothing. Th eir religion is vain, they have learnt only but cannot work up to it. Th eir religion is false. You need not follow such people. Simply read the Bible from where belief springs. Christ is the example for us.42

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Conducted on the road, quite literally, this seesaw argument on colonial rule and its nationalist disputations brought to the fore issues of liberal governance and racist practice. In the fi rst part of the passage, the two protagonists debate the ‘right principles’ of being swadeshi and the ‘right lines’ of being Indian. Ganesh Chattri endorses the Swadeshi movement of Indian nationalism and criticizes the inequities of British governance soon aft er meeting the catechist, apparently because the well-educated and upper-caste man takes the native evangelist to be a Hindu. For his part, the catechist stridently confesses his faith, declaring at once his disagreement with the Swadeshi movement on account of its not being conducted on the ‘right principles’ and his agreement with being a ‘real’ swadeshi or Indian, which implies desisting from opposing the government. Unsurprisingly, Ganesh Chhatri denounces the loyalism of native Christians, announcing that they are not acting on the ‘right lines’: despite the country of their birth, Christians in India ever side with alien rulers.

Our intrepid evangelist is wholly unconvinced by this invocation of the land of one’s birth as the ground of one’s politics. Once again, his response entwines two simultaneous arguments, variations on the theme that we have encountered earlier. Th e catechist highlights the unexceptionable principle of religious liberty for all subjects and faiths of the British Indian Empire upheld by the ‘Government’, particularly by stressing the terrible fate of Christians at the hands of the Hindus in the absence of such fair rule. But he also ineluctably braids together religion and politics in order to emphasize the signifi cance of Christianity as essential to the ‘brotherhood of mankind’, for the good of all nations.

Clearly, this response cannot satisfy Ganesh Chhatri. Th e Hindu man reminds the catechist of the force of racial distinctions under British rule, emphasizing the gulf that separates Indian Christians from Christian sahibs (masters). Such diff erence has left all Indians, including native Christians, unarmed and defenceless: when war comes, European and American Christian superiors, whether offi cials or missionaries, will fend for one another, leaving in the lurch their co-religionists, the Indian Christians. With equanimity, the catechist admits of the presence of racial discrimination, adding that rather than looking toward such prejudice and its beholders as models, he fi nds his own inspiration in the Bible. For it is precisely the force of the ‘brotherhood of mankind’,

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enshrined in the Book, which stands in the way of war. With ingenuity, the evangelist combines critical emphases of 1 Corinthians 13: 1 with his rendering of the phrase, ‘an empty vessel makes great sound’, which also has resonance in Chhatisgarhi. Th ereby, he questions all those people—offi cial or missionary, ruler or ruled—who profess Christianity but who resist the Word of God from becoming an attribute of their being.

Before palpable fi gures of Western authority and beyond urgent demands of Indian nationalism, the catechist’s own faith lies in the Bible and rests upon Christ, the former as the wellspring of belief and the latter as the exemplar of life. Strikingly, the texts and the times of the catechists acquire form and assume substance in the very regularity and distinctive detail of such encounters—lives and worlds according to the native evangelists. Yet the precise routine and specifi c singularity of these experiences equally register the mapping and the moulding of other worlds through discrete terms of local travel—of the Word, the catechist, and the catechists’ word.43

In these journeys, the past and the present ever appear as critical resources, ineluctably negotiated, inevitably reworked, underlying illustrations of tradition and representations of modernity, debated and discussed through the retailing of new faith and the retelling of old stories.

14 Th ursday [September 1911] Mahasamund. Post Master. Th ere were some present in the Post Offi ce and the Postmaster had suffi cient time to engage himself in some talk whether political or religious. Seeing the inclination of his mind I mentioned that now-a-days many tracts are sold and distributed free by Hindus, they have followed the example of Missions. In these tracts one point [that] I came across [was] that [educational] instruction should be given to women. Th is is an example of the [infl uence of] Missions with regard to female education which was unknown at all in India. He [the Post Master then] related that [education for women] was carried on in former times before the Mohammadan invasions, [but] when India was conquered by Mohammadans, it was altogether stopped because the power of Hindus was destroyed and there was none to patronise it. When Mohammadans invaded India there were many heroines who stood up to fi ght for their country and they themselves became leaders in the army, fought bravely till death. I said [that] there might be a few instances to prove this, this was a special case for some, because those who were rulers of the law, perceiving that [in the event] of their un[for]seen death the female heirs might be

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able to govern their country with as much competence as the males did [gave] the princesses instruction which was specially of a political nature. [Th is instruction was] not from a religious point of view [so] that they may understand the moral standards of piety and virtue and [so] that they may be an example to others and introduce the same instruction for the benefi t of their sex. [Now] education to women is given with a view that they may see their ignorance and be better wives and train their children which will make their future lives pleasant and successful [for] themselves and others....44

Once more, we meet the redoubtable Postmaster who had confronted the resolute catechist on the fate of the Black population in the United States. Th is time it is the Postmaster who responds to the evangelist’s provocation that the initiation of education for women in India was on account of the infl uence of missions, its principles and purposes being previously unknown in this land. Here the Postmaster construes a distinct litany, whereby prior to ‘Mohammadan invasions’, ‘female education’ was part-and-parcel of the Hindu order. Th e proof of such pedagogy lay in the practice of heroic women who had sought to defend their polities against Islamic invaders, by joining armies and engaging in battle. Th e ascendance of Islamic power and the decline of Hindu hegemony put an end to these principles of pedagogy, such practices of education.

To the Postmaster’s proposition, the catechist confi dently retorts that in the past such education for women was an exception, confi ned to families of ‘rulers of the law’. He thereby brings into play again the critical categories of politics and religion, now revealing in an independent manner the instability of the former and the ruses of the latter. We have seen that speaking on the administration of the law in America and the politics of swadeshi in India, the catechist had interwoven politics and religion to highlight the hierarchy between Christian rule and heathen misrule. However, on this occasion, in his discourse on education for women, the catechist insinuates a clear separation between politics and religion. Under Hindu rule, in former times, female education implied political means, preparing royal women to assume the role of kingly men in special circumstances—attributes of mere politics. In the present day, under British rule and through Christian infl uence, education for women was imparted toward religious ends, in order to make them pious, moral, and virtuous wives, shining examples to other members of their sex—distinctions of true religion.

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Taken together, the accounts of the catechists acquired form through vernacular work upon the civilizing mission and assumed substance through colonial labour upon a vernacular Christianity. Th rough their terms and agreements, idioms and inscriptions, lives and stories, these texts seized and stipulated the evangelical encounter, reinstating and rewriting its salience. Th e catechists’ chronicles suggest that the dialectic of empire and evangelism could forge enduring bonds between colonial power and Christian knowledge: but the intense literalism of these narratives—that reworked missionary truths through the force of vernacular translation—equally accompanied and interrogated such key complicities. Th e catechists’ writings indicate that the dynamic of reason and faith could establish lasting links between civilization and the Saviour: but the dense surplus of these tales that recast evangelical idioms through procedures of vernacular translation simultaneously straddled and subverted such close connections.

CodaTh e history of the Bible is itself a history of translation. Th is is true quite literally. For the need for translation appeared only aft er Babel, when God confounded the lips of humans, uninvited mortals, seeking to ascend to heaven through the loft y tower of Babel. Th is was the third Diaspora—aft er Eden, aft er the Flood, now aft er Babel. It was a Diaspora of peoples and tongues, indeed a babble of tongues, necessitating translation. Since then each rendering of the Bible is a translation. Th is is as true of the Greek synoptic Gospels as it is of the Jerome Bible (or the Vulgate) as it is of the renderings by Luther and the scholars of King James. Each of these translations attempts to go back to the original tongue before Babel, indeed the single language before the Fall. All of these translations are a surpassing of the ‘corrupt’ original, assuming the authority of the former, so that the second text becomes the original.45

Yet is this true of all translations of the Bible? Actually, colonial translations introduce a twist to this spectacular narrative of immanence and transcendence.46 For when European evangelists in imperial India translated the Word into Bengali, Hindi, and Tamil, the original, the master Book, remained the one in English, a register of the ‘inequality of languages’. And it is precisely vernacular renderings of Christianity,

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particularly cultures of dalit and adivasi Christianity in India today, that seek to make the translation of God’s word in their tongue the original.

Th e catechists’ writings register such processes of colonial transactions and vernacular translations. Of course, it is at once ironic and inevitable that the catechists’ writings are in English. For this reason, too, it is a mistake to dismiss these chronicles as an exotic exception, a one-off oddity. While these accounts are not ‘representative’ in the sense of necessarily expressing the terms of belief of the majority of Christians in imperial India, they are yet ‘exemplary’ texts, at the cutting edge of a vernacular and a colonial Christianity.47 It should not surprise us, therefore, that the stipulations of the catechists’ ideas, the provenance of their faith, and the determinations of their arguments are not a world apart from exemplary expressions of an Indian Christianity in Chhattisgarh today. Here the acute bind concerns a surplus of faith in the Book, which ceaselessly circulated in the catechists’ chronicle, which can uninterruptedly operate in contemporary narratives.

On the morning of 26 January 2001, with the Indian State poised to celebrate Republic Day, there was a devastating earthquake in the state of Gujarat. Soon aft er this calamity, in the last few days of January, I twice met M. P. Nand, a vigorous man approaching his eighties, long the pastor of Christian congregations around the town of Champa, collecting his life story, recording his apprehensions of Christianity and colonialism, religion and politics. Th e one conjoint with the other, a literalism and an excess of faith in the Bible articulated Pastor Nand’s remarkable testimony. From the opening of his narrative that established him as an original, adiavsi inhabitant and an early, exemplary Christian in the region, primarily through the ruse of chronology. To his construal of a striking cosmology that synthesized ideas from the Hindu Puranas and Islamic understandings with passages from the Old Testament. To the end of his narrative when his bass baritone voice boomed, ‘Th e present earthquake in Gujarat on Republic Day, the ones in Latour and Bihar before, what do they tell us? Th ese are the punishment for attacks on Chritsian brothers and sisters, Catholic nuns and adivasi believers.’ Pastor Nand’s moving tales were one of a vernacular faith and practice, establishing the grounds of an Indian Christianity. Pastor Nand’s passionate stories did not countenance a simply vengeful God, but told rather of a God merciful in his kindness and just in his vengeance, declaring that sins of government

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and wrongs of religion had become unbearable in recent years, calling for true belief in these ever-enmeshed domains.

Aft er this conversation, taking leave of Pastor Nand, overcome with emotion, I touched his feet to pay my respects to a Christian, an Indian, an elder, a person of integrity. Th is gesture actually also compensated for the question I could not ask him—about the terms today governing distinct procedures of vernacular translation, the place of surplus and excess within procedures seeking to make God’s Word in one’s own tongue the original. Th en, both words and courage had failed me. Now, in front of immediate reminders of the limitless hatred and endless brutality of the ‘majority’ and the ‘minority’ toward each other in contemporary India, I must ask the question. Such are the stipulations of a history without warranty.

Notes1. Th is chapter forms part of a rather wider, ongoing project on evangelical

entanglements in central India and North America over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the expressions of this project is Saurabh Dube, Native Witness: Colonial Writings of a Vernacular Christianity, manuscript of book, based on the catechists’ accounts discussed in this chapter.

2. For fuller details of the processes described in this section, see, for example, Saurabh Dube, Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780-1950 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), particularly 70–77, 193–204; Saurabh Dube, ‘Paternalism and freedom: Th e evangelical encounter in colonial Chhattisgarh, central India’, Modern Asian Studies, 29 (1995), 171–201; and Saurabh Dube, ‘Travelling light: Missionary musings, colonial cultures, and anthropological anxieties’, in Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk (eds.), Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics (London: Zed Press, 1999), 29–50.

3. During this time, there was also the expansion of evangelical, educational, and medical endeavour in four posts of the German Evangelical Mission Society in Chhattisgarh. By the turn of the century, missionaries of other denominations—the American Mennonites, the General Conference Mennonites, the Disciples of Christ, and the Methodists—joined the members of the German Evangelical Mission Society.

4. For example, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff , ‘Christianity and colonialism in South Africa’, American Ethnologist, 13 (1986), 1–22; John Comaroff , ‘Images of empire, contests of conscience: Models of colonial domination in South Africa’, American Ethnologist, 16 (1989), 661–85;

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and Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff , Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). But see also, J. D. Y. Peel, ‘For who hath despised the day of small things? Missionary narratives and historical anthropology’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37 (1995), 581–607.

5. See, for example, Ussama Makdisi, ‘Reclaiming the land of the Bible: Missionaries, secularism, and evangelical modernity’, American Historical Review, 102 (1997), 680–713; Saurabh Dube, Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004): Nicholas Th omas, ‘Colonial conversions: Diff erence, hierarchy and history in early twentieth century evangelical propaganda’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34 (1992), 366–89; Walter Mignolo, ‘On the colonization of Amerindian languages and memories: Renaissance theories of writing and the discontinuity of the classical tradition’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34 (1992), 301–30; John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff , Of Revelation and Revolution: Th e Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier Vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and David Scott, ‘Conversion and demonism: Colonial Christian discourse on religion in Sri Lanka’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34 (1992), 331–65. See also, Ann Stoler, ‘Rethinking colonial categories: European communities and the boundaries of rule’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31 (1989), 134–61; and Vicente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

6. See, for example, Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999); Pier M. Larson, ‘“Capacities and modes of thinking”: Intellectual engagements and subaltern hegemony in the early history of Malgasy Christianity’, American Historical Review, 102 (1997), 968–1002; Geoff rey White, Identity through History: Living Stories in a Solomon Islands Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Dube, Stitches on Time; Paul Landau, Th e Realm of the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (London: Heinemann, 1995); Comaroff and Comaroff , Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 2. See also, Peel, ‘Day of small things’; Rafael, Contracting Colonialism; Derek Peterson, ‘Translating the word: Dialogism and debate in two Gikuyu dictionaries’, Th e Journal of Religious History, 23 (1999), 31–50; and Diane Austin-Broos, Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics of Moral Orders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

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7. In the South Asian context, such processes emerge clearly in works such as Rowena Robinson, Conversion, Continuity, and Change: Lived Christianity in Southern Goa (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1998); and Robinson, ‘Taboo or veiled consent? Goan Inquisitorial Edict of 1736’, Economic and Political Weekly, 35 (2000), 2423–431; Richard Eaton, Th e Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Susan Visvanathan, Th e Christians of Kerala: History, Belief, and Ritual among the Yakoba (Madras: Oxford University Press, 1993); Carl Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Dennis Hudson, ‘Th e fi rst Protestant mission to India: Its social and religious development’, Sociological Bulletin, 42 (1993), 39–59; Saurabh Dube, ‘Issues of Christianity in colonial Chhattisgarh’, Sociological Bulletin, 41 (1992), 37–63, and Dube, ‘Paternalism and freedom’.

8. Th e point warrants emphasis. Several of the impressive developments in scholarship on Christianity and colonialism are based upon the writings of missionaries and indigenous Christians high up in church hierarchies. Accounts such as those of the catechists constitute an unusual and signifi cant corpus in this context. A discussion of these issues is contained in Dube, Native Witness.

9. In speaking of a ‘history without warranty’ I am not demarcating a particular domain or a specifi c style of history writing. Rather, as the remarks that follow and this chapter itself should make clear, ‘history without warranty’ refers to certain dispositions toward the past and the present and the social world and historical analysis. I develop these considerations in Dube, Stitches on Time.

10. My particular critical engagement here is with the infl uential work of Homi Bhabha, Th e Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), especially 85–92, 102–22; yet, see also, Gyan Prakash, ‘Science between the lines’, in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds.), Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 59–82. Of course, there are interesting, specifi c uses of both ‘hybridity’ and ‘mimicry’ in, for example, Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Meyer, Translating the Devil; Paul Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Fritz Kramer, Th e Red Fez: Art and Spirit Possession in Africa, translated by Malcolm R. Green (London: Verso, 1993). A longer discussion of these themes is contained in Dube, Stitches on Time.

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11. Michel de Certeau, Th e Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), ix.

12. Willis Barnstone, Th e Poetics of Translation: History, Th eory, Practice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 261.

13. Ibid.14. George Steiner, Aft er Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London:

Oxford University Press, 1975), 250.15. Talal Asad, ‘Th e concept of cultural translation in British social anthro-

pology’, in Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Th e Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 171–99.

16. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Historical Th ought and Postco-lonial Diff erence (Princeton, 2000), 17–18. See also Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

17. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism; Larson, ‘“Capacities and Modes of Th inking”’; Peterson, ‘Translating the Word’. See also, Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: Th e Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Walter Mignolo, Th e Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

18. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, 21.19. Ibid., 20–21.20. Ibid., 22.21. Ibid., xi, 21, and passim.22. I elaborate these considerations of vernacular translation by reading the

catechists’ chronicles alongside the Bible and diff erent missionary writings in English and Hindi in Dube, Native Witness.

23. Th e wider provisions of vernacular translation that I discuss here ceaselessly circulate within the catechists’ chronicles. Ibid.

24. Entry for 24 January 1908 from the day-book of a catechist (not named), manuscript, 83–5. Th is manuscript is contained in Eden Archives and Library, Webster Groves, Missouri. Henceforth, EAL.

25. Hebrews 9: 11–13. Th e Holy Bible, King James version (New York: American Bible Society, 1950), 226.

26. As I argue elsewhere, it is important to stay with such ambiguities and tensions, which do not admit clear resolution, while discussing them in context-bound ways. Dube, Native Witness.

27. Bisrampur Kalasiya ki Vishesh Agyayen [Special Rules of the Congregation at Bisrampur] (Bisrampur: n.p., 1890).

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28. Annual Report of the Chuttesgurh Mission, 1876–77, EAL, 2–3; Der Deutsche Missionsfreund, 11 (November, 1875), 81–83; Der Deutsche Missionsfreund, 11 (February, 1877), 18–19; Der Deutsche Missionsfreund (n.s.), 4 (April 1887), 29–31.

29. M. M. Paul, Chhattisgarh Evangelical Kalasiya ka Sankshipt Itihas (Ilhabad: Mission Press, 1936), 8–9; Th eodore Seybold, God’s Guiding Hand. History of the Central Indian Mission 1868–1967 (Philadelphia: Million Testaments Campaign, 1971), 28–29.

30. Seybold, God’s Guiding Hand, 47–48; Paul, Chhattisgarh Evangelical Kalasiya, 13–14.

31. Reverend Ernst Tillmanns, cited in Seybold, God’s Guiding Hand, 62; Paul, Chhatisgarh Evangelical Kalasiya, 44–46.

32. Central Provinces District Gazetteer. Raipur. Volume A. Descriptive, edited by A. E. Nelson, ICS (Bombay: Government Press, 1909), 310.

33. Ibid., 310–11.34. Elsewhere, I recount my search of the catechists in the archive and the

fi eld. On three occasions, I felt I had attained a breakthrough, only to be disappointed very soon. Of the three catechists, we know the name of just one, S. J. Scott, because he had himself inscribed it on the top page of his account. Yet, the name tells us little. It is only in the case of the long, 250-page manuscript that the internal evidence of the catechist’s writing reveals that he was from the United Provinces, a convert to Christianity from Islam. Trained by the Methodists in the United Provinces, he had reached Chhattisgarh in 1908. Dube, Native Witness.

35. ‘From the diary of an Indian catechist’, typescript, fi led by missionary M. P. Davis, providing a selection from the reports of one catechist (not named) for the period September 1911 to April 1912, 1. M. P. Davis Papers, EAL.

36. Entry for 22 January 1908 from the day-book of a catechist (not named), manuscript, 83–5, EAL.

37. Dube, Stitches on Time.38. Th e catechists’ arguments combined particular apprehensions of the Bible

with their own understandings of the emphases of missionary tracts in Hindi, which the native evangelists distributed in their work of preaching. Here tracts such as Jati Pariksha [Test of Caste], Ganga ka Vrittant [Th e Testimony of (the river) Ganga], Hinduyon ki Nirdhanta [Th e Poverty of the Hindus], and Hindu Dharma ke Phal [Th e Fruits of Hindu Religion] set up a broad distinction between Hindu superstition and Christian progress. Th e catechists seized upon this basic distinction to construe specifi c, novel understandings of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’, which far exceeded offi cial and missionary projections. In the examples ahead it is important to register such

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labour of the catechists, while also noting that their disjunctive unravelling of missionary texts found striking illustrations when they broached, for example, subjects of Western science and Hindu divinities. North India Christian Tract and Book Society, Jati Pariksha (Allahabad: Indian Christian Press, 1905), second edition; North India Christian Tract and Book Society, Ganga ka Vrittant (Allahabad: Indian Christian Press, 1905); North India Christian Tract and Book Society, Hinduyon ki Nirdhanta (Allahabad: Indian Christian Press, 1909), second edition; and North India Christian Tract and Book Society, Hindu Dharma ke Phal (Allahabad: Indian Christian Press, 1905), second edition. Dube, Native Witness.

39. Entry for 30 September 1911 from the day-book of a catechist (not named), manuscript, 83–5, EAL.

40. Th is catechist’s apprehensions and extensions of ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ are connected to what he understands of the ‘law of God’ and to the wider political sociology of quotidian life in central India concerning the indissoluble links between power/dominance and religion/politics. I hope to elaborate these issues later as part of my wider project on evangelical entanglements.

41. With its beginnings in political endeavours of the 1890s, the Swadeshi movement within Indian anti-colonial nationalism was at its height between 1905 and 1908, especially in the large imperial province of Bengal. By the time of this encounter of the catechist, organizationally and in terms of its central imperatives the Swadeshi Movement was already in decline: but clearly its spirit lived on in remote regions such as Chhattisgarh. For details see, Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), 96–100, 105–35.

42. Entry for 1 October 1909 from the day-book of a catechist (not named), manuscript, 83–5, EAL.

43. Indeed, coping with recognized terrain and confronting unknown territory, these evangelists not only reiterated but also rearranged the veracity of the Word. Such alternative articulations of doxa and doctrine equally construed in novel ways the divinities, scriptures, beliefs, and rituals of Hinduism, Islam, and adivasi religions, especially through contending orientations towards readings of texts. Not surprisingly, the catechists’ chronicles contain the simultaneous formation of anthropological objects, for example, Islam and animism, caste and Hinduism, and the making of the truths of historical subjects. Dube, Native Witness.

44. Entry for 14 September 1911 from the day-book of a catechist (not named), manuscript, 83–5, EAL.

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45. Th e arguments of this paragraph owe much to Barnstone, Poetics of Translation, where he also reveals the interpolations and appropriations, excisions and insertions in the translations of the Bible.

46. Such questions are also discussed in interesting ways in Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, especially 23–54.

47. Here I am drawing upon Aamir Muft i’s useful distinction between the ‘representative’ writer and the ‘exemplary’ author, extending it to considerations of a vernacular Christianity. Aamir Muft i, ‘A greater story-writer than god: Genre, gender and minority in late colonial India’, in Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan (eds.), Subaltern Studies XI: Community, Gender, and Violence, (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2000), 1–36, quotation from 35.

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3SPECTRES OF CONVERSION

Transformations of Caste and Sect*

Th e phantasm of conversion acutely haunts India today. Th e force of this spectre is tied to the ease of narration and the sweep of explanation implied by the trope of conversion. In dominant scholarly understandings and commonplace quotidian conceptions, conversion is too limiting a category and too large a terrain—not only within the contemporary politics of India, but also in other historical arenas. Quite simply, the concept of conversion requires critical questioning of its enormous pretensions, specifi c elucidation of its explanatory potential, and context-bound extension of its analytical possibilities.

Terms of ConversionTh is chapter explores questions of conversion by taking up considerations of caste and stipulations of sect in South Asia. It focuses particularly on the terms of incorporation and initiation and the wider shaping of distinct boundaries at the heart of determinations of caste and provisions of sect. Here we primarily build upon our own work on popular religious formations in central and eastern India, also keeping in view other relevant studies in history, anthropology, and religions.1 Our aim is to read and render the meaning of sect and the power of caste in the light and against the grain of dominant and commonplace conceptions of conversion.

In widespread scholarly understandings and pervasive everyday apprehensions conversion is seen as marking a radical rupture with earlier faith and announcing exclusive change of religious affi liation.2 Th e

* Co-authored with Ishita Banerjee-Dube

spectres of conversion 65

problem is deep. Attributing conversion to another religion, particularly to Islam and Christianity, as premised upon rupture tends to overlook the creation and contention that defi ne the overlap(s) of the new faith with the anterior religion, especially in relation to means of apprehension and modalities of action that are palpably prior and plainly present. Alongside, merely emphasizing continuities with the earlier faith and its encompassing ethos in the event of conversion to another religion has its own problems. Such techniques of understanding excise the contradictions and contestations at the heart of vernacular renderings of distinct religions, focusing rather exclusively on the perpetuation of a singular civilizational core, in this case of Hinduism.

It should barely surprise us, therefore, that procedures of caste and sect are widely understood as occupying a ground that is wholly marked off from processes of conversion. Here the fashioning of discrete identities and the formation of newer orientations that underlie the transformations of caste and sect are generally contained through aggrandizing notions of essential continuities within an overweening Hindu civilization, implicitly framing the key norms of the Indian ethos. Not only do such manoeuvres ignore the work of novelty and challenge, but they also excise the distinction and disjunction underlying the meanings and mutations of sect and caste.

In sum, a somewhat singular mutual logic governs the blinkers toward processes of historical construction and symbolic elaboration that shape caste, sect, and conversion. Against the grain of such scholarly transactions and contemporary common-sense, this chapter considers the discrete terms of transformation within caste and sect and queries the determinations of absolute transference posited by conversion—the two together, as parts of a single analytical fi eld. As noted above, our arguments explore designs of initiation and incorporation, patterns of ostracism and excommunication, and the institution of salient boundaries, each apart and all conjoint, as constituents of the labour of caste and the production of sect. Th ereby, we also make an implicit case for understanding conversion to another religion less as an unremitting rupture with prior faith, and more as a wider process of the making of novel beliefs and practices in the constitution of vernacular religiosities. In a word, this chapter seizes upon unfamiliar terrain and highlights unconventional temporality in considerations of conversion.

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Primary ConsiderationsTh ese twin tasks call upon a realignment of perspective in considerations of caste and sect, and a rethinking of the stipulations of Hinduism and history. It is such shift s that we now describe, primarily through a critical engagement with the work of Louis Dumont, which has exercised an enormous infl uence upon discussions of caste, sect, and religion in India. Th e starting point for Dumont is the order of dharma (faith/code of conduct), the command of caste, and the principle of hierarchy. Girded by the mandate of dharma, the structure of caste is manifested consciously in the ideology of hierarchy, which fi nds its key form in the opposition of the pure and the impure, and assumes its critical characteristic in the separation of status and power. Not surprisingly, attributes of consciousness and essentials of form defi ne a continuous hierarchy as the core value of the Indian ethos. Th ese fi rst principles also provide the basis for the range of Dumont’s readings—renderings that extend from discussions of the relationship between caste and sect through to understandings of Islam and Christianity in South Asia.3

It is well known that Dumont’s palpable dichotomies between status and power in the Hindu order have been variously questioned for long now.4 In comparison, historians, anthropologists, and students of religions—unto their distinct purposes—have accepted Dumont’s apparent polarities of caste and sect, the householder and the renouncer, in Indian society rather more readily.5 Th is is striking in view of the fact that Dumont’s statements on these questions are far from being either conclusive or clear, convolutions that have also been broadly ignored by the few critiques of his formulations on caste/sect and householder/renouncer.6 Indeed, it is important to distinguish between the overlapping but discrete emphases of Dumont’s two critical proclamations here.7

In his famous essay on world renunciation in Indian religion, fi rst published in 1959, Dumont suggests that ‘the secret of Hinduism may be found in the dialogue between the renouncer and the man-in-the world [or the householder]’. At the same time, ‘rather than demonstrate the dichotomy upon which this suggestion rests’, Dumont takes the dichotomy as ‘a postulate which will be justifi ed if it allows us to take a simple and consistent view of the whole both in its present shape and in its historical development’. 8 In tune with his wider method, this

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move is at once ingenious and ingenuous. It allows Dumont to posit the householder and the renouncer as ‘ideal-types’.9 Yet these are ideal types of a special order: conceived of largely a priori, they also betoken a prior pure status—or an original distinct attribute—of the fi gures and forms of thought they describe. Th us, the ‘two kinds of thought, the two ideal types ... mingle at the mercy of various milieux and temperaments’, combining in fact ‘more and more in the course of time’.10

What then are the terms of this type of dialogue, such sort of mingling, this kind of combination? Dumont’s response betokens a resolute formalism, fi nding expression in a dual logic marked by the stipulations of ‘aggregation’ when it comes to the religion of the man-in-the-world, and the determinations of ‘containment’ in relation to the practice of the individual-outside-the-world. On the one hand, the religion of the man-in-the-world aggregates the innovations introduced by the renouncer to its own end: impregnated by the thought of the renouncer, it off ers a substantialistic theory, yet it remains a structural practice, essentially a matter of conceptual relations. Th is is not unlike the manner whereby the complemantarities of ‘common’ religion are made indistinct by Brahmanical practice and rendered invisible by Brahmanical thought in entirely substantializing manouevres, and yet such moves only secure the inviolable principle that inherently ‘the world of caste is a world of [structural/categorical] relations’. On the other hand, even as the renouncer introduces all the innovations and inventions in ‘Indian religion’, the ‘developments of renunciation, with all their riches, are contained aft er all within the narrow limits [of caste] which they were unable to go beyond’. Th is is to say that the ‘substantialistic’ theory of the renouncer is ever contained by the ‘structural’ practice of caste, in the end doing no more than ‘off ering to the man-in-the-world a choice of religions for the individual’. Th us, Dumont concludes, ‘Hinduism, the religion of caste and of renunciation, has developed by integrating—within Brahmanism—and by tolerating—in the sects—the products of the renouncer’s thoughts and mysticism.’11

It should be clear that Dumont does not hermetically seal off the worlds of the householder and the renouncer, as has oft en been implied by critics and commentators. Yet it also ought to be evident that in his statement the terms of dialogue between these worlds are truly tendentious. On the one hand, the religion of the man-in-the-world

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aggregates, adds, and absorbs the thought and person of the renouncer only to reproduce caste as structural practice. On the other hand, the disciplines of the individual-outside-the world might contribute to innovations in Hinduism (or, to Indian religion, as Dumont will have it), but they fi nd their true signifi cance in being contained by the limits of caste. Here the single guiding principle for understanding the two intersecting worlds is provided by the overriding continuity of the caste order. Not surprisingly, for Dumont, ‘the most important aspect is the addition to group religion of individual religion.’12

By the time Dumont reverts to the question of caste and sect in his celebrated book Homo Hierarchicus, the dichotomy between the man-in-the-world and the individual-outside-the-world has acquired attributes that reach beyond its prior formulation as the intriguing interplay between interacting ideal-types. Of course, the dualism is still understood as facilitating an ordered and unifi ed view of the diversity and development of religious tendencies in Hinduism. At the same time, the dichotomy is now presented as principally a priori, an unshakeable verity governing history, society, and religion in India. In keeping with his earlier emphasis on interaction, here too Dumont does not posit the man-in-the-world and the individual-outside-the-world in terms of a ‘solid opposition’. Rather, caste and renunciation constitute a complementary duality. Indeed, there is a homology ‘between the interaction of renunciation and worldly Hinduism in the fi eld of religious forms’ and the interplay ‘so far as social groups are concerned, between sect and caste’.13

What are the stipulations of this dialogue, now between caste and sect? Dumont’s response is familiar. ‘In theory, for the man-in-the-world adherence to a sect is an individual matter, superimposed on caste observances, though not obliterating them, and the sect respects these observances even though it relativizes them and criticizes worldly religion from the point of view of individualistic religion.’ In practice, sect either comes to ‘resemble’ or ‘degenerate’ into caste.14 Even in a truly ‘limiting case’—Dumont takes the example of the Lingayats or the Virashaivas—the sect obeys the structural logic outlined above, now replacing the complementarity of purity and impurity with the complementarity of caste and renunciation. But this is not all. For despite such diff erences, the social order and the religious organization of the Lingayats stand circumscribed by a Hindu environment, not unlike Christianity and Islam in India.15

spectres of conversion 69

It is to Dumont’s credit that he does not sharply separate in the Indian context the terms of Islam and Christianity from the processes of caste and sect. At the same time, he subordinates these religions to the dictates of caste, and they appear as analogous to sect. Encompassed by a Hindu ethos, in India Christianity and Islam—and faiths such as the Lingayats—are ever unable to provide what Dumont calls an ‘alternative social system’ to the caste order.16 Th rough a circuitous route, once more we are back to the dual logic traced earlier, insinuating the centrality of ‘aggregation’ and ‘continuity’ in relation to caste, and intimating the mutuality of ‘addition’ and ‘containment’ in connection with sect, including the circumscribed nature of Islam and Christianity in India.

We have spent a long time in recalling and unravelling these arguments. Our endeavour has a purpose, which extends beyond scholarly disagreements over arcane points of abstract theory. Call this an irony or consider it a curiosity, but the wider terms of Dumont’s arguments, despite their conceptual dialectics and structuralist designs, share much in common with dominant projections of a singular Hinduism, implying modular understandings of history and seamless conceptions of civilization, a point we shall develop soon. In front of such overarching formulations, we wish to highlight diff erent emphases in considerations of the interplay between caste and sect, suggesting too a distinct understanding of Hinduism.

It was earlier discussed that in Dumont’s understanding the world of caste aggregates and contains in order to remain and reproduce itself, and the corollary to this is the apprehension that sects invariably accept and usually resemble caste. Th e framing of the relationship between caste and sect in such resolutely rigid and mainly modular terms has several consequences. First, this understanding ignores the distinct and diverse ways in which the principles of caste and the codes of sect can interpenetrate each other, producing newer meanings, constituting distinct practices, and forging novel boundaries of these formations.17 Second, taking as its touchstone the viewpoint of the Brahman and the order of caste, Dumont’s proposition overrides the perspective of the ascetic, the place of the lay disciple of a sect, and the position of the non-twice-born caste.18 Finally, his formulation reduces the development of caste and the elaboration of sect to a relentless dialectic of concepts, whereby diff erence is assimilated to sameness and change is aggregated

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to continuity. Th is leaves little place for the specifi c transformations and particular excesses of caste and sect, enacted in concrete contexts and constituted within distinctive processes.

At stake here is an exclusively demarcated Hinduism and a singular construction of history, which work in tandem. Rather more than an outright rejection of history, in Dumont’s writing the terms of history are deployed to aggrandize and buttress his conception of Hinduism, which betokens a civilizational core and an encompassing ethos. Th is has wide implications. Albeit with diff erent emphases, dominant under-standings and commonplace conceptions of religion, society, and nation in India occupy mutual terrain with Dumont’s use of history and his image of Hinduism. Not surprisingly, forms of Christianity and Islam in the Indian context are widely envisioned in the mirror of Hinduism, whether perceived as being contained by its encompassing ethos across history and the here-and-now, or understood as enacting a rupture with its civilizational core in the past and the present. And so too the place of caste and the position of sect consist of conforming to overweening constructions of Hinduism and of articulating its exclusive history. Th rough intonations of the essential continuity of the Hindu civilization, such understandings either underplay the diff erences embodied by caste and sect in the name of a unifi ed Hindu order, or they dissolve the distinctions of these formations into a continuous Hindu ethos.

Against the grain of such conceptions, we emphasize the specifi c meanings and the particular practices—or, the distinctive attributes and the disjunctive aspects—at the heart of caste and sect. Here the means of history do not simply lie in supplying narrow illustrative material for aggrandizing projections of the unity and continuity of Hindu civilization. Similarly, the ends of ethnography reach beyond the provision of evermore examples that shore up a priori promulgation(s) concerning the place of caste and the position of sect in the Hindu order. Rather, the task of history and the labour of ethnography consist of unravelling the contingent, contested, and contradictory elaborations of caste and sect, including their distinct articulations of Hinduism. Upon this perspective, Hinduism is constituted within quotidian relationships and practices and transacted through everyday apprehensions and meanings, ever shaped by provisions of power and processes of history. Th e diversities, discontinuities, and diff erences in the production of its many meanings

spectres of conversion 71

critically defi ne Hinduism. At work here are various elaborations, negotiations, and contestations of the intermeshing of divine, social, and ritual hierarchies that are central to Hinduism. Th ese transactions include the construction of multiple Hindu identities as a negotiated and contested resource, particularly by castes and communities, sects and formations that have stood on the margins of the categories of Hindu and Hinduism.19

On the one hand, we are not content with simply recognizing the identity of the forms—for example, rituals, practices, and meanings—of caste and sect, which primarily envisions these as fi gures of a single Hinduism. Rather, we focus on the novelty of such forms that is enacted through their articulation within concrete contexts, their elaboration in particular locations, and their entailment of discrete associations.20 It follows too that we emphasize here the diverse articulations and permeable boundaries of caste and sect, discussing the perspective of the lay disciple of a sect, and the position of the non-twice-born caste. On the other hand, it is precisely by understanding the production of newer meanings and the implication of critical diff erences at the heart of caste-sect formations that it is possible to reconsider questions of conversion. Of course, the distinction and disjunction of caste and sect are not the same as the determinations and diff erences of conversion to another religion. Yet, to understand the two together as parallel processes of the making and unmaking of religious forms, cultural identities, and ritual practices is to question the assertions of essential continuity implied in considerations of sect and caste, and to rethink the notions of absolute diff erence posited by perceptions of conversion. Th ese analytical emphases underlie the account ahead, and it is time we introduced the protagonists of our story.

