CHINA, INDIA AND ALTERNATIVE ASIAN MODERNITIES

CHINA, INDIA AND ALTERNATIVE ASIAN MODERNITIES

‘This rich collection of essays pluralizes our understandings of modernity by offering new conceptual frameworks and empirically grounded analyses of alternative modernities. The contributions, all by well-known scholars, show how differently the world was experienced and constructed across time and space in Asia.’

— Anand Yang, Professor and Chair, Department of History, University of Washington, author of

Bazaar India: Markets, Society, and the Colonial State in Bihar (U of California

Press, 1999) and co-editor of a multi-volume New Oxford World History series

published by Oxford University Press

‘This is an excellent collection of essays on India, China, and beyond by some of the outstanding scholars in the field. The book offers insights into a wide range of topics, from issues of modernity to circulatory history. It also presents innovative methodologies to study and understand Asia through comparative and connected frameworks. The book will appeal not only to historians and anthropologists, but also to those interested in the religious, philosophical as well as the political traditions of Asia.’

— Tansen Sen, Director of the Center for Global Asia and Professor of History at NYU

Shanghai and Global Network Professor at NYU, author of Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of India–China Relations,

600–1400 (U of Hawai’i Press, 2003); India, China, and the World: A Connected History

(Rowman & Littlefield, 2017)

‘From ‘connected’ to ‘circulatory’ and ‘competitive’ histories, this volume brings together a stellar cast of scholars, from across a range of disciplines, to provide alternative and vernacular accounts of modernity in China, India and Southeast Asia. It provides a platform for conversations between ‘alternative’ modernities as south–south dialogues, making it unnecessary for these conversations to be always mediated through the west. It is a timely venture and an ever more important one.’

— Gurminder K. Bhambra, Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies,

University of Sussex, author of Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the

Sociological Imagination (Palgrave, 2007); Connected Sociologies (Bloomsbury 2014)

‘It is now abundantly clear that some of the deepest problems engendered by capitalist modernity cannot be solved only by the social, political and ethical categories associated with the modern west. Yet, while much scholarly energy and effort have been expended on a small but dominant number of western traditions, little systematic research has been done to excavate the conceptual treasures of other non- western forms of life. Only when the resources of the critical traditions of India, Africa, China, Persia, Arab, and the Latin American subcontinent are imaginatively unearthed will we make headway towards addressing the pressing issues of our times and transform the social and political imaginaries of our crisis-ridden societies. This illuminating collection of essays on Indian and Chinese modernity will make an invaluable contribution towards that endeavor and is bound to become an indispensable guide to alternative modernities.’

— Rajeev Bhargava, Professor, CSDS, Delhi, author of The Promise of India’s Secular

Democracy (OUP, 2010) and Secular States and Religious Diversity (UBC Press,

Vancouver, 2013)

The conception of modernity as a radical rupture from the past runs parallel to the conception of Europe as the primary locus of global history. The chapters in this volume contest the temporal and spatial divisions – between past and present, modernity and tradition, and Europe’s progress and Asia’s stasis – which the conventional narrative

of modernity creates. Drawing on early modern Chinese and Indian history and culture instead, the authors of the book explore the provenance of modernity beyond the west to see it in a transcultural and pluralistic light.

The central argument of this volume is that modernity does not have a singular core or essence – a causal center. Its key features need to be disaggregated and new configurations and combinations imagined. By studying the Bhakti movement, Confucian democracy and the maritime and agrarian economies of China and India, this book enlarges the terms of debate and revisits devalued terms and concepts like tradition, religion, authority and the rural as resources for modernity.

This book will be of great interest to researchers and academicians working in the areas of history, sociology, cultural studies, literature, geopolitics, South Asian and East Asian studies.

Sanjay Kumar is Professor of English at Banaras Hindu University. He is engaged in a comparative study of South Asian vernacular and folk literary and cultural traditions as sites of articulation of alternative modernities.

Satya P. Mohanty is Professor of English at Cornell University. He has written and edited books on literary theory, minority studies and colonial and postcolonial studies.

Archana Kumar is Professor of English at Banaras Hindu University. She is currently engaged in research on women’s folk culture and has done extensive fieldwork in the Banaras region to collect women’s folksongs.