The ProtagonistsTh e histories and ethnographies recalled here concern two popular religious formations, Satnampanth of Chhattisgarh and Mahima Dharma of Orissa. Both had their beginnings in the nineteenth century, and they continue to be an important presence in central and eastern India, respectively. Initiated by Mahima Swami in the 1860s, Mahima Dharma was also known as Alekh Dharma and Kumbhipatia Dharma. Mahima

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Dharma declared an all-powerful, omnipresent and indescribable (alekh) Absolute who had created the world out of his mahima (radiance/glory) to be the only object of devotion. True devotion, bhakti made the maker of the universe accessible to all. Together with the discarding of idolatry, this message questioned the role of the Brahman as the mediator between gods and men, and interrogated the hierarchies embedded within caste. Th e faith was open to all: but its constituency lay primarily among low-caste, untouchable, and tribal groups, particularly in the far-fl ung territories of the Gadjats, tributary states under Oriya rulers.

Th e dictates of Mahima Swami concretized the challenge to the ritual power of the Hindu order. He defi ed norms of commensality by asking for cooked food from all households, and underlined his rejection of caste by prohibiting his followers to accept food from a king, a Brahman, a barber, and a washerman. Th e king and the Brahman were twin symbols of the intertwining of ritual and power, while the barber and the washerman belonged to the traditional service castes, the denial of whose services was the prime instrument by which ostracism, the mechanism of social control, was practised. Mahima Swami’s complete disregard of property found expression in his constant mobility, his practice of burning his temporary residences before moving on, and in his refusal to accept as alms anything but cooked food that constituted one frugal meal a day.21

Th e death of Mahima Swami produced a crisis among his adherents. He had been deifi ed in his own lifetime as the human form of the Absolute, and his followers had not expected him to die. Besides, the Swami had made no arrangements for the continuation of the faith aft er his lifetime. Th ere was no nominated successor, no institutional property, and no permanent structure. Taken together, organization became crucial to the survival of the faith aft er the preceptor’s demise. Th e leading ascetics convened a meeting at Joranda, the place where the Swami had left his mortal remains. Th ey decided to construct a memorial for the preceptor at the site.

Th e ascetics of Mahima Dharma had stumbled upon a critical form, a monumental statement of past and posterity. Th e memorial became the symbolic locus, the repository of the guru’s authority and grew into a temple complex, the religious-administrative centre of Mahima Dharma. Ritual services were introduced at the memorial, and annual pilgrimage to the site reinforced the identity of an adherent of Mahima

spectres of conversion 73

Dharma. Indeed, such services at the memorial came to represent worship of the guru, bestowing honour, prestige, and authority on those who performed them. Th ey also proved to be a source of friction. Two groups of renouncers, distinguished by their discrete garb—the wearers of balkal, the bark of the Kumbhi tree, and the wearers of kaupin, loin cloth—fought over the interpretation of the guru’s teachings, and over exclusive control to off er ritual services. Over time, this dispute led to the crystallization of a loose religious formation into an institutionalized sect made up of distinct ascetic orders.22

Initiating the intervention of the legal apparatus of the modern (colonial and postcolonial) state to settle the dispute, the two ascetic orders became opposed litigants, rival ‘parties’. Both acquired land and property in Joranda in order to substantiate their claims as the true heirs of Mahima Swami, and produced ‘offi cial’ accounts of the sect as evidence before courts. Th ese accounts primarily took the shape of history, grounding the divine preceptor within a temporal sequence in order to establish his quintessential timelessness, and codifying his teachings and practices in order to defi ne the contours of Mahima Dharma.23 It is not only that these processes exceed formulations of the degeneration of sect into caste, or of sect being contained by caste. It is also that these processes betoken discrete histories, of the institutionalization and the sedentarization of Mahima Dharma through salient engagements with the modern state, its legal matrices, and offi cial constructions of time. Ahead of these developments, as we shall see, both renouncers and lay disciples continue to fashion new meanings of their dharma in order to establish distinct identities, which highlight particular apprehensions and specifi c appropriations of caste, sect, and Hinduism.

Chronologically prior to Mahima Dharma, Satnampanth was initiated in the 1820s by Ghasidas, a farm servant, primarily among the Chamars (etymologically, leather workers) of Chhattisgarh. Th is group formed a little less than one fi ft h of the total population of Chhattisgarh. Most of its members either owned land or were sharecroppers and farm servants. Yet the ritual association of the Chamars with hides and carrion meant that the group and its members, collectively and personally, embodied the stigma of the death pollution of the sacred cow, locating the caste on the margins of the Hindu order. Th e Chamars—and a few hundred members of other castes—who joined Satnampanth, became Satnamis.

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Th e Satnamis had to abstain from meat, liquor, tobacco, and certain vegetables and pulses. Th ere was a rejection of Hindu deities, idols, and temples within Satnampanth. Th e members were asked to believe only in a formless god, satnam (true name). Th ere were to be no distinctions of caste within Satnampanth. With Ghasidas began a guru parampara (tradition) which was hereditary, and there developed in Satnampanth a stock of myths and rituals that were associated with the gurus. Th e subaltern religious formation has combined in itself the features of a caste and the principles of a sect.

From the moment of its inception, Satnampanth has served to reconstitute the overwhelmingly untouchable caste status of its exclusively householder members, forging rather particular relationships between principles of sect and codes of caste. Th e constitution of Satnampanth as a sect was based upon the reworking of the beliefs, symbols and practices of popular sectarian traditions such as Kabirpanth that had posed alternatives to the hierarchies of caste. Alongside, the making of this subaltern religious formation involved too the appropriation of a set of focal signs from the ritual hierarchy of purity and pollution embedded within the caste order. At work here were two simultaneous movements. On the one hand, a rejection of Hindu gods and goddesses and of the purohit (priest) and puja (worship) within temples, questioning the close connections between divine, ritual, and social hierarchies. On the other hand, the creation of Satnampanth as a pure body through its accent on the appropriation of signs of ritual purity, which removed the impurities of the bodies of its members. Th ese seemingly contradictory moves worked together to question the ritual subordination of Satnamis, since the twin articulations were governed by a single logic that was made up of a fusion of the codes of caste and sect. As we shall see, being and becoming a member of Satnampanth involved both, the initiation into a sect and the incorporation within a caste.

Over the second half of the nineteenth century, the elaboration of an organizational hierarchy within Satnampanth, with the guru at its head, further clarifi ed this pattern. Actually, the fashioning of the fi gure of the Satnami guru constructed new meanings of asceticism. Ever a householder, the guru embodied the truth and purity of satnam through a rejection of the integrally bound hierarchies closely connected to the Hindu pantheon and the creation of Satnampanth as a pure body. At

spectres of conversion 75

the same time, the guru also gradually acquired attributes of a raja admi (kingly person), derived from schemes of ritually fashioned kinship within the caste order, to become the living symbol of worship within the Satnami community. Th e guru and the Satnami organizational hierarchy enforced the norms and practices, an amalgamation of the principles of sect and caste, which maintained the boundaries of Satnampanth.

In their special singularity and distinctive detail, these various attributes of Satnampanth contested the tenor of ritual power and the terms of colonial authority in Chhattisgarh, but they also reproduced forms of inequality among the group. Indeed, these simultaneous processes were part of a wider logic. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Satnamis coped with shift s in the agrarian economy and changes in the relationships of power, negotiated various eff orts to regulate the community, and drew upon symbols of power to question and challenge their subordination. At the same time, across this period, the Satnamis also elaborated schemes of meaning and power imbued with ambiguity and authority within the community.24

Clearly, Satnampanth and Mahima Dharma—and our respective analyses of these caste-sect confi gurations—reveal divergent trajectories. Yet, it is precisely such disjunction that is critical for the account ahead. For our task does not cease with highlighting the distinctions underlying the creation of novel identities of sect and the constitution of newer formations of caste. Our eff ort equally extends to exploring the manner in which such diff erences assume discrete patterns and acquire dissimilar textures across the labour of caste and the production of sect. To this end, we now focus on two slices of the past and the present, of the designs of Satnampanth primarily in the second half of the nineteenth century, and of the patterns of Mahima Dharma mainly toward the end of the twentieth century.

Initiation and IncorporationWithin Mahima Dharma, the rules for the initiation of gruhi (lay) bhaktas (devotees/followers) are simple. A person who feels drawn to the faith starts praying to Alekh and to follow prescribed practices. Th e prescriptions include rising before sunrise, avoiding food aft er sunset, total devotion to the Absolute in place of all other deities, and the

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conduct of an honest life. Th e person then asks to be initiated by the itinerant Mahima sanyasi (ascetic) who comes to his/her neighbourhood. If the sanyasi is satisfi ed that the applicant is imbued with the true spirit of the faith, diksa (initiation) is granted. Initiation can take place in the initiate’s neighbourhood. In this case, it has to be sanctifi ed by the Mahima Dharmi samaj (community) at the annual congregation at Joranda on the occasion of guru purnima (festival of Full Moon in January–February). At other times the bhakta waits until guru purnima in order to be initiated.

Th e applicant rises early on the day of initiation, cleanses his/her body, and then stands near the sanyasi’s tungi (place of prayer/residence). Th e sanyasi purifi es the bhakta’s body with pabitra (a mixture made up of the excretions of the cow) and grants him/her a gairik bastra (ochre-coloured cloth). Th e bhakta wears it aft er off ering it to the Lord and then stands facing east to hear the advice of the diksa guru (preceptor). Th e guru explains the greatness of Nirakar Parambramha, the maker of the world, and asks the devotee to surrender completely to this Supreme Absolute. Th e main tenets of the faith and the procedure of saran-darsan (off ering of prayers to the Absolute at sunrise and sunset, and, if possible, at midday) are elucidated. Th e bhakta invokes the name of Mahima Alekh and performs saran. Th e initiation ceremony concludes with the grant of bhiksa by the new initiate to the sanyasis. Th e bhakta returns to routine life with a pledge to follow the path of the Dharma, with the maker of the world now a friend and guide.25

Th e act of initiation enjoins lay Mahima Dharmis to follow a well-defi ned code of conduct. In addition to the prescriptions noted above, these include the daily performance of saran and darsan, the wearing of ochre-coloured cloth, service and hospitality to all the sanyasis of the faith, and the exercise of strict control over sexual urges. For married gruhi bhaktas sexuality is to be geared towards the sole purpose of procreation. Husband and wife are meant to sleep together on particular days of the wife’s menstrual cycle. Restraint is the key word in dealings with the opposite sex, members of which are to be addressed as bapa (father) and ma (mother) irrespective of their age. Norms of fi delity and loyalty are stricter in case of women. Th ey are to dutifully serve and obey their husbands and parents-in-law, look aft er the running of the household, and take care of their children.

spectres of conversion 77

What prompts a person to enter Mahima Dharma? Th e reasons are many. To begin with, some bhaktas are born into families of Mahima Dharmis. Th ey are initiated into the faith early, fathers persuading sons to take to the Dharma in several instances. At the same time, bonds of kinship also imply the acceptance by affi nes of Mahima Dharma. In several cases, a Mahima Dharmi daughter-in-law has succeeded in infl uencing her husband and her parents-in-law to become bhaktas. At this point, it is important to consider the range of reasons for initiation into the faith expressed by the Mahima Dharmis, contained in Ishita’s and Anncharlott Eschmann’s fi eld notes.26

A very strong motive to be initiated into Mahima Dharma concerns the search for a sahay (friend/guide) and for shelter (asray), both with divine attributes. Here Mahima Dharma and Alekh Prabhu are seen as off ering guidance and support, as restoring the self-confi dence of their followers, and granting them the strength to face the vicissitudes of life with equanimity. Many of the bhaktas interviewed declared without hesitation that their faith was by far the best, the only one capable of leading a devotee to salvation in kali yuga (era of evil). Th e austere style of life of the itinerant sanyasis and their preaching carry the force of conviction. For several Mahima Dharmis the preaching and advice of the Babas (ascetics) were enough to draw them into the faith. Many are happy just being devotees of the great Prabhu (Lord). Th ey do not necessarily worry about salvation: that is for the Lord to decide.27

Alongside therapy for mind and soul, the Dharma also eff ects bodily cures. Th e desire to possess a vigorous, healthy body has prompted many to adopt Mahima Dharma. A large percentage of followers disclosed that they had become bhaktas following prolonged illnesses. Here the Absolute acted as the nostrum for their ailments when other remedial measures had failed. Eschmann recorded an unusual case in 1974. In Kuska, Gauranga Nayak, a practising homeopath, proved to be a source of inspiration for the conversion of patients whom he cured. Th e doctor prayed to Alekh Prabhu before treating his patients and announced that whoever had faith in the Master would be cured. Alekh Prabhu invested homeopathic medicine with effi cacy; medical treatment proved eff ective only when the Lord’s blessings were bestowed on it. 28 Th ere are also distinct patterns here. In 1991, a small neighbourhood in Bhubaneswar was plunged into tension and crisis. A witch possessed a young girl. All attempts to exorcise

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the witch proved futile. As a last resort a Mahima Dharmi beseeched his Prabhu to come to their rescue. Th e witch left the girl. Mahima Dharma triumphed. Many inhabitants of the neighbourhood became convinced of the greatness of the bhakta’s dharma and started following it.29

Th e rules for initiation into Mahima Dharma, its prescribed codes of conduct, and the reasons of devotees to seek initiation, none of these may appear novel, intimating instead variations on the familiar theme of the addition to group religion of individual religion. Yet, initiation into and membership of Mahima Dharma are signifi cant since they critically reconstitute the identities of its adherents, conferring upon them an acute sense of belonging to a distinct community, the Mahima Dharmi samaj. We shall soon return to these questions. Our point here is that the tropes of tension and the terms of contestation surrounding adherence to this faith reveal the singularity of Mahima Dharma. Numerous stories recount how initiation into the faith can appear as a sundering of ties of caste and custom, a break with the bonds of family and kinship. All this can become truly critical in the case of women.

Shakuntala, a spirited woman from a village in Sundargarh district, told Ishita the story of the opposition that she had to overcome before her initiation.30 An initiate into the Dharma for seven years in 1989, Shakuntala was attracted to the faith in the late 1970s. Argument and friction marked the four years that preceded her initiation. Her father and brothers were unable to come to terms with her distinct views on matters of faith. Th ey had warned her that the rules of Mahima Dharma were rigorous and that their observance was diffi cult. But Shakuntala refused to give up. She bore her troubles patiently and persisted until her initiation signalled her victory. Shakuntala explained that she has not deviated from the path she has taken. Th e subject of occasional ridicule of fellow villagers, Shakuntala ‘has given it back to them’. And her example has been followed by another woman, Parvati, Shakuntala’s source of support in the village and her companion on Mahima Dharmi pilgrimages.

For many Mahima Dharmi women married into families who do not follow the faith, continuance in its path involves a constant struggle. Th e daughter of a family that had been Mahima Dharmi for generations, Nirmalprabha was married into a family of ardent Jagannath devotees.31 Life for Nirmalprabha was not smooth, reaching a crisis when her

spectres of conversion 79

mother-in-law returned from Puri with the mahaprasad (the graced left overs of Jagannath). Following the dictates of her faith, Nirmalprabha desisted from taking the prasad, upon which her mother-in-law and other members of the family were incensed. How dare the wife of their only son, a child born with the blessings of Jagannath, refuse to accept their deity’s prasad? Th e situation was critical. Nirmalprabha told herself that it was her Prabhu’s wish that she take the prasad. Or why else should the Prabhu have guided her parents to marry her into a family of Jagannath devotees? Nirmalprabha prayed silently to Alekh Prabhu and ate the prasad. Th e next day she fell ill. Her fever continued for a fortnight. Doctors, medicines, prayers to Jagannath, all proved futile. Her parents-in-law became worried and they sought the help of her father. Nirmalprabha’s father, outraged at the wrong done to his daughter, asked her parents-in-law to beg for Alekh Prabhu’s forgiveness. Her father-in-law went to a Mahima asrama, donated ghee (clarifi ed butter) for the sacred fi re, and arranged for a ritual gathering of ascetics and devotees of Mahima Dharma. Nirmalprabha’s temperature subsided and she soon recovered from her illness. From then on there were no impositions that went against her religious practices.

Although both Mahima Swami and Bhima Bhoi openly fl outed caste norms and rules of commensality—and the sanyasis of Mahima Dharma do not observe distinctions of caste—the lay disciples in general retain their caste affi liations in everyday life. However, it will be much too simplistic to explain the patterns at stake here through resolute fi lters of sects being absorbed and contained by caste. To be sure, among Mahima Dharmis norms of caste are observed in dealings with those who are not adherents of the true dharma. Similarly, in matters of marriage, procedures of caste are central when a match is arranged between a Mahima Dharmi and a non-Mahima Dharmi family. At the same time, in gatherings of Mahima Dharmis caste rules are totally disregarded, and the equal status of all devotees is stressed. Nor is this true only in ritual contexts. Rules of commensality also play no role in designs of reciprocity and patterns of hospitality when one Mahima Dharmi visits another member of the group.32 Here Mahima Dharma not only relativizes but it also rejects the distinctions of caste. Taken together, it is useful to conceive of Mahima Dharma as a distinct sectarian formation combining an acceptance of the norms of caste and connected behaviour in certain arenas alongside

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a rejection of the rules of caste and related practices in other contexts. Within the faith, this imparts specifi c meanings of sect and particular understandings of caste, also implying distinct apprehensions and articulations of Hinduism. Indeed, the incessant interplay between dharma and jati (caste)—at once conjoint principles and disjunctive practices—at the heart of Mahima Dharma militates against polarized understandings of caste and sect.

Th e confi gurations of caste and sect and the terms of initiation and incorporation fi nd a distinct salience among the Satnamis, revealed clearly by the nature of the organizational hierarchy of Satnampanth. Th is organizational structure has extended from the gurus at the top to mahants, diwans (religious functionaries) and, fi nally, down to the bodyguards and peons of the guru and bhandaris and sathidars (village-level functionaries) in villages. Ghasidas had appointed bhandaris. His son Balakdas developed and formalized the structure. Th is was possibly refi ned even further by the later gurus.33 Satnampanth had a fi rmly entrenched organizational hierarchy by the middle of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Aft er the guru at the apex, the mahant regulated the community and upheld the norms of Satnampanth within defi ned territorial limits: the area under his control could range from fi ve to a hundred villages. Th e diwan always accompanied the guru on ramat (tour) and was his adviser, while the chaprasi ran errands and did odd jobs for the guru. Th e bhandari was the representative of the guru in a village. Acting as a priest in life cycle rituals, he oversaw Satnami feasts for the expiation of an off ence. On these occasions the bhandari broke a coconut in the name of the guru and in return received eight annas or a rupee. Th e sathidar in a village issued invitations and gathered Satnamis for ceremonies and feasts and received four or fi ve annas on these occasions. Th e sathidar and bhandari had taken on the respective roles of the barber—who issued invitations to ceremonies and rituals of all but the lowest castes—and the Brahman priest to constitute an alternative to the network of relations with service castes in the village, which excluded the Satnamis. Th e group elaborated a pattern where members of the extended kin carried out the ritual functions that were performed by the service castes of priests, washermen, barbers, and graziers during the rites of passage of other castes.34

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Th is organizational structure has meant that principles of caste and sect stand intermeshed with each other within Satnampanth. A comparison with Kabirpanth serves to clarify the issue. Members of all castes can, theoretically, be initiated into Kabirpanth. Th e gurus of Kapirpanth do not admit distinctions of caste among lay followers. All Kabirpanthis join in the bhandara, the communal kitchen, and eat the food cooked by Kabirpanthi ascetics. At the same time, Kabirpanthi householders have been governed by the norms of their respective castes in everyday life. It is not only that rules of caste forbade inter-dining and intermarriage, for example, between Teli and Panka members of Kabirpanth. It is also that the guru of Kabirpanth has no say in matters involving marriage, commensality, and transgressions of caste norms among their followers. Th ese questions have been internal to each caste, settled through the mechanism of the caste panchayat.35 All this is expressed in the contrast that the Kabirpanthis draw between samaj (society) and jati (caste), on the one hand, and dharm (faith) and panth (sect), on the other, a contrast that also fi nds distinct expression in the practices of Mahima Dharma.36

Th e Satnamis have functioned with rather diff erent principles. We have noted that contrary to Louis Dumont’s model of renouncers and their orders, sects adopt diff erent approaches towards rules of caste. In Satnampanth, an acceptance of rules of caste in certain areas was combined with the rejection of these distinctions in other spheres. We know that Satnampanth was a sect that admitted members of diff erent castes through a rite of initiation. At the same time, the rules of admission were governed by norms which did not permit members of castes that bore impurity—for instance, Mehtars (sweepers), Ghasias (a caste which looked aft er horses), and Dhobis (washermen)—to be initiated into Satnampanth.37 Here the admission of a person who could be taken into Satnampanth involved his/her acceptance of a kanthi and a feast for the Satnamis. Th e twin act signalled both, the initiation into a sect and the incorporation into a caste. Once a person joined Satnampanth there were no distinctions between high and low. Members of diff erent castes—for instance, Telis, Rawats, and Chamars—became part of one body and were bound through ties of consanguinity, commensality, and the belief in a common guru.38

Th e guru as the head of the organizational hierarchy within Satnampanth regulated the prohibitions on food and the transactions

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with service castes. By the latter decades of the twentieth century the rules of Satnampanth prohibited Satnamis from getting their clothes washed by a washerman, or their hair cut by a barber, or eat sweets made by the village confectioner, or drink buttermilk from the house of the village grazier. Now, the Satnamis had always been denied the services of the barber and the washerman. But the transactions with the confectioner and the grazier were within the bounds of fair play in the caste order. Together, the prohibitions on interaction with the barber, the washerman, the confectioner, and the grazier seized upon the signs of subordination of the Satnamis and set them up as symbols of the self-reliance and the superiority of the sect. Th ey formalized a clear alternative to the powerful network of relationships with service castes within village life, an alternative overseen by gurus, mahants, and bhandaris.39

Th e control of the guru extended to matters of marriage. Indeed, the breaking of rules of Satnampanth and consequent ostracism and excommunication oft en centred on issues of gender. A Satnami man was outcaste when,

(1) he ate in the house of a person of another caste (2) kept a woman of another caste (3) was caught doing wrong with a woman of another caste (4) did wrong with the brother’s wife or the wife’s elder sister or another relative.40

During ramat the guru also imposed a dand (fi ne) on those men who contracted a relationship with another man’s wife or with ‘a woman who had been abandoned by her fi rst husband’.41 Th e reference here was to secondary marriages (known as churi or paithoo), where a person left his/her spouse and started living with another partner.42 Th is marriage was solemnized with the new husband giving the woman churis (bangles), paying a behatri (compensation for brideprice) to the earlier husband, hosting a ritual feast for Satnamis in the village, and paying a fi ne to the guru.43

Th e settlement of jati (caste) aff airs and disputes among the Satnamis was carried out by the jat sayan (caste elders), the bhandari, and the caste panchayat. If the matter could not be settled in the village the Satnamis of a group of villages took it up. Th e settlement at the level of a village or a group of villages involved the imposition and payment of a fi ne and a feast to the caste for the expiation of the off ence. Th e guru received a portion of the fi ne usually when he went out on ramat. Th e number of people

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to be fed depended on the nature of the transgression and violation of rules and the status and standing of the off ender. A failure to accept the decision of the caste elders led to excommunication. In such cases the readmission into Satnampanth required the mediation of the guru. Th e off ender had to drink the guru’s amrit, break a coconut, make an off ering of money to the guru, and feed the Satnamis in the village.44 Th e guru as the head of the organizational hierarchy of Satnampanth regulated the community that combined the twin, closely linked features of jati and panth, caste and sect.

Practices of DistinctionBoth Mahima Dharma and Satnampanth have been characterized by salient boundaries, forged through distinctive practices within the two communities. On the one hand, in terms of the logic of their historical constitution and symbolic elaboration, these processes bid us to explore anew the vernacular fabrications of Islam and Christianity on the Indian sub-continent.45 On the other hand, the ambiguities and diff erences, the tension and disjunction at stake here warn us against a façile appropriation of these practices and such boundaries to the overriding construct of a singular Hinduism. In a word, the details of the discussion ahead carry forward the analytical emphases of this chapter.

Within Mahima Dharma, Biswanath Baba codifi ed specifi c and elaborate rules for all important life-cycle rituals of the lay disciples.46 While complete adherence to the code is not too frequent, an exposition of these rules allows us to explore the distinctions important to Mahima Dharmis. Here life begins at birth and the period of birth impurity continues for 21 days regardless of the sex of the child. At the end of this period the parents throw water mixed with cow-dung over their bodies, bathe, and drink pabitra (a sacred mix of fi ve substances) to rid themselves of all impurity. Th ey bathe the child with water mixed with cow-dung and then perform saran. Later in the day a gathering of sanyasis and bhaktas is organized in a nearby asrama. Bhajans are sung, lamps lit, and Mahima Prabhu invoked. Balkaldhari Babas are off ered bhiksa (alms) and wearers of loin-cloth are given kaupins. Th e ascetics choose a suitable name for the newborn. Th e parents bear the cost of the ceremony. In the absence of sanyasis, lay disciples are invited. Th e

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naming ceremony then has to wait for the appearance of a Baba in the area or for the annual congregation at Joranda.

Brahma bibaha, the prescribed mode of wedding within the sect, is distinctive in style. It is performed only when both the bride and the groom belong to Mahima Dharmi families. At each stage, starting with the negotiations and extending to the time the bride and groom start their new life, the lay disciples of the faith play an important role. All the participants choose a bhakta to offi ciate at the wedding. Th e ceremony takes place in the bride’s house early in the morning. Th e site of the ceremony is swept clean the day before and purifi ed with cow-dung. Saptamruta (a sacred mixture of seven substances) is prepared. On the day of the wedding, a lamp and two vessels full of water are placed near the wedding platform. Th e lamp is lit with ghee. Th e ceremony begins with a prayer to Alekh by the offi ciating devotee. Prayers by the prospective parents-in-law and by the bride and the groom follow. Th e groom’s hand is placed on one of the vessels, the bhakta joins to it the hand of the bride. Th ey are declared man and wife. All the participants pray to the Lord again for the health, happiness, and prosperity of the couple. Now saptamruta is drunk by the partners and shared by other unmarried invitees. Th e earthen pot that contained it is then broken. A vegetarian feast follows.47

In the brahma bibaha, the total absence of priests and scriptures and the service castes is remarkable. Th eir place is taken instead by the devotees of Mahima Dharma. Th ese bhaktas place their sole reliance on Mahima Prabhu. Here it will be quite inadequate to focus primarily on the Hindu identity of the symbolic and practical forms that shape the ritual. Instead, it is important to consider the terms of novelty—namely, the discrete associations and the diff erent apprehensions of sectarian practices and Hindu forms—that the ritual embodies and produces. To be sure, brahma bibaha as a form of wedding is not very common. Yet, its very emphases reveal the self-conceptualization of the Mahima Dharmis as a distinct community. Indeed, lay disciples are not only aware of the signifi cance of brahma bibaha but also imbue it with their own salience. Without conforming to the rules of brahma bibaha in every detail, these lay members of Mahima Dharma oft en devise their own versions of this style of marriage in which the Brahman priest is characteristically and conspicuously absent.48

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Ceremonies and festivals reinforce the identity of devotees and reinstate the boundaries of the Mahima samaj. Let us take the example of balyalila, a simple ceremony that is held regularly, either celebrated on its own or as part of a brahma bibaha or other observances. An individual bhakta or a group of adherents take the initiative in organizing balyalila. Embodying the desire for fulfi lment of wishes, the ceremony takes place at dawn on any purnima (night of the full moon). Bhaktas begin gathering at the asrama from the aft ernoon of caturdasi, the previous day. A common meal is shared before sunset. Aft er it the followers change into darsan bastra (ochre-coloured cloth) and pray to Alekh in unison facing west. At the end the presiding Baba lights the bati (lamp) and holds it up, off ering prayers for one and for all. Th e singing of bhajans follows, continuing late into the night.

On the day of the purnima, participants get up well before dawn, cleanse themselves by bathing, and perform saran. A particular spot is swept clean and purifi ed with cow-dung. A mixture of puff ed rice, fl aky rice, milk, curds, ghee, honey, sugar, coconuts and bananas is prepared in a new earthen pot and carried to the spot which has been cleaned. Th e bati is lit and the Baba off ers the food to the Absolute. Sanyasis and bhaktas stand around and pray. Children from neighbouring areas are called to the asrama, made to stand in rows and repeat the name of Mahima Alekh. Each child is fed a handful of the mixture and the rest is distributed among the bhaktas. Th e children go away while the devotees stay on for another ritual meal, which marks the end of the ceremony. Th e participants start to disperse having restated their faith in the Prabhu and reasserted their membership of Mahima Dharma. Needless to say, these processes are enacted with key variations in distinct contexts, from the routine gathering of disciples from a cluster of villages occasioned by the visit of a sanyasi, to the annual pilgrimage of ascetics and householders to Joranda, bringing deity and devotee in close contact— practices that diff erently recall, rehearse, and reinvigorate the identity and solidarity of Mahima Dharma as a community, a community at once inescapably gendered, signifi cantly hierarchical, and critically bounded. 49

With discrete emphases, the boundary of Satnampanth has also been defi ned by a set of symbolic markers. Th e kanthi, a string with wooden beads, appropriated from Kabirpanth has signalled a neophyte’s initiation into Satnampanth since the time of Ghasidas. His son Balakdas added to this process of symbolic construction by distributing the sacred thread

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among the Satnamis. Let us cast aside the tendency to interpret this move through the analytically aggrandizing grid of Sanskritization. Our point is that the sacred thread, which was worn by a Satnami aft er he came of age and started following the rules of Satnampanth, was equally a symbol of sectarian rivalry and inter-sectarian diff erence. Not surprisingly, the Satnamis have argued that the combination of janeu and kanthi distinguishes them from Kabirpanthis, Vaishnavas, and Brahmans.50 Finally, the Satnamis acquired another marker in the form of jait khambh (victory pillar), a high bamboo pole with a triangular piece of white cloth that served as a fl ag on top, over the nineteenth century. Th e jait khambh in each Satnami settlement was a symbol of the guru’s authority that also reminded the community of their boundedness as a group. Th e white fl ag, a sign of purity, was changed on dashera, the occasion of guru puja.51 Th e markers within Satnampanth underscored the centrality of the guru who was the representative of satnam.

Th e gurus were also the key players in Satnami myths, part of a vigorous oral tradition, which elaborated the group’s cultural construction of its past and embodied its representations of history. Th e internal order, distinct structure, and specifi c representations of the myths underlay the symbolic constitution of the Satnami community. Here, the major mythic fi gures of Satnampanth, particularly Ghasidas and Balakdas, eff ected resolutions and negotiated fi gures of authority who populated the cosmic and social order in order to defi ne the boundary and orchestrate the construction of Satnampanth. Th ese movements served to reaffi rm Satnami identity, reinforce their solidarity, and question the relationships of power constituted by the ritual hierarchy of purity and pollution, the culturally constituted centrality of kingship and dominant caste(s), and colonial authority within Chhattisgarh. Th e Satnami rehearsal of myths in multiple contexts—including, their performance as story and in song at weddings and rituals—ordered the past and reinforced the boundary of Satnampanth.

Th e centrality of the gurus was further elaborated through the distinctions of pilgrimage within Satnampanth. Th e injunctions against the propitiation of Hindu gods and goddesses meant that the guru, the only anthropomorphic icon, became the living symbol of worship and belief for the Satnamis who started fl ocking to Bhandar aft er Ghasidas settled there. Balakdas inherited Bhandar as a sacred space of Satnami

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pilgrimage, where the darshan (vision) and amrit (nectar) of the guru carried the substance of his authority. Th e second guru also elaborated the pattern. Th e reconstitution of sacred time in the Satnami ritual calendar was pressed further into the service of the gurus when Balakdas institutionalized the practice of an annual puja of the guru on dashera.52 Th e calendrical event attracted Satnamis in ever larger numbers to the seat of the guru. Th e establishment of Bhandar as a focal site of Satnami pilgrimage over the nineteenth century defi ned its pre-eminence in the structure of beliefs and practices within Satnampanth. A serious violation of norms and taboos could occasion a visit to Bhandar. Here the guru at Bhandar provided the Satnamis, who had broken rules and transgressed norms, the way to re-enter Satnampanth.

At the same time, it would be far too simplistic to assume that the Satnamis ever eff ected a complete break with the beliefs and traditions of the past. Rather, we are in the face of a creative cultural process in which the Satnamis drew upon their membership of the new sect and upon pre-existent traditions to fashion novel modes of belief and worship over the nineteenth century. Th is construction of deities and constitution of practices worked alongside the Satnami subversion of the divine hierarchy of the Hindu pantheon and the central role accorded to the gurus of Satnampanth.

Apart from satnam and Ghasidas, Mahadev (Shiva) and Drupda Mata emerged as the two major deities of the Satnamis. A convert to Christianity described that the Satnamis,

make an earthen vessel and, believing a stone to be the phallus of Mahadev, put it on top [of the vessel] and a basil plant in the vessel. Th is is worshipped once a year. Th ey light incense and break a coconut before it and say, O Mahadev Maharaj [see to it that] the grain, wealth, bullocks, and cows that we have now always remain with us.53

Here the particular representation of Mahadev and the puja off ered to the deity were peculiar to the Satnamis. While the worship of a stone might fuse together attributes of the deities Vishnu and Shiva, an earthen vessel with a stone and a basil plant—the last a distinctive symbol of Vishnu—was a novel construction of Mahadev. Similarly, even as the burning of incense and the breaking of a coconut seemed to draw upon paradigmatic elements of Hindu puja, issues of fertility and the off ering

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of milk which are characteristic of the Hindu worship of Mahadev were absent from the Satnami variation on the theme.

Similarly, Drupda Mata was a goddess fashioned by the Satnamis. Drupda or Drupta was a corruption of Draupadi, the heroine of the epic narrative Mahabharat. In Hindu mythology it was Draupadi’s marriage with fi ve brothers and her subsequent inability to love all of them equally that prevented her from entering heaven. Th is has also stood in the way of her deifi cation. Th e Satnamis seized upon the character of Draupadi from the dramatic performances of the Pandvani (a folk epic), gave it a new twist by celebrating the heroine’s marriage with the fi ve Pandavas, and provided her with the attributes of other goddesses to transform her into Drupda Mata. She was worshipped by the lighting of a lamp and incense in front of the jait khambh. Even as the symbol of the guru served simultaneously as the icon of the goddess, the songs sung were in the praise of Drupda alone. Th e Satnamis would ‘fall down and appeal, O Drupda Mata guard our children’.54 Th e fashioning of Mahadev and Drupda as distinctive deities of the community was a part of the Satnami innovation with and play upon pre-existent traditions in the construction of their forms of worship.

Th e pattern replicated itself in the Satnami reworking of Hindu festivals. In dashera, established as a sacred date within the Satnami calendar, the celebration of the god-king Rama’s victory over the demon Ravana was replaced by guru puja and an annual pilgrimage to Bhandar. Th is performance of guru puja on dashera, in keeping with a larger cultural scheme of the practices of rajas during this festival, underscored the regal attributes of the Satnami guru. Th ere was also a little more to the picture. In 1868, the missionary Oscar Lohr visited the Satnami guru on the occasion of dashera. Th e evangelist reported that the guru’s body was dripping with ‘sour milk’, which had been poured over him by his followers.55 Now this was also part of a wider pattern where the icons and idols of major Hindu deities—Shiva and Vishnu—are bathed in curd and milk. Th us, the Satnami guru had taken the place of the god-king Rama, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu, and the ‘sour milk’ reinforced the deifi cation of the guru as a god on earth.

Satnami life cycle rituals combined features shared with other castes in the village with their own emphases.56 Let us take the example of (primary) marriage. On the one hand, the Satnamis followed practices

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of ritual prestations between affi nes, negotiation and payment of a brideprice, ceremonial feasts and pathoni (the bride’s formal move to her affi nal home aft er reaching puberty). None of these practices were peculiar to the Satnamis. Rather, they were features common to marriages among several low and middle castes. On the other hand, among the Satnamis, the elders of the community, without consulting astrologers or priests, fi xed the auspicious date for the wedding. Th e bhandari represented the guru at the ceremony, which took place without any Hindu incantations and chants in front of the chauka (a ritual) of Satnampanth. Here the songs sung by the women of the group on the occasion celebrated Drupda and the Satnami gurus, and aft er pathoni the couple would sometimes visit the guru at Bhandar.57

Th e pattern was not altered in the rituals around death among the group.58 Here, too, amidst certain similarities with other castes—for example, the symbolic signifi cance of a calf, the ritual removal of death pollution, and the ceremonial feast—there were also signifi cant diff erences. Th e panchamrit (mixture of fi ve pure substances) served during the ritual was distinctive. It included water in which the feet of fi ve Satnamis had been washed. Th is signifi ed the purity of Satnampanth and the boundedness of the community, and the ritual was offi ciated over by the bhandari who served as the representative of the guru of Satnampanth. Of course, this boundedness was inescapably gendered, since it was fi ve men who contributed to the constitution of the (pure) boundaries of the community.

ConclusionTh e title of this chapter is ambiguous. Th e ambiguity is deliberate. On the one hand, our attempt is to point toward the haunting of politics, life, and scholarship in India today by the phantasm of conversion, understandings that envision conversion as an endless nightmare of bad faith, a wound to the spirit of civilization and the soul of the nation. On the other hand, transformations of caste and sect might themselves be considered as spectres of conversion. Th ese are assiduously sought to be exorcized through invocations of a continuous Hinduism, even as their spectral place and palpable presence put a question mark on evocations of a singular Hindu order.

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Th e discrete transformations and diff erent trajectories of caste and sect that we have described highlight that the craft ing of rituals and identities, the making of myths and meanings, and the forging of pasts and boundaries critically embody contradiction and distinction, continuity and disjunction. At stake here are particular apprehensions and specifi c articulations of caste and sect, of the category of the Hindu and the relationships of Hinduism. Such historical processes of symbolic elaboration and cultural reconstitution, it seems to us, further indicate the importance of understanding conversion less as unremitting rupture and more as the fashioning of novel practices, beliefs, identities, visions, and boundaries of discrete religiosities—oft en vernacular, distinctly Indian.

Notes1. For example, Saurabh Dube, Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power

among a Central Indian Community, 1780–1950 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); and Ishita Banerjee-Dube, Religion, Law, and Power: Tales of Time in Eastern India, 1860-1995 (London: Anthem Press, 2007).

2. Th e arguments of the following two paragraphs are elaborated in Saurabh Dube, Native Witness: Colonial Writings of a Vernacular Christianity. Manuscript of book.

3. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: Th e Caste System and its Implications. Complete Revised English Edition. Translated by Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont, and Basia Gulati (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

4. For example, Nicholas B. Dirks, Th e Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Gloria Goodwin Raheja, Th e Poison in the Gift : Ritual Prestation and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Declan Quigley, Th e Interpretation of Caste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Dube, Untouchable Pasts; Dipankar Gupta, ‘Continuous hierarchies and discrete castes’, in Gupta (ed.), Social Stratifi cation (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 110–41; Gerald Berreman, ‘Th e Brahmanical view of caste’, Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s), 5, 1970, pp. 16–25.

5. See, for example, R. Blake Michael, Th e Origins of Virasaiva Sects: A Typological Analysis of Ritual and Associational Patterns in the Sunyasampadane (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1992), pp. 4–12.

6. Richard Burghart, ‘Renunciation in the religious traditions of South Asia’, Man (n.s.), 18, 1983, pp. 635–53; Peter Van der Veer, Gods on Earth: Th e

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Management of Religious Experience in a North Indian Pilgrimage Centre (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Dube, Untouchable Pasts.

7. Louis Dumont, ‘World renunciation in Indian religions’, fi rst published in French in 1959 and in English in 1960, reproduced as Appendix B in Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, pp. 267–86 (all further citations will be from this version); and Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, particularly pp. 184–91.

8. Dumont, ‘World renunciation’, p. 270.9. Ibid., p. 275.10. Ibid., pp. 285, 275.11. Ibid., pp. 285–86. 12. Ibid., p. 286.13. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, pp. 186–87.14. Ibid., pp. 187–88.15. Ibid., pp. 187–91. For a distinct reading of the Lingayats see Ishwaran,

Speaking of Basava: Lingayat Religion and Culture in South Asia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992).

16. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, pp. 201–12.17. Burghart, ‘Renunciation in the religious traditions of South Asia’; Van der

Veer, Gods on Earth, pp. xii–xiii, 66–182; Dube, Untouchable Pasts; Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 34–40; David Lorenzen, ‘Kabirpanth and social protest’, in Karine Schomer and W.H. Mcleod (eds.), Th e Sants: Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1987), pp. 281–303. See also, Veena Das, Structure and Cognition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 46–49; and Roland Lardinois, ‘Th e genesis of Louis Dumont’s anthropology: Th e 1930s in France revisited’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 36, 1996, pp. 27–40.

18. Burghart, ‘Renunciation in the religious traditions of South Asia’; and Dube, Untouchable Pasts.

19. For an elaboration of the issues at stake here see, Dube, Untouchable Pasts.20. Consider, for example, the emphases of works as distinct and diverse as

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Th ought and Historical Diff erence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Michel de Certeau, Th e Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); and V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and Philosophy of Language. Translated by L. Mateija and I.R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).

21. For a detailed examination of the issues broached here see Ishita Banerjee-Dube, ‘Issues of faith, enactments of contest: Th e founding of Mahima Dharma in Eastern India’, in Hermann Kulke and Burkhard Schnepel (eds.),

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Jagannath Revisited: Studying Religion, Society and the State in Orissa (Delhi: Manohar, 2001), pp. 149–77.

22. A critical analysis of these processes is contained in Ishita Banerjee-Dube, ‘Taming traditions: Legalities and hierarchies in twentieth century Orissa’, in Gautam Bhadra, Gyan Prakash, and Susie Th aru (eds.), Subaltern Studies X: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 98–120.

23. Ibid.24. For a discussion of the internally diff erentiated nature of the Satnami

community—focusing on the articulations of property and offi ce, the ambiguities of gender and kinship, and the contrary engagements with a colonial modernity, which have shaped patterns of authority among the group—see Dube, Untouchable Pasts.

25. A discursive description of the ritual of initiation into Mahima Dharma is contained in Biswanath Baba, Gruhasthasrama Subhakarmavidhana (Joranda: Mahimagadi, 1977), pp. 22–26.

26. Out of the ten fi eld diaries of Eschmann, six deal mainly with Mahima Dharma: fi eld diaries No.1 (1971–72), No.2 (April–May 1974), No.3 (May 1974), No.4 (May 1974), No.5 (June 1974) and No.6 (no date). Eschmann Papers, Munich.

27. For example, interview with Sricharan Sahu, Khaliapali, 11 March 1992.28. Eschmann’s interview with Gauranga Nayak, Kuska, 27 April 1974. Field diary

No.2, Eschmann Papers, Munich.29. Interview with Nirmalprabha and Saudamini, both residents of Bhubaneswar,

Khandagiri, 16 March 1992.30. Interview with Shakuntala, Mahimagadi, 10 February 1989.31. Interview with Nirmalprabha, Khandagiri, 17 March 1992.32. For details see, Ishita Banerjee, Religion and Society in Eastern India:

Mahima Dharma in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Calcutta, 1994, chapter 4.

33. Oral testimony of Kanhaiyalal Kosariya, Bhopal, June 1988.34. Th is account derives from Jai Singh, ‘Satnami Dharma’, manuscript in

Hindi, Folder on Satnamis, M. P. Davis Papers, Eden Archives and Library, Webster Groves, Missouri, f. 5.

35. Report of the Ethnological Committee (Nagpur: Government Press, 1867), p. 104; J. W. Chisholm, Report on the Land Revenue Settlement of the Belaspore District 1868 (Nagpur: Government Press, 1868), pp. 50–51; Oral testimony of Girja, Birkona, 25 February 1990; Oral testimony of Manru, Birkona, 18 January 1990; Census of the Central Provinces 1881, II (Bombay: Government Press, 1883), pp. 22–23.

spectres of conversion 93

36. Th is contrast cropped up frequently in discussions with Panka and Suryavanshi (Chamar) Kabirpanthis in the village of Birkona near Bilaspur in January–February 1990.

37. Central Provinces Ethnographic Survey XVII, Draft Articles on Hindustani Castes, First Series (Nagpur: Government Press, 1914), pp. 54–55.

38. Th e report on the census of 1881 mentioned that the roughly 2,000 non-Chamar members of the sect belonged to all castes ‘from Brahman downwards’, Census of the Central Provinces 1881, p. 34. Report of Land Revenue Settlement of Belaspore 1868, p. 47; C.P. Ethnographic Survey, p. 50; Oral testimony of Pyarelal, Koni, 21 November 1989.

39. Jai Singh, ‘Satnami Dharma’, f. 4.40. Ibid.41. ‘Note on Satnamis’, untitled and unsigned manuscript in Hindi, Folder on

Satnamis, M. P. Davis Papers, Eden Archives and Library, Webster Groves, Missouri, f. 3.

42. An elaboration of the implications and signifi cance of secondary marriages in terms of caste-sect confi gurations and conversion is contained in Saurabh Dube, Stitches on Time: Colonial Cultures and Postcolonial Pasts (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) and Dube, Untouchable Pasts.

43. Census of the Central Provinces 1881, p. 3944. ‘Note on Satnamis’, ff . 3–6.45. Such overlaps between transformations of caste and sect and processes of

conversion to Christianity in central India are discussed in Dube, Stitches on Time, chapters 2 and 3.

46. Biswanath Baba, Satya Mahima Dharmar Itihasa (Cuttack: Satya Mahima Dharmalochana Samiti, 1935), and Gruhasthasrama Subhakarmavidhana (Cuttack: Satya Mahima Dharmalochana Samiti, 1985). Biswanath Baba belonged to the Balkaldhari order within Mahima Dharma. Th e Balkaldharis are the ascetics who wear balkal, the bark of the Kumbhi tree and claim to be superior to the Kaupindharis, the wearers of loin cloth.

47. Th is account draws upon Ishita Banerjee-Dube, Religion, Law and Power, chapter 5.

48. Some of these emphases are equally revealed in death rituals of the community. Ibid.

49. Th is discussion is based on participation in the balyalila ceremony held at Khandagiri on 16–17 March 1992.

50. Oral testimony of Suritram, Sakri, 11 December 1989.51. Davis, ‘Note on Satnamis’, f. 2.52. Oral testimony of Sawaldas, Sakri, 12 December 1989.53. Jai Singh, ‘Satnami Dharma’, f. 7.

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54. Ibid., f. 6.55. Reproduced in Der Friednsbote, 79, 20, 1928, pp. 309–15.56. Jai Singh, ‘Satnami Dharma’, ff . 4–5.57. C.P. Ethnographic Survey, p. 53; M. P. Davis, ‘Note on Satnamis’, Folder on

Satnamis, M. P. Davis Papers, Eden Archives and Library, Webster Groves, Missouri, f. 7; Census of the Central Provinces 1881, II, p. 38; Oral testimony of Jambai, Chhoti Koni, 11 November 1989.

58. Jai Singh, ‘Satnami Dharma’, f. 6.

spectres of conversion 95

PERSONAL PORTRAITS

96 after conversion

ties that bind 97

4TIES THAT BIND

Tribe, Village, Nation, and S. C. Dube

Th e title of this chapter is unambiguous. It refl ects the bonds of a historian son writing of his anthropologist father.1 Yet, the ties invoked are also those of tribe, village, and nation that bound the work of S. C. Dube.2 Th ese overlapping yet distinct connections are presented here through recognition of the poignant contradictions of a scholarly subject and the dense sensuousness of his social worlds, which I articulate through the dispositions of a history without warranty.

First ConsiderationsWhen Shyama Charan Dube died in February 1996, at the age of seventy-three, he left behind a body of writing and a sphere of infl uence spanning almost half a century, which traversed distinct disciplines, languages, and arenas. Initiated into the academy through the tribal anthropology of the 1940s, Dube was a major player in the village studies boom of the 1950s, straddled scholarship and administration over the 1960s, primarily occupied higher positions in academic bureaucracy in the 1970s and 1980s, and dedicated himself to political-cultural writing in Hindi aft er the mid-1980s. At each step, Dube’s interests and presence could not be simply compartmentalized into discrete arenas, easily divided into diff erent roles. His life and work were shaped by the interplay between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular, while imbuing such intersections with a distinct twist, a particular salience. Writing as a son and an academic, a critic and an admirer, heeding a warning Arthur O. Lovejoy issued several decades ago, I feel that it would be a mistake to treat S.C. Dube’s work and life as ‘all of a piece’.3 Rather, Dube’s contribution and legacy emerge from

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within a dynamic but chequered career, a productive yet divided vocation, and an accomplished life but with under-realised possibilities.

My purpose in this chapter is not so much to construe a narrative around Dube’s legacy to the disciplines of anthropology and sociology, as it is to discuss aspects of his work and life, attributes of an intellectual biography. Here I feel it is important to consider the texture of Dube’s vocation and the terms of his writing by thinking through their inner tensions—from fl uctuations and hesitancies to juxtapositions of opposed sensibilities and contrary ideas, and from subterranean continuities bound with productive contradictions to expressions of ambiguities and containments of ambivalences. On the one hand, my endeavour proceeds by having learnt from studies in the history of anthropology:4 but all the while remaining concerned with the diff erence introduced by understanding a particular scholar, the subject of an old colony and a new nation. On the other hand, my eff orts keep in view works exploring the conjunction of ethnography and biography:5 yet they also stay with a historian’s disposition, interweaving historical readings with anthropological sensibilities. Mediating and conjoining these orientations is my search for an adequate narrative toward an intellectual biography. Here, eschewing the ruses of distant depiction while sacrifi cing the claims of ready intimacy, the aims of the chapter are present in the dispositions of its description. Along such tracks, I will focus on the fi rst four decades of Dube’s life that also saw the publication of three important books by him. Th en, based upon this discussion, considering constraints of space, at the end of the chapter, I will raise a few questions concerning Dube’s later career and writing.

Early YearsBorn in the unremarkable town of Seoni (Central Provinces) on 25 July 1922 into a family of comfortable if middling circumstances, Shyama Charan was the only child of Dharma and Mool Chand Dube. Although there were close links with the ancestral home in Narsinghpur, close to Jabalpur, aft er obtaining a Bachelor’s degree in agriculture, Mool Chand Dube worked in a transferable position, as a middle-ranking offi cial in the Agriculture Department of the Central Provinces Government. However, this employment did not last long. Soon aft er the birth of his

ties that bind 99

son, while in Seoni, following a racist remark by a British superior, Mool Chand Dube resigned from his position in the Agriculture Department. If this bold measure was born of Mool Chand’s own personal pride, it further carried the tangible support of his wife.

By all accounts, Dharma Dube was an unusual woman. Striking and beautiful—in the memory of those who had seen her; no photograph survives—she was also a person of integrity and intelligence, her pride and politics played upon familial registers. An ardent nationalist, aft er the death of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a grief-stricken Dharma had refused to eat for four days. While living in Narsinghpur, as part of the joint family, she had quietly but fi rmly asserted her dignity before a self-willed and tyrannical mother-in-law, always covering her head modestly with the end of her saree, but ever refusing to entirely hide her face behind it. Infl uenced by writings on the new Hindu woman in literary Hindi magazines of the day, Dharma had extended sustenance and solidarity to the other, younger daughters-in-law in the family and neighbourhood. Indeed, S. C. Dube liked to describe his mother as the ‘fi rst feminist in the family’. It is barely surprising that Dharma should have more than stood by her husband when he resigned from an employment that aff orded security at the cost of dignity to take up a less prestigious position, without the benefi ts of a pension, in the semi-government Court of Wards Service in the Chhattisgarh Division of the Central Provinces.

Prior to Indian independence, the Chhattisgarh region comprised of the khalsa, areas under direct rule of the imperial government, several feudatory states, and numerous zamindaris, landed estates under petty chieft ains that had a semi-independent status. Th e zamindars (petty chieft ains) were placed under the charge of the Deputy Commissioner of the zamindari system. When a zamindar (or a feudatory chief) died with a minor to succeed him—or when a state or an estate were ‘mismanaged’ and/or became insolvent—they came under the charge of the Court of Wards. In the mid-1920s, Mool Chand Dube took up the position of an administrator in the Court of Wards Service, and over the next two and a half decades, he worked primarily as a Manager in zamindaris such as Deori, Pitora, Bilaigarh, and Phingeshwar, all in the western reaches of Chhattisgarh.

Th ese zamindaris mainly occupied heavily forested regions, comprising a population that a colonial administrator described with

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characteristic candour as ‘sparse and backward consisting principally of the simple aboriginal tribes’.6 It was here that the child Shyama Charan took primary education, also making his fi rst, distant acquaintance with the adivasi peoples of these estates. It was here, too that his mother told him stories derived from the Mahabharat and the Ramayan, tales of nationalist leaders, and legends of Hindu heroes, including Sikh Gurus, and Shyam himself brought out a magazine, ‘Sevak’, written by hand on un-ruled paper, his mother and father its sole readers. And it was amidst hill and forest that little Shyam, barely eight years old, lost his vibrant, young mother. Dharma died of Tuberculosis. Adored always by her husband and child, she was unable in her last days to have either come close to her. It is not only that Shyama Charan retained vivid recall of these times, places, tales, feelings. It is also that these memories assumed a palpable force—traversing Shyam’s vocation, haunting Dube’s life.

Aft er the death of Dharma, Mool Chand and Shyam, father and son, rebuilt their lives, founded on loss, sorrow shared more than suff ering spoken. Now, Shyama Charan studied in schools away from Chhattisgarh, fi rst in Narsinghpur, living with his grandmother, and then at Model School in Jabalpur, lodging in the Boarding House there. It was during school vacations that he would return to his father’s home, books becoming his companions through solitary summer days and long winter nights. Away at school but even more in a large house occupied by only two inhabitants, with few acquaintances and no friends around, he read voraciously. ‘I began with popular detective novels—Robert Blake and Sexton Blake—but soon graduated to serious fi ction and poetry in Hindi, and later to classics in English.’7 Both in Hindi and English, the works he read included translations from other Indian and European languages. Reading was not all. ‘While still in High School I began to write, and dashed off my eff orts to magazines.’8 Th ese fi rst eff orts included pieces on popular cinema, their publication a matter of immense pride for the adolescent Shyama Charan. During these years, his loneliness also led to an interest in the folklore of Chhattisgarh, a region that was to become the base of his writing and research for most of the 1940s.

Shyama Charan took the school leaving examination in Hindi, apart from the obligatory papers in English language and literature. Th is was a nascent nationalist nod toward the live possibility of Indian languages, against the assumption that English alone was the medium of success.

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He performed well enough in this test, but did not secure the results expected of him. Th ree months before the examination, he had enrolled as a volunteer at the Tripuri session of the Indian National Congress. At the meetings, the machination of the old guard and the marginalization of the younger force within the Congress laid hold of Shyama Charan’s youthful passion and politics.9 Th e event itself was enormously demanding of his time and draining of his energy, leaving him less than fully prepared for the fi nal rite of passage out of High School. Dube’s father’s disappointment at his son’s examination results was expressed in a single statement: ‘I had not expected this of you.’

Entering AnthropologyFor the Intermediate Degree, Shyama Charan came to Raipur, joining Chhattisgarh College, affi liated to Nagpur University. Here he built upon his prior, extra-mural interests. While in fi rst year of college he wrote in Hindi and English on the folksongs and folktales of Chhattisgarh, the articles published in journals such as Hans, Modern Review, and Vishal Bharat.10 Somewhat later, Shyama Charan also published a collection of Chhattisgarhi folksongs in the form of a small book, also in Hindi, quite as his range of interests expanded—in his own remembrance imperceptibly preparing the ground for a vocation in anthropology:

From folklore I moved to people, and wrote about their customs and traditions. Th e anthropologist within me was taking shape, although at that time I did not know what anthropology was all about. Around this time I came in contact with two tribal groups, the Kamars and Bhunjia. Th ey came to my father with petitions or in connection with court cases that he was hearing. Th ey would never spend the night in a town or in a mixed-caste settlement, retreating always to the jungle nearby. I liked their shy smiles and their openness. I persuaded them to sing, to tell stories, and to talk about their life and problems. I was irretrievably being drawn into anthropology.11

Yet, these were contradictory times, their downs and ups partly excised by Dube’s recollection of his entry into anthropology.

During his second year as a student of Chhattisgarh College, stricken by typhoid, Shyam nearly died. Indeed, his state was so critical that the Principal closed the college for a day in his remembrance. Having survived

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the illness, his preparation for the Intermediate Examination consisted of a friend, Dashrath Chaube, reading from textbooks and supplementary texts to him. Shyama Charan nonetheless posted remarkable results. All this turned him into a local legend in a provincial town. So, it is hardly surprising that those around him felt that his future lay in entering the Indian Civil Service (ICS). We do not know how Shyama Charan looked upon this possibility at the time, but he wanted to off er his father a spectacular university career. Aft er completing the Intermediate degree, inspired by Ziauddin Khan, his teacher of Civics (and a friend) in Raipur, in 1941 Shyama Charan enrolled for the BA (Honours) in Political Science in Nagpur University, now studying and living in the capital of the Central Provinces. His performance in the fi rst year was exemplary, betokening a bright future.

During the Quit India Movement, various educational institutions closed down, Nagpur University among them. Shyama Charan returned to stay with his father, also visiting Raipur. While there, in those heady, stormy days, Shyama Charan and an acquaintance, possibly from Chhattisgarh College, engaged in a youthful prank. Considering it as nationalist politics, their own contribution to ridding India of British rule, they sought to burn a Post Box. Th e police caught them. Th e Post Box counted as Crown’s property. A criminal case ensued. Th e details are not clear. Most people who knew Shyama Charan then accorded little signifi cance to these events. But Dube himself emerged terribly shaken, refusing until the end of his life to talk about the matter, as was his way with unhappy memories, which he refused to share. Shyam had disappointed his father a second time, undoing too his own certainties regarding life and future.

Back in Nagpur, Shyama Charan Dube read widely for his elected subject, particularly works of political thought, even as he searched for a vocation. No longer envisioning the ICS as a possibility, but thinking about journalism as an option, he sent for the handbook of the Journalism Faculty at Columbia University. Th e other alternative that he considered was anthropology, seeking to fi nd out more about the subject.

Th e library of Nagpur University did not have a rich collection of books on anthropology …. Grigson’s Maria Gonds of Bastar; Elwin’s Baiga … Christoph von Fürer Haimendorf ’s Chenchus; and Sarat Chandra Roy’s Kharia. Later a copy

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of Lowie’s Primitive Society was acquired. Frazer’s formidable Golden Bough was also there. I read bits and pieces of it without much comprehension.12

More concrete help came from an unexpected source.

About this time I had a chance meeting with K. B. Lall, then an I.C.S. probationer …. He had studied anthropology for the I.C.S. examination in England. He spoke of the climate of British anthropology and the debates around the approaches of Malinowski and Radcliff e-Brown. As a model of analysis he suggested Malinowski’s Crime and Custom, which he also generously lent me. I borrowed several other books from him. My ideas were still hazy but my mind was being made up ….13

Indeed, Shyama Charan soon decided upon a career in anthropology, beginning with a study of a tribe of hunter-gatherers and shift ing-cultivators, the Kamars, for the PhD, which he would pursue in Nagpur University. Many of his well-wishers considered this a foolhardy move, a foolish measure, particularly aft er Shyama Charan secured a fi rst division and the fi rst position in the BA (Honours) examination. It is not just that he was the fi rst student to gain a fi rst class in the BA (Honours) in Political Science in Nagpur University, a diffi cult programme of study that was equal to an MA in the subject, along the Madras (or Oxbridge) pattern. It is also that the university did not off er anthropology or sociology as subjects. Nonetheless, for the PhD project, Shyama Charan Dube got generous support in the form of two research awards—the King Edward Memorial Research Scholarship and, a little later, the Morris Memorial Fellowship—of Nagpur University. He was to be supervised by Political Science Department’s A. Sen—who had popularized anthropology and sociology in Nagpur—and was also advised to consult the man who had put central India on the map of anthropology, Verrier Elwin.

First FieldworkDube had established primary contacts with the Kamars in 1939, recording their folksongs and taking notes on their ‘life and living’. Gradually, his collection of Kamar songs had grown and his interest in their ‘culture’ had increased, permitting him to publish representative examples of the former and a brief account of the latter. Th is work was enabled by continued visits to Kamar settlements that allowed him to

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acquire a working knowledge of the Kamari dialect, also conversing with the group in Chhattisgarhi, which many of its members spoke by the latter part of the interwar period. Based upon this familiarity, Dube began his fi eldwork for the PhD project on the Kamars in the second half of 1944, limiting his ‘fi eld to the southern part of the Raipur district in Chhattisgarh, specially to the still wild and backward Zamindari of Bindranawagarh’.14

Aided by his father’s contacts in the region, Dube entered fi eldwork accompanied by his friend, Dashrath Chaube, and a cartman-cum-cook, Polu Kewat.

My research procedure was simple. I had to record all that I saw and heard. Th e outline of the coverage was provided by the standard monographs and by the sacred Notes and Queries brought out by the Royal Anthropological Institute. I was in no tearing hurry to start interviewing my informants. I began instead by observing the physical aspects of the settlement and its daily routine. When young people went out to collect fruits, roots, and tubers, I accompanied them. I also joined their hunting and fi shing expeditions. Th ey mostly hunted small game—rabbits and barking deer, or an occasional wild hog or spotted deer. Night fi shing was particularly thrilling. I also observed the sixth day ceremony for [a] newborn, two weddings, and a burial. Th is was occasion for me to witness several stages of the slash and burn method of cultivation. When people had opened up suffi ciently I began asking questions. Most of my data was gathered through informal discussions. My Zeiss-Ikon SuperIkonta camera was also active, although because of wartime shortages fi lm was hard to get and expensive.15

Yet, these idyllic days soon yielded to live diffi culties.Now, the wider terms of the unequal encounter between the

anthropologist and his subject became palpable. As Dube wrote in Th e Kamar,

I stayed in the wild and sparsely populated Bindranawagarh Zamindari, the home of the Kamars, from January to June 1945. Unfortunately, my tours of investigation in the Kamar country were preceded by a drive for recruitment to the labour units of the army. Th is created diffi culties for me. A rumour went around that I had come to enlist the Kamars for war. Our initial eff orts to establish contacts with the people were mostly fruitless, and on several occasions we found that on our approach the entire population of the village deserted it. Th e fi rst few weeks were thus spent in disappointment.16

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Almost fi ft y years aft er, Dube added that his mistake lay in ‘recording genealogies and taking a village census before I had established a proper rapport. I was recording their names, they thought, to conscript them into the army.’17 Th is was not all. Th ere were other diff erential perceptions as Dube ‘penetrated deeper into the fi eld and visited Kamar settlements in the hills’.18

Although I could speak their dialect I was still an outsider and therefore suspect. A taciturn elder did not take kindly to my camera. From him spread the notion that each time a person was photographed he lost a little bit of his ‘life-substance’. All I could do was [to] show hundreds of enlargements of photographs that I had taken earlier in my research without bringing any calamity upon their subjects.19

What allayed the Kamars’ suspicions? In the 1940s, Dube had written of establishing ‘some valuable contacts’, of securing the ‘friendship of Dukalu, Sukalu, and Bhainsa, the celebrated Kamar Baiga’, which cleared earlier misgivings, leading to their ‘excellent co-operation’.20 In the early 1990s, the ethnographer-ethnologist presented a more dramatic account of how he convinced the Kamars:

One aft ernoon I found myself surrounded by the inhabitants of the settlement. Th eir mood was ugly. No book had prepared me for a situation like this. I had a fl ash. I said, ‘I am young. When I go back the British may recruit me forcibly. Th at is why I am hiding here.’ A few smiles encouraged me to go on: ‘Keep me here. If there is a dumb-witted girl I will marry her. Never mind if she is ugly and has been deserted by her husband. But keep me here.’ Th ere was a burst of laughter. Th e dark clouds of suspicion had cleared. Th e next day I was taking photographs and recording genealogies again, without a murmur of protest.21

Th e tensions between these accounts notwithstanding, the vignettes stand shaped around a specifi c storyline, intimating unexpected hurdles to research, each inexorably overcome, all in the interest of anthropology. At the same time, folded into the accounts, including in Dube’s memories of the adventure and romance of fi eldwork—lingering invocations of ‘cool and comfortable shelters’, of lurking wild animals kept at bay through fi res lit at night and the beating of drums—there lie other tales. Th ey point poignantly to Dube’s ambivalent presence as an anthropologist, at once ‘alien’ and ‘native’, among a tribal people, ‘primitive’ yet ‘his own’, in

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the midst of war and conscription—an ambivalence and a context that shaped the Kamar study.

In the months that followed, travelling on foot or in a bullock cart, Dube made ‘an extensive tour of the wild hill-villages’, also visiting Kamar settlements in the Khariar Zamindari in Orissa. Here he ‘witnessed a number of important rites and ceremonies and recorded very full sociological census of a number of important villages visited’, further tracing nearly two hundred genealogies.22 While these visits provided the mainstay of materials that underlay Dube’s dissertation and book on the Kamars, the fi eldwork itself was interspersed with an important interlude, which was to have crucial consequences for his research and, indeed, his life.

Late in the fi rst quarter of 1945, Dube came to Nagpur, possibly to collect his fellowship money from the University. Here he received an unusual proposal. Leela Ambardekar, then studying for an MA in Political Science, had heard of Shyama Charan, two years her senior, as a brilliant student. Leela had only recently told her parents that rather than their seeking a suitable match for her, she would herself try to fi nd a husband. Now, she had a glimpse of Shyam:

When I saw him he was wearing khadi clothes. I sought further information about Dube from my younger sister’s husband who was acquainted with him. Dube belonged to a Hindi speaking Brahmin sub-caste, but did not feel compelled to marry within his biradri (endogamous group). He too was opposed to dowry, rituals, and ostentation. He looked forward to an academic career.23

Leela’s brother-in-law carried the proposal for marriage. Although Shyam was somewhat chary of marrying at the time, he agreed, stipulating that the wedding would only take place once he had a job. Th eir decision approved of by Leela’s parents and Shyam’s father, Dube soon resumed his research in the fi eld.

Around this time, Dube was off ered a lectureship, teaching Political Science, in Hislop College at Nagpur, which he accepted in July 1945. A little over a month later, Leela and Shyam were married in a simple civil ceremony. When Shyama Chran Dube returned to the fi eld in April 1946, he was accompanied by Leela Dube. Collecting ‘important data on tribal law and its breaches’ while checking ‘the materials collected in previous tours’,24 his fi eldwork was aided immensely by the presence of his wife. Not

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only did Dube have a greater acceptance among the Kamars as a married man, but Leela also helped secure invaluable information—and a wider perspective—through her access to Kamar women. Although she had no formal anthropological training, she was already familiar with Shyam’s research, helping him with the analysis of the data and the writing of the dissertation, which he had begun soon aft er their marriage. Back in Nagpur, Dube completed and submitted his dissertation on the Kamars, helped ‘unobtrusively’ by his formal supervisor, Shri Sen, and aided by the warmth and support of Verrier Elwin, his unoffi cial advisor. As an examiner of the thesis, Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf appreciated the work, fi nding it comprehensive and capable. Th e dissertation was to provide Dube’s fi rst monograph, Th e Kamar, but this had to await moves to other institutions.

Invigorating TimesTeaching Political Science in a small institution was confi ning Dube. Th ere was little by way of sustained anthropological debate and discussion in Nagpur. Meeting senior fi gures of the discipline such as D. N. Majumdar and Iravati Karve, both of whom delivered endowment lectures in Nagpur University, and attending the occasional anthropological event was exciting. But these encounters perhaps also enhanced Dube’s larger sense of intellectual isolation. Majumdar drew him into the board of editors of the newly launched Eastern Anthropologist, and also published a collection of Chhattisgarhi folksongs by Dube under the auspices of the Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society of UP.25 But even this did not alleviate the misery.

Th en, in the second half of 1947, Dube hesitatingly applied for, and in the following year delightedly accepted, the position of a Lecturer in Political Science at Lucknow University. Around the time of Indian independence, Lucknow University was a remarkable institution. Here Dube learnt about ecology and regional planning from Radhakamal Mukerjee, picking up ‘valuable ideas about the importance of tradition’ from D. P. Mukerjee. Above all, he interacted professionally with D. N. Majumdar.

Majumdar’s zest for anthropology was infectious. He lived anthropology, talked anthropology, and, I suspect, even dreamt anthropology. We talked about the

108 after conversion

gaps in the ethnographic map of India and of the monographs that remained to be written; and about how anthropology could be useful in the administration of tribal areas.26

Th ese discussions were based upon concrete collaboration. On the one hand, in addition to his duties in the Political Science department, Dube was assigned classes in anthropology—teaching economic organization, social organization, and religion—for a few hours a week, sharing Majumdar’s burden. On the other, Dube was an active volunteer in the activities of the Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society recently founded by Majumdar, also assisting his senior colleague in the running of the Society’s journal, Eastern Anthropologist.

In Lucknow, Dube encountered keen academic challenges alongside wider intellectual stimulation. Beyond anthropology, there were conversations with other scholars, an engagement with other disciplines. Beyond academics, there was lively political interchange, meetings in the Coff ee House with important public fi gures, representing a range of political persuasions, from Communists to Lohiaites to Congressmen, including the occasional presence of a charismatic Parliamentarian, Feroze Gandhi. Dube read widely, delving into the rich collection at the Tagore Library of the University. He also began systematically building a personal library that cut across disciplines and included various literatures, buying from two superb bookshops, Universal and Ram Advani.

In this invigorating atmosphere, Dube fi nalized the Kamar study for publication. Already before his move to Lucknow, the work was quite complete. By way of a commendation of the manuscript, possibly in order to help Dube secure a subsidy toward its publication, Verrier Elwin had sent him a handwritten note in June 1947:

I have had the pleasure of reading Mr. S. C. Dube’s MSS on the Kamars. It is a substantial contribution to Indian anthropology. It is thorough, fresh, well-written and gives a clear and vivid picture of the life of the tribe. Mr. Dube evidently has a future in anthropology, and I hope it will be possible for his work to be published in the style it deserves… I again commend Mr. Dube’s work as of high excellence and as among the best by an Indian writer of recent times.

In Lucknow, Dube partially revised and mainly polished the manuscript.Th e Kamar was published under the auspices of the Ethnographic and

Folk Culture Society, with Majumdar extending a great deal of practical

ties that bind 109

support to the project. Th e work bore the impress of discussions with Majumdar on the application of anthropology toward the administration of tribal communities. Deeper anthropological infl uences upon the study came from Dube’s long-term engagement with the work of Elwin and his ongoing exchanges with Fürer-Haimendorf. At the same time, Dube registered a particular voice in the book, providing a distinct twist to Elwin’s primitivist blueprints of anthropological practice while bypassing Fürer-Haimendorf ’s diff usionist concerns that were characteristic of the Vienna School.

Tribe and NationDube’s fi rst monograph marks a specifi c moment in the passage of Indian anthropology. At the time, he saw the work as a contribution to the anthropology of the Central Provinces. Th e book bears a simple structure. From the introduction that lays out the basics of the Kamar country, the earlier accounts of the tribe, and attributes of their physical appearance. To the next three chapters that describe, successively, the nature of Kamar settlements and their forms of livelihood; their patterns of social organization; and the phases of life among the group. To the following two chapters that discuss customary law through its provisions and transgressions, sanctions and containments; and myths and legends, ritual and religion, magic and witchcraft among the Kamars. To the fi nal two chapters that explore questions of ‘cultural contacts’ of the Kamars; and issues of ‘tribal adjustment’ under a nationalist dispensation. Recall that Dube had described his approach to anthropology in Th e Kamar as governed by the standard monograph and the ‘Notes and Queries’ format. Th is actually led to a comprehensive presentation of ethnographic materials, based upon careful fi eldwork, enlivened by an anthropological sensitivity related to Dube’s wider familiarity with region and subject. In addition, through brevity of style and economy of expression, Dube averted the inelegance of grab-all, salvage-baggage ethnography that confused volume with knowledge.27

But the signifi cance of the work might also be traced in other ways. Th e Kamar lies on the cusp of the end of colonial rule and the arrival of Indian independence. Th e study was shaped by presumptions of the prior ‘primitive’, the ‘savage slot’, within colonial ethnography:28 yet it

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referred to Kamar life-ways as embedded within wider societal processes. Th e work cast its subjects as caught within the larger terms of nationalist transformation: but it nonetheless constantly returned to an essential Kamar tradition. Such tension does not merely register a shift of accent in the study between portions written earlier and sections draft ed later. Nor is the tension simply disabling. Rather, the tension is formative of the book, running through its chapters. Th is is to say that Th e Kamar captures and contains the ambiguities and ambivalences of S. C. Dube’s thought and writing—themselves indicative of anxieties at the heart of his discipline—at a critical juncture. Th e work uneasily braids anthropological demand and nationalist desire, raising questions for considerations of an ethnographic practice in the shadow of empire and nation.29

Th e formative tensions and the productive ambiguities of Th e Kamar appear bound to the style, structure, and sentiment of the work. Dube considered that primitive cultures were not static but dynamic, especially since culture itself was an adaptive mechanism. Here the notion of the primitive entailed twin registers. On the one hand, it signifi ed backwardness upon an evolutionist axis, a self-explanatory schema, assumed in place a priori, the dominant vision of anthropology and nation at the time. On the other, it registered cultural diff erence, coeval with the ethnographer, in the space of the nation, which invited empathetic understanding. Th us, in the study, the imperative to describe the Kamar way of life before it changed crisscrossed with the impulse to record the changing way of life of the Kamars, the dual dispositions pulling apart but also coming together.