Raj Kumar is Professor of Hindi at Banaras Hindu University. He has extensively published research articles in reputed Hindi journals and is currently involved in a comprehensive project of retrieving, editing and interpreting rare vernacular texts and manuscripts of the early modern period.

http://taylorandfrancis.com

CHINA, INDIA AND ALTERNATIVE ASIAN

MODERNITIES

Edited by Sanjay Kumar, Satya P. Mohanty,

Archana Kumar and Raj Kumar

First published 2019by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Sanjay Kumar, Satya P. Mohanty, Archana Kumar and Raj Kumar; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Sanjay Kumar, Satya P. Mohanty, Archana Kumar and Raj Kumar to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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FORKAMAL SHEEL

HISTORIAN, FRIEND AND MENTOR

ix

Notes on contributors xiPreface and acknowledgments xvi

Alternative Asian modernities: an introduction xviiiSANJAY KUMAR, SATYA P. MOHANTY, ARCHANA KUMAR

AND RAJ KUMAR

PART ITranscultural Asian modernities 1

1 European self-making and India’s alternative modernities 3ARJUN APPADURAI

2 Circulatory and competitive histories 18PRASENJIT DUARA

3 Connected histories: the Asian roots of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions 42ARUN BALA

4 Dominant and counter-imaginaries: analyzing India’s modernities 60MARTIN FUCHS

CONTENTS

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C O N T E N T S

PART IIChina and Southeast Asia 79

5 A perspective on Confucian democracy in Cultural China 81TU WEIMING

6 Chinese maritime economy: historical globalizing forces 103MAYFAIR YANG

7 Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century: early modern or what? 121GEOFF WADE

PART IIIIndia 143

8 Alternative modernities: the Odia Lakshmi Purana as radical pedagogy 145SATYA P. MOHANTY

9 Vernacular modernity and the public sphere of bhakti 168PURUSHOTTAM AGRAWAL

10 Before the great divergence: the early modern South Asian agrarian economy in a global perspective 185RAJAT DATTA

11 Revisiting the early modern merchant: caste, power and the politics of transition 203LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN

12 Modernity as renewal mechanism: alternative(s) to modernity in India 220AVADHESH KUMAR SINGH

Index 230

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Purushottam Agrawal, formerly Professor at the Centre for Indian Languages, Jawaharlal Nehru University, is currently associated with the ITM University at Gwalior. He has researched and written extensively on the Bhakti movement and its social context (espe-cially on Kabir), and vernacular modernity. His key publications include Sanskriti: Varchaswa Aur Pratirodh (1995); Teesra Rukh (1996); Vichaar Ka Ananta (2000); Nij Brahma Vichar: Dharma Samaj Aur Dharmetar Adhyatma (2004); Kabir: Sakhi Aur Sabad (2007); Akath Kahani Prem Ki: Kabir Ki Kavita Aur Unka Samay (2009); and Hindi Sarai: Astrakhan via Yerevan (2012). More recently he has turned to fiction writing; his maiden novel, Naco-hus (2016), has been very well received by Hindi readers and critics.

Arjun Appadurai is an anthropologist and Professor of Media, Cul-ture and Communication at New York University, where he is also Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. He is presently spending a term (2016–2018) as Visiting Professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University, Berlin. He has authored a number of seminal books within the field of globali-zation studies, such as Modernity at Large (1996); Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006); and The Future as a Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (2013). His latest book is Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (2015), which offers an unconven-tional approach to the economic collapse of 2008.

Arun Bala is the author of The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science (2006) and Complementarity Beyond Physics: Neils Bohr’s Parallels (2017). He also edited Asia, Europe and the Emergence of Modern Science (2012) and co-edited The Bright

CONTRIBUTORS

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C O N T R I B U T O R S

Dark Ages: Comparative and Connective Perspectives (2016). He is currently a partner in the international collaborative project. The Cosmopolitan and the Local in Science and Nature, creating an east–west partnership between universities in India, Canada and Singapore.

Rajat Datta is Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawahar-lal Nehru University, New Delhi. He researches, teaches and writes on the economy of early modern India, with special reference to the eighteenth century. He is also an editor of the Medieval History Journal and serves on the editorial board of the Worlds of the East India Company, a series of monographs published by Boydell and Brewer.

Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University and Director of the Global Asia Initiative. He was Pro-fessor of History at the University of Chicago (1991–2008) and Raffles Professor and Director of Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (2008–2015). He is the author of Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (1988; Joseph R. Levenson Prize of the Association of Asian Studies and John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Associa-tion); Rescuing History From the Nation (1995); Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (2003); and, most recently, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (2014). His work has been widely trans-lated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and many European languages.

Martin Fuchs holds the Professorship for Indian Religious History at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany. Trained in both anthropology and sociology, he has taught at universities in Germany, Switzerland, Hungary and New Zealand. His research interests include cultural and social theory, urban anthropology, social movements, strug-gles for recognition, normative transformations and religious indi-vidualization; his regional focus is on India. He has most recently co-edited Religious Individualization, a special issue of Religion, 45 (3), 2015.