Th e Kamar cast the economy of its subjects as being in transition, showing at crucial points that their social structure and oral traditions stood shaped by interactions with other tribes. At the same time, precisely through its terms of description the work clung to the notion that the Kamars had not lost the ‘distinctiveness of their tribal culture which shows very few signs of disintegration and degeneration.’30 Dube wrote of the Kamars as singing of ‘the Englishman’s raj, where kantopwalas (hat-wearers) used to rule’, and mentioned their ‘seriously talk[ing] about Gandhi Mahatma, the king of all kings … endowed with greater magical powers to fi ght the white sahibs’.31 Poignantly, he recorded that the Kamars,

ties that bind 111

... talk despisingly about the Englishman who put an end to their age old practice of dahi [shift ing cultivation]. With suspicion they talk of the suraj [swaraj: literally, self-rule/freedom/independence], the reign of the congress, in which ‘liquor may be completely forbidden to them’ and ‘they may not be allowed to eat any meat’ nor will ‘they be permitted to have two wives or more’. Th ey are afraid that in this new epoch they may even lose the semblance of freedom which they possessed under the British rule.32

Yet, Dube described the Kamars as ‘almost untouched’ by the ‘great political awakening which has given a new national consciousness to India during the last sixty years’, as barely aff ected by the ‘social and economic upheaval which had stirred the bulk of Indian society to its depth’.33 Th e narrative holds together, but it also strains at the seams.

Th e tension is palpable, the strands intertwine, each constitutive of Th e Kamar. For it is this strain and such braiding that suggest the need to approach the work in a manner that does not simply assimilate it to Elwin’s propositions regarding tribal segregation or Ghurye’s calls for tribal assimilation.34 Th is is especially the case when Dube deals with the problem of tribal ‘adjustment’ in the face of national reconstruction. Here analytical predilections, ethnographic sensibilities, and nationalist imperatives appear bound and separate, paternalist but also democratic, presenting the Kamars at once as object of anthropology and subject of nation. Long decades aft er, recalling how the book had stopped short of describing the quotidian forms of exploitation of the Kamars, the abuse and corruption of local offi cials, and of the Kamars’ questioning of everyday domination through their ‘improvised skits’, Dube wrote that ‘we really were the prisoners of a pattern’.35 Actually, the very tensions and the precise ambivalences of Th e Kamar hold a mirror up to the pattern, suggesting the need for readings that reconsider the chequered history of Indian anthropology.

Th e profession was pleased with the book for its own reasons. In his Foreword to the study, Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf had praised Dube’s ‘lucid and sympathetic description of the Kamars, a tribe hitherto practically unknown to anthropology’.36 An unsigned review, which appeared in the Hindu, carried a slightly diff erent fl avour:

Mr. Dube’s book on the Kamar is a pleasant surprise, for it is published in a series sponsored by the Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society of Lucknow,

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which includes some of the most inferior work done in the fi eld of Indian anthropology—and that is saying a good deal. But Mr. Dube’s monograph is admirable. It is the result of long and careful research; it shows a suffi cient acquaintance with technical method and theory; it is simply and unpretentiously written. It obviously belongs to the Elwin School of writing, and Mr Dube in several passages echoes the ideas and methods of such a book as ‘Th e Baiga’.37

Writing in Th e Illustrated Weekly of India, Elwin himself reiterated the terms of such critique and praise, fi nding Th e Kamar ‘quite brilliantly illustrated’: ‘Dr. Dube gives us really lovely photographs well reproduced. Th e text, too, is good. Dr. Dube knows his people and wants the best for them. His chapter on “Problems of Tribal Adjustment” should be read by all Ministers of Tribal Welfare.’ But then the twist came: ‘Unfortunately, the book appears in a series sponsored by the Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society of Lucknow, whose previous publications are masterpieces of shoddy scholarship. Dr. Dube should keep better company.’ On the one hand, Elwin was seriously concerned about poor publication qualities, a worry expressed in the commendation note that he had sent Dube in June 1947: ‘Much good work in this line [of anthropology] in India is spoilt by bad printing and wretched reproduction of pictures. It is essential that Mr. Dube’s work be handled by a responsible publisher.’ On the other hand, Elwin used Th e Kamar to criticise Majumdar, who was a rival, further aligning Dube’s work with his own writing.

Away from this struggle for turf in Indian anthropology, J. H. Hutton at Cambridge wrote a generous review of the work in Man, emphasizing that:

Dr. Dube has aimed at giving a full and integrated picture of the Kamar culture and has done it well; and beyond that he has dealt with the problems arising from the contact of these primitive hunters and cultivators … with the external world of offi cials, traders and moneylenders, at whose hands they suff er the victimization and exploitation so familiar to all of India’s primitive tribes. His treatment of these problems and his views as to the measures which need to be taken are moderate and sane, and might well be acted upon by those now in authority … Dr. Dube is to be congratulated on his careful and objective work.38

At the same time, outside of India, the best known of Dube’s work in tribal anthropology is a concise essay on ‘token pre-puberty marriage’,

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also published in Man and widely cited within the discipline.39 Dube himself was in the midst of a journey from tribe to village.

Village WorkMuch before the actual publication of Th e Kamar, aft er a stay of less than two years in Lucknow, Dube was invited to Hyderabad for an interview. Here Fürer-Haimendorf served as the Advisor on Tribal Welfare to the Nizam’s Government, and also held the position of Professor of Anthropology in the Sociology Department at Osmania University. He was soon to leave India, and had suggested that Dube replace him, at an appropriate junior rank, in the University. Following a meeting over a drink with the Vice-Chancellor, Nawab Ali Yavar Jung, at the Secundarabad Club, Dube was formally interviewed the next day under informal circumstances, and off ered the position. Aft er a moving farewell from Lucknow University, home to an eventful, productive period and a painful, piercing memory—during this time, Leela and Shyam had lost their fi rst child, a girl, who died some days aft er birth—the Dubes found home in yet another urban centre of Indian Islam, Hyderabad.

Amidst somewhat eccentric, rather colourful, yet appropriately supportive colleagues, Dube reorganized the syllabi, teaching a general introduction to anthropology, a survey of the history of ethnological theory, and a third course on ethnography. While none of these was entirely innovative, the latter two courses introduced aspects of recent developments in the discipline and comparative perspectives on tribal cultures. It was research that truly occupied Dube in Hyderabad. On Fürer-Haimendorf ’s suggestion that he work on a tribe in the region, Dube had explored possible projects in adivasi pockets in Andhra country, witnessing the ruthless killings by the police of communists and their sympathizers in the process. Yet, the research he eventually undertook was wholly diff erent, the study of a village, Shamirpet, located in the Telangana region, 25 miles from the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secundarabad.

Th e project was an outcome of the shared imaginings of a seasoned, visionary administrator and a young, ambitious scholar,

... the result of a conjunction of two somewhat dissimilar ideas. Ali Yavar Jung

... had in mind an experimental rural social service extension project in which

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the diff erent faculties of the university could pool their insights and resources to work for the uplift of the village. I was thinking of an in-depth study of a non-tribal village, diff erent from the hundreds of surveys done by governmental agencies. Th e inputs of the several specialist units could enrich my study, which itself could serve as a benchmark for later extension work. Ali Yavar Jung recognized the fi t between the two objectives and gave me the go-ahead to draw up a comprehensive plan.40

Th e choice of Shamirpet combined practical and sociological considerations. Not too far for project members to reach and return on the same day, the village was more than merely a sub-urban extension; and in terms of its size (area as well as population) and caste composition, Shamirpet was representative of the villages of the region.

Th e project team consisted of 18 members drawn from six faculties—Arts, Agriculture, Veterinary Science and Animal Husbandry, Medicine, Engineering, and Education—of Osmania University. Each unit carried out a research survey and conducted social work in the area of its interest and competence. Th e units had considerable autonomy with respect to social work, limited chiefl y by the funds and resources available to them. At the same time, Dube and four other members of the Sociology Department designed the diff erent surveys, also helping in the conduct of research by all units at every stage.41 Th e inter-faculty team carried out 20 weeks of work over two summer vacations, while the anthropology/sociology unit was active in Shamirpet for an entire year. Dube himself divided his time between Shamirpet—where he directed both the welfare and research activities of the project—and Hyderabad, home to teaching, administration, and family life with Leela and their newly born son, Mukul.

On the one hand, given its novel objective of village welfare and rural research as part of nation-building in a former princely state, a ‘feudal’ terrain as it were, from the beginning the project attracted considerable attention in the press, including a documentary fi lm on the venture. Th is tended to draw curious visitors and onlookers, their presence oft en annoying and aggravating, a diffi culty resolved partially and gradually. On the other hand, the villagers themselves were at fi rst sullen and suspicious, regarding the project as a missionary endeavour and then as anti-communist government propaganda, their apprehensions allayed in steps:

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…our resources, especially our tents, crockery and cooks and buses impressed them. Th e co-operation of highly placed offi cials rehabilitated us in the eyes of the village folk, and many of them who went to the city and made enquiries about us from educated relations returned to the village satisfi ed about our credentials. But more than all this, the excellent work of the Medical Unit established rapport with the community, and the sympathetic welfare activities of the Agriculture, Veterinary and Education units further helped us to establish more intimate contacts with the people. Th ey were benefi ting by our presence …. Th is changed the attitude of the people considerably. To begin with the investigators making anthropological enquiry were regarded as a nuisance; now they [we] were tolerated as inquisitive but friendly outsiders. In a few days there was a change for the better. We had never talked politics or religion, there was no propaganda or attempt at reform and no superiority of city-ways and sneering at the rustic ways of the village people in our attitude. Indiff erence turned into warmth and friendship, and at this point we intensifi ed our anthropological investigations.42

Th e passage speaks for itself and of the texture of the times, optimistically straddling the instrumentality of fi eldwork and empathy for its subjects, easily intertwining the means of rural welfare and the ends of village anthropology.

Beginning with a general sociological census, the anthropological enquiries of the project focused upon themes of social, economic, ritual, kinship, and family structures of the village. Here an important role was played by intensive investigations by means of a selected sample of 120 families (out of a total of 380)—representing diff erent castes and religions, at distinct levels of income, education, and urban contact—together with 80 episodic and topical life-histories and 11 full biographies, recorded through free-association interviews. Besides, the social sciences team used ‘the established method of participant observation and the usual techniques of anthropological enquiry’, also studying carefully available village records.43 Surveys on diet and nutrition, village agriculture and animal care provided useful, supplementary information. As a team endeavour, engaging the joint energies of several members, the research conducted by the Osmania project on Shamirpet village was wide-ranging in its sweep and depth. At the end, Dube had ‘three-thousand sheets of notes neatly typed and systematically classifi ed’.44

Even as the project was underway, Dube received an invitation from Fürer-Haimendorf in London, to spend a year as a Visiting Lecturer at

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the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Resolving to write up the study of Shamirpet in the year abroad, during the late summer in Hyderabad, from June to August 1952, Dube immersed himself in the notes and the data, sketching an outline, preparing tables, and producing a tentative draft of two chapters. Sailing by ship, a month later, Dube was in London. Amidst seminars and lectures, lodging in the home of the archaeologist couple, Raymond and Bridget Allchin, with a social life largely limited to academic acquaintances, working up to 14 hours a day, Dube read widely even as he searched for means of giving shape to the materials in front.

My main diffi culty was that I had no model for my study. Th e complexity of working on the caste system made everything so diff erent and diffi cult. Redfi eld’s studies and many other books on villages around the world were helpful, but they could not solve several of my problems. Th e Wiser’s Behind Mud Walls was limited in scope, and the village surveys of the time were tilted toward economic rather than sociological data. I was aware that some studies were in the pipeline. M.N. Srinivas was doing a Mysore village. With his cooperation the Economic Weekly ... was publishing a series of studies done by anthropologists and sociologists, including one by me, though it was not on Shamirpet. Th ere was news that McKim Marriot at Chicago University had planned a symposium volume on village India, but its contents were not known to me. As I was working on a tight schedule, I had to fi nd my own way.45

Dube’s aim was an integrated account of an Indian village community, providing a feel of its fabric, conveying a sense of its texture. Two seminars helped him shape such a study: his own at the School of Oriental and African Studies; and that of Raymond Firth at the London School of Economics (LSE), where Dube presented some of his materials and arguments. In each case, the imperatives of clear exposition and the responses to his presentations proved crucial to the framing and the writing of the work.

Once the manuscript was complete, Dube sought the ‘professional opinion’ of a senior colleague.

Raymond Firth agreed to read the typescript, and with some trepidation I handed it over to him. Ten days later he asked me to lunch at the LSE. On his desk rested my typescript, with the brief notation ‘First Rate—R.F.’ My vegetarian meal in the senior dining room could not have tasted better.46

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Firth also felt that the work deserved a quality publisher, sending the manuscript over to Routledge and Kegan Paul (RKP). Not much later, Dube received a letter of acceptance: the book was to form part of RKP’s prestigious series, Th e International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction.

Constitutive of Indian Village is simplicity of style, ease of exposition. Setting out to provide ‘a clear and intimate picture of some aspects of life in one Indian village’, Dube singularly succeeded in the endeavour.47 From Shamirpet’s physical, historical, and demographic attributes, to its social, economic, caste, political, and ritual structure(s), to its ethos and ambience, the book presented a compelling, vivid portrait of the village. Th is led Morris Opler to describe the work as ‘a total study, not in the sense that it gives us all possible details concerning the village Shamirpet, but in the sense that it presents between its two covers all important aspects of the culture of this community.’48

Th e descriptive devices and narrative techniques of the book were bound to its terms of theory. Here, a latent functionalism was unobtrusively woven into the texture of the account; the presentation of dominant norms and their main variations—with personality oft en projected as ‘explaining’ the latter—formatively shored up the description; a tight terminology was entwined with the narration. In the book analytical categories and empirical materials were imbricated in each other. As Edmund Leach wrote, in an unsigned review, in Th e Times (London): ‘Dr. Dube describes his book as a “descriptive” study and at the level of description it is unsurpassed. Th e moral atmosphere and facts of day-to-day life are well conveyed. It is perhaps a sign of this richness of matter that problems of theory change.’49 Rounding off the picture were Dube’s concern with social change; interest in ‘binding forces in Indian culture’;50 engagement with issues of ‘civilisation’ on the subcontinent;51 and insights into ‘psychological’ dimensions.52

Yet, Dube’s fl uid, graceful prose, seamlessly binding the analytical and the empirical, also contains contrary strains, lying at the heart of the narrative. Let me turn here to the tension between the presence of history and the present of anthropology—or, the push and pull between projections of a village as shaped by the past and propositions regarding a community as out of time—at the core of Indian Village. In the account, Dube not only questioned the notion of an entirely ‘representative’

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village, casting matters instead in terms of the important distinctions and structural similarities between villages in India, but also argued that ‘we cannot regard the Indian village community as static, timeless and changeless. Time and the interplay of historical and sociological factors and forces have infl uenced the structure, organisation and ethos of these communities in many signifi cant ways.’53 Yet, in the narrative, transformations through time primarily made their appearance at the opening and the close of the account, the fi rst steps its framing devices, and the last strides its masterful fi nale, a comprehensive chapter describing the changes in the village, in the past and the present.

Th is is to say that the work of history is not absent from Indian Village. On the one hand, such labour inhabits the edges of the account, intimating its ends. At work is a breach between change and transformation that come from outside the village and continuity and stability that inhere within the community. Th at is to say, here is a divide between external history and internal structure. On the other hand, the narrative equally presents historical processes and contemporary developments as encompassing the village, thereby further inserting and instituting Shamirpet in a lasting ethnographic present, descriptively a place in history, analytically an entity out of time. Th ese twin attributes are a result of the structure of the work, and of its style of writing, which work in tandem. For example, the organisation of Indian Village and Th e Kamar bear a family resemblance, each discussing the changes aff ecting its subjects at the end of these works. Yet, while Dube’s exploratory prose in his fi rst monograph could not rein in the transformations of ‘tradition’ among the Kamars—despite his wider predilections concerning an unmoving social structure, registering its reworking over time in the middle of the account—in his second study an accomplished, elegant writing managed to neatly fi t such tensions into the fl ow of the work.54

Such questions of substance and style have wide implications. André Béteille has hinted that a critical reading of Indian Village today would consist of revisiting the work in light of what we have come to know of villages on the subcontinent since its publication.55 In addition, it seems to me, such a task equally entails considerations of how later village studies, too many to recount here, were infl uenced by the terms of Dube’s writing—both, its implicit assumptions and explicit descriptions—in

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order to bracket ethnography from history, forging a tendentious relationship between anthropological structure and historical process.

Indian Village received wide acclaim, attaining extraordinary success, especially as ‘the fi rst book on a single village’ in post-Second World War South Asia.56 Indeed, it represented a key statement of the wider shift from tribe to village in Indian anthropology, a work presented further as part of the movement away from studies of ‘isolated’ groups toward writings on ‘modern’ communities in the discipline at large.57 André Béteille recalls that as a college student in the late 1950s, Indian Village appeared to him as embodying meaningful, relevant anthropology, distant from the dead weight of tribal studies, providing for his own arguments in discussions with friends such as Sukhomoy Chakravarty.58 Th e book’s contents and its close connections with a collective project of social welfare carried intrinsic interest in an India aiming at directed change in rural areas through Five Year Plans. Th e work’s moorings in a multi-disciplinary team endeavour captured the attention of the discipline in post-Second World War US, where collective research projects signalled the mood and interest, sensibility and ambition of departments of the state and the academy.59 Th e intimacy of the account and its straightforward nature led to mentions of Dube’s ‘Indian background and Western scientifi c training’ as providing him with a ‘double insight’ (Th e New Statesman); of his exploiting ‘to the full his advantages as a man of the country to gain that kind of information and insight usually denied to the Western sociologist in India’ (Th e Times Literary Supplement).

Th e work blended with the times, making Indian Village something of a fl agship endeavour of social sciences in a young, independent India—generously cited, drawn upon as a model monograph, and heavily used in teaching in diff erent parts of the world. It had several hardcover and paperback editions in the UK, US, and India, and came to be widely excerpted and translated in Indian and foreign languages. Reviewing the book in Rural Sociology, James Silverberg had commented that it provided an ‘excellent’ basis for ‘measuring’ directed change and the impact of technological factors, further wondering about the fate of India’s community development programme in Shamirpet.60 Indeed, this was the direction and drift of Dube’s next book, even as he relocated the research to north India.

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Two Villages and the NationSoon aft er his return from London, Dube very nearly left the academy. Selected for the high-powered Indian Frontier Administrative Service, which was later merged with the Indian Administrative Service, Dube was a younger member of an elite corps handpicked to work in North East Frontier Administration (NEFA). Aft er a brief meeting with Nehru in the presence of Elwin, Dube underwent a month’s training in Delhi as he awaited his fi rst posting. Th en, at the last moment, he declined the appointment. Much later, Dube recalled that while this was not a case of his developing ‘cold feet’, he had also realized that the move would mean a farewell to academic anthropology.61 Th e statement, it seems to me, tells us only partly why Dube took the fi nal decision at such a late stage. At the time, there were other opportunities waiting in the wings, taking Dube toward questions of community development.

During his stay at SOAS, Dube had participated in Claude Levi-Strauss’ seminars in London on questions of myth, making interventions there that drew upon adivasi legends, myths, and stories, especially from central India. Based on these contacts, toward the end of his year in London, he received an invitation to a UNESCO roundtable in Paris on the human implications of technological development, organised by Levi-Strauss. While he had discussed aspects of social change in his fi rst two books, the roundtable provided Dube with ‘an abiding interest in planned change and its human dimensions.’62 A little aft er Dube’s brief fl irtation with joining administration, two developments permitted him to translate this interest into a concrete study.

Among the diff erent multi-disciplinary projects on newly independent nations launched within the US academy aft er the Second World War, the Cornell India Project, directed by Morris Opler, focused on villages in north India. Opler was enthusiastic about Dube’s work—recall that he had written the Foreword to Indian Village—and now invited his Indian colleague to join the project, the off er consisting of a year of fi eldwork in UP, and then a year as a visiting professor of anthropology and Far Eastern studies at Cornell University. Equally, at this time, India’s community development programme had been launched amidst great expectations, with even greater fanfare. Th e Secretary of the Planning Commission, Tarlok Singh, wanted Dube to play a role in evaluating the programme.

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Dube himself was keen to get a grassroots perspective on the responses to these initiatives. Combining these concerns, Dube accepted Opler’s off er to join the Cornell India Project, choosing to focus on the community development programme at work in UP villages, while he was left free to devise his own terms for the study.

During 1954–55, the Dubes were part of the Rankhandi Field-Station of the Cornell project. Conducting research along with other scholars—among them, John Gumperz, Michael and Pauline Mahar, and Leigh Minturn—Dube had four associates as part of his own study, Leela Dube, Raghuraj Gupta, R. Prakash Rao, and Tuljaram Singh. Th e aim was to analyse and evaluate a wholly rural community development project—especially the responses it engendered—covering slightly over 150 villages. Dube and his team carried out an in-depth study of two villages, ‘Rajput’ village with a population of slightly over 5,000 people, and ‘Tyagi’ village with around 750 inhabitants. Th e research procedure primarily consisted of fi eldwork among offi cials and villagers, using extensive interviews and wide-ranging surveys, and the study of materials generated by the community development programme. Th e work was carried out under the leadership of Dube, but the team members also took up specifi c aspects of the study more individually, so that, for example Leela Dube took care of research among women in the villages.

At the end of the year in the fi eld, during the late summer of 1955, the Dubes left for upstate New York, with the data from the Rankhandi research shipped to Ithaca. Th ere they found a stimulating academic atmosphere and keen intellectual interlocutors, but Dube also had to shoulder a heavy teaching load, consisting of a graduate seminar on culture and change in India, and large parts of both, a seminar on anthropological theory and a survey course on Asia with a very large number of students. Living close to campus, Dube worked prodigiously hard to write up the study, assisted in the analysis of the data by Leela, while Prakash Rao and Tuljaram Singh continued to provide help from the fi eld. Th e time away from this hectic schedule primarily consisted of travel for talks and seminars, including a memorable visit to Chicago on the invitation of Robert Redfi eld. At the end, Dube completed the manuscript three days before leaving Ithaca, submitting it to Cornell University Press on the eve of his departure, and handing it over to Routledge and Kegan Paul in London, enroute to India.

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Quite possibly, the work was completed too quickly, fi nished too fast. In India’s Changing Villages the writing is clear, the style adequate: but there is something, somewhat un-weighty about its substance.63 If the neatness of Indian Village was the strength of the study, as well as containing its tensions, in its sequel, the structure was too linear, the materials too modular. It is not only that the fi rst four chapters of India’s Changing Villages largely detailed a community development project and its work through mainly descriptive and statistical commentary. It is also that such terms of organization, these requirements of writing, cast a tangible shadow upon its later, more imaginative and analytical chapters, which discussed questions of communication and issues of culture in community development.

Th e departures, distinctions, and diffi culties of India’s Changing Villages entail each other. Here the key departure derived from the focus of the study on actions of the state, the building of the nation. Several decades before ethnographic considerations of the state became important in the discipline,64 Dube’s work gestured toward anthropological apprehensions of the interplay between nation and village, articulated by protagonists seen as subjects moulding the present, rather than as peoples of never, never lands. If the concerns of the book intersected with those of wider area-studies projects launched in the US academe in the 1950s, the distinction of the work emerged in the ways such interests and apprehensions were sieved through the fi lters of a nationalist provenance, being imbued thereby with a specifi c salience.65 Yet, precisely these measures of the work appear orchestrated and over-determined by its construal of a specifi c sociology uncertainly in and out of the tracks of the state, the grooves of governance. Th is is to say, its envisioning of anthropology in the looking-glass of the nation. Now, my quick remarks do not form a total appraisal, intimating instead possible, critical-constructive readings of the contrary archival traces of state and nation in Indian anthropology/sociology. I am indicating readings that might even pick up quotidian confi gurations of state and everyday formations of nation, which are embedded as details, especially in the latter part of India’s Changing Villages—an authoritative account that was yet unable to entirely stamp out such stubborn, recalcitrant residues.

Th e work did not entirely live up to the expectations aroused by its predecessor. A part of the problem, as McKim Marriot pointed out,

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concerned the title of the study, which implied a link with Shamirpet of Indian Village and an account of changes in Indian villages, though the book had nothing to do with the Deccan village and primarily discussed villagers’ ‘responses’ to change.66 (Calling the work India’s Changing Villages was a decision of Routledge and Kegan Paul; Dube’s preferred title, Human Factors in Community Development being used by the publisher as the subtitle.) Th e larger diffi culty concerned the nature of the work, which meant that although the scholarly response to the book was broadly enthusiastic, it did not necessarily consist of critical acclaim and academic accolade. Nonetheless, as T. N. Madan put it: ‘In the 1950s, Dube and Srinivas were showing the way for Indian anthropology.’67 Th e real success of India’s Changing Villages came from its use in administrative programmes in ‘third-world’ nations, even as questions of modernization and development themselves became central to Dube’s thought and writing in the following decades.

At the same time, even before the book was published, the Dubes had moved from Hyderabad. Here is how Dube recalled the events.

On my return from Cornell I was keen to remain in Hyderabad. C. D. Deshmukh, Chairman of the University Grants Commission (UGC), suggested the creation of a research professorship for me with the Commission’s support; but this idea did not materialize as there was a clause in the university’s statutes which prescribed thirty-fi ve years as the minimum age for a professor. In retrospect I feel that [I] should not have become sore about the snag, but I was young then and very sensitive. I decided to leave Hyderabad. Within a month I had a senior position in the Anthropological Survey of India and a few months later I was appointed to the chair of Anthropology at the University of Saugar. I was still under thirty-fi ve and had made my point.68

As at many other points in Dube’s life, success was shadowed by sorrow. Not much aft er the move to Sagar, Dube’s father—who had taken early retirement to live with Shyam, Leela, and Mukul—took a journey alone to Amarkantak, dying on the way.

AfterwardsIt is time to end the detailed description, but it will not do to terminate the tale here. How are we to apprehend Dube’s later vocation and work?

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In broad strokes, there are two kinds of orientations to the life and work of a fi gure such as Dube, dispositions that fi nd everyday expression and public pronouncement within the academic world. Th e fi rst concerns projections of Dube’s important earlier studies giving way to synthetic, thinner, general pronouncements—especially with Dube moving back and forth between administration and academics—until, in the end, he became only an essayist in Hindi, mainly marginal to anthropology and sociology. Th e second entails proposals of a singular success story—of Dube following his early achievements by making solid contributions to academic administration, participating actively in public life, ever widening his intellectual canvas, acutely addressing questions of national import, increasingly drawing in a larger readership, with the entire process culminating in his later writings in Hindi.69 Neither orientation is simply wrong, each pointing in important directions: yet, both refl ect the image of an ideal academic life, the likeness of an immaculate intellectual biography. Failure and success are all too easy to fi nd here. Rather than arguing with such propositions, my point is that the uneven textures of a life and the contrary pasts of a discipline suggest other dispositions to ethnography and biography, history and anthropology.

Consider Dube’s presence in Sagar. On the one hand, it can be proposed that the precise limitations of a provincial university curbed Dube’s academic talents and scholarly energies. On the other, it can be argued that intellectual dynamics are no prerogative of metropolitan centres, and that Dube’s contribution exactly lay in developing teaching and research in Sagar, a place of scholarship in its own right. My worry concerns the singularity and starkness of such suppositions.

When the Dubes moved to Sagar in 1957, the university there was an exciting place: counting some distinguished scholars on the faculty, there were eff orts afoot to draw in younger talent from diff erent parts of the country, and the new campus was under construction.70 Dube was on par with the senior scholars yet one with the younger faculty, both marks of distinction.71 Here Dube built the anthropology department very nearly from scratch, starting novel courses, recruiting new faculty, initiating team projects of research, insisting on plurality and autonomy in academic endeavour. With his trademark pipe and classic cigar, Harris Tweed jackets and well-cut suits, an impressive presence and a striking manner—‘something subtle that had to do with “style”—what

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he said and how he said it’, as T. N. Madan has put it72—Dube was a fi gure of admiration and envy, a role model to his male students. In a relaxed social environment with few hierarchical distinctions among the younger set, Dube’s broad range of intellectual interests meant that he was at the centre of lively discussions on literature and philosophy, politics and psychology, his colleagues and friends from other departments also invited to address his students. Clearly, Dube loved all this, none of it in fact adversely aff ecting his academic productivity as he initiated a major team project of research on leadership in villages of Madhya Pradesh and wrote a non-textbook introduction to anthropology in Hindi, Manav aur Sanskriti, both ventures intimately tied to his presence in Sagar.73

Yet, these times came with their twist. Rather less than three years aft er the move to Sagar, in 1960, aft er D. N. Majumdar died, Dube received the proposal to take up his position as professor and chair of the anthropology department from the vice-chancellor of Lucknow University. Th e details need not detain us, but matters proceeded very far before administrative mismanagement together with opposition from some faculty meant that Dube could not take up the appointment. Dube spoke little of the aff air aft erwards, but it was a blow at the time. Not surprisingly, a few months later, at the end of the year, a little before I was born, he accepted the position of Director of Research at the National Institute of Community Development (NICD) in Mussoorie, remaining at the institution for four years.

Upon Dube’s return to Sagar, aft er gaining prominence on the national and international stage, the university may have seemed constraining, the town too small. Now Dube organized conferences and held seminars, inviting senior and promising scholars, yet he did this on a campus that had lost some of his main interlocutors and friends, such as the philosopher Daya Krishna. Dube secured a grant of ‘special assistance’ from the University Grants Commission for the department he reconstituted as one of anthropology and sociology, initiating new broad-based courses on communication, modernization, development, and sociological theory, linked not just to one or two schools, but introducing and discussing the work of, for instance, Merton, Parsons, C. Wright Mills, Gunar Myrdal, and Barrington Moore, Jr. But Dube also increasingly travelled away from Sagar for conferences, meetings, and selection committees.74 Dube was not dying to leave Sagar—for

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example, he took insuffi cient interest in a possible professorship in the US (Stanford or Hawaii, we do not know clearly), suggested by Wilbur Schramm—yet when off ered the position of Director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study in the early 1970s, he was happy to move on. 75

Th e years in Mussoorie further left a strong imprint on the nature of Dube’s writings. India’s Changing Villages had led to Dube’s appointment at NICD, fi rst as Director of Research and then as Principal. Here acute conjunctions between administration and academics shaped Dube’s concerns, moulding his work. Offi cial visits to assess rural development programmes and village leadership initiatives in Afghanistan and Pakistan provided Dube with hands-on experience of nation-building in a wider South Asian context, and he participated in numerous international conferences and workshops, where his contributions primarily consisted of ‘think-pieces’, which drew upon his ongoing involvement in research and bureaucracy, particularly training programmes for rural development conducted by NICD. At the same time, Dube’s insistence on research inputs meant that the NICD forged close connections with academic departments, involving scholars from universities and running a PhD programme. It followed that Dube also produced work grounded in detailed fi eld investigations by team projects. Especially important was a long essay on communication and planned change.76 Th is carried forward issues initiated in India’s Changing Villages, which proved infl uential in discussions on the ‘modernization’ of developing nations, addressing and extending the infl uential views, at the time, of Daniel Lerner and Wilbur Schramm.

Taken together, we might ask two questions of this body of Dube’s work. Despite shared concerns and a mutual sensibility, do these writings perhaps lack a consistent engagement with a set of theoretical questions or empirical materials, possibly because Dube wrote to address readily, immediately the themes at hand? But can we also approach this work as constituting an acute record of social sciences in pursuit of nation-building, issues of analyses bound to matters of state, the envisioning of sociology in the mirror of the nation, a salient chapter in the contrary pasts of Indian anthropology?

Th e concerns of the period actually led to a more systematic study, which Dube wrote aft er completing his tenure at NICD, based on the results of research projects on questions of leadership, factionalism,

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and communication in villages of Madhya Pradesh and Orissa, team endeavours that Dube had initiated before and aft er the move to Mussoorie. Much of what we know about this work is through T. N. Madan, who read the manuscript soon aft er its completion:

On his return to Sagar, Dube resumed analysis of data gathered earlier …. Unlike the work in Hyderabad, this research was more concerned with ‘problems’ and ‘processes’ than holistic description. It focused on themes such as ‘power’, ‘factionalism’, and ‘leadership’. For reasons never clear to me, the book that was written on the basis of this research … was not published. Only one article, which was an abridged chapter from it, came out in Contributions to Indian Sociology (1968). Some of the results of this research, however, appeared as articles in a few edited volumes.77

Upon my further enquiries about this study, Madan added that it was a rich work, with ‘a lot of data, a lot of analytical categories, not just descriptive categories’ that might well have been Dube’s ‘best book’.78

Why did Dube lose interest in publishing an almost fi nished manuscript? Leela Dube does not remember the reasons behind Dube’s decision. Madan himself asked Dube several times regarding his plans for the manuscript, but received evasive answers. Was there insuffi cient intellectual stimulation in Sagar to prod Dube into providing that fi nal push? Did a severe illness and a major operation—one that Dube almost did not survive—come in the way? Had Dube’s interests and commitments widened so much that he simply forgot about the manuscript and moved on to other challenges? Was there no sense of loss, feeling of pain, from work unfi nished, so tantalizingly close to completion? Is this the reason that Dube never talked about this study, bearing it like his other disappointments as a quiet secret?

In the past, Dube had left behind research agendas—for instance, work on the Bhunjia adivasis carried out in the late 1940s; detailed, rich materials from the Shamirpet study—but he had always turned manuscripts into books with dogged persistence. In the late 1960s, Dube partly assumed the mantle of a scholar-at-large, inaugurating the anthropology series of the University Grants Commission National Lectures and the Dr Rajendra Prasad Lectures, the former in English and the latter in Hindi, both broadcast on All India Radio to public acclaim, the two series together comprising a slim book on development.79

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For Dube, the role of an academic administrator accompanied his prominence as a public intellectual. In 1972, he became the Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS) in Shimla, appointed to the position by his friend from Lucknow days, the historian Nurul Hasan, now the Minister of Education in the Congress government at the Centre. In the magnifi cent environs of the former Viceregal Lodge, as the head of an institution commanding generous resources, the support of the Education Ministry in Delhi in hand, Dube was pleased with the position, seemingly tailored for him. Here he could express his ability in administration and enjoyment of power. Here he could articulate his wide-ranging intellectual interests and his gift for public speaking. Here he could seek out younger talent, something that always gave him true pleasure, from diff erent disciplines—Mrinal Miri, Ramchandra Gandhi, Sudhir Chandra, and Sudipta Kaviraj among them—invited as Fellows, Visiting Fellows, and participants in several imaginative, important conferences he organized over the years at the Institute. Here he could invite a range of senior scholars. Here he could encourage newer scholarship by upcoming academics and established scholars, including Satish Saberwal, S. C. Malik, Prabhati Mukherjee, K. N. Sharma, Baidyanath Saraswati, and A.K Saran, engage his passion for publication qualities, and increase too the range and number of books published by the Institute. Under Dube’s direction (1972–77), the Indian Institute of Advanced Study regained its prior prominence—acquired in the mid-1960s under Niharranjan Ray—and posted new achievements in the Indian academy.80

Not all was smooth sailing, of course. Dube’s desire for aff ective acknowledgement and readiness to trust people, too easily, too much, meant that he was pursued by ‘favourites’.81 Th is did not always augur well in front of a community of Fellows with its distinct commitments and cleavages, ambitions and dissensions.82 Besides, as India inched toward the Emergency and aft er its declaration, Dube’s friendship with Nurul Hasan meant that he was oft en seen as a state intellectual. Given the texture of the times, especially the sharp divisions in academic and public life, the charge stuck in parts, although Dube resisted pushing the Institute’s activities in the service of a political regime, retaining his own academic integrity, sense of justice, and fi erce personal pride.83

Th e intellectual integrity found expression when, soon aft er the declaration of the Emergency, Dube announced to the Fellows of the

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Institute that within its premises they had the right to discuss any question, and that he would defend their academic freedom.84 Th e sense of justice was manifest in Dube’s readiness to shelter in the offi cial Camp Offi ce of the Institute in New Delhi an old acquaintance, gone underground, a prominent accused in the Baroda Bomb Conspiracy Case, at the height of political victimization in Indira’s India. In those times spawning a culture of sycophancy, demanding absolute loyalty, Dube registered his personal pride when he gently asked the Minister of Education, ‘Nurul bhai, aapko chamche chahiye ya dost [Nurul bhai, do you want sycophants or friends?]’ Dube’s stay at Shimla came to a somewhat abrupt end in the middle of 1977.

Subsequently, Dube held other senior appointments in academic bureaucracy: but the period at the IIAS was possibly the most productive and successful of his administrative forays. As the Vice-Chancellor (1978–81) of Jammu University, his eff orts at developing a new campus, cleaning up the administration, and bringing in new faculty are remembered with fondness and admiration.85 Yet, it is also important to ask if the university and the town did not in the end prove much too resistant, caught in a curious warp, of place and time, which turned upon each other?86

As the Director of the Madhya Pradesh Uccha Shiksha Anudan Ayog (Madhya Pradesh Higher Education Grants Commission) between 1984 and 1988, Dube undertook a dynamic drive and wide-ranging measures to revamp the higher education system in his home state. He drew in the eff orts of scholars toward redrawing the syllabi and changing examination patterns, while seeking to infuse new life into teaching.87 But it is equally important to consider whether, save perhaps in tiny pockets, Dube’s best laid plans and well-meaning measures were not eventually rolled back by a formidable inertia and sedimented interests at the heart of higher education in Madhya Pradesh?88

How did these long years in academic administration—broken by a short, three-year spell as National Fellow, Indian Council for Social Science Research and as Consultant at the United Nations’ Asian and Pacifi c Development Centre, Kuala Lumpur—augur for Dube’s scholarship? Over the 1970s and 1980s, in addition to the volumes he edited,89 much of what Dube published in English took the shape of synthetic writings, including several papers presented at international conferences and workshops, many organized by the UNESCO and related

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UN institutions concerned with development.90 Th ere were books, of course. At the beginning of this period there was a short work, consisting of the inaugural D. N. Majumdar Lectures delivered in Lucknow in 1972,91 as well as another one on modernization;92 at its middle there were two slim volumes;93 and at its end lay three books, one commissioned by the United Nations University and the other two comprising collections of papers written over the last thirty years.94

Th is corpus addressed three broad, overlapping sets of concerns in the sociology of India: communication, education, and change; tradition, development, and modernization; and the terms for relevant, adequate, and ‘indigenized’ social sciences. Now, despite a shared sensibility, the corpus equally embodies important diff erences of emphases, carrying rather particular distinctions. Th is is to say, these writings need to be read together, but recognizing their wider, constitutive contrariness—from their conception through to their reception. On the one hand, labouring under administrative burdens, pressures of time, and endless deadlines, most of this work was written quickly, usually realized in order to meet specifi c requirements of conference formats, which called upon Dube to make general statements on broad problems. On the other hand, Dube himself increasingly insisted upon a ‘committed’ social science, directed toward public policy and national concerns, written in an entirely accessible style, exceeding narrow scholarly concerns. Taken together, necessity and belief fed each other.

Th ere are continuities between Dube’s earlier work and his later writings, from the 1940s through to the 1980s. Th ese concern the emphasis upon the application of the social sciences toward nation-building, which found fi rst expression in the Kamar work and later provided the grounds for Modernization and Development.95 Th ey extend to the characteristic ability of Dube’s scholarship to synthesize ideas and materials, using theoretical considerations primarily as a means of analytical description. Yet, there were also critical diff erences. Earlier, Dube’s statements regarding a practice of anthropology adequate for the time(s) and the nation—and his synthesis of empirics and analytics—had emerged from broad-based research, individual and collective. Later, the requirements of social sciences relevant to development, modernization, and the nation expanded from being a key concern to becoming the frame and locus of his writing, secondary

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works now shoring up Dube’s refl ections. Here the 1960s were at once a bridge and a watershed.

In the context of the greater professionalism of Indian sociology by the end of the 1960s—and following the wider institutionalization of the social sciences, especially through the eff orts of the Indian Council of Social Science Reasearch, in the following decade—Dube’s body of work of the 1970s and 1980s appears as bearing contrary connections with disciplinary emphases. Here, in his own way, Dube addressed the terms for a relevant sociology, including issues of academic colonialism and decolonization of disciplines, which were being variously debated in the social sciences in India.96 Similarly, his formulations regarding modernization and development, tradition and change were read with respect in various arenas, provincial and metropolitan.97 But these writings could also appear at some remove from the more theoretical preoccupations of the discipline, particularly in its important hubs such as the Delhi School of Economics. Unsurprisingly, Dube’s friends and critics such as T. N. Madan and André Béteille were disappointed in this corpus, fi nding that it looked askance at what they considered as the important analytical issues within the discipline, insuffi ciently thought through these concerns, and progressively turned away from professional colleagues.98 Once again, it is precisely because of such diff erent attributes that Dube’s work of the time bears critical reading, its limits and possibilities articulating the past and present of the social sciences in India, indexing abiding ironies and formative tensions.

As noted earlier, these writings insinuate more than unchanging verities and dead certainties, registering shift s in accent, movements in thought, particularly as Dube developed his ideas regarding purposive scholarship and elaborated his understandings concerning meaningful development. In the early 1970s, Dube had called for a relevant anthropology: one that eschewed grand theory and abstruse formulations; that endorsed committed, objective research in order to off er analysis, interpretation, and social criticism; that infl uenced change yet did not legislate upon it; and that advised but did not dictate policy.99 Th is found distinct formulations a decade later in Dube’s appeals toward the ‘indigenization’ and ‘decolonization’ of the social sciences.100 Th e former drew upon the wider criticism of the disciplines in the 1960s and the latter elaborated the critical ‘third world’ spirit directed against Western

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epistemic domination at the close of the Bandung Era, each anticipating some of the questions concerning Eurocentrism that are important in the academy today. Similarly, Dube’s incipient questioning of authoritative paradigms of development and modernization in the early 1970s was elaborated over the following years, especially as he spoke and wrote more and more on the importance of tradition, until it found a much clearer manifestation in his writings of the 1980s, which revised and recast his prior predilections.101

At the same time, it is important to ask if this corpus also appears as caught between a desire for innovative understanding and the force of inherited apprehension. For example, Dube pointed to the salience of ‘everyday’ categories for social understanding yet himself elaborated these in all too given, attenuated forms. In what ways, then, did Dube’s probing in newer directions simultaneously push against yet remain limited by the categorical compulsions and analytical grids of the nation? Woven into the warp of the times, such strains in Dube’s work were bound to its style and sensibility, poised between academic sociology and public scholarship. Th ey raise crucial questions.

Did Dube’s preference for objective scholarship, which could advise policy, lead to his opting for clear solutions rather than staying with, thinking through, critical tensions? Dube struggled against what Bourdieu has called ‘scholastic reason’, the detached view of the world of the ascetic scholar.102 But did he not question the premises of such reason only inadequately, reproducing its oppositions? Did this mean that he was separated from his critics, regarding the terms of academic endeavour, by just an old, rickety epistemological fence? While addressing varied, distinct audiences, Dube wanted to present the model of a relevant scholarship to his professional colleagues. But in going about this task, did he not become increasingly distant from at least some among them? Dube never wanted to marry off sociology to the state. Yet is it not the companionship between social sciences and nation-building, shoring up his writings of the 1970s and 1980s, which registers these works as a key presence in the archival tracks of Indian anthropology?

Aft er completing his term of appointment in Bhopal in 1988, Dube came to live in Delhi. In an aggressive city resonant with institutionalized power, he found prestige away from offi ce. Of course, Dube was part of important juries and committees, himself receiving prestigious awards

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and commendations.103 Th ere were meetings and travel, conferences and talks, plenary lectures and keynote presentations. However, above all, Dube wrote. He wrote furiously and mainly in Hindi – with passion and desire, urgency and anxiety.104 Th e terms of this writing require close, careful, critical reading, which I cannot off er here.

Th e point is that in the last decade of his life, Dube’s medium of expression drew in a wide readership.105 He commented incisively on cultural politics and critically analysed political cultures. In all of this he combined a literary sensitivity, a sociological sensibility, an ethnographic imagination, and a citizen’s concerns. Dube wrote on new subjects, and returned to older concerns of education and development, tradition and culture, conceptually translating and imaginatively recasting the terms of the social sciences into Hindi, coining a new idiom of apprehension and expression in the language, according to his interlocutors.106 Now, a somewhat diff erent, more vernacular, nation came to the fore, with Dube concerned about its progress by salvaging its civility, quite as he extended support, publicly but also privately, to citizens’ struggles such as the Narmada Bachao Andolan.

Th ese years and this labour came with their twists, another chapter in Dube’s life and vocation. In Samay aur Sanskriti, a work published soon aft er Dube’s death, he had written of how the contemporary Indian intellectual was alienated from indigenous thinking and the common man, writing and publishing mainly in a foreign idiom, adding that those who wrote in Indian languages were either ignored or considered second- or third-grade intellectuals.107 Commenting on this passage, the critic Namvar Singh wrote:

Antim dino mein Dube ji adhikanshtah Hindi mein likhte they. Is gunah ki saza bhi mili. Dusre darze ke buddhi jivi mane jane lage. In shabdon mein kahin na kahin unki peeda bhi hai. “Bhartiya Gram” multah angrezi mein likhi gayi thi. Yah Dube ji ki dusri pustak thi. Desh ke sath sath videsh mein bhi sarahi gayi. Aaj bhi Dube ji usi pustak ke liye yaad kiye jaate hain. Is prashansa mein bhi ek dansh hai. Use Dube ji khub samjhte the.108

[In his last days Dube ji wrote mainly in Hindi. He was also punished for this crime. He came to be considered a second-grade intellectual. Somewhere or another, these words also contain his personal pain. Indian Village was basically written in English. Th is was Dube ji’s second book. It was praised in the country

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and abroad. Even today Dube ji is remembered for this book. Th is praise also carries a sting. Dube ji understood this very well.]

Th e contrast between the enormous prestige accorded to Dube’s later writings in Hindi and the formidable odds against anyone writing in the vernacular being heard in the English-dominated academy are important issues. At the same time, rather than reading Singh’s statement as a fi nal appraisal, it is better approached as symptomatic of the divisions and tensions between the worlds of refl ection and writing in English and Hindi.109

Dube straddled these divisions and embodied such tensions, his life and work shaped by contradictions and conjunctions between Hindi and English, administration and academics, nation-building and ‘classical’ anthropology, the vernacular and the metropolitan. Similarly, the notable shift s indexed by Dube’s scholarship, from tribe to village, from proposals of modernization to critiques of development—each mediated by nationalist concerns and policy prescriptions—do not simply insinuate a clear-cut trajectory. Rather, they appear imbued with a wider contrariness, emblematic of the pervasive and present yet chequered and changing relationship between the pursuits of sociology and the provisos of the nation.

Neither the tensions nor the shift s bear easy resolution. Th ey demand staying with, patiently. Th ey require thinking through, prudently. And so we return to Namwar Singh, who closed his essay with a near-clairvoyant, intensely personal profi le of Dube, noting that he was ‘adequately successful in every way, yet pained by a hurt of failure. Entirely secure, but still haunted by insecurity’.110 When placed alongside the shift s and tensions at the core of Dube’s life and work, these appraisals—entwining the public and the personal—are pregnant with questions for an adequate, ethical biography of an Indian anthropologist, for a critical, careful history of Indian anthropology.

Notes 1. For obvious reasons, I have found this a very diffi cult chapter to write.

For reasons still unclear, an enormous resistance to writing and revision overcame me at diff erent points. I would like to thank Ishita Banerjee for sustenance and comments through the process and Leela Dube for

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answering queries as well as detailed inputs. I also acknowledge interviews/conversations with Leela Dube, T. N. Madan, André Béteille, Yogendra Singh, and McKim Marriot. Discussions with Purushottam Agarwal, Satish Deshpande, Michael Herzfeld, David Lorenzen, Chandana Mathur, Anupama Rao, and Nandini Sundar put matters in perspective.

2. I am aware, of course, of the problematic nature of the concept-entity of the ‘tribe’, especially as it emerged through the interplay between colonial constructions and Indian elite and middle-class usages. Yet, the term has been used by anthropologists such as S. C. Dube in a manner that registered the limitations of the category even as it was deployed somewhat uncritically. Registering this, the chapter uses the category in a refl ective, critical way: the fact that it implicitly appears within inverted commas should be obvious.

3. Arthur O. Lovejoy cited in Stephen Kern, Th e Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 10. Of course, Lovejoy was speaking of the reading of texts, an emphasis that bears extension to the narratives of lives. On such conjunctions see, for example, Saurabh Dube, ‘Witnessing lives: Conversion and life-history in colonial central India’, in Ishita Banerjee-Dube and Saurabh Dube (eds), Ancient to Modern: Religion, Power, and Community in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 259–90.

4. See, for example, George Stocking, Jr., Aft er Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); George Stocking, Jr., Th e Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); Joan Vincent, Anthropology and Politics: Visions, Traditions, and Trends (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1990); Stanley J. Tambiah, Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also, Mariza G.S. Peirano, ‘When anthropology is at home: Th e diff erent contexts of a single discipline’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 27, 1998: 105–28.

5. Michael Herzfeld, Portrait of a Greek Imagination: An Ethnographic Biography of Andreas Nenedakis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Ben Orlove, In My Father’s Study (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995); Deborah Reed-Danahay (ed.), Auto-ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social (Oxford: Berg, 1997). Consider, too, Deborah Battaglia (ed.), Rhetorics of Self-making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

6. A. E. Nelson (ed.), Central Provinces District Gazetter. Raipur. Volume A. Descriptive (Bombay: Government Press, 1909).

7. S. C. Dube, ‘Th e journey so far’, in Yogesh Atal (ed.), Understanding Indian Society: Festschrift in Honour of Professor S. C. Dube (New Delhi:

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Har-Anand, 1993), p. 24. Th is short text primarily consists of Dube’s autobiographical recollections of his times in anthropology/sociology and academic administration. I have quoted from it liberally in the earlier parts of this essay for two reasons. First, such a move foregrounds the memory of Dube as subject, particularly when the passages are read alongside other materials and memories, setting up an interplay between distinct terms of remembrance. Second, the volume in which Dube’s piece appears is oft en diffi cult to fi nd, a result of clumsy, poor distribution.

8. Ibid.9. As is well known, it was in the Tripuri session that Subhas Bose was

eff ectively sidelined aft er having been (re)elected as the President of the Indian National Congress. Gandhi played an important role here. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 372–75.

10. Needless to say, these were reputed and signifi cant periodicals of the day. Hans and Vishal Bharat were fl agship endeavours in Hindi writing inspired by Munshi Premchand and Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, respectively. Later, Shyama Charan Dube would recall his enormous audacity at sending in the articles to these journals, and his sense of utter disbelief and extraordinary excitement at their being accepted for publication.

11. Dube, ‘Journey so far’, p. 24.12. Ibid., pp. 24–25.13. Ibid.14. S. C. Dube, Th e Kamar (Lucknow: Universal, 1951), p. x.15. Dube, ‘Journey so far’, p. 26.16. Dube, Kamar, p. x.17. Dube, ‘Journey so far’, p. 26.18. Dube, Kamar, p. x.19. Dube, ‘Journey so far’, p. 26.20. Dube, Kamar, p. x.21. Dube, ‘Journey so far’, pp. 26–27.22. Dube, Kamar, p. x.23. Leela Dube, ‘Doing kinship and gender: An autobiographical account’,

Economic and Political Weekly, 35, November 11, 2000: 4039.24. Dube, Kamar, p. x.25. S. C. Dube, Field Songs of Chhattisgarh (Lucknow: Universal, 1948).26. Dube, ‘Journey so far’, p. 30.27. T. N. Madan, ‘Shyama Charan Dube (1922–96): A memoir’, Contributions

to Indian Sociology, 30, 2, 1996: 299–305.28. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘Anthropology and the savage slot: Th e poetics

and politics of otherness’, in Richard J. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology:

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Working in the Present (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991), pp. 17–44.

29. I am not suggesting that Dube’s fi rst ethnographic monograph prematurely reconciled these contrary tendencies. Rather, my point is that the text is the site where such contradictory pressures are visible, the terrain where these tensions were set in motion, also revealing and unravelling the conjunctions and disjunctions between anthropological frames and nationalist formulations. Quite as prejudice is not merely a mistake but can also be productive of a truth, so too are contradictions more than just lapses. My eff ort to stay with the tensions that were constitutive of a work such as Th e Kamar is to point toward archival traces in the history of anthropology and the past of nationalism that require further examination.

30. Dube, Kamar, p. 177.31. Ibid., p. 166.32. Ibid.33. Ibid.34. On this debate, see Ramchandra Guha, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier

Elwin, His Tribals, and India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 155–60, 274–75.

35. Dube, “Journey so far”, p.27.36. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, ‘Foreword’, in Dube, Kamar, p. i. 37. In a few cases, including this one, I have been unable to trace the full reference

to reviews of Dube’s works. Nonetheless, I have cited these, providing what bibliographical information I have for them in the text rather than in the notes.

38. J. H. Hutton. ‘Review of Th e Kamar by S.C. Dube’, Man, 53, 2, 1952, 77.

39. S. C. Dube, ‘Token pre-puberty marriage in middle India’, Man, 53, 1, 1953, 18–19.

40. Dube, ‘Journey so far’, p. 32.41. Th ese members from the Sociology Department were research assistants

on the project, mainly students who had recently fi nished their MA from Osmania University. Apart from Dube, the Sociology Department at Osmania included a guest lecturer, Nawab Mansab Jang Bahadur, and a professional sociologist, Jafar Hasan, neither of them involved in the Shamirpet project. Ibid., p. 31. In the context of a social work project, this also meant that Dube was the only one who produced an academic account (ethnographic or otherwise) based on the work of the project.

42. S. C. Dube, Indian Village (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; and Ithaca: Cornell University Press), pp. 14–15.

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43. Ibid.44. Dube, ‘Journey so far’, p. 32.45. Ibid., p. 33.46. Ibid.47. Dube, Indian Village, p. 15.48. Morris Opler, ‘Foreword’, in Dube, Indian Village, p. vii.49. Leach was suggesting that the book delivered marvellously at the level of

description, but that there was also more to the work. With theoretical considerations woven between the lines, quietly organizing the study, the very richness of the materials presented in the book meant that they raised new questions for anthropological theory.

50. Opler, ‘Foreword’, p. ix.51. Yogendra Singh, interview, 2002.52. McKim Marriott, interview, 2002.53. Dube, Indian Village, pp. 3–7.54. When focussing on an Indian anthropologist studying Indian society

soon aft er national independence, to pose matters in this manner is to indicate the importance of revisiting and extending a variety of issues: of the ‘denial of coevalness’ between the anthropologist author and the native subject, raised by Johannes Fabian; of the presence of ‘never, never lands’ in ethnography, indicated by Bernard Cohn; of the ‘savage slot’ of anthropology, intimated by Michel-Rolph Trouillot; and of the persistence of ‘enchanted spaces and modern places’ and of ‘exotics at home’ in social worlds, raised by myself and Micaela di Leonardi, respectively. Th is is to say that the contrary tracks of the timeless object of an enquiry/civilization who is also the coeval subject of a nation/knowledge require further investigation. Johaness Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Bernard Cohn, ‘History and anthropology: Th e state of the play’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22, 1980: 198–221; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘Anthropology and the savage slot: Th e poetics and politics of otherness’, in Richard J. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991), pp. 17–44; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘North-Atlantic universals: Analytical fi ctions, 1492–1945’, in Saurabh Dube (ed.), Enduring Enchantments. A special issue of SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly 101, 4, 2002: 839–58; Saurabh Dube, Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004); Saurabh Dube, ‘Enchanted spaces and modern places’, in Saurabh Dube, Ishita Banerjee-Dube, and Edgardo Lander (eds), Critical Conjunctions: Foundations of Colony and Formations of Modernity. A special issue of

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Nepantla: Views from South, 3, 2, 2002: 333–50; Micaela di Leonardi, Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Th e point equally holds for other anthropological works on South Asia, such as those that appeared around the time of Dube’s book, including collections of village studies edited by M. N. Srinivas and McKim Marriott as well as Srinivas’s seminal study of the Hindu Coorgs (that had, however, also earlier seen a diff erent incarnation under the supervision of G. S. Ghurye in the 1940s). M. N. Srinivas (ed.), India’s Villages (Bombay: Media Promoters and Publishers, 1955); McKim Marriot (ed.), Village India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955); M. N. Srinivas, Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).

To ask such questions is to be vigilant of how metropolitan theory came to be translated in practice in its application in the academic context of a new nation. Such procedures equally hold a mirror up to the contradictory strains that could shore up metropolitan anthropology. All this is also to consider further the legacy aff orded to the post-independence sociology of India by the prior presence, the extended tradition, of colonial and nationalist writings on the village in the subcontinent, which have been discussed by Ron Inden. Th is is especially the case if, following Nicholas Dirks, it is admitted that colonial modalities of ‘knowledge/power’ themselves shift ed from the ‘historical’ to the ‘ethnographic’ between the fi rst half of the nineteenth century and the later 90 years of imperial rule. Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), pp. 131–51; Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

55. André Béteille, ‘Shyama Charan Dube (1922-96)’, Economic and Political Weekly, 31, March 30, 1996, p. 811.

56. David G. Mandelbaum, ‘Review of Indian Village by S.C. Dube’, American Anthropologist, 58, 3, 1956: 579–80.

57. Dube, Indian Village, pp. 8–13.58. André Béteille, interview, 2002.59. See, for example, Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge:

Th e British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 11–15; Cliff ord Geertz, Aft er the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 99–109.

60. James Silverberg, ‘Review of Indian Village by S.C. Dube’, Rural Sociology, 20, 4, 1955: 332–33.

61. Dube, ‘Journey so far’, p. 35.

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62. Ibid.63. S. C. Dube, India’s Changing Villages: Human Factors in Community

Development (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958).

64. For example, Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998); Th omas Blom Hansen, Th e Saff ron Wave: Hindu Nationalism and Democracy in Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); C.J. Fuller and Veronique Bénéï (eds), Th e Everyday State and Society in Modern India (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2000); Brian Keith Axel, Th e Nation’s Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh ‘Diaspora’ (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001).

65. Interestingly, Dube’s study was the only one in the Cornell-India project that focused on eff orts at nation-building through community development and village welfare. Th e other scholars, all from the US, at the Rankhandi station pursued more conventional ethnographic, social-scientifi c, and linguistic enquiries. John J. Gumperz, ‘Dialect diff erences and social stratifi cation in a north Indian village’, American Anthropologist, 60, 1958: 668–81; Leigh Minturn and John Hitchcock, Th e Rajputs of Khalapur (New York: Wiley, 1966); but also see, John J. Gumperz, ‘Language problems in rural development of north India’, Journal of Asian Studies, 16, 1957: 251–59. Apart from Dube, the other Indians on the project based in western UP were academic associates, research assistants, and interpreters. Th ere were few dissensions here of the kind that led to D. N. Majumdar’s criticism of the conduct of the Cornell-India project in another part of UP. Nor did Dube’s association with the project aff ect his relations with Majumdar. Leela Dube, interview, 2003.

66. McKim Marriot, ‘Review of India’s Changing Villages by S.C. Dube’, Th e Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 320, 1958, p. 192.

67. T. N. Madan, interview, 2002.68. Dube, ‘Journey so far’, p. 37.69. As already indicated, such dispositions circulate as part of quotidian

confi gurations of academic worlds, and over the years I have encountered them so oft en that to signal particular writings as indexing the one or the other orientation might well be to miss the point.

70. Th is paragraph is based on several essays in Leela Dube and Sudhish Pachori (eds), Seemanton ke Anveshak: Shyamacharan Dube (Delhi: Vani, 1997).

71. Younger members of faculty in Sagar at the time included Dayakrishna and Pratap Chandra (Philosophy), S. R. Swaminathan and Malikarjunan

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(English), Muzzafar Ali and Vinod Mishra (Geography), R. N. Mishra (Ancient History), Premshankar (Hindi), and Brijraj Chauhan (Anthropology/Sociology). Senior scholars included Nanddulare Vajpeyi (Hindi), George West (Geology), M. P. Shrivastava (Physics), and Baburam Saksena and Dhirendra Verma (Linguistics). Th is is an indicative inventory: there were other, young and established scholars on the Sagar faculty.

72. Madan, ‘Shyama Charan Dube’, p. 299.73. Shyama Charan Dube, Manav aur Sanskriti (New Delhi: Rajkamal, 1960).

Dube’s writings in Hindi all appeared under his full fi rst name.74. Th is is not to suggest that Dube travelled away extensively from Sagar

only aft er his return from Mussoorie. When he assumed the chair of anthropology in Sagar in 1957, full professors were rare in the Indian academy. A decade or so later, when he was still in his mid-40s, Dube was one of the senior fi gures in sociology/anthropology. Between these years, there were numerous appointments made in departments of sociology all over India, with Dube invited as an expert on several selection committees. Together with conferences, this involved a great deal of travel from the later 1950s through to the end of the 1960s. It also meant that Dube had an important role, which cut diff erent ways, in the founding of sociology departments in India. My question is: Should Dube have refused some of these invitations, especially as he was seeking to establish a major centre of research and teaching in Sagar from the mid-1960s?

75. For most of S. C. Dube’s working life, his career intersected with that of Leela Dube. Not only had he fi rst advised and encouraged her to work on Gond women for her PhD, but Dube’s father was also very supportive of his daughter-in-law’s fi eldwork. Later, she recalled, ‘While working on and completing my dissertation, for a few years, I had an interrupted career. In a way I had become an adjunct of S.C. Dube, temporarily teaching in his place, helping him in fi eld work and its analysis, being his research associate ….’ (Leela Dube, ‘Doing kinship and gender’, pp. 40–41.) In Sagar, Leela Dube fi rst took up an honorary teaching position in the Department of Anthropology, S.C. Dube’s ethics preventing him from asking the academic authorities for a position for his wife. It was at the initiative of the Vice-Chancellor that Leela Dube was off ered a permanent position there. Th e two worked together in the conduct of anthropology and sociology at Sagar University, Leela taking charge of the department in the absence of Dube, particularly when he left for Mussoorie and then for Shimla. Not only during these years, but also from the mid-1970s through to the late 1980s Leela Dube and Shyama Charan usually lived apart, taking up appointments in diff erent places, which in their case meant both personal understanding and

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professional support for each other. Such mutual support also extended to scholarship: despite their very diff erent scholarly styles, Shyam oft en edited Leela’s writings just as Leela was generally the fi rst reader of Shyam’s work, both intensely loyal to each other’s academic endeavour; my father took care of me when my mother travelled to the Lakshadweep for fi eldwork in the late 1960s; and Leela stood by Shyam through his successes and disappointments. Yet, I doubt if they professionally promoted each other. All this is not to envision the Dube’s married life as an immaculate likeness, an ideal image. Rather, it is to register intersections that bear consideration in understanding two distinct lives and scholarly styles that constantly criss-crossed, bearing upon and shoring up each other, issues that require further elaboration in a manner biographical and theoretical, ethical and critical.

76. S. C. Dube, ‘Communication, innovation, and planned change in India’, in Daniel Lerner and Wilbur Schramm (eds), Communication and Change in the Developing Countries (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1967), pp. 129–67.

77. Madan, ‘Shyama Charan Dube’, p. 302.78. T. N. Madan, interview, 2002.79. S. C. Dube, Explanation and Management of Change (New Delhi: Tata

McGraw-Hill, 1971).80. K. N. Sharma, ‘Ek pratibha parkhi evam sahridya samajshastri’, in Dube and

Pachori (eds), Seemanton ke Anveshak, pp. 32–34; R. N. Mishra, ‘Professor deluxe’, in Dube and Pachori (eds), Seemanton ke Anveshak, pp. 55–56; Sacchidananda, ‘Abhi unki bahut zarurat thi’, in Dube and Pachori (eds), Seemanton ke Anveshak, pp. 78–79.

81. Baidyanath Saraswati, ‘Bhartiya bhasha aur parampara ke prahri’, in Dube and Pachori (eds), Seemanton ke Anveshak, p. 61.

82. Nirmala Jain, ‘Shyamcharan Dube: Smriti-chitra’, in Dube and Pachori (eds), Seemanton ke Anveshak, pp. 65–66.

83. Saraswati, ‘Bhartiya bhasha’, p. 62.84. Mishra, ‘Professor deluxe’, p. 56.85. Th is was evident more than twenty years aft er Dube left Jammu, when I

visited the city in February 2003 to deliver the Second S. C. Dube Memorial Lecture of Jammu University.

86. Jain, ‘Shyamcharan Dube: Smriti-chitra’, p. 66.87. Mishra, ‘Professor deluxe’, pp. 56–58.88. Jain, ‘Shyamcharan Dube: Smriti-chitra’, pp. 66–67.89. S. C. Dube (ed.), Tribal Heritage of India, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Vikas, 1977);

S. C. Dube (ed.), India since Independence: A Social Report on India 1947–1972 (New Delhi: Vikas, 1977); S. C. Dube (ed.), Public Services and Social

ties that bind 143

Responsibility (New Delhi: Vikas, 1979); S.C. Dube and V.N. Vasilov (eds), Secularization in Multi-religious Societies: Indio-Soviet Perspectives (New Delhi: ICSSR and Concept, 1983).

90. During this time, Dube also frequently lectured and published in Hindi. For example, S. C. Dube, Shiksha aur Samaj (New Delhi: Satvahan, 1983). He also wrote in these years a textbook in English on sociology for the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT).

91. S. C. Dube, Social Science in Changing Society: D. N. Majumdar Lectures 1972 (Lucknow: Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society of Uttar Pradesh, 1973).

92. S. C. Dube, Contemporary India and its Modernization (New Delhi: Vikas, 1974).

93. S. C. Dube, On Crisis and Commitment in the Social Sciences (New Delhi: Abhinav, 1983); S. C. Dube, Development Perspectives for the 1980s (New Delhi: Abhinav and Kuala Lumpur: Asian and Pacifi c Development Centre, 1983).

94. S. C. Dube, Modernization and Development: Th e Search for Alternative Paradigms (London: Zed Books and Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1988); S. C. Dube, Tradition and Development (New Delhi: Vikas, 1990); S. C. Dube, Understanding Change: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives (New Delhi: Vikas, 1992).

95. Dube, Modernization and Development.96. Seminar, a special issue on ‘Studying our society’, 254, 1980; Seminar, a

special issue on ‘Academic colonialism’, 112, 1968.97. Yogendra Singh, interview, 2002.98. Also, as T. N. Madan put it, compared to M. N. Srinivas, from the later

1960s Dube lost contact with important centres of anthropological research in the UK and the US. (T. N. Madan, interview, 2002.) Of course, this had to do with the nature of Dube’s work, including his generally intelligent but oft en impatient responses to analytical and theoretical concerns within the discipline. Yet, it was also a matter of Dube’s increasing ambivalence toward approval from abroad in developing the social sciences in India, and his insuffi cient professionalism as regards sending his writings to colleagues, which he did but rarely.

99. Dube, Social Science in Changing Society.100. See, for example, Dube, Tradition and Development.101. For example, Dube, Modernization and Development.102. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge:

Polity Press, 2000).103. Th ese included the coveted Moorti Devi Award of Bhartiya Jnanpith in

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1993, which was awarded for Shyama Charan Dube, Parampara, Itihasbodh, aur Sanskriti (Delhi: Radhakrishna,1991), the Indira Gandhi Gold Medal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1993 (he had already won the S.C. Roy Gold Medal of the Society in 1976), and honorary doctorates from Kashi Vidya Peeth and Kanpur University.

104. During the 1990s, Dube’s books in Hindi included those comprising earlier essays. Dube, Parampara, Itihasbodh, aur Sanskriti; S. C. Dube, Shiksha, Samaj aur Bhavishya (Delhi: Radhakrishna, 1994). Other works by him were written aft er the move to Delhi, and some of these were published posthumously. S. C. Dube, Sankaraman ki Peeda (New Delhi: Vani, 1994); Samay aur Sanskriti (New Delhi: Vani, 1996); S. C. Dube, Vikas ka Samajshastra (New Delhi: Vani, 1996). A wider appreciation of Dube’s contributions to writing in Hindi can be found in most essays in Dube and Pachori (eds), Seemanton ke Anveshak.

105. Th is was also true of Dube’s writings in English of the period. Th us, Indian Society, written in the late 1980s for the younger and lay reader, showcased Dube’s capacity to synthesize varied and complex materials in an accessible style, the book appearing in translation in several Indian languages over the 1990s. In English and in translation, the work has come to be widely used as a textbook at school and college levels. S. C. Dube, Indian Society (New Delhi: National Book Trust, India, 1990).

106. See the essays by Hindi critics in Dube and Pachori (eds), Seemanton ke Anveshak.

107. Dube, Samay aur Sanskriti.108. Namvar Singh, ‘Vah hansi bahut kuch kahti thi’, in Dube and Pachori (eds),

Seemanton ke Anveshak, p. 109.109. Dube continued to write in Hindi throughout his life. Th us, from his earliest

essays of college days through to his fi nal books of the 1990s in the Hindi language, mentioned earlier, Dube also wrote for periodicals and magazines such as Yojana, Kalpana, and Dharmayug.

110. Singh, ‘Vah hansi bahut kuch kahti thi’, p. 111.

auguring art 145

5AUGURING ART

A Dalit Iconography of an Expressionist Imagination

Th is chapter provides another personal portrait, this time of the work of an artist friend. As in the previous chapter, issues of aff ect are also important in this one. But now the requirements of sacrifi cing ready intimacy draw not on the considerations of the history of anthropology and an intellectual biography of an anthropologist subject. Rather, they rest on the concerns of an ethnography of art and a historical anthropology of a radical artistic imagination. Th us, the acute sensuousness and dense contradictions of social worlds and their artistic expressions—as well as the stipulations of a history without warranty—fi nd distinct confi gurations here.

MeetingsI fi rst met Savindra (‘Savi’) Sawarkar in the late autumn of 1999. It was an entirely unexpected encounter, at a party celebrating deepawali (the Hindu festival of lights) held in the bright premises of the Indian Embassy in Mexico City. As well-dressed women and smartly-spruced men came and went, in an open arena and in enclosed rooms, speaking of friends and family, a dark man in casual clothes walked up—a little uncertain, a trifl e diffi dent—to the quiet corner where I was fl eeing from the fi esta. He introduced himself as Savi, an artist, who had recently arrived with three other sculptors and painters from India, on an exchange programme between the Mexican and Indian governments. During their fi rst few months in Mexico, the four artists were learning Spanish in the colonial town of Taxco, and later they were to attend La Esmeralda, a well-known

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school of art in Mexico City, as a means to interact with other artists, scholars, and students.

As Savi and I talked, our mutual interests in cultural politics and political cultures of caste and untouchability became palpable. In what seemed like little more than moments, the traces of Savi’s diffi dence disappeared, and I no longer wanted to run away from the party. Indeed, he soon reached into his satchel, never far from hand, and produced a striking catalogue from a recent exhibition of his work. Even a casual glance through the catalogue was enough to establish that Savi himself was an untouchable, a dalit, and that his work embodied a profound challenge to established procedures of art—in India and beyond. Not surprisingly, our fi rst meeting led to several subsequent encounters. Blending the personal and professional, these trysts have resulted in an abiding acquaintance that has grown over time.

Now, the aesthetics and the politics of his art make Savi an important and a challenging artist. For these very reasons, he is also an intriguing and a defi ant artist. Precisely in order to appreciate the aura of his art, the sources and the strengths of Savi’s works make specifi c demands upon the task of understanding. Th ey suggest the salience of tracking the interplay between meaning and power within regimes of caste and cultures of untouchability, while simultaneously registering the place in Savi’s representations of distinctive artistic infl uences, including (more recently) fi gures and forms from Mexico. Indeed, it seems to me that critical apprehensions of Savi’s work cannot shy away from the contexts it evokes, pointing rather toward an ethnography of a distinct art and an anthropology of a dalit imagination. As an ethnographic historian curious about art, this also explains my own ongoing interest in Savi’s work and life. Let me only add that the term ‘untouchable’ should be read as appearing within inverted commas in the account ahead.

ConfluencesSavi was born in 1961 into a family of the Mahar caste in Nagpur. As is generally known, the Mahars constitute a numerically large caste in central and western India, ranking at the bottom of the caste order. As part of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s wider movement among untouchables challenging the hierarchies of caste from the 1920s onwards, in 1956 Savi’s family

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converted to Buddhism along with hundreds of thousands of other Mahar peoples. Savi’s art confronts the disabilities and discrimination faced by dalit communities, and it draws upon the critical heritage of Buddhism.

Savi fi rst studied art at the University of Nagpur, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Here the constraining premises of an institution that continued to cherish the ideals of Victorian art and colonial aesthetics meant that Savi honed his own artistic abilities by ceaselessly sketching peoples and places, subjects and objects, especially spending long hours at the Nagpur Railway station. Next, he attended the prestigious art department at the M. S. University, Baroda in western India, where he took a Master of Fine Arts, specializing in Graphics. Subsequently, Savi has held shorter apprenticeships at art institutions in, for example, Santiniketan, New York, London, and Taxco.

Savi’s paintings, graphics, and drawings combine diff erent infl uences. From the immediacy of varieties of expressionist art, ranging across its early twentieth-century developments in Germany, its 1960s manifestations in North America and Europe, and its likeness in the work of the (New York-based) Indian artist Francis Newton Souza. To the poet Rabindranath Tagore’s critical drawings of the 1920s and 1930s, which constitute a landmark in creative expression. To the important ‘narrative movement’ of the 1970s and the 1980s that revisited questions of tradition and modernism, epic and modernity in Indian art, and the subsequent radical reworking of these tendencies, particularly by the ‘Kerala Group’, working out of Baroda.1 To the delicate brushwork of Zen masters that is itself combined with Savi’s openings toward Buddhist aesthetics.

Yet, far from being derivative upon any school or tradition, Savi’s art sets to work the eff ects and aff ects of these discrete imaginings in a manner all his own. Conjoining distinct apprehensions of the past and the present of an unjust, murky world with a varied and vibrant, deft and striking use of colour, Savi conjures fi gures and forms of intense force and enormous gravity. Th e result, as the well-known Indian art critic Geeta Kapur put to me in conversation, is a veritable ‘iconography’ of a radical art and a dalit imagination.

Central to this iconography and imagination are very particular representations both of history and the here-and-now. Th e sources are overlapping and distinct, poignant and varied. Moving recitals of untouchable pasts by Savi’s unlettered paternal grandmother, whom he

148 after conversion

describes as his ‘fi rst teacher’. Striking lists drawn up within the political movement led by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar concerning the disabilities faced by untouchables, especially under Brahman kingship in western India in the eighteenth century. Haunting lore of dalit communities deriving from diff erent regions of India. Passionate parables regarding the life and times of Dr. Ambedkar and of other (major and minor) untouchable protagonists. Telling tales of Buddhist reason. Sensorial stories from dalit literature. And Savi’s own experiences as an artist, an activist, and a dalit in distinct locales, from statist spaces in New Delhi to remote places of gender and caste oppression in village India. In each case Savi seizes upon these discursive and experiential resources, sieving them through the force of an expressionist art, to construe images, icons, and imaginings that are contestatory yet complex, strong yet sensitive.