Archana Kumar is Professor of English at Banaras Hindu University. She is currently engaged in research on women’s folk culture and has done extensive fieldwork in Banaras region to collect women’s folk-songs. She is writing a book on Voices from the Margins: Women and Folksongs. She is also working on cultural practices of Indian

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indentured diaspora. She has done fieldwork among descendants of indentured migrants in Mauritius and has written a monograph on Birth Songs of Mauritius and India along with an audio CD of songs.

Raj Kumar is Professor of Hindi at Banaras Hindu University. His areas of interest are literary theory and criticism, postcolonial stud-ies and early modern vernacular literary cultures. He has exten-sively published research articles in reputed Hindi journals. He is currently involved in a comprehensive project of retrieving, editing and interpreting rare vernacular texts and manuscripts of the early modern period.

Sanjay Kumar is Professor of English at Banaras Hindu University. He is engaged in a comparative study of South Asian vernacular and folk literary and cultural traditions as sites of articulation of alternative modernities. He is currently working on a book pro-ject on the oral epics of Bharthari and Gopichand, and co-editing a volume of essays on a sixteenth-century Odiya vernacular text, Lakshmi Purana and a related Bhojpuri folk song based on the story of Lakshmi Purana.

Satya P. Mohanty is Professor of English at Cornell University. He has written and edited books on literary theory, minority studies, and colonial and postcolonial studies. His book, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (1997), argues for a ‘postpositivist realist’ theory of cul-ture and literature and introduces a new theory of social identity, especially minority identity. He is one of the founders of the Future of Minority Studies (FMS) Research Project and the founding direc-tor of the FMS Summer Institute (established 2005). Mohanty has (co-)edited four volumes, including The Future of Diversity (2010) and Colonialism, Modernity and Literature (2011), and is com-pleting a book titled Thinking Across Cultures, forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Avadhesh Kumar Singh is Vice Chancellor of Auro University at Surat. He has been Professor and Director of the School of Translation Studies and Training, Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi. His key publications include Indian Knowledge Systems, 2 Vols. (with Kapil Kapoor) (2005); Ramayana Through Ages (2007); Voices of Woman: Gargi to Gangasati (2008); Interventions: Critical and Literary Discourses (2009); Towards Interdisciplinarity: (the) University, Social Sciences and Humanities (2010); Revisiting

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Literature, Criticism and Aesthetics in India (2012); Samkalin Alochana Vimarsh (2016); Sanskrit Alochana ki Bhoomika (2017); and Valmiki’s Ramayana: Voices and Visions (2017). He is also Gen-eral Editor of the Critical Discourses in South Asia series, Routledge.

Lakshmi Subramanian is Professor of History at the Centre for Stud-ies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. Her main research areas are the Indian diaspora in the Indian Ocean and transnational networks; the economic and cultural history of India; and histories of music and performance. She is the author of The Sovereign and the Pirate Ordering Maritime Subjects in India’s Western Littoral (2016); Three Merchants of Bombay (2012); A History of India 1707–1857 (2010); Veena Dhanammal: The Making of a Legend (2009); Ports, Towns and Cities: A Historical Tour of the Indian Littoral (2008); New Mansions for Music Performance, Pedagogy and Criticism (2008); and From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Acad-emy: A Social History of Music in South India (2006).

Geoff Wade is a Canberra-based historian of Asian connections and interactions. His key publications include Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu: An Open Access Resource (2005; http://epress.nus.edu.sg/msl/); China and Southeast Asia, 6 Vols. (2009); Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century: The China Factor (ed. with Sun Lai-chen) (2010); Anthony Reid and the Study of the Southeast Asian Past (ed. with Li Tana) (2012); and Asian Expansions: The Histori-cal Experiences of Polity Expansion in Asia (2015).

Tu Weiming is Professor Emeritus at Harvard University and the Chair Professor of Humanities and the Director of Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University, Beijing, China. He received his PhD from Harvard University and has held positions at Prince-ton University, UC Berkeley and Harvard University. As a prom-inent philosopher, he was elected as the Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Executive Member of the Federation of International Philosophical Societies and Titular Member and Vice-Chairman of the International Institute of Philosophy.

Mayfair Yang is Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Stud-ies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a cultural anthropologist of Chinese religions in the context of modernity, post-coloniality and the modern state. She is the author of Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (1994; American Ethnological Society Prize) and Re-enchanting

http://epress.nus.edu.sg

http://epress.nus.edu.sg

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Modernity: Ritual Economy & Indigenous Civil Society in Wen-zhou, China (forthcoming). She has also edited Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China (1999) and Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation (2008).

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The chapters in this volume mainly focus on the early modern period of Chinese and Indian histories, during which the societies of these regions, contrary to a general perception of their having become stagnant and decadent, witnessed considerable transformation and change in social, political and economic spheres that led to the emergence of new values and institutions. Our exclusive preoccupation with western modernity has made us oblivious to these changes and to the possibilities for the emer-gence of discourse of indigenous modernities being articulated through these changes. The chapters seek to identify and analyze those features of early modernity in Asian societies and how these features encapsulated the possibilities of the articulation of alternative forms of modernity.