DeparturesLet me begin by focusing on two works by Savi in some detail, as a means to unravel the distinctive confi gurations of his art. Consider the oil on canvas, Dalit Couple with Om and Swastika. Th e background deploys a bright yellow colour—applied with quick, short, thick, swirling brushstrokes—quite as cracks and smudges of black show through here. Against this background, slightly off -centre, stand two dark, squat, foreboding fi gures. Th eir long feet support thick, log-like legs as wide as their trunks, which imperceptibly merge with their heads. Two dark-dots for pupils, their eyes are a screaming red, reaching out from the painting, staring at viewers, drawing them into the canvas. Th e red colour is also applied in little dabs to defi ne the stub noses and barely formed mouths, twisted with pain, of these androgynous forms, and to partly outline their feet, legs, and hands. Th e untouchable fi gures carry a clay pot each, hanging from their necks, one painted with the sacred Hindu sign of Om and the other bearing the symbol of the (caste-Hindu) Swastika.

Th e allusion here is to tales of how under the rule of Brahman kings, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, untouchables were made to carry clay pots to spit into so that their saliva did not fall on the ground and then accidentally pollute an upper-caste person. Th e fi gure in front also holds in his right hand a stick with bells, which was designed to announce the approach of untouchable folk so that caste-

auguring art 149

Hindus could move away from their impending shadows. Taken together, in the composition, the untouchable fi gures are at once densely palpable and forcefully spectral, haunting the past and the present. Th e heavy clay pots bearing the Hindu sacred signs of the Om and the Swastika that hang from their necks reveal the ruthless burden of Hinduism and history. Th e very silence of the untouchable couple bursts forth into a scream, echoing with the sound of the bells on the stick, enunciating powerfully, ‘We were there, then. We are here, now.’

Diversely depicted fi gures of untouchables, Buddhist bhikshus (ascetics), and lower-caste devadasis (women given into ritual prostitution by being symbolically married off to a Hindu god), of Brahmans, religious chauvinists, and political zealots combined with the insignia of domination and subordination of religious and secular hierarchies constitute focal forms in Savi’s pictorial narratives. My rather immediate point is that along with the pots bearing the Om and Swastika of Hinduism and the stick with bells, other iconic forms here are the black crow, the black sun, the Hindu fl ag, the Muslim crescent, and the Christian Cross. Th ese forms all come together in Savi’s remarkable canvas, Two Dalits under the Black Sun.

On a background painted in gold, the two untouchable fi gures are rendered as spectral silhouettes, defi ned by strong lines and deft shadows in unremitting black colour. One untouchable stands, a clay pot painted with a Swastika hanging from his neck in front of him, holding a stick with bells in his right hand. Th e other sits on the ground, a clay pot painted with Om around his neck, which is slung behind him. On his head he bears three signs, the Hindu fl ag, the Muslim crescent, and the Christian Cross. Th e two untouchables glance sideways to the right, peering over their shoulders. Th eir gaze seeks an unknown horizon. Between these fi gures, occupying most of the upper-centre of the canvas, a large sun hangs heavy, outlined in thick, blunt, scraggly black, its inside a mish-mash of black on gold. Above and below the sun, two stylized crows, scavenging birds, signs of untouchability, almost snake-like, seem to speak to the two untouchables.

All told, the allusion here is to the upper-caste sanctioned practice of the dalit caste of Mangs going out to beg in villages and towns during suryagrahan (solar eclipse). Yet, the force and the implications of the representation extend much, much further. Here are salient spectres of

150 after conversion

untouchability. From crows that bear witness and extend solidarity, to the distinct insignia of the lowest ritual status within the caste order, to the immense undecidability of what constitutes the religion of dalits in front of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian faiths all making claims on their souls. Th ese very spectres are forms of immense tangibility, located on the cusp of the past and the present. Together they proclaim that the sun is not black during an eclipse alone; rather, the sun is ever eclipsed, forever black, thereby giving the lie to the phantasms of progress that haunt modern regimes of culture, identity, and diff erence, of state and nation—not only in India, but also far beyond.

ConjunctionsIt should be clear that the reach of Savi’s work far exceeds a simple documentation of the past and the present, reaching beyond mere images of social oppression. Rather, in tune with Walter Benjamin’s advocacy that to ‘articulate the past [and the present]… is to seize hold of a memory as it fl ashes up at a moment of danger’,2 Savi conjoins the experiential realism of subterranean imaginings with the revealing terms of a forceful expressionism. Th ereby, history and the here-and-now become the means for and the expression of a dalit imaginary, a critical mode of artistic production.

Th e ‘inaugural dimension’ of this imagination rests upon and powerfully articulates critical conjunctions3—between caste and gender, institutionalized power and its subaltern subversions, the lie of progress and the ethic of hope, and religious/statist authority and its gendered/popular transgressions. Consider together four works. Th e canvas and the etching that both depict an untouchable carrying the carcass of a dead cow and holding a lantern, Dalit with Dead Cow – I, and Dalit with Dead Cow – II, respectively. Second, the powerful representation of an untouchable bearing a bright lantern, Dalit with the Lalten [lantern]. And, fi nally, the picture that frames a naked man on the left , a lantern in hand, and an androgynous form on the right who touches the former on his throat, Dalit Woman with Brahmin.

In the fi rst two works—Dalit with Dead Cow, I and II—the untouchable carrying the dead cow slung over his shoulders reveals the enormous weight of institutionalized Hinduism. For it is the precise association

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of untouchables with the carcasses of dead cattle, particularly the death pollution transmitted by the holy cow, which is said to defi ne their lowly status in the caste order. Yet, the very untouchable fi gure that bears the burden of the past and caste, of Hinduism and history, embodied by the dead animal, also carries a lantern, a sign of illumination and hope. Indeed, rather than collapse under this burden, the untouchable walks on, his strong legs merging with his sturdy torso, his path strewn with the light of the lantern.

Th e exact form of the lantern further comes alive in the next work under discussion, Dalit with the Lalten. Here the brightly burning mustard yellow fl ames of the lantern in the left hand of the untouchable protagonist further cast their acute refl ection on the body of this fi gure. His torso is transformed thereby into a wispy, smoky, fl aming reddish and pink, brown and ochre silhouette, clearly marking out the well-defi ned left arm holding the lantern. Th e head of this untouchable fi gure is bent but his piercing left eye is far from downcast. His profi le reveals dark determination and distinct gravity, the back of his bald pate and the front of his face resolutely refl ecting the mustard yellow of the fl ames of the lamp, the light of possibility exceeding the shadow of history.

Yet this is not all. For in addition to the fi gure(s) of the untouchable as simultaneously bearing the burden of the past and holding hope in the present, Savi’s work conjoins diff erent forms of subordination, further expressing the dominant and the subaltern as mutually entailed in the one and other. In the oil on canvas, Dalit Woman with Brahmin, upon a red background, to the left stands an androgynous fi gure that is outlined with a sharp black line, its body presented in shades of blue, a colour that Savi oft en uses within animate forms as a signifi er of untouchable status. Not only is this fi gure an untouchable woman, she also embodies the attributes of a devadasi, a woman ritually prostituted under the terms of dominant religion in the name of Hindu gods. Here the subordination of gender is articulated with the discrimination of caste, a critical characteristic of Savi’s work that variously construes interlocking representations of the degradation of women and the degradation of untouchables. To the right of this woman untouchable/devadasi stands a naked man. Th is fi gure is also delineated with the use of a deft black line but the body is painted in a diff erent, much lighter colour. Both the complexion of the body and the exposed penis—the former indicative of the hierarchies of colour, and

152 after conversion

the latter of the sexually predatory nature of the Brahman, within the caste order—establish that the fi gure is upper-caste, a Brahman.

At the same time, in this painting the limits and possibilities of the dark untouchable/devadasi woman and the fair Brahman man are not radically marked off from one another. On the one hand, quite as the fi gure of the Brahman embodies religious and sexual domination within the intermeshed hierarchies of caste and gender, his fi rmly presented, upraised left arm holds a lantern, its fl ame burnt out, dark and dead. At the same time, the caste mark on the forehead of this Brahman fi gure itself refl ects the blue of the untouchable woman’s body. On the other hand, the right hand of the devadasi/untouchable woman rises resolutely, an interrogating index fi nger touching, probing the Brahman in the middle of his throat—a move that challenges the upper-caste monopoly over religious authority and transgresses the rules of untouchability within the caste order. Yet, this woman is not merely a fi gure of accusation and inquisition: the middle of her own body carries the dark refl ection—now illuminated—from the lamp held by the Brahman, and the movements of the legs and feet of the two forms work in tandem. Taken together, in the composition, the fi gures of the devadasi/untouchable woman and the Brahman man are not separated by an incommensurable breach. Rather, through their very enmeshments they lead each other to their mutual possibilities, while bringing each other to their shared crises.

Such acute sensibility turned toward critical contradiction—in the terrain of culture and caste, art and religion, aesthetics and politics—runs through Savi’s work. As a result, his art fi rmly draws upon but also far exceeds the techniques and terms of a radical realism, including poster-art. In the oil on canvas, Foundation of India, the fi ve-fold hierarchical Varna division from the Brahman at the top to the untouchable at the bottom itself becomes a means of representing democracy, politics, and the nation in India. Th e corporeal divisions of caste now stand in for distinctions of the body-politic. Here political democracy and the Indian nation are depicted through four blocks, arranged one upon another, which yet remain slightly apart, representing respectively from the top down, the Brahman (the head), the Kshatriya (the arms), the Vaishya (the stomach), and a more ambiguous fourth category (the thighs and legs), all supported by the lowly feet, which also carry ambiguity.

auguring art 153

Th e cube containing the Brahman bears an angry, unforgiving face staring outward from the canvas, and several disembodied eyes lie to its left and right. Th is is the face of Manu, the ancient law-giver who is said to have instituted the regulations of caste. Th e eyes surrounding this visage indicate the omniscient gaze of dominant Hinduism, a conduit for the power of the ruthless Brahman, Manu. In the next block, even as the upturned arms of the Kshatriya warrior extend outward to the left and the right, a dagger representing the martial status of the group comes to lie at the heart of the corpus of caste and the body of politics in contemporary India. Th e third cube representing the Vaishya merchant features a corpulent belly, the very rotundity of the form revealing its relentless appropriation and consumption of social surplus. And then, the entire composition comes alive even further with the ambiguities and tensions surrounding the fourth block and the fl aming feet.

On the one hand, the fourth and the fi ft h categories in the Varna ranking—the Shudra servants and the Antyaj menials, respectively—are presented together, forming one block, which is defi ned by two pre-eminent signs of Buddhism, the Stupa and the Chakra. Th is points toward the possibility of political and religious solidarity among the hierarchically divided lower-castes, challenging Hindu hegemony. On the other hand, the feet that bear the burden of these four blocks are those of women, indicated by the dancing bells around the ankles. If the face of the Brahman commands the modular construction of politics and caste from the top, it is the anonymous, gendered feet at the bottom that hold up the edifi ce of the nation and religion. Pushed down by all, even by lower-caste solidarities, yet they walk on.

Th ere is more to the picture. Beside this modular, corporeal structure of caste and politics in India, the canvas features a large wagon, a cart that carries the force of Buddhism. Is this wagon about to drive/pull the entire edifi ce of religion and power in India in its own direction? Or has the cart totally come apart from the structure of caste and politics on the subcontinent? Or is this separate, squarish cube about to crash into the modular blocks, bringing down the edifi ce of democracy, the artifi ce of the nation? Th ese are not merely rhetorical questions. Rather, they point toward the critical contradiction and acute tensions posed and unravelled by Savi’s art.

Such tension and contradictions fi nd distinct confi gurations in a

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painting such as Devadasi I. Upon a canvas painted in saff ron, a colour auspicious within Hinduism, sits a woman, her form outlined using brown and black lines. She is a devadasi, a fi gure of ritualized prostitution that is sanctioned by particular strains of Hinduism. Her pudenda exposed, the woman bears Hindu fl ags on her head, while in her hand she holds—almost in the middle of the canvas—the roughly depicted form of a Hindu temple that itself carries a sacred banner. Th e very sympathy with which the fi gure of the devadasi is realized in the painting brings into relief her cohabitation with the hierarchies of Hinduism and the asymmetries of gender, which articulate the one and the other.

Other BeginningsBetween 1999 and 2002, Savi was on sabbatical from Delhi University, where he teaches at the Delhi College of Art. In late 2002 he completed his second year studying painting at the famous Academia San Carlos, the alma mater of Diego Rivera among others, even as he learnt mural techniques at other institutions in Mexico City. His artistic production today showcases Savi’s experience and labour in Mexico, revealing too that there are few full-stops in the script of his art. Here forms of pre-Columbian expression, the force of colonial architecture, and the fi gures of a vernacular Christianity in contemporary Mexico all push each other toward novel confi gurations. Earlier techniques and imaginings—expressed, for example, in Portrait of a Zen Master—are construed anew in drawings, graphics, and canvases, unravelling the depth and the breadth of Savi’s artistic and political commitments. Th us, the honing of an art fi nds new meanings for the loud crow and the silent untouchable, imbuing the inescapably bound fi gures with the singular distinction of a voice of their own. Yet facile solutions are hard to fi nd here. Not surprisingly, the stipulations of introspection in a dalit imagination serve to reveal the moving contradictions of subaltern identities—entangled in the past, embodying the present, envisioning the future.

ConclusionI hope it is clear that Savi’s art does much more than simply interrogate formations of caste and religion in India. Indeed, the critical import

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of his work derives from its twin dispositions toward terms of power and determinations of diff erence. To be sure, the force of this art rests on the opposition between religious (and statist) power and the untouchable (and gendered) subaltern. At the same time, precisely this opposition makes possible de-centred portrayals of power and diff erence. For rather than occupying a singular locus or constituting an exclusive terrain, power appears here as decisively plural, forged within authoritative grids—of caste and gender, nation and state, and modernity and history—that interlock and yet remain out-of-joint, the one extending and exceeding the other. Th is is to say that Savi’s art traces the expressions and modalities of power as coordinated portraits yet fractured profi les, eff ects and aff ects bearing the burden of the spectral subaltern and palpable diff erence. It follows that these representations do not announce the romance of resistant identities and the seductions of the autonomous subject, split apart from power. Rather, fi gures of critical diff erence and subaltern community appear here as inhabiting the interstices of power, intimating its terms and insinuating its limits—already inherent, always emergent—as the spanner of discrepancy inside the work of domination. Th us, the wider implications that I derive from this art entail imperatives of theory and the politics of knowledge, better expressed as two sets of indicative questions.

On the one hand, what is at stake in critically exploring terms of power and dominant knowledge(s) without turning these into totalized terrain? Are attempts to pluralize power—for example, the force of caste and Hinduism, the stipulations of globalization and modernity—mere exercises in empirical and conceptual refi nement of these categories? Alternatively, do they also imply an ‘ontological turn’, not only pointing to the problem of ‘what entities are presupposed/ by theories and world-views’, but also carefully questioning ‘those “entities” presupposed by our typical ways of seeing and doing in the modern world’4—critically engaging newer critical orthodoxies that render dominant categories as ‘dystopic totalities’?5 What is the place of the particular, of ‘details’—a notion of the historian Michel de Certeau, acutely embodied in the work of Savi Sawarkar—in unravelling the determinations of power and diff erence?6

On the other hand, what distinctions of meaning and power come to the fore through the elaboration of tradition and community, the local and the subaltern as oppositional categories? Must such contending

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categories inhabit the locus of ‘unrecuperated particulars’, as a priori antidotes to authority, in the mirrors of critical understandings?7 How are we to articulate the dense sensuousness and the acute mix-ups of social life? Can this be done not only to query cut-and-dried categories and modular schemes of ordering the world, but also to think through axiomatic projections of resistant diff erence that abound in the here-and-now, characterizing scholarly apprehensions and commonplace conceptions?8

Notes1. For recent, critical discussions of art in contemporary India see, Geeta

Kapur, When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000); and Gulammohammed Sheikh (ed.), Contemporary Art in Baroda (New Delhi: Tulika, 1997).

2. Walter Benjamin, ‘Th eses on the philosophy of history’, in Benjamin, Illuminations, trad. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 253.

3. For a powerful perspective on the terms of an inaugural dimension in literature (and art) see Milind Wakankar, ‘Th e moment of criticism in nationalist thought: Ramchandra Shukla and the politics of “Indian responsibility”’, in Saurabh Dube (ed.), Enduring Enchantments, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, 2002, published by Duke University Press.

4. Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affi rmation: Th e Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Th eory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 3–4. Consider too the move toward a ‘strategic practice of criticism’ in David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism aft er Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 3–10, 17–18.

5. I borrow this notion from John McGowan, Postmodernism and its Critics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

6. Michel de Certeau, Th e Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University, 1984), p. ix.

7. Th e term ‘unrecuperated particulars’ also comes from McGowan, Postmodernism and its Critics.

8. I elaborate issues arising from these two sets of questions in Saurabh Dube, ‘Introduction: Enchantments of modernity’, in Dube (ed.), Enduring Enchantments; and Saurabh Dube, Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004).

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HISTORY AND MODERNITY

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6HABITATIONS OF HISTORY

Th e work of Dipesh Chakrabarty off ers critical refl ections on history and modernity. More than fi ft een years ago, his important essay ‘Postcoloniality and the artifi ce of history’ had raised, with care and imagination, key questions concerning the presence of Europe in the writing of history.1 Implicitly construing his arguments against the backdrop of Heidegger’s interrogation of the artifi ce of a meaning-legislating reason, in the essay Chakrabarty focused on ‘history’ as a discourse that is produced at the institutional site of the University, making a compelling case for the ways in which Europe remains the sovereign theoretical subject of all histories. By admitting that ‘Europe’ and ‘India’ are ‘hyperreal’ terms that refer to certain fi gures of the imagination, Chakrabarty critically pointed toward how—in the ‘phenomenal world’, in everyday relationships of power—Europe stands reifi ed and celebrated as the site and scene of the birth of the modern, working as a silent referent that dominates the discourse of history. Here, Chakrabarty unravelled the consequences of the theoretical privileging of Europe as the universal centerpiece of modernity and history, so that the past and present of India or Mexico—or of Afghanistan or Namibia—come to be cast in terms of irrevocable principles of failure, lack, and absence, since they are always/already measured against the West.

Chakrabarty’s recent books, Provincializing Europe (PE) and Habitations of Modernity (HM) further elaborate such critical consi-derations.2 An interview with him appeared as the best means to highlight these arguments. Th e initial interchange took place via email in 2001, and was followed by further exchanges in 2004 and 2009.3 Together, the questions and answers touch upon Chakrabarty’s earlier concerns—as expressed, for example, in Rethinking Working-Class History (RWH)4— while primarily tracking considerations that arise from PE and HM.

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Now, PE and HM are both multi-layered and intriguing works, defying conventional summary. Th erefore, the questions in this interview predominantly take the form of clusters of queries in dialogue with key issues turning on modernity, history, and theory. Th ere has been very little editing of the questions and the answers as they were articulated, although I have added notes, mainly as a means of clarifi cation. As an abiding measure, the entire exchange circulates in cyber-space.

Saurabh Dube (SD): You have written extensively, critically about the subaltern studies project, with which you have been associated from its beginnings. Could you tell us something about how the involvement with the endeavour has aff ected your own refl ection and writing, their continuities, shift s, and transformations?

Dipesh Chakrabarty (DC): Th e Subaltern Studies project has mutated and fragmented over the years into many connected but diff erent directions and projects. Members of the collective have pursued in a variety of ways the implications of the original questions that both held them together and started them off . For example, the idea of a separate subaltern domain of politics or ‘popular politics’ proposed once by Ranajit Guha became the question of ‘political society’ in what Partha Chatterjee has done in the last decade. Shahid Amin’s search for the Mahatma in popular culture and subaltern history became a deeper—even chronologically deeper—investigation into stories and songs about Ghazi Miyan. David Hardiman’s new work on missionaries and medicine combines his own long-standing interests in fi eldwork, archival research, and Dangi history with some of the directions in which David Arnold pushed questions about colonialism and modern medicine. Gyan Pandey is now engaged in developing the concept/fi gure of the subaltern-citizen. Among the younger members, Ajay Skaria has been engrossed for some time in a deep study of Gandhi. Some of the roots of his interests must go back to the discussion on Gandhi that Guha, Chatterjee, and Amin initiated. Th ese are diff erent projects, indicative of the ways in which the intellectual interests of individual members of the collective have grown. Th e projects are also, at the same time, connected to one another. And they all bear some relation or other to the questions Guha originally raised for Subaltern Studies. One also has to acknowledge, however, that the original project that issued out of the 1970s’ interest in the possibility of a peasant-based socialist revolution

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in India has now been superseded. Subaltern Studies perforce had to engage with the implications of feminist and dalit politics in the 1980s and 1990s; it has also had to deal with and make its own the discourses of deconstruction, globalization, and postcolonial studies. Besides, since all of us, including Chatterjee, have worked mainly as historians or in the terrain of history, new trends in historiography, such as micro-history or world history or new imperial history, have also infl uenced us in varying degrees. My work is no exception to these remarks.

I guess what distinguishes my own projects is my interest in metahistorical questions and in questions about history as a form of knowledge. PE was a historian’s—i.e., by someone trained in the methods of research and reasoning in the discipline of history—attempt to think through the relationship between thought and place. Of course, this goes back, genealogically, to critiques of history as a colonial form of knowledge (to use Bernard Cohn’s expression) that many including Ranajit Guha and Ashis Nandy produced in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Th ere was also a debt to Hayden White and the debates around his work. But, autobiographically speaking, I was profoundly infl uenced by the debates that marked the emergence in Australia of a new subject called ‘Aboriginal history’ in the mid-1980s, just when I started lecturing at the University of Melbourne. Th is subject revolutionized the meta-narrative of Australian history. But it also raised sharp and deep questions about the methodological and political assumptions of my discipline. For instance, there were days when Aboriginal students refused to imbibe the pleasure that a historian is meant to take in fi nding and reading ‘sources’. Students said it hurt them to read documents about massacres of Aborigines, so living was this history for them. I don’t think I would have been able to write the chapter on ‘Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts’ without being around these debates in Australia. It is only with hindsight that I realize this debt. Fortunately, I was asked recently to contribute to a volume celebrating the work of the Australian historian Henry Reynolds, the most pre-eminent of revisionist Australian historians of the 1980s and 1990s, and I took the opportunity to acknowledge this long-standing debt. I should mention in this connection some other Australian friends whose work has had a formative infl uence on my work—they include: Greg Dening, Meaghan Morris, Bain Attwood, Chris Healy, Patrick Wolfe, Simon During, and Stephen Muecke. I mention them because

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sometimes we do not realize how diasporic our work, at least mine, in Subaltern Studies was. We speak as if the issues came out of only debates about India. True, they did but there were other debates stoking the fi res we had individually lit.

My more recent work has grown in two diff erent directions. I have become interested in how history generally got democratized aft er the Second World War and in what may have been the costs and benefi ts of such democratization. I have also become interested in trying to think if, in the context of the grave environmental and planetary crises that humanity faces, there could be ways of combining ‘deep’ and ‘recorded’ histories and of fi nding new forms of species-politics. I have taken a very fi rst and tentative stab at this question in an essay I recently published under the title ‘Th e Climate of History: Four Th eses’ in Critical Inquiry (Winter 2009). I have just started on the second project.

SD: Your earlier writings on the working class in India, especially RWH, approached community and tradition as defi ning the worker’s quotidian experience of hierarchy in a society/culture where the assumptions of a hegemonic bourgeois culture did not apply. Th ey were as much the mark of a ‘limit’ as they were the sign of an ‘absence’. In PE, you do not explicitly engage either community or tradition. Nonetheless, are these categories not implicitly present in the book’s arguments, intimating diff erent horizons from your prior emphases?

DC: In RWH, ‘community’ was opposed to what Marx called ‘the dot-like isolation’ of the modern individual/worker his theory of capital assumed. In PE, I see community as an always-already fragmented phenomenon. Th ere is, in that sense, no identifi able ‘Bengali community’ or even a ‘Bengali middle-class community’ for whose history PE may be regarded as representative. Th at is what I try to say at the very beginning of the book, that it is not a history of the Bengali bhadralok. Instead, I use the more diff use idea of ‘life-world’ assuming that life-worlds—even within the same speech-community, say—could be both diverse and overlapping. Th e life-world(s) that PE is most concerned with are those imagined and worlded within certain practices of modernity in Bengal, practices made possible primarily by seepage of literature into life (and vice versa). At the same time, I assume that actual people move in and out of several life-worlds at once: so I do not visualize reality as made

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up of colliding and insulated life-worlds. Alongside, the disavowal of the representative function of history releases me from the burden of having to speak for a community. Bengali-ness I imagine (provisionally) as a collection of certain skills and competences that made it possible for some people in some particular moments of their lives to make a world out of this earth in very particular ways. Nobody is, ever, fully or exhaustively defi ned by these competences. My argument was that even from the limited perspective of the history of these forms of worlding, European categories seem indispensable but inadequate as explanatory or analytical devices.

So, yes, I move away from the idea of ‘community’. As for ‘tradition’, I do not deploy the idea. Some of the bodily and other orientations to the world I mention and describe in the second part of the book are indeed very old. Some are very new. Yet they are all present in the practices I document making for the hetero-temporality I try to explicate in the fi rst part of PE. My position would be something like this: capitalist production may be a relatively recent phenomenon but the subject who lives with and under the sway of capital is not made solely by capital itself. Th e struggle to be at home by making a world out of this earth—a struggle that admits of no permanent resolution—both intersects with and diverges from the logic of capital. Th is is something I attempt to explicate in PE by talking about History 1 and History 2 in the chapter called ‘Th e Two Histories of Capital’.

SD: Th e interplay between ‘History 1’ and ‘History 2’ entails particular understandings of capitalism and colonialism, modernity and the post-colony. How would you refl ect on these categories—and the histories they contain—aft er PE?

DC: Well, then, what I say is that modernity and the post-colony, as categories, cannot be thought without some understanding of the logic of capital (or the universal history of capital). Conversely, we should not reduce them to simply this logic. What makes modernity and the post-colony inherently plural is that the logic of capital—its universal history that I have called History 1—cannot subsume into itself all the pasts that capital encounters as its ‘antecedents’ (to stay with Marx’s expression). It attempts to subsume but the subsumption is never total. Both its success and failure in this respect are partial, and in this very partial nature of

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the success, paradoxically, lies the condition of possibility for the global regime of capital. If everything was reduced to the universal logic of capital, then what we loosely call ‘capitalism’ would have been very oppressive indeed. So this partial realization of ‘capital’ is the enabling condition for globalization—you will see that I make a distinction in PE between globalization and universalization of capital.

SD: A central strand running through PE is your emphasis upon ‘the fragmentary histories of human belonging that never constitute a one or a whole.’5 Such pasts and experiences are signalled by the book’s evocations of life-worlds and of ways of being-in-the-world, its invocations of the pre-analytical or Heidegger’s ‘ready to hand’ (as distinct from the analytical, ‘present at hand’), and its articulations of the time of gods and spirits. Th ese ‘fragmentary histories’ exist alongside the objectifi cations of analytical history and the social sciences, revealing the limits of historicizing and universalizing thought, indeed modifying and interrupting in practice the latter’s totalizing thrusts. Here, I would like to follow upon these emphases, opening related terms of discussion.6

On the one hand, while you clarify that subaltern pasts come into being in the relationship of the historian to the archive, how are we to conceive of the time of gods and spirits—or subaltern practices—that you explore in PE? Do these primarily exist as the pre-analytical or the ‘ready to hand’ in your arguments? Yet, do not these times and practices contain both the ‘ready to hand’ and the ‘present at hand’, consisting at once of (prior) experiences of history and (distinct) modes of historical consciousness of subaltern subjects? Put diff erently, do the distinctions at hand come into play only when you question the artifi ce of modern reason and interrogate the limits of historicism? Should we not think of these distinctions as having a conjoint provenance, signifying diff erent orders of reasoning and disjunctive modes of historical consciousness?

On the other hand, in the manner that ways of being-in-the-world are part of the human condition, it is not only stipulations of colonial history and postcolonial modernity in India that interrogate the limits of historicism and totalizing thought. As you hint more than once in PE, ways of being-in-the world or subaltern pasts everywhere, including Europe, perform this task. How then are we to conceive of the relationship—entailing not only conjunction and/or disjunction, but

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also possible conversation—between the life-worlds of, say, the English worker, the Bihari peasant, and the Bengali modern in the nineteenth century? For in the absence of (the positing of) such a relationship, would not the salience of ways of being-in-the world inhere only in their opposition to ‘universal, abstract, and European categories of capitalist/political modernity’?7 Taken together, what implications arise from such congeries of considerations for imperatives of postcolonial thought and terms of historical diff erence?

DC: As I understand Heidegger’s development of these categories in the ‘Being and Time’ phase of his life, it would be wrong to think of one having any kind of historical or epistemological privilege over the other. In other words, you could not say that humans lived primarily in a ‘ready to hand’ orientation to the world before the coming of modern scientifi c rationality. Nor could you say that the ‘ready to hand’ is somehow more primordial compared to that which is ‘present at hand’. Why? Because, there is always the phenomenon of what Heidegger calls the equipmentality of the world breaking down. One day you suddenly fi nd that the hammer you habitually hit the nail with has a broken head. In repairing it, you are forced to look on this particular hammer as ‘the hammer’—that is, develop toward it an objectifying analytical relationship. Th at is how the ‘present at hand’ constantly comes into play—because the ‘ready to hand’ constantly breaks down. If, however, the ‘ready to hand’ is what we need in order to be at home, to practise dwelling, then Heidegger is also saying that the human can never be permanently at home in this world. Our ‘worlds’ continually break down calling into existence the more placeless logic of the present-at-hand. Since, however, we cannot world our existence through the present-at-hand (for the present-at-hand is indiff erent to place; it is simply analytic), and if to be human is to tend to dwell, then it follows that we cannot live by the present-at-hand alone either, that the ready-to-hand will also continually be called into being. Politically committed social science usually subordinates the ready-to-hand to that which is analytic and assumes that the analytic holds the key to what’s ‘real’ about the pre-analytic world. I was trying to resist that tendency of Marxist social thought and historical writing. Th e last chapter of PE gives examples of intellectuals both inhabiting and developing techniques of

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denying—historicism is one such technique—diff erent ways of being in the world.

PE also makes another specifi c claim about historicism—that historicism is made possible by an unacknowledged relationship to that which resists historicism. Th is is what I discuss in the chapter on ‘Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts’. You are right: this happens globally and not just in colonial histories. In the case of the specifi c histories of the Indian middle classes, there is an interesting phenomenon. At least until now, we have never been very far from peasant or rural modes of orienting ourselves to the world. Th is is partly because (of) our practice of employing domestic servants who are oft en of peasant stock. Th is is a very complicated part of our collective biographies.

Someone like Ashis Nandy can speak very creatively and intelligently on these matters. I cannot. Yet, let me just say this. Most of us as children have intimate relations of proximity to members of the class we later come to see as objects of pedagogical exercise. In our childhood, however, these people are oft en our teachers. Th rough the stories they tell when looking aft er us, through the aff ections they shower on us in our childhood, they impart to us orientations of the world we oft en later disavow. I did not have to read the history of plague riots of 1898 to understand the opposition of subaltern classes to hospitalization or modern medicine. When we were kids, the city authorities used to send vaccinators to our homes to vaccinate against cholera, typhoid, small pox, and other diseases. Who would hide under the bed for fear of the needle? It would be my sister and me, and our adult servant. My father would drag us out of there. While we the children got a modernizing lecture on public health and hygiene, the servant was bullied into submission. I have oft en wondered if Subaltern Studies did not have some roots in this aspect of the collective biography of the Indian middle classes.

As to how the life-worlds of the Bihari peasant and the Bengali intellectual would come together, you will remember that I do not regard life-worlds as constituting hermetically sealed entities. Nor do I see people as being marked by their belonging to only one life-world. Life-practices for anybody are manifold and would resist being summed up into the description of one life-world. Th ere is for instance an academic life-world you and I share, and that is irrespective of where our parents came from. People move in and out of life-worlds, and life-worlds, as I

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think of them, are permeable entities. An example of this actually occurs in the chapter in PE on Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Nation and Imagination’. Take the case of ‘darshan’ as I discuss it there.8 Tagore aestheticizes the practice while the everyday temple-goer is not required to do that. Yet a connection remains between the diff erent locations of this world, and even in Tagore’s aestheticization the word does not lose all connection with the other location of its use.

Again, for me, PE was a way of saying that European social thought only gives us a limited—though critical—purchase on the life-practices through which we world the worlds (and we do not do this in one single way). Hence, the need to know European thought as giving us a particular, and not universal, genealogy of thought which we translate into other genealogies. Indeed, to know it as a particular genealogy is to move away from its trans-historical pretensions.

SD: My next set of questions precisely concerns the place of universal categories in your work. PE emphasizes the simultaneous indispensability and inadequacy of universal categories of European thought in considerations of political modernity and social justice in India and beyond. Indeed, you return to the question several times, in diff erent ways. Here, particularly interesting is the manner in which you set up a distinction between the necessity of the universal and the avowal of the local, only to fi nd the one entailed in the other. For example, you argue that, ‘on inspection the universal turns out to be an empty place holder whose unstable outlines become barely visible only when a proxy, a particular, usurps its position in a gesture of pretension and domination.’9 Yet, it seems to me, at several crucial junctures in the book, the universal intimates itself in the form of rather fully fabricated entities, a given corpus of categories, already in place, ever there. Rather than pointing an accusatory fi nger, here is what I wish to ask: Can your practice of reading diff erence into and against universals be at all possible without bringing into play such formations of totality, which tend to retain the prior given-ness of universal categories? Put another way, alongside diff erence and heterogeneity, is there perhaps a critical tension circulating through your own confi gurations of the universal, insinuating disjunctive registers that defl ect and disrupt one another? Finally, how do you construe the constitutive contradictions and founding exclusions—looking far beyond

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the gap usually invoked between preaching and practice—of universal categories within your advocacy for the ‘need to think in terms of totalities while at the same time unsettling totalizing thought by putting into play non totalizing categories’?10

DC: Th e question of universals is solved for me by two observations. Th e fi rst is that they are all around us in everyday life and inform much of our everyday sense of justice. Take the newspaper for instance. Ideas of rights and representation, of equal punishment for equal crime, equal pay for equal work—these are all there around us at least as rhetoric if not as concepts. Any engagement with the political has to begin with the everyday, the commonsensical. Th e universals are there I think. Second, we deal with institutions that, in their ideal form, see themselves as based on certain universalist ideas. Th eir own ideational structure requires us to engage the universals. In a footnote in PE, I think, I give the example of the parliament. To be a parliamentarian in India, one does not have to know, even in outlines, the global history of ‘the parliament’ as an institution. But imagine writing about ‘the parliament’ for a civics course for high school students. Th en an abstract and universal conception of the parliament will be your thought-object. My point in PE was that being modern did not involve us in thinking universals (though it may fi nd us using universal-sounding words pragmatically and rhetorically). Yet thinking about political modernity is impossible to do without engaging some universals of ‘European thought’. Th e problem with these universals is this. Th ey, as thought-concepts, come packaged as though they have transcended the particular histories in which they were born. But being pieces of prose and language, they carry intimations of histories of belonging which are not everybody’s history. When we translate them—practically, theoretically—into our languages and practice, we make them speak to other histories of belonging, and that is how diff erence and heterogeneity enter these words. Or, in thinking about them and self-consciously looking for places for them in life-practices we have fabricated using them, we sometimes rediscover their own plural histories in the history of European thought. I try to do this with the category ‘imagination’ in one of the chapters in PE.

So, unlike many postmodernist thinkers, I do not rail against totalizing concepts. I think they are unavoidable if one takes contemporary

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critiques of our lives seriously. As Indian historians, I think we have to remember the investment that Dr B. R. Ambedkar developed as a ‘dalit’ or Untouchable leader in Enlightenment universals in the fi rst half of the twentieth century. Th is does not stop me from critiquing these universals for the problems of thought they pose for me. Yet how could I deny their political appeal when I see someone representing some of the most oppressed sections of my society fi nding them inspiring and helpful. PE refl ects this tension. It is not a simple tension between thought and practice. Th us, I am not saying that we need the universals practically but should think without them. No. I think we need to think of the universals as part of immanent critiques of structures of domination that predicate themselves on the same universals; but we also need to think about what problems of thought they create because of our having to make them speak to histories of life-practices from which they did not originate. I guess I try to resolve this tension by talking about diff erent ways of being in the world. In saying this, I am not just following Heidegger. I am also drawing on my lessons of high school and undergraduate physics. Physicists deal with both the Newtonian and quantum worlds without having to claim that only one must prevail. Something similar can be said of the two tendencies of thought that I try to build on—the totalizing and the non-totalizing ones.

SD: All of this raises critical questions for history writing. It is these that I would like to focus on now, registering that such issues have been present in all your work, from RWH through to HM and beyond. In PE you make a key distinction between ‘hermeneutical’ and ‘analytical’ traditions as a ‘fault-line’ constitutive of modern European social thought.11 What do you see as the place and possibilities of hermeneutic procedures in history writing today, particularly of a postcolonial persuasion? And what might such protocols in the present learn from the hermeneutic impulses at the core of—what has more conventionally been regarded as—Western, contra-analytical historicism?12

DC: You have to remember that the methodological legacy of Ranke—source-criticism—came out of developments in philology. Philology still makes us ask questions about what a word may have meant in a particular period and context and thus gives us glimpses into other ways of being in the world. All this was somewhat forgotten as history became a social

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science—albeit a ‘soft ’ one—aft er the 1960s. Th e roots of this phenomenon go back to the 1930s and 1940s. You will remember that early attempts in England to write histories of the common people fostered ‘economic history’ as it was relatively easier to fi nd data about wages, standard of living, mortality, etc. Th e modernization debates of the 1950s and 1960s, Marxist interests in dependency and underdevelopment—all emphasized the importance of economic history. And these fell particularly within what I called the analytical side of the divide: universal questions, universal categories, particular answers that only localized the general. As against this, there were also important tendencies in interpretive history (Edward Th ompson to Keith Th omas; Alf Lüdtke’s ‘everyday history’ in Germany; Natalie Davis’ and Carlo Ginzburg’s micro-history) though, of course, they never completely escaped the social-science side, but why should they? My distinction was heuristic. But one could point to Th ompson’s work as ‘aff ective’ history: a critique of Englishness by someone for whom being English was also an erotic experience. I had a similar relation to being an inheritor—along with millions of other Bengalis and Indians—of the intellectual wealth of Tagore, and of his contemporaries and predecessors (not to speak of the larger heritage of being from India). To relate to Indians who tried to be at once civilized, cosmopolitan, and Indian-Bengali or Indian-whatever at the same time was an erotic experience for me too. Our childhood of the 1950s gave us the capacity to experience some of the feelings of nationalism that our parents would have experienced in the 1930s and 1940s. Th ey passed them on. Yes, thus I do think ‘aff ective history’ is still possible today. But it depends on whether you think you argue from a place (that is, from within ways in which particular groups of humans—it does not have to be your own ethnic group—have made a world out of the earth) or from a non-place (as, for instance, do many Marxists and globalization-analysts). I have written about this problem in my Preface to the 2007 edition of PE.

SD: Your essay on ‘Postcoloniality and the artifi ce of history’ of the early 1990s had spoken of a ‘politics of despair’ as a critical component of the project of provincializing Europe,13 but in PE you declare that such politics do not any longer drive your arguments. ‘Historicism can circulate only in a mood of frustration, despair, and ressentiment’, you

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state, questioning your own, prior propositions.14 Th is is a powerful but intriguing statement. Could you say more about it? What are its implications for a radical critique and possible transcendence of liberalism that you propose? How might such considerations bear upon possible practices of history writing that critically (and carefully) engage with universals and that carefully (and critically) attend to histories of belonging and the ‘non-integral’ nature of historical time?

DC: Th e despair I felt then came from an exclusive dependence on the vocabulary of critique that Marxism and liberalism provide us. I accepted this vocabulary in toto. I knew, instinctively and from having unsuccessfully struggled with the problem in my labour-history book RWH, that the ‘ends of human life’ encoded in this vocabulary did not necessarily represent the whole—or even the best—of human experience. Yet I knew no other place where I could turn to look for critical perspectives on life-practices that I have grown up with. In other words, I was aware of the inadequacy of European thought but also of its indispensability (for reasons explained above.) Yet I did not know where to go from there, hence the despair. I thought that articulating one’s sense of helplessness in the face of the assumed inevitability of what Heidegger once called ‘Europeanisation of the earth’ was the only political option one had. Not only was this politics motivated by ressentiment, it also failed to acknowledge the positive debt one may owe to Europe and European thought. Th is sense of despair lift ed, however, once I paid more attention to the translational processes through concepts and practices are made one’s own. I saw that these processes make available to us—if we are prepared to see and listen—many other vantage points of criticism that are not necessarily indebted to European thought but that do not come in a separate package either. Th ey come blended into our conceptual artifacts of modernity.

Th e chapter on widows in PE is a good case in point. Th ere is no doubt that that chapter documents the emergence of a citizenly voice in social critiques of Bengali patriarchal arrangements. Yet the voice actually contains grains that have very little to do with any theory of citizenship or rights. Th ey could be about human-god relationships and the critical perspectives they lend on the world, or about familial relationships, or about other things. In other words, being attentive to the translational

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processes makes us aware of horizons of human existence that speak of histories other than those encoded into European political thought.

Now, it is up to us to build an archive or repository of these other horizons so that we can use them creatively to fabricate our lives as we live them. It means further that while one can acknowledge, without seeking revenge, what one owes to Europe, one can at the same time also investigate the histories that provided the grounds on which European thought was situated and translated in our pasts. At present, most of us studying modern Indian history do not do this digging. We lack the training, although that we can rectify through collective eff ort. At the same time, there are other histories still living among us. Th ey remain hidden because their intimations come delivered through words and practices that we use or conduct in an everyday laziness of spirit. Yet it is also up to us to reawaken those histories, doing this for both elites and subalterns. Th ere would be interesting overlaps as well as critical diff erences between the two groups. But none of this will happen if we simply allow the concept-metaphors ‘citizen’ or ‘rights’ to obscure from view the tremendous heterogeneity they actually gather under their umbrella at the same time as we enter the historical process of making these concepts our own.

SD: In HM, especially while discussing the work of Ashis Nandy, you underscore the important issue of the ‘dark side’ of cultures.15 Do these dark-zones intimate only the limits of both (self-perpetuating) historicizing and (self-confi dent) voluntarist gestures or might they be articulated, too, more substantially with the writing of history?

DC: I did. It was not a criticism of Nandy whom I respect and value. It was just that the richness of his insights allowed me to raise some of these questions. I meant to say that we cannot ever see completely into that which we may consider ‘our culture’. But the word ‘dark’ was also an attempt to acknowledge the baser sides of our collective practices. I have always been interested in how we write histories in which we relentlessly expose cruelty while accepting that to be human is to have prejudices. Prejudices are a part of the human condition. Yet the problem is that your own prejudices are oft en things you cannot see. Sometimes, we even encode them into our highest values, our poetry, into our modes of dwelling. I hinted at this in several essays in HM. So now we are talking about the

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need to develop a self-critical idiom even as we write aff ective histories. Aff ective histories must not ever be an excuse for absolving the group or the collective you identify with most of the cruelties they perpetrate or have perpetrated in the past. But, you see, this means trying to see how your poetry prejudices you but this, you can only half-see, for that poetry is also what gives you your pleasure of being in the world. ‘Poetically, man dwells’, says the late Heidegger, and yet man suff ers constant breakdowns of the very equipments with which he creates his sense of dwelling—what is called ‘the breakdown of equipmentality’ in Being and Time. Aff ective history is a matter of exploring how you could never fi nally be at home in the middle of that which gives you, only provisionally and for short periods of time, the feeling of being at home; it is about exploring on a variety of creative registers the necessary nostalgia humans have for being at home. I think that if we comport ourselves thus in relation to the question of writing history, we then neither simply historicize the past nor just assume a voluntarist or decisionist gesture towards it.

SD: Th ese are profound challenges for the practice of history. What do you consider as the limits and the possibilities of critical histories and postcolonial perspectives today to respond to these challenges?

DC: Th ank you for the generosity of spirit that inheres in all your questions. It is diffi cult for me to spell out all the ‘challenges’ that PE and HM may have for the practice of writing history. A text has its own life, and not simply in terms of the diversity of reception that it may encounter. Anything in prose contains a certain degree of heterogeneity over which no author has complete sovereignty. So let me only mention some of the points that I myself was aware of as I worked on PE.

I think PE tries to hold some kind of a middle ground between taking categories of thought seriously, particularly the categories we need to think through issues of political modernity, and the tendency to reify these categories themselves into historical actors. Th is happens, for instance, with the category—‘capital’. Obviously, I think that we need in order to understand the internal construction of this category—I deal, of course, only with the Marxist construction of it—in order to think about political modernity. But I do hope that I have said enough about the politics of belonging and dwelling and its intersection with the ‘logic of capital’ to help interrogate the plausibility of statements such as ‘capital

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has done this or that in the world’. (Similar remarks could be made about the nation-state. Th ere is widespread scholarly tendency to reduce this simply to its form—as monopoly of violence, etc., which, as such, is not problematic—and then blame the formal abstraction for many instances of actual governmental violence in the world.) I also hope that my work has something to say about the relation between historical narratives and literary imagination. Of course, the literary imagination I have explored is that exhibited by the established writers of the Hindu-Bengali middle classes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the middle classes are not the only source of literature. Th is is, in a way, also a plea for histories written out of bi-lingual or multi-lingual positions. And, fi nally, my writing is involved in investigating the diff erent ways the European message about human sovereignty in organizing public life—what else is modern European political thought?—has been worked on and hybridized by a certain group of people in the world as they tried to evolve their politics of dwelling under modern conditions initiated by colonial rule. Th is hybridization, by the way, happens in all areas of the world including Europe, for we must not equate thought-traditions with actual historical processes. I have tried to demonstrate this for a small part of the world, which I have had the privilege of knowing somewhat intimately. I simply hope that the exercise is relevant for others as well. Th ank you, once again, for your own stimulating and generous reading of my work. I have learned from listening to you.

Notes1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the artifi ce of history: Who speaks

for “Indian” pasts?’, Representations, 37, Winter 1992, 1–26.2. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Th ought and

Historical Diff erence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

3. Th e interview had its beginnings as an exchange in Dube (ed.), Enduring Enchantments. It then appeared in an expanded form in Dube (ed.), Postcolonial Passages, forming an ‘Aft erword’ to the volume. Th e present version develops the interchange even further.

4. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

habitations of history 175

5. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 255.6. Th e queries that follow bring into play what is widely considered as a central

insight of Heidegger, described by Paul Ricouer as Heidegger’s recognition of the capacity of ‘Dasein to project its most proper possibilities inside the fundamental situation of being in the world’, so that understanding itself entails ‘the mode of being before defi ning the mode of knowing’. Here, in understanding of history, for example, the implicit awareness of exposure to the labours of history precedes the objectifi cations of documentary historiography, which is to say that (what is frequently understood as) historical consciousness barely covers the experience of history. Th e questions that I sent to Chakrabarty clarifi ed these premises, and his response registers this. Paul Ricouer, cited in Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London, 1992), pp. ix–x.

7. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 255.8. Here the reference is to the activity of darshan (to see), connoting ‘the

exchange of human sight with the divine’. Ibid., p. 173.9. Ibid., p. 70. 10. Ibid., pp. 21–22. 11. Chakrabarty fi nds in ‘analytical’ social science the tendency to ‘evacuate the

local in favour of some abstract universal’ and to demystify ‘ideology’ in the pursuit of a just social order. Against this is contrasted the ‘hermeneutical’ tradition that ‘produces a loving grasp of detail in search of an understanding of the diversity of human life-worlds’, based on the intimate connection of thought with particular places and forms of life and resulting in ‘aff ective histories’. Chakrabarty admits that the distinction between these traditions is somewhat ‘artifi cial’ in as much as ‘most important thinkers’ belong to both at once, but he equally casts the division as ‘a fault line central to modern European social thought’. Ibid., p. 18.

12. Here, my reference is to discussions of historicism as entailed in the practice of philosophy and history of, for example, Vico and Herder, and acquiring diverse yet acute manifestations across the nineteenth century, the time when the term was fi rst invented. Such expressions of historicism variously played out: the principle of individuality (even as they oft en pursued a universal history); critiques of an abstract and aggrandizing reason as well as of ‘the prejudice of philosophers that, in some spiritual way concepts preceded words’; reassertions of the centrality of language and historical experience; and acute inclinations toward hermeneutical (as distinct from analytical) understandings. Th is is to say also distinct formations and discrete intimations of what Isaiah Berlin has notably described as the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’. Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical

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Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 247. Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 1–24.

13. Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the artifi ce of history’.14. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, pp. 248–49. 15. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, pp. 45–47.

identity and difference 177

7IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE

Th is chapter explores issues of identity and questions of diff erence under regimes of modernity. It does this by critically considering key provisions of culture and power, especially the stipulations of ‘medieval’ (or ‘enchanted’) spaces and ‘modern’ (or ‘disenchanted’) places. Such stipulations and these terms lie at the heart of contemporary politics, fi nding distinct articulations within recent scholarship.

For the purposes of the present discussion, we might usefully distinguish between two broad scholarly orientations.1 On the one hand, over the past two decades a close questioning of the limits of the ‘local’ (as a category) has been accompanied by an emphasis on the multiple mappings of colonial histories and the plural plottings of contemporary cultures, especially within newer ethnography and historical anthropology. Here identity and diff erence are understood as constituted within trans-national processes, intersecting cultures, and overlapping histories.2 On the other hand, during this time critical scholarship has interrogated the embedding of modern history in narratives of the nation, models of progress, and the telos of modernity. It has turned rather to the recuperation of the singular, the fragmentary, and the everyday in processes of the past and the present, emphasising the ethics of critical diff erence over the reason of historical identity or sameness.3 Taken together, at stake in such dissimilar apprehensions are the place of identity and the presence of diff erence within modern regimes of power and disciplinary grids of knowledge.

It follows that one manner of articulating questions of identity and diff erence consists of focusing on such overlapping strains in contemporary scholarship. At the same time, this chapter adopts a diff erent tack in addressing the issues at hand. It discusses instead an example from cultural

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politics and political cultures in the here and now, a critical event of current history, the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in Afghanistan early in 2001. Actually, in its own way, my endeavour no less provides the basis for thinking through the discrete orientations toward identity and diff erence that were outlined above.

Indeed, such elaborations of an event can carry wide implications, also infusing the notion of event-based history with critical resonance. Elsewhere, I have described the event of the opening ceremony of the Sydney Games: not only as revealing the limitations of the rehearsal of diff erence within statist-stagist multiculturalism; but also as intimating the risks of privileging cultural diff erence and identitarian subjectivity as ethical, epistemological, and ontological a priori in front of power.4 Th e questions become particularly acute as we turn from the celebration of diff erence skin deep in the Sydney Games to the denigration of diff erence culturally thick in the case of the Taliban.

Now, there are curious affi nities between the projections of the opening ceremony of the Sydney Games and authoritative apprehensions of the Taliban, whether concerning their destruction of the giant Buddhas, or in the matter of the suicide attacks by Al Qaeda in New York and Washington later in 2001 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In every case, dominant representations of diff erence appear at once as embedded in the past and as emblematic of the present. And so also the instance in front reveals the limits of envisioning the world in terms of historical identity—confronting the ruse of imagining all pasts, every present, and each future in the mirror of a bloated and imaginary West.5 Put another way, by means of the example ahead, I seek to rethink issues of identity and diff erence and questions of power and alterity through critical fi lters.

Medieval MattersTh e storyline is straightforward, simple, and seductive. Some years ago, an ultra-militant Islamic group, the Taliban, seized power over ninety per cent of Afghanistan. Carrying forward the legacy of a nation ravaged by feuding ‘tribal’ and ‘Islamic’ militias, all too soon, they initiated a regime of terror, marked by an acute violation of human rights, particularly against women. At the dawn of the new millennium, the Taliban destroyed two

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ancient, precious statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan, a cultural heritage of humankind.

On the one hand, the many criticisms of the Taliban, stemming from distinct political positions, were prompt and unambiguous, together condemning this unusual act as the vandalizing of history, amounting to cultural genocide. Unsurprisingly, several of these denunciations—issued from India, Europe, and elsewhere—commonly characterized the destruction and its agents as ‘medieval’. On the other hand, an unrepentant Taliban regime defended these measures through invocations of Islam and claims upon the nation. Here the terms of the Taliban’s representations and practices appeared as emergent attributes of modernity. Taken together, issues of identity and diff erence precisely straddle this seemingly incommensurable divide, articulating the ‘medieval’ and the ‘modern’.6

In most denunciations of the Taliban’s actions, the simplicity of the storyline marked off one world from another, construing critical antinomies: we are progressive: they are backward; we are tolerant: they are intolerant; we are modern: they are medieval: we are we/us: they are they/them.7 Yet, mine is not a call for expressly undoing these oppositions—of merely revealing the ideological nature of the fault-line they insinuate—by introducing empirical depth and conceptual nuance to a straightforward story, in order to turn it into a more complex narrative. Rather, I wish to stay longer with the seductions of the story, registering these as the enchantments of identity and diff erence under regimes of modernity. For to do so opens the possibility of holding a mirror up to the assumptions, categories, and entities that shore up our worlds of modernity, including the odds of critically understanding the actions of the Taliban. Th e term ‘medieval’ bears an enormous burden here.

Images of the ‘medieval’ as darkly delineating practices, beliefs, cultures, faiths, and histories are acute refl ections of the hierarchies of modernity. Th is is to say that the spectre of the ‘medieval’ is a prior presence and an ongoing horror in mirrors of modernity. As an idea, ideal, and ideology, modernity and the modern appear as premised upon fundamental ruptures: a surpassing of tradition, a break with the medieval.8 Time aft er time, in this vision of the past, present, and posterity, an exclusive, imaginary, and bloated West has morphed into history, modernity, and destiny—for each society, any culture, and every

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people.9 Even more widely, assiduously plotted against the horizon of a singular modernity, distinct meanings, practices, and institutions appear as primitive or progressive, lost or redeemable, savage or civilized, barbaric or exotic, ever-behind or nearly-there, medieval or modern.

Th ese peoples have missed the bus of universal history, or they hang precariously from one of its symmetrical sides. Patiently or impatiently, they still wait for the next vehicle plying the road of modernity. Comfortably or uncomfortably, they now sit within this transportation of time. Th eir distance from the modern registers redemptive virtue. Or, their falling behind on this route refl ects abject failure.10 Rather more than ideological errors, awaiting their inexorable exorcism through superior knowledge, such mappings circulate as structures of feeling, instituted as categorical entities, intimating the measures and the means of the modern—which is to say, they are formative principles and abiding enticements of modernity. Not surprisingly, when the Taliban departed from this main thoroughfare of history, revealing themselves as neither the noble tribal nor the tolerant exotic, it followed that the ineluctable hierarchies of modernity came into play, naming their action as savage, backward, uncivilized—in a word, as ‘medieval’.

Th e castigations of the Taliban as ‘medieval’ also drew upon the intense demonology surrounding Islam, from images of the ‘Oriental despot’ within classical writing, to tropes of the ‘fanatical Arab’ in terrorist journalism, to constructions of Muslim monstrosity in contemporary India.11 We know that such representations have grave implications, not only fl attening the diversity of Islam but also articulating regimes of epistemic/political violence. Yet, precisely for this reason, once more, it is important neither to isolate these representations, nor to posit them chiefl y as erroneous stereotypes, fl awed understandings, pointedly, proudly overcome by adequate knowledge, more tolerant of diff erence and more true to reality. Such steps tend to overlook the ways in which demonizing apprehensions of Islam share a wider provenance with liberal orientations more tolerant of diff erence, each bound to a dominant presupposition, a categorical disposition, toward religion and politics in the modern world.

Th is presumption, sharpening the immaculate image of modernity, is the following: since the Protestant Reformation, in the modern West, religion has undergone a profound transformation, becoming a largely tolerant and broadly private aff air, processes of secularization

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encompassing the ‘private’, intact autonomy of religion. Do not get me wrong. Mine is not the silly suggestion that processes of secularization over the past few centuries are only a fi ction, a lie. Nor am I just proposing that there is an unavoidable discrepancy between the ideal of secularism and its realization in history, an inevitable distance between preaching and practice, thereby casting the story of secularization as an incomplete narrative, yet to arrive at its immanent resolution. My point concerns how the force and reach of this presupposition, not unlike the telos of progress, another monumental enchantment of modernity, constitute the very basis of our worlds, their inherited and internalized verities lying at the core of commonplace conceptions and authoritative apprehensions of religion and politics.12

Among the consequences, enormously pertinent is the elision of distinct intermeshing(s) of religion and politics in the modern West.13 Here apprehensions of the interplay between the categorical terrain of religion and politics in, say, the United Kingdom or the United States of America—as part of a reifi ed West—usually rest upon a readily proff ered, putative gap between the ideal and the real. Th e former, the doctrinal ideal is the true norm, while the latter, the not perfect reality is merely a deviation.14 Th is underplays the manner whereby the ideal and the actual—of the separation between religion and politics—mutually shape and reshape one another, each apart yet ever entwined, both much more than mere straw fi gures.

It follows from this that distinct intermeshing(s) of religion and politics in Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism, in Afghanistan or India or Mexico in modern times usually appear as fi gures of absence, lack, and failure. Th ey emerge as imperfect images in the mirror of an immaculate, secular West. Th us, once the undemocratic Taliban directed their depredations against the hapless Buddha(s) in the name of Islam, the projections and fi gurations of secularization under modernity went into overdrive, predestining, so to say, the denunciation of the Taliban’s actions as ‘medieval.’

Medieval to ModernYet does this short genealogical outline of the ‘medieval’ make the Taliban ‘modern’? Of course, one can argue that the Taliban used modern

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weapons and contemporary communications, which were much more than just objects of wonder to the savage’s juvenile sensibility. Similarly, it is easy to show that far from inhabiting a never, never land, essentially sealed off from our own worlds, the Taliban were endlessly entangled in wider circuits of commodities and consumption. From traffi cking in (impure) heroin and (pure) politick, to dealing in guns and weapons of mass-destruction, to trading in art and antiques, particularly those looted from the museum of Kabul, and, later, fragments of the Buddha statues. Th is is to say that the Taliban insinuated themselves within international networks and transnational transfers. While trade in guns and heroin or the circulation of expensive arms and precious museum pieces are not the brightest side of our worlds, the Taliban’s transactions were nonetheless critical components of the global fl ows of contraband and ‘culture’, modernity and history at the beginning of the millennium.

I am not suggesting, however, that their insertion into global processes of contemporary history inevitably, inexorably made the Taliban modern. For it is clearly insuffi cient to assert, through the means of a chronological axiom, that everyone living in the modern age—in the present as in the past—essentially counts as a modern. At a very least, such a claim disregards the issue of how being modern or non-modern—or, indeed, medieval—entails the fashioning of the subject. At the same time, I also wonder about the wisdom of confl ating the subject of modernity with the modern subject.

Let me begin with the proposition that modernity is not only an idea, an ideal, an ideology, but that modernity is simultaneously the articulation of distinct historical processes over the past few centuries. As history, over the past fi ve centuries, modernity emerges elaborated within intersecting and disjunctive, authoritative and resistant processes of meaning and power. I refer here to processes entailing, for example, capital and consumption, industry and empire, nations and colonies, citizens and subjects, public spheres and private spaces, circumscribed religion(s) and disenchanted knowledge(s), resurgent faiths and reifi ed traditions, normalizing states and disciplinary regimes, and enchantments of governance and the magic of the modern. As history, then, modernity is not singular, existing rather in its plural, modernities. Yet this is not all. For whether cast as modernity or modernities, the procedures entailed herein are neither monolithic

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nor homogeneous, referring rather to decisively checkered, decidedly contingent, and distinctly contradictory processes. Indeed, it is within such contingency and contradiction that the constitutive hierarchies and formative distinctions of modernity, a few of which I noted above, are inserted and elaborated.15

Th ese processes are not subject-less procedures. Rather, they emerge articulated by subjects of modernity, subjects who have engaged and elaborated the terms, stipulations, and disciplines of modernity, history, modernity-as-history. Time aft er time, subjects of modernity have revealed that there are diff erent ways of being modern, now accessing and now exceeding the determinations of the modern subject, suggesting the need to rethink exclusive apprehensions of the latter entity—as image and as practice. Yet, all too oft en, subjects of modernity have also betrayed scant regard for the niceties of the modern subject while articulating the enduring terms of modernity, registering within their measures and meanings the formative contradictions, contentions, and contingency of modernity/modernities.

Monumental HistoriesIt is precisely here that my eff ort is to raise a few questions concerning the modernity of the Taliban, especially as we consider the stipulations of their representations, the provisos of their practices. Th e burden of my discussion falls, admittedly selectively and all too briefl y, upon the interplay between authoritative traditions and monumental histories at the core of the modern self-fashioning(s) of state and nation, especially in recent times.

I have implied earlier that representations of modernity imbue categories and arenas with a distinct salience. One such category/arena is the concept-terrain of tradition.16 Th is has meant that in the business of negotiating and enacting modernity as image and practice, communities and peoples—from the fi rst world through to the fourth world—have unravelled particular traditions as constitutive of their specifi c identities. Such moves have been characteristic as much of ‘local’ communities as they have of nation states, acutely intensifi ed under conditions of late modernity.17 Indeed, the burden of authentic traditions and authoritative identities in such distinct yet overlapping terrain—from the ‘local’ to the

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‘national’ to the ‘global’—emerges intimately bound to the hierarchical oppositions of modernity, fi gures of endless enchantment.

Here novel construal and institutionalization of hoary traditions of peoples and territories has gone hand in hand with newer construction and sedimentation of monumental histories of state and nation. Th is has happened over the short run and in the long haul—from the altering faces of national civilization in India, to the changing destinies of the Mestizo nation in Mexico, to the shift ing fortunes of the multicultural state in Western democracies. Yet, this should barely surprise us. Quite as the performative and the pedagogical imperatives of the nation entail one another, so too is the nation confi gured simultaneously through its past traditions and its present distinctions—history as imagined and instituted on a monumental scale. Th is is to say that terms and visions of monumental history lie at the heart of narratives and practices of the modern state and nation, albeit assuming critically diff erent forms.18

So, how do the Taliban fi t into this wider picture? Precisely in their quest for a monumental history, the Taliban invested both tradition and Islam with a novel salience and a special signifi cance. For the Taliban’s eff ort was to combine ‘Islamic’ and ‘tribal’ traditions in order to turn Afghanistan into the purest Islamic nation and a powerful modern state. Not surprisingly, such transaction of monumental history was equally an eff ort on the part of the Taliban to gain recognition from the international community, at least from some of its constituent member nations. Th us, in the latter half of 1998 the head of the Taliban declared against their destroying the two enormous statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan. Yet, as is well known, somewhat over two years later, faced with sanctions on arms and resources imposed by the UN (Security Council), the Taliban retaliated. Indeed, according to their rhetoric, they were also avenging the destruction by the forces of the Hindu Right of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in north India in December 1992, a further testimony to the Taliban’s investment in international politics. Now, monumental history received a distinct twist—in the name of Islam and for the fame of the nation, through the fi lters of a monumental history, the Taliban destroyed the monumental Buddhas.

In presenting this picture in necessarily broad strokes, I am aware of the dangers of bringing into existence newer modular designs of modernity, while overlooking critical dimensions of its prior understandings. For

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example, in considerations of the Taliban, am I disregarding key processes of secularization, individualization, and the separation of private and public domains, privileging rather singular enactment(s) of monumental histories, as constitutive of modernity? Well, actually, no.

On the one hand, I have earlier pointed to processes of secularization and formations of the private and the public as among the important attributes attending modernity. Yet, I have also suggested that it is signifi cant to look beyond an exclusive pathway of secularization and individualization, recognizing precisely the diverse articulations of the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ across time, space, and their enmeshments, while registering the immaculate image of these processes in the unfolding of modernity. For, to do otherwise, might be to endlessly endorse the hierarchical oppositions of modernity, or to merely reiterate the empirical complexity of modern history as restlessly defying analytical categories, or indeed to be simultaneously bound to the one move and the other measure.

On the other hand, I also admit the salience of thinking through the distinctions of monumental histories of state and nation, discussed earlier, which come in diff erent shapes and sizes, divergent hues and patterns. At the same time, my point is that we encounter in such distinct expressions of monumental history plural, disjunctive articulations of modernity, which is as true of secular states as it is of regimes that reject principles of secularization, individualization, and the separation of the private and the public. Aft er all, for very long now, anti-modernist propositions—including, critically, positions that refuse claims made on behalf of the secular—appear enmeshed with authoritative terms, enduring oppositions, of modernity. Similarly, the negotiation and rejection of a dominant Western modern within enactment(s) of monumental history bear critical consideration.

Hence, my questions: What are the challenges before eff orts to apprehend the Taliban’s opposition to a Western modern—precisely through their claims upon an authentic tradition and an authoritative Islam—as intimating the contentions of modernity, a contending modern project? What might the Taliban’s eff orts to remake the world, albeit in a disjunctive likeness of historical progress, cultural hierarchies, and a strong nation, tell us about the horizons of modernity? How do the Taliban’s distinctions and conjunction between the past and

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the present—both ongoing and vanishing, the one purifying and perfecting the other—and their binding of eschatology and prediction in confi guring the future bear upon regimes of historicity widely understood as inaugurating modernity? 19

Aft er all, at stake here is nothing less than concatenations of distinct, coeval temporalities and overlapping, heterogeneous histories that variously straddle and scramble the hierarchies and oppositions of modernity. Put diff erently, the terms of modernity are assiduously articulated, but they are also contingent and contradictory, even out of joint with themselves.

ConclusionIn taking up this example my eff ort has been twofold. On the one hand, I have tried to highlight the importance of questioning assumptions of historical identity—of interrogating modular designs of the past, present, and posterity—precisely while recognising the salience of critical diff erence. On the other hand, I have sought to show that to privilege diff erence or alterity might be to reinstate the dualties of history versus diff erence, power versus alterity. Th e rather immediate point is this: to think through such antinomies is to critically articulate two infl uential and competing conceptions, questioning dominant Eurocentric imaginings without succumbing to facile strains of anti-Enlightenment rhetoric in Western theatres and non-Western arenas.20 But it is to do this while registering that the very positions and oppositions being questioned have profound worldly attributes, powerfully defi ning the terms and textures—and the tatters and tangles—of modernity. It is exactly to issues of modernity in India that I now turn.

Notes1. It bears clarifi cation that in the distinction ahead, the two sets of scholarly

orientations that I identify are each made up of enormously varied—at times, even contending—tendencies. Also, these orientations can occasionally overlap. At the same time, when understood broadly these two sets of orientations entail and suggest distinct scholarly imperatives toward the determinations of diff erence and the fabrications of identity.

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2. For example, Akhil Gupta, ‘Th e song of the nonaligned world: Transnational identities and the reinscription of space in late capitalism’, Cultural Anthropology, 7, 1992, 63–79; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Paul Gilroy, Th e Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Brackette Williams, Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff , Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder: Westview, 1992) and Comaroff and Comaroff , Of Revelation and Revolution: Th e Dialectics of Modernity on the South African Frontier, Volume Two (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See also, Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line (London: Allen Lane, 2000); and Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in East and Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

3. For examples from the critical history of South Asia see Gyanendra Pandey, ‘In defense of the fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim riots in India today’, Representations, 37, Winter 1992, 27–55; Ashis Nandy, Th e Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of the Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982); Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Ranajit Guha, ‘Th e small voice of history’, in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds), Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–12. See also, Partha Chatterjee, Th e Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Th ought and Historical Diff erence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), and Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Th inking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

4. Saurabh Dube, Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

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5. Clearly, the term ‘identity’ has been articulated on twin registers so far: fi rst, as social identity that itself entails cultural diff erence; and second, as identity in the sense of sameness in modular imaginings of history. In what follows, my use of the term ‘diff erence’ will include the fi rst connotation of identity as expressing alterity, so that my critical comments on identity will primarily concern its second sense of historical sameness. For sensitive commentaries on the mutual entailments of cultural identity and cultural diff erence see, for example, Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, ‘Crosscurrents, crosstalk: Race, “postcoloniality”, and the politics of location’, in Padmini Mongia (ed.), Contemporary Postcolonial Th eory: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996), pp. 347–64; and several of the contributions in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Social Th eory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).

6. Am I implying that every denunciation of the Taliban’s actions was a categorical error? Am I defending the Taliban? I know of nothing that the Taliban did that I could endorse or support—though this does not mean that we do not critically understand their actions and learn from what they express about the world—and the sooner we stop treating categories (or denunciations) as mere mistakes the better. Both these points will soon become clearer.

7. I fi rst discussed the Taliban and the responses to their actions of early 2001 in Saurabh Dube, ‘Historical identity and cultural diff erence: A critical note’, Economic and Political Weekly, 36 (2002), 77–81. Th is chapter is an expanded, revised version of the earlier endeavour.

8. Th is is not to deny the complex pasts of the term ‘modern’, whose ‘conceptual history’ in Western Europe, for example, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht traces in interesting ways—a history that makes clear the articulations of the ‘modern’ with the ‘ancient’, the ‘classical’, and the ‘romantic’. Rather, as the Introduction noted, it is to stay longer with the moment of Gumbrecht’s understanding where the concept ‘modern’ yields to the category ‘modernity’, while recognizing that a purely ‘internal’ account of a concept can elide its multiple hierarchies, played out on distinct registers. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘A history of the concept “modern”’, in Gumbrecht, Making Sense in Life and Literature, trans. Glen Burns (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).

9. Th is pervasive, ‘metageographical’ projection appears elaborated in several ways, from the evidently aggressive to the seemingly benign, embedded of course in ‘modernization’ theory, yet also long lodged within the interstices of Western social and political thought. As was noted in the Introduction, the way all this might come together is evident in the following statement of Gumbrecht: ‘From our perspective at least, modernization

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in the underdeveloped countries is ... taking place somewhere between decolonization and our own present.’ Th e ‘stagist’ presumptions here are not so far apart from the wide-ranging elisions of authoritative accounts—for example, by Giddens and Habermas—that see modernity as a self-generated, European phenomenon. Th e projection also fi nds contradictory articulations within discrete expressions of ‘tradition’ that question ‘modernity’ by reversing the moral import of its constitutive hierarchies and oppositions. To consider the enchantments of identity and diff erence under modernity is to think through such oppositions, hierarchies, and elisions. Ibid., p. 108; Anthony Giddens, Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Jürgen Habermas, Th e Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: Th e MIT Press, 1987). See also, Enrique Dussel, ‘Eurocentrism and modernity’, Boundary, 2 (1993), 65–76.

10. Even as prior enchantments can appear as an antidote to a disenchanted modernity, so too logics of ‘exclusion’ and terms of ‘inclusion’ bind each other within the hierarchies of modernity. Keeping this in view, works that have especially infl uenced my own emphases here include Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Th ought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Th ought and Historical Diff erence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff , Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992). See also, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘Anthropology and the savage slot: Th e poetics and politics of otherness’, in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard M. Fox (Santa Fe, NM, 1991); and Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

11. Here two classics are Alain Grosrichard, Th e Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1998); and, of course, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

12. See particularly, Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). See also, Russell McCutheon, Manufacturing Religion: Th e Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

13. See, for example, Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann (eds), Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

14. Against the grain of what such assertions insinuate regarding the stipulations

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of secularization in everyday life, consider the implications of Crapanzono’s explorations of the dense presence of ‘literalism’ in religion and the law in the US today. Vincent Crapanzono, Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench (New York: New Press, 2000).

15. Here the question is not just one of contending intimations of heterogeneous modernities questioning authoritative apprehensions of a singular modernity, but equally that of considerations of modernity exceeding sociological formalism and a priori abstraction. See, for example, Fernando Coronil, Th e Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Donald Donham, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff , ‘Introduction’, in Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (eds), Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. xi–xiv; John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff , Of Revelation and Revolution: Th e Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, Volume Two (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Saurabh Dube, Stitches on Time: Colonial Cultures and Postcolonial Pasts (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004); Peter Redfi eld, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China aft er Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See also, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Paul Gilroy, Th e Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: Th e Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Charles Piot, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Michael Taussig, Th e Magic of the State (London: Routledge, 1997).

16. To state matters in this way is not to foreclose the category of ‘tradition’. Rather, it is to bring into view distinct horizons for carefully considering the possibilities of ‘tradition’ as expressed , for example, in Alasdair MacIntyre,

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Aft er Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983) and Stephen Watson, Tradition(s): Refi guring Community and Virtue in Classical German Th ought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

17. I discuss these issues—in dialogue with part of the wide literature they have spawned—in Dube, Stitches on Time; and Saurabh Dube, ‘Terms that bind’, in Dube (ed.), Postcolonial Passages (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).

18. I am suggesting that critical attributes of monumental history variously lie at the core of what Hansen and Stepputat have recently classifi ed as three ‘practical’ languages of governance and three ‘symbolic’ languages of authority that are ‘particularly relevant’ for understanding the state. (Th e former consist of the state’s ‘assertion of territorial sovereignty by the monopolization of violence’, ‘gathering and control of knowledge of the population’, and ‘development and management of the “national economy.”’ Th e latter entail ‘the institutionalization of law and legal discourse as the authoritative language of the state’, ‘the materialization of the state in series of permanent signs and rituals’, and ‘the nationalization of the territory and the institutions of the state through inscription of a history and shared community on landscapes and cultural community.’) Clearly, monumental history articulates the institution of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, the labour of anti-colonial nationalist diff erence, and everyday confi gurations of state and nation. Th omas Blom Hansen and Finn Stupatat, ‘Introduction: States of Imagination’, in Th omas Hansen and Finn Stepputat (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham, 2001), pp. 7–9; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Refl ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Partha Chatterjee, Th e Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Prakash, Another Reason.

19. My reference is especially to the disjunctions between prophecy and prediction, past and present, and eschatological visions and secular imaginings that, for example, Koselleck considers as critical to regimes of historicity under modernity. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: Th e MIT Press, 1985), particularly pp. 3–20.

20. Regarding my own work, detailed critical elaborations of this spirit are contained in Dube, Untouchable Pasts; and Dube, Stitches on Time.

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8Epilogue

MODERNITY AGAIN

By now it should be clear that I consider that the tropes and processes of modernity—as well as several, attendant provisos of progress and their contentions—have been long present in India. Th is is true not only of infl uential and everyday understandings of South Asia, but of institutional and quotidian confi gurations of modernity on the subcontinent. Shaped by diverse subjects of modernity as well as by distinct modern subjects, we fi nd such presence in everything from historical debates on social advance under colonial rule to formations of anti-colonial nationalism and processes of postcolonial politics; from sociological enmeshments in modernization theory to governmental seductions and everyday expressions of the importance of being modern as a state, a nation, a people; and from diverse articulations of modernist aesthetics and an Indian modern in the arts, architecture, and cinema to critiques of modernity as embodied, for example, in the thought and practice of M. K. Gandhi. Th ese examples further register that at stake here have been processes characterized by contrariety and contention, contradiction and contingency, and ambivalence and excess.

All of this registered, I would like to turn in this Epilogue to some of the ways in which questions of modernity have been considered in scholarship on India in recent years. Here there have been diff erent understandings of the distinctions and dynamic and the determinations and direction of modernity in South Asia. To begin with, various scholars, albeit in diff erent ways, continue to present modernity in rather idealized terms as principally an enlightened trajectory of social transformation.1 Th is should not be surprising. Th e portrayal of modernity through its ideal attributes, where what the phenomenon ‘is’ (or ‘was’) is imagined as

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what it ‘ought’ to be (or have been), has an authoritative genealogy. As I have discussed elsewhere, such storylines are formative of discourses of modernity, one of their abiding enchantments.2

Away from such projections and intervening in discussions of ‘early’ and ‘multiple’ modernities, scholars working on the distant and proximate pasts of South Asia (and beyond) have expressed distinct, imaginative proposals. Th ree instances should suffi ce. In the fi rst place, Sanjay Subrahmanyam has made an important case for understanding modernity historically, as ‘a global and conjunctural phenomenon … located in a series of historical processes’. Th ese processes were themselves ‘uneven’, and they bore ‘strong local roots and colors’.3

Second, Sheldon Pollock has explored long-term processes of ‘vernaculariztion’, initiated at the beginning of the last millennium and entailing literary languages and texts, in the south of the Indian subcontinent, Sri Lanka, and Europe. Th is has served to raise intriguing questions, including concerning understandings of modernity, particularly through Pollock’s foregrounding of the emergence of unifi ed vernacular literary cultures; his emphasis on the invention, creation, and naturalization of ‘local’ communities and ‘regional’ formations in the fi rst half of the second millennium; and through his posing of the challenge of apprehending the non-modern and the non-European in the wake of modern epistemologies that have been implicated in the unravelling of Western empire and nation.4

Finally, Sudipta Kaviraj has sought to partially revise ‘infl uential theories of modernity in Western social theory’, especially their emphases on the homogeneity of the phenomenon concerning its causes and consequences, origin, and trajectory. His eff ort is to write into the category of modernity the place and presence of heterogeneous understandings, plural processes, and refl exive principles. Kaviraj contends that such perceptions and precepts ever characterized the phenomenon of modernity in the non-West and the West, although his endeavour continues to be grounded in somewhat modular understandings of the concept-entity.5

Clearly, at stake in such discussions are critical questions of culture and power, alterity and authority, diff erence and domination. Th e issues have found distinct delineations in other work concerning the subcontinent, and I provide two quick examples. On the one hand, as is well known,

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across the past several years, the writings of Ashis Nandy have expressed and endorsed anti- and counter-modern sensibilities, the latter a critical, formative part of modernity for a very long time now. His work has envisioned and articulated modernity (and its associated institutions and imaginings) as signalling an overweening project, constitutive of a colonization of the mind (of the colonized and the colonizer), against which have to be pitted the labours of creative diff erence, psychic decolonization, and resolute recuperations of critical tradition—in the past and the present.6 On the other hand, based mainly on the analytical emphases—yet only partly on the aesthetic sensibilities—of the work of Homi Bhabha, Gyan Prakash has approached modernity as an authoritative apparatus that ever engenders critical alterity. In this reading, the terms of modernity as expressed in the work of science fi nd form and assume substance in the productivity of power of colonialism and nationalism. At the same time, content with having established the presence of alterity, Prakash barely stays any longer with the burden of such diff erence, especially in the space-time of the post-colony.7

Now, even this brief discussion should suggest that a formative heterogeneity has characterized understandings of modernity in scholarship on the subcontinent.8 Th is is as it should be and it is important to register the fact, but my recalling of these arguments also has a somewhat diff erent purpose. It sets the stage for considering the place of key tensions and constitutive contradictions in salient writings concerning modernity in South Asia, especially in work in which critical renderings of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity have emerged intimately tied to each other by being sieved through historical fi lters, ethnographic grids, and (at times) their conjunctions.9 Such tensions and contradictions are productive to ponder. It is in this manner that we better appreciate how critical scholarship on South Asia has queried the very nature of the academic archive, closely bound to aggrandizing representations of a reifi ed Europe/West; interrogated dominant designs of a singular modernity through contending intimations of heterogeneous moderns; and questioned pervasive imperatives of a subject-centred reason, a meaning-legislating rationality, and the telos of progress, each shoring up the other.

Let us begin, then, with aspects of the seminal work of Ranajit Guha. In his writings about the peasant insurgent in nineteenth-century India,

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especially through his criticism of the notion of the ‘pre-political’, Guha renders this historical subject as entirely coeval with, a contemporary and a constituent of, processes of politics under colonialism.10 Th is opens up the possibility of approaching the peasant in colonial India as a subject of modernity, and consequently of understanding modernity itself in newer ways. Conversely, only a few years later, while making a case for ‘dominance without hegemony’ in colonial India, Guha posits an archetype of bourgeois hegemony, where persuasion outweighs coercion in the composition of its dominance.11 Here is the classic prototype of the hegemonic liberal state representing a revolutionary bourgeoisie and democratic politics in modern, metropolitan Britain, against which is contrasted the hapless instance of dominance without hegemony in colonial India. All of this renders the principal historical narrative of the subcontinent under colonial rule as one of failure and lack, assiduously articulated by the bad faith of an autocratic imperial power and the ingrained limits of an ineff ectual indigenous bourgeoisie—each envisioned in the immaculate image of a vigorous democratic culture and a vital liberal politics of the modern West. Such teleological projections of colonial pasts and metropolitan histories, where the incomplete transitions of the former are measured against the fulsome trajectories of the latter so that each shores up the other, put severe stress on eff orts at critical understandings of modernity. Together, it is exactly by attending to such simultaneous discourses in diff erent tongues in Guha’s writings that it becomes possible to query the notion of an implacable breach, an innate contradiction, between a modern democratic regime at home and its endless retrograde omissions in the colony—and to question as well assertions regarding the entirely exceptional nature of ‘colonial governmentality’ and ‘colonial modernity’—in order to track instead the mutual constitution and reciprocal labour of modernity and colonialism in the metropole and the margins.

Here is another example. In his much misunderstood work Th e Nation and its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee actually locates forms of community within regimes of modernity, rather than reifying these as instances of romanticized tradition or as ‘pre-modern remnants that an absent-minded Enlightenment forgot to erase’.12 Th is makes it possible for Chatterjee to construe forceful readings that seek to think through the categories of the state and civil society, while equally allowing him

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to suggest other imaginings of community, nation(s), and modernity. At the same time, such possibilities in Chatterjee’s work are at once upheld and undercut by the sharp separation that he sets up between state and community—entirely occluding thereby the intricate relationships between symbols of state and contours of community—and by his even more tendentious (and implausible) assertion that ‘by its very nature, the idea of community marks a limit to the realm of disciplinary power’.13 Taken together, in the Th e Nation and its Fragments the precise glimmers of newer orientations to modernity and community cannot be separated from postulations of the work regarding the potential of modernity as being realized through the virtue of community, which insinuates pure diff erence, an unsullied alterity.14

Th is brings me to the fi nal work that I would like to discuss in this Epilogue, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe.15 Far from attempting to magisterially summarize or comprehensively analyse this multilayered work, I wish rather to raise a few critical questions regarding its arguments and emphases. Provincializing Europe is shored up by formative tensions.16 Here, I turn to Chakrabarty’s articulations of ‘historicism’ and his related discussion of the place of the ‘hermeneutic’ and the ‘analytical’ in modern knowledge. I do this to open up such formulations, entering their own protocols yet tracking their certainties, hesitations, and possibilities, especially as read upon complementary but distinct registers.

Chakrabarty frames historicism as a pervasive mode of thinking and manner of knowing, which appears intimately implicated in social-scientifi c understandings and wider historical practice. Based on the principle of ‘secular, empty, homogeneous time’, historicism has found acute articulations since the nineteenth century, a period when it ‘made possible the European domination of the world’. Against the terms of historicism, Chakrabarty posits the plurality of life-worlds, the ‘necessarily fragmentary histories of human belonging that never constitute a one or a whole’, which straddle an ever living past and a radically heterogeneous now.

It is possible to suggest that Chakrabarty’s rendering of historicism shares attributes with understandings of the concept that not only abound in the present but reach back to the past (recall, Karl Popper, for instance). But my point concerns the importance of attending to other

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sets of defi nitions and debates involving historicism. Here are to be found discussions of historicism as entailed in the practice of philosophy and history of, for example, Vico, Herder, and Hamman, and acquiring diverse yet acute manifestations across the nineteenth century, the time when the term was fi rst invented. It hardly requires emphasis that such expressions of historicism variously played out: the principle of the individuality (even as they oft en pursued a universal history); critiques of an abstract and aggrandizing reason as well as of ‘the prejudice of philosophers that, in some spiritual way concepts preceded words’; reassertions of the centrality of language and historical experience; and acute inclinations toward hermeneutical (as distinct from analytical) understandings.17 Th is is to say also distinct formations and discrete intimations of what Isaiah Berlin has notably described as the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, ‘the great river of romanticism’ running from the eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries, its waters no less overfl owing into the times and terrains that have come aft er.18 If Chakrabarty admits at all of such formations and intimations of historicism in his own discussion of the concept-entity, he does so only in an all-too hesitant and mainly implied manner.

Th ere are critical overlaps as well as key distinctions between Chakrabarty’s sensibilities and those of this other, modern historicism. Th e overlaps especially concern Chakrabarty’s avowal of hermeneutic propensities and protocols and his interrogation of a purely analytical reason and its overwrought procedures. He fi nds in ‘analytical’ social science the tendency to ‘evacuate the local in favor of some abstract universal’ and to demystify ‘ideology’ in pursuit of a just social order. Against this is contrasted the ‘hermeneutical’ tradition that ‘produces a loving grasp of detail in search of an understanding of the diversity of human life-worlds’, based on the intimate connection of thought with particular places and forms of life and resulting in ‘aff ective histories’. Chakrabarty admits that the distinction between these traditions is somewhat ‘artifi cial’ in as much as ‘most important thinkers’ belong to both at once, but he equally casts the division as ‘a fault line central to modern European social thought’.

In Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty’s analyses ‘turn around’ and ‘take advantage’ of the ‘fault line’ by sustaining a separation between the ‘analytical’ and the ‘hermeneutical’ as critically opposed traditions.19 Indeed, his eff ort is to retain a tension between the two, where the

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‘analytical’ is seen as indispensable to thinking about issues of social justice and the ‘hermeneutic’ is understood as leading toward recognition of the innate heterogeneity and the not-oneness of social worlds. Th ese twin procedures—both based on Chakrabarty’s rethinking of developmental thought—further signal key aspects of the diff erences between his dispositions and those found within the other, modern historicism.

Where am I going with this discussion? To begin with, rather more than terminological quibbles about the word and category of historicism are at stake here. It is not only that Chakrabarty’s apprehensions and critique of historicism can be understood as being internally consistent, including considering the lack of consensus that has from the beginning characterized this much debated and variously articulated notion. It is also that Chakrabarty’s defi nition of historicism has the potential of registering, if only implicitly, that writings and traditions included in the other usage of historicism, outlined above, were clearly marked by developmental assumptions regarding the unfolding of the past and the present.

Th e last point brings up my main proposals. I consider it important to stay with Chakrabarty’s distinction between analytical and hermeneutical traditions. But I fi nd it equally imperative to take leave of those of his procedures that treat these traditions primarily as rather pure heuristic principles and render them as functioning at a remove from each other, only to then bring the two together by retaining a tension between them. For it is by taking these simultaneous steps that we encounter the analytical and the hermeneutical in their precise concreteness and murkiness, their mutual admixtures and interpenetrations.20

On the one hand, as suggested above, writings and traditions profoundly veering toward hermeneutic ways of understanding have oft en shared crucial attributes of the developmental historicism that is the object of Chakrabarty’s critique. On the other hand, varieties of modern history writing and thought—both of a hermeneutic provenance and, of course, of a more analytical, social-scientifi c bent—have no doubt accessed what Chakrabarty speaks of as secular, empty, homogeneous time. Yet, in practice they have equally exceeded such an idea of time, intimating in their narratives (especially when they are read with an eye for the under-thought and the under-said) concrete, heterogeneous, even eschatological times and temporalities. Th is is quite in tune with the experience and construal of time and space within constellations of

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everyday activities. It is in related ways also that tracking the interleaving and admixture of analytical and hermeneutical traditions can reveal the formative ambivalences and constitutive contentions at the core of modern social thought.21

It should hopefully be clear that I am not merely registering empirical exceptions to Chakrabarty’s claims. Nor am I disregarding his reminders concerning the critical limits of aggrandizing historical thought and the decisive plurality of our own worlds. Rather, recognizing that there is much to be learnt from Chakrabarty’s work, my purpose has been to suggest the salience of traversing pathways that Provincializing Europe might point toward and even partially illuminate but routes that the book shies of treading, especially on account of its emphases and procedures. It is in this spirit that I have indicated the importance of opening up the diff erent registers of ‘historicism’, the ‘hermeneutical’, and the ‘analytical’, including their mutual (inter)play and formidable entanglements, as a crucial part of the worlds of modernity and their articulations.

To pose matters in this manner is to point toward possibilities of critical-affi rmative readings, which were discussed in the Introduction and that have sustained the chapters of this book. Such readings help to engender meaningful intellectual exchanges, especially by critically engaging the constitutive presumptions of scholarly endeavours—and those of everyday eff orts—while carefully attending to their critical potentialities. To reiterate, here are to be found wagers that combine the rethinking and acknowledgement of categories and worlds of the past with the querying and affi rmation of concepts and entities in the present. Since they question and affi rm, these dispositions toward—and procedures of—narrative and theory are not merely analytical conceits. Rather, these are orientations—and protocols—that come with their own expectations and anxieties, desires and despairs. All of this is open to revision, but only aft er registering its sensuous, worldly attributes, which cannot escape commitment. Such sensibilities have been integral to Aft er Conversion.

Notes1. Dipankar Gupta, Mistaken Modernity: India between Worlds (New Delhi:

Harper Collins, 2000); Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern

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Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

2. Saurabh Dube, ‘Modernity and its enchantments: An introduction’, in Dube (ed.), Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization (New Delhi: Routledge, 2009).

3. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Hearing voices: Vignettes of early modernity in South Asia, 1400-1750’, Daedalus, 127, 3, (Summer) 1998, 75–104.

4. Sheldon Pollock, ‘India in the vernacular millennium: Literary culture and polity, 1000-1500’, Daedalus, 127, 3, (Summer) 1998, 41–74.

5. Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Modernity and politics in India’, Daedalus, 129, 1, (Winter) 2000, 137–62.

6. For example, Ashis Nandy, Th e Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Ashis Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); Ashis Nandy, Th e Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Ashis Nandy, An Ambiguous Journey to the City: Th e Village and Other Odd Remains of the Self in the Indian Imagination (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). In a related vein, consider, Vinay Lal, Th e History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).

7. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

8. Such heterogeneity is acutely intimated further by the contemporary practice of anthropology/ethnography of the subcontinent that engages issues of modernity in implicit and explicit ways. While I am unable to discuss the corpus in detail here, it is important to point out that such work has especially entailed anthropologies of the state and nation while extending also to a variety of other terrains and practices. See, for example, Th omas Blom Hansen, Th e Saff ron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Brian Keith Axel, Th e Nation’s Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of the Sikh “Diaspora” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of India’s ‘Emergency’ (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003); C. J. Fuller and Véronique Bénéï (eds), Th e Everyday State and Society in Modern India

epilogue: modernity again 201

(New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2000); Th omas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and (somewhat more obliquely yet imaginatively) Lawrence Cohen, No Aging in India: Modernity, Senility, and the Family (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). Similarly, questions of modernity, especially those concerning the terms of a distinctively Indian modernist aesthetics, have been raised in several ways in the practice and discussion of art and cinema in India. Th is work should not be ignored in discussions of modernity within history and anthropology, the humanities and the social sciences. See, for example, Geeta Kapur, When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000); and Gulammohammed Sheikh (ed.), Contemporary Art in Baroda (New Delhi: Tulika, 1997). Concerning anthropological and historical perspectives related to the presence and play of the ‘visual’ as variously part of the colonial and the national, the postcolonial and the modern, see, for instance, Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: Th e Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); William Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: Television, Womanhood and Nation in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000); Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed.), Beyond Appearances?: Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003); and Tapati Guha-Th akurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

9. For example, Partha Chatterjee, Th e Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Th ought and Historical Diff erence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Hansen, Saff ron Wave. Needless to say, such work has built on and departed from the ways in which questions of colonialism and nationalism have occupied a critical place in writings on the history, economy, and society of South Asia for several decades now.

10. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). Such a reading of Guha’s work on

202 after conversion

the insurgent peasant in colonial India is powerfully suggested by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 8–14. However, Chakrabarty does not stay suffi ciently longer here with the tensions in this work of Guha as well as in his other writings.

11. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), chapter 1.

12. Chatterjee, Th e Nation and its Fragments.13. Ibid., pp. 237–38.14. In a related manner, it seems to me, such tensions and their productivity

can be seen as constitutive of several other writings. For example, in his Castes of Mind Nicholas Dirks’ emphases on the historical particularity of caste under colony and nation are upheld and undone by his presupposition that the (post-1857) colonial construal of caste became the (modern) Indian practice of caste. And so also I wonder about the place of the all-too limited articulations of the ‘everyday’—despite the strong claims made on its behalf—in Manu Goswami’s explorations of colonial and nationalist productions of space. Dirks, Castes of Mind; Goswami, Producing India.

15. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.16. See, for example, Jacques Pouchepadass, ‘Pluralizing reason’, History and

Th eory, 41, 3, 2002, 381–91.17. Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to

Herder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 247. I am keeping references to a bare minimum in this discussion.

18. Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 1–24.

19. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p.18.20. Th is means tracking also the wider contours and shift ing confi gurations

of the hermeneutical and the analytical—on empirical and conceptual registers.

21. I take up such tasks in Dube, ‘Anthropology, history, historical anthropology’.

index 203

Africa 30n44, 57–58n4, n5, n6, 59n10, 91n17, 187n2, 190n15

Agarwal, Purushottam 135n1Alekh Dharma and Kumbhipatia

Dharma (see Mahima Dharma)Alekh Prabhu (see Mahima Dharma)alterity (see diff erence)Ambedkar, B. R. 146, 148, 169Amin, Shahid 160Anderson, Benedict 191n18Appadurai, Arjun 187n2, 190n15,

200n8Asad, Talal, 60n15, 189n12Attwood, Bain 161Austin-Broos, Diane 58n6Australia 30n45, 161authority (see power)Axel, Brian Keith 140n64, 200n8

Baba, Biswanath 83, 92n25, 93n46Babri mosque, Ayodhya, destruction

of 184Balakdas 80, 85–86 Balkaldhari Babas 83, 93n46Barnstone, Willis 60n12–13, 63n45Battaglia, Deborah 135n5Bauman, Zygmunt 10, 23n10, 26n21Bayly, Christopher A. 9, 24n17

Berlin, Isaiah 175–76n12, 199, 202n18Berreman, Gerald 90n4Bénéï, Véronique 140n64, 200n8Benjamin, Walter 150, 156n2Béteille, André 118–19, 131, 135n1,

139n55, n58Bhabha, Homi 59n10, 194Bhadra, Gautam 92n22bhajans 47bhakti 72bhandari 80–83, 89Bible (Th e Holy, King James Version),

43, 60n25Bourdieu, Pierre 20, 21n2, 26n23,

27n27, n29, 29n43; on scholastic reason 11, 20, 26n23

Brown, Norman 22n8Buddhas of Bamiyan, destruction of

181, 184Buddhist bhikshus 149Burghart, Richard 90n6, 91n17–18

Calhoun, Craig 26–27n24, 27n29caste 2–4, 44, 45, 46, 49, 65–94,

101, 106, 114–17, 146, 148–55, 202n14; Mahar 146; Mang 149; and Manu 153; and sect 18–19, 44–46, 65–94

INDEX

204 index

catechists (subaltern Indian evangelical workers) 33–63 (also see conversion, translation)

Chakrabarty, Dipesh 159–87, 23n11, 24n16, 25n20, 29n41, 91n20; books of 161–62; Habitations of Modernity of 159, 172–74, 202n10; historicism of 196–97; Provincializing Europe of 29n41, 60n16, 91n20, 159–72, 187n3, 189n10, 195–199, 201n9, 202n15, n19; Rethinking Working-Class History of 159, 162, 169, 171, 174n4; and Subaltern Studies 162–63, 166, 168

Chakravarty, Sukhomoy 119Chand, Mool 98, 100Chandra, Sudhir 128Chatterjee, Partha 160–61; Th e

Nation and its Fragments of 187n3, 191n18, 195–96, 201n9, 202n12–13

Chaube, Dashrath 102, 104Chhattisgarh 34, 39, 43–44, 99;

catechists in 44–45; Christian communities in 44; evangelical encounter in 53, 57n2; German Evangelical Mission Society in 34, 45, 57n3; Satnampanth of 71–75; Indian Christianity in 56 (also see Christianity and colonialism, Kamar, Satnampanth)

Chisholm, J. W. 92n35Christianity and colonialism 33–63

(also see conversion, translation)

Cohen, Lawrence 201n8Cohn, Bernard 138n54, 139n59, 161colonial cultures 35, 37, 40,

57n2, 93n42, 187n2 (also see

Christianity and colonialism, modernity, power)

Comaroff , Jean and John Comaroff , 22–23n8, 25n20, 57n4, 58n5, 187n2, 189n10, 190n15

Conversion 33–63, 64–94 (also see catechists, modernity, power, translation)

Coombe, Rosemary 22n7Cooper, Frederick (and Ann Stoler)

187n2Cornell India Project 120–21, 140n65Coronil, Fernando 22n8, 25n20,

190n15Counter-Enlightenment 175n12, 199Crapanzono, Vincent 190n14

dalit 3–5, 145–56, 171 (also see caste)darshan 87, 167Das, Veena 91n17, 200n8Davis, M. P. 61n35Daya Krishna, 125de Certeau, Michel 38, 60n11, 91n20,

155, 156n6deconstruction 161Dening, Greg 21n2, 161Deshpande, Satish 135n1devadasis 149, 151–54dharma 66, 73, 78, 79, 80diff erence 4, 11, 22n6, 23n13, 29n42,

38–40, 44, 52, 58n5, 69–70, 75, 83, 86, 98, 110, 150, 155, 156, 165, 167–68, 177–91, 193, 194, 196, 198, 201n9 (also see heterogeneity)

di Leonardi, Micaela 139n54Dirks, Nicholas B. 90n4, 139n54,

201n9, 202n14Disciples of Christ 57n3Donham, Donald 190n15

index 205

duality (see opposition)Dube, Dharma 99, 100Dube, Ishita Banerjee 25–26n20,

91–92n21–23, 92n32, 93n47, 138–39n54

Dube, Leela 106, 113–14, 121, 123, 127, 135n1, 136n23, 140n65, n70, 141–42n75; and Sudhish Pachori 140n70, 142n80–84

Dube, Saurabh 21n5, 22n8, 23n9, n12–14, 24n16, 25–26n20, 28n30, n37, 29n42, 57n1–2, 58n5–6, 59n7–8, 60n22, 61n34, n37, 62n38, n43, 90n1–2, 90n4, 91n17, 91n19, 92n24, 93n42, n45, 138–39n54, 135n3, 138n54, 156n8, 187n4, 190n15, 191n17, 200n2, 202n21; history without warranty 23n9, 29n42, 36–38, 47, 57, 59n9

Dube, Shyama Charan 97–144; Director of Madhya Pradesh Uccha Shiksha Anudan Ayog 129; D.N. Majumdar Lectures 130, 143n91; at Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS) 128; Indian Village of 117–19, 126, 137–38n42–53, 139n56; India’s Changing Villages of 122–23, 140n63, n66; invitation from Fürer-Haimendorf 115–16; J. H. Hutton on 112; Th e Kamar of 103–13, 118; Modernization and Development of 130, 143n94–95, 143n101; in Mussoorie 126; and NEFA 120; at NICD 126; project on Shamirpet village 114–16, 119, 123; in Sagar 124, 141n71; at SOAS 120; Verrier Elwin on 112; writings in Hindi 144n103–4, n109

Dumont, Louis 66–70, 90n3, 91n7–16; on Hinduism 67–70; on caste and sect 68–69

During, Simon 22n8Dussel, Enrique 25–26n20

Eaton, Richard 59n7Eley, G. 28n36Elwin, Verrier 102, 103, 107, 108, 109,

111, 112, 120, 137n34enchantment (see modernity)Ernst, Carl 59n7Eschmann, Anncharlott 77, 92n26–31Ethnographic and Folk Culture

Society of UP 107, 108, 109ethnonationalism (see nation/

nationalism)Euro-American evangelist/

missionary 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, 47, 48, 50

Eurocentrism 25n20, 132, 189n9Europe 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 25n20,

147, 159, 163, 164, 170, 171, 174, 179, 188n8, 195, 196; European thought (social and political) 13, 167–72, 174, 175n11, 199 (also see modernity)

evangelism 36–38, 43, 45–47, 81 (also see Christianity and colonialism)

Fabian, Johannes 20, 25n20, 30n44, 60n17, 138n54

Ferguson, James 190n15Firth, Raymond 116–17Fuller, C. J. 140n64, 200n8Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von

107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 137n36

Gallop, Jane 21n2–n3Gandhi, Feroze 108

206 index

Gandhi, Ramchandra, 128Geertz, Cliff ord 139n59gender 58n6, 63n47, 82, 85, 92n24,

136n23, 148, 150–55 German Evangelical Mission Society

45; in Chhattisgarh 57n3; Raipur, training school of 45

Ghasias 81, 85Giddens, Anthony 29n39, 189n9Gilroy, Paul 187n2, 190n15Gond, Kondu 42Goswami, Manu 203n9, 204n14Grosrichard, Alain 189n11Guha, Ramchandra 137n34Guha, Ranajit 162, 163, 187n3, 194–

95; Dominance without Hegemony of 195, 202n11; Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India of 195, 201n10

Guha-Th akurta, Tapati 203n8Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 16–17,

29n38, n40, 188–89n8–9Gumperz, John 121, 140n65Gupta, Akhil 140n64, 187n2, 202n8Gupta, Dipankar 90n4, 201n1Gupta, Raghuraj 121guru purnima 76

Habermas, Jürgen 9–15, 23n10, 25n19, 26n22, 27n27, 28n31–33, 189n9; and communicative action 10; and counter-discourse of modernity 10–18; and idealized history 11

Hansen, Th omas Blom 140n64, 202–3n8, 203n9, 191n18

Hardiman, David 162Harootunian, Harry 190n15Hasan, Nurul 128Healy, Chris 163

Heidegger, Martin 159, 164–65, 169, 171, 173, 175n6

Herzfeld, Michael 135n1, 135n5heterogeneity 167–68, 172, 173, 194,

198, 200n8 (also see diff erence) Hindu-Muslim riots 189n3history (see Chakrabarty, diff erence,

Habermas, modernity, nation/nationalism, power, time)

Hudson, Dennis 59n7Hunt, Nancy Rose 59n10, 187n2Hutton, J. H. 112, 137n38hybridity 38, 59n10

identity 71, 84–86, 178–91, 188n5 (also see diff erence)

Inden, Ronald 139n54Islam 178–85, 189n12

jati (see caste)Jung, Nawab Ali Yavar 113

Kabirpanth 74, 81, 85, 86, 91n17, 93n36

Kamars 101–11, 118Kapur, Geeta 147, 156n1, 201n8Kaviraj, Sudipta 128, 195, 200n5Kelley, Donald R. 29n41, 177–78n12,

202n17Kern, Stephen 135n3Kewat, Polu 104Khan, Ziauddin 102kinship 34, 75, 77, 78, 92n24, 115,

136n23, 141n75Koselleck, Reinhart 191n19Kramer, Fritz 59n10Kulke, Hermann 91n21

Lal, Vinay 200n6Landau, Paul 58n6

index 207

Lander, Edgardo 26n20, 138–39n54Lardinois, Roland 91n17Larson, Pier M. 58n6, 60n17LiPuma, Edward 22n8Lodge, David 21n2Lohr, Oscar (Reverend of German

Evangelical Mission) 34Lorenzen, David 91n17, 135n1Lovejoy, Arthur O. 97, 135n3Lutz, Catherine 25n20

MacIntyre, Alasdair 190–91n16Madan, T. N. 123, 125, 127, 135n1,

136n27, 140n67, 143n98mahant 80, 82mahaprasad 79Mahar, Michael 121Mahima Dharma of Orissa 71–73,

75–81, 83–85, 91n21, 92n25–26, n32; alms and property 71–73; aran-darsan 76; bhaktas 75–77, 83–85; Bhima Bhoi and 79; boundaries 83–90; caste and sect 80; dharma 79; initiation of lay devotees 75; rules for initiation of gruhi bhaktas (lay devotees) 75–77, 83–85; salvation in kali yuga 77; samaj 76; sanyasi 76, 77, 79, 83, 85; sexuality 76

Mahima Swami 71–73Majumdar, D. N. 107–8, 125, 140n65Makdisi, Ussama 58n5Malik, S. C. 128Mandelbaum, David G. 139n56Mankekar, Purnima 203n8marriage 44, 79, 81, 82, 88, 89, 93n42,

112, 137n39; Brahma Bibaha 83–85 (also see Mahima Dharma)

Marriott, McKim 122–23, 135n1, 138n52, 139n54, 140n66

Mathur, Chandana 135n1Mayaram, Shail 187n3Mazzarella, William 201n8McCutheon, Russell 189n12McGowan, John 23n13, 156n5;

dystopic totalities 155; unrecuperated particulars 156, 156n7

McLeod, W. H. 91n17Mehta, Uday 189n10Mehtars (sweepers) 81Mennonites (American Mennonites;

the General Conference Mennonites) 57n3

Methodists 57n3Mexico 145–46, 154, 159, 181, 184Meyer, Birgit 22n8, 58n6, 59n10Michael, R. Blake 90n5Mignolo, Walter 25–26n20, 58n5,

60n17, 187n3Minturn, Leigh 121, and John

Hitchcock 140n65Miri, Mrinal 128Mitchell, Timothy 27n28Mitchell, W. J. T. 28n34modernity 5–6, 8–18, 29n39,

194–204 (also see colonial cultures, postcolonial, power); enchantments of 6, 22n8, 23n9, 24n16, 26n20, 27n24, 28n30, n36, 156n3, n8, 174n3, 179, 181, 182, 184, 186n9, n10, 195, 202n2; history and 159–76; modernization 9, 16, 29n39, 123, 125–26, 130–32, 134, 194; political 165, 167–78, 173; subjects of 183, 194; and Taliban 178–80 (also see nation/nationalism)

Morris, Meaghan 161Muecke, Stephen 161

208 index

Muft i, Aamir 63n47Mukerjee, Radhakamal 107Mukerjee, D. P. 107Mukherjee, Prabhati 128

Nand, M. P. 56–57Nanda, Meera 201–2n1Nandy, Ashis 161, 166, 168, 172–73,

187n3, 202n6; on modernity 195–96

Naregal, Veena 24n18, 28n36nation/nationalism 7, 12, 23n9,

24n18, 25n20, 26n24, 28n36, 51–53, 70, 150, 152–53, 167, 170, 174, 177–79, 182–86, 191n18, 195–96, 197–98, 202–3n8, 203n9; anti-colonial 162n41, 194; S.C. Dube and 97–144

Ong, Aihwa 190n15Opler, Morris E. 117, 120–21, 138n48,

n50oppositions 16, 24n16, 29n39, 66, 68,

132, 155, 165, 166, 179, 184, 185, 186, 189n9 (also see modernity)

Orlove, Ben 135n5Owen, Alex 22n8

Pandey, Gyanendra 160, 187n3Paul, M. M. 61n29Peel, J.D.Y. 58n4, 58n6Peirano, Mariza G. S. 135n4Pels, Peter 22n8Peterson, Derek 58n6, 60n17Pinney, Christopher 203n8Piot, Charles 190n15Pollock, Sheldon 195, 202n4postcolonial 1, 7, 9, 23n10, n11,

25n20, 58n5, 73, 140n64, 156n4, 161, 164, 165, 169, 173, 187n3,

188n5, 190n15, 191n18, 194, 203n8 (also see modernity)

postmodern ix, 1, 22n7, 23n10, n13, 25n18, 156n5, n7, 168, 201n1

Pouchepadass, Jacques 204n16Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 30n45power 1–31 (also see colonial

cultures, conversion, modernity); of argument 10–12 (also see Habermas); and caste 2, 64–94; and everyday 6, 36

Prakash, Gyan 59n10, 91–92n22, 190n15, 196, 202n7

Protestant 41, 43, 59n7; Reformation 180

purohit and puja 74

Quigley, Declan 90n4Quit India Movement 102 (also see

Swadeshi movement)

Rabinow, Paul 21n2, 23n11Rafael, Vicente 40–42, 58n5–6,

60n17–21, 63n46Raheja, Gloria Goodwin 90n4Ramaswamy, Sumathi 203n8ramat 80, 82Rao, Anupama 135n1Rao, R. Prakash 121Rawats 81Redfi eld, Peter 190n15Reed-Danahay, Deborah 135n5religion (see Christianity and

colonialism, conversion, vernacular Christianity)

Reynolds, Henry 161Ricouer, Paul 177n6Robinson, Rowena 59n7Rofel, Lisa 190n15Rorty, Richard 28n34; on stories 14

index 209

Rosaldo, Renato 21n2

Saberwal, Satish 128sacred thread 85–86Said, Edward 189n11Sakai, Naoki 60n16Samay aur Sanskriti 133, 144n104saptamruta 84Saran, A.K. 128Saraswati, Baidyanath 128Sarkar, Sumit 25n18, 62n41, 90n5,

136n9Sarkar, Tanika 24n18sathidar 80Satnami 73–75, annual puja 87;

community 92n24; pilgrimage 85–88, 91n6

Satnampanth 71–75, 80–83, 86; boundaries of 83–89; ceremonies and feasts 80; deities of 87–88; festivals 88; by Ghasidas 73–74, 80, 85; guru in 81–82, 86; interaction with barber, washerman 82; kanthi 85; Kabirpanth 81; life cycle rituals 80, 88–89; mahant 80; mahants, and bhandaris 82; of Chhattisgarh 71–75; ramat 80, 82; sathidar and bhandari 80; settlement of jati (caste) aff airs 82

Savindra (‘Savi’) Sawarkar 145–56Schnepel, Burkhard 91n21Scott, David 21n1, 58n5, 156n4Scott, S. J. 61n34secularism/secularization 28n30, 51,

58n5, 143n89, 149, 180–81, 185, 190n14, 191n19, 198, 200 (also see time)

Seybold, Th eodore 61n29–31Sharma, K. N. 128, 142n80

Sheikh Gulammohammed 156n1, 203n8

Silverberg, James 119, 139n60Singh, Namwar 134Singh, Tuljaram 121Singh, Yogendra 135n1, 138n51,

143n97Skaria, Ajay 162Srinivas, M. N. 116, 123, 139n54,

143n98 Steiner, George 39, 60n14Steinmetz, George 22n7Stocking, Jr., George 135n4Stoler, Ann 58n5Stoller, Paul 59n10Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 24n17, 195,

200n3Sundar, Nandini 135n1Swadeshi movement 51–52, 62n41

Taliban 177–91Tambiah, Stanley J. 135n4Tarlo, Emma 202n8Taussig, Michael 22–23n8, 187n2,

189n10, 190n15Telis 81temporality (see time)Th aru, Susie 91–92n22Th omas, Nicholas 58n5Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 99time 2, 11, 17–18, 26n24, 48, 51, 65,

73, 87, 101, 118, 138n54, 163, 165, 171, 180, 186, 196, 198–201 (also see modernity)

translation 38–44, 55–57 (also see christianity and colonialism, conversion, vernacularization)

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 136–37n28, 138n54, 189n10

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt 187n2

210 index

van der Veer, Peter 90–91n6, 91n17, 189n13, 201n9

varna 153 (also see caste)vernacularization 40–41vernacular Christianity 33–63vernacular translation (see

translation)Vincent, Joan 135n4Visvanathan, Susan 59n7Voloshinov, V. N. 91n20von Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph

107, 111, 113

Wakankar, Milind 156n3Watson, Stephen 191n16White, Geoff rey 58n6White, Luise 187n2White, Stephen K. 23n13, 27n27,

28n31–33, 156n5; on ontological turn in theory 155

Williams, Brackette 187n2Wolfe, Patrick 161

zamindar/zamindari 99–100, 104, 106