The volume not only examines the notion of modernity empirically in two different Asian contexts (China and India) but also explores it on a theoretical plane, thus significantly expanding and enlarging the terms of debate. It focuses on the inclusionary dynamics of moder-nity to reveal the patterns of assimilation and cross-fertilization of ideas, institutions and practices which characterize Eurasia of the early modern period. Such a move both helps to shift our gaze from the idea of European exceptionalism and the ‘me too’ approach, and opens up possibilities for new conceptualizations of a non-capitalist modernity based on a non-instrumental conception of nature, and even of rationality itself. Further, in considering modernity a shared and transcultural phenomenon, it goes beyond mere comparison to explore and establish connections and linkages in terms of how changes in and development of institutions and practices in one part affected and contributed to changes and developments in other parts of the world. And, more importantly, this volume brings India closer to the center of the discussion on modernities.

These chapters were first presented at two conferences – Multiple Trajectories of Early Asian Modernities and Transcultural Asian

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

P R E F A C E A N D A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

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Modernities – hosted by the Inter-Cultural Studies Center at Banaras Hindu University in December 2011 and 2012. One of our most pleasant tasks as editors is to gratefully acknowledge the varied and manifold debts that we have accumulated in organizing the conferences and putting together this volume. Our first debt of gratitude is to all the scholars who participated in the conferences and contributed richly to our discussion and debate. We take this opportunity to thank them all: J. N. Mohanty, Velcheru Narayana Rao, Ashis Nandy, Namwar Singh, Ashok Vajpeyi, Vasudha Dalmia, Harbans Mukhia, John Hawley, William Pinch, Claude Alvares, C. K. Raju, Prathama Banerjee, Brij Tankha, Makarand Paranjape, A. Raghuramaraju, Rakshanda Jalil, Ranjana Mukhopadyaya and Raka Ray. It is with their generous support and encouragement that we have made the conference on alternative modernities an annual event. Special thanks are due to all the contributors who went through the arduous task of revising their papers for publication. We are thankful to Cambridge University Press and Johns Hopkins University Press for granting us permission to publish revised versions of Prasenjit Duara’s and Satya P. Mohanty’s essays. We also thank Verso for granting permission to use part of Arjun Appadurai’s previously published material in the essay that he wrote for us.

We must make a special mention of Kamal Sheel, our friend, mentor and historian and the then-Dean of the Arts Faculty of Banaras Hindu University, who has been the guiding force behind this endeavor. In fact, his presence looms large over this volume, and we dedicate it to him.

Sudhir Chandra has been a patient listener and interlocutor. He was kind enough to go through many drafts of the Introduction as well as many of the chapters and offered insightful comments and suggestions for improving clarity, although we have had our share of disagreements. Without his help, this volume would not have seen the light of day.

We must thank Shashank Sinha of Routledge for securing quick approvals and expediting the publication process of an already much-delayed project. We are grateful to Antara Ray Chaudhary, our editor at Routledge, for working through the manuscript, offering many valu-able suggestions for its improvement and, finally, overseeing it through the complex publication process with patience and understanding. We also thank Makenzi Crouch for her meticulous copyediting and typesetting.

SKSPM

AKRK

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Historians approach the past from the perspective of the present, and when the present changes, they adjust their historical lens. The categories of the social sciences were developed – and most histories written – to account for the rise of the west. The rise of the non-west after decolonization in the middle of the twentieth century, and more specifically the rise of Asia, may require us to revisit these categories and histories.

This interdisciplinary volume by a group of international scholars challenges the dominant understanding of modernity. It engages with Asian (Chinese and Indian in particular) modernities with the hope that ‘at some point in the future when different sites in Asia become reference points to each other and different intellectual circles begin to interact, new and alternative modes of knowledge production might be able to emerge from this experiment’ (Chen and Chua 2007: 4–5). But more than the shift in geopolitical relations and the need to account for it, what has prompted us to engage in this exercise is the need to address the crises produced by the current phase of global capital-ist modernity. Modernity, in its unending pursuit of material growth through the rational mastery of nature, has led to exploitation of the earth beyond its carrying capacity. Climate change and global warm-ing now pose the threat of extinction to humans and other species. Clearly, the capitalist mode of development, together with its present patterns of production and consumption, is not sustainable. In order to imagine a more just and sustainable future, it is time that we looked at the possibilities of conceiving a non-capitalist modernity based on a

ALTERNATIVE ASIAN MODERNITIES:

AN INTRODUCTION

Sanjay Kumar, Satya P. Mohanty, Archana Kumar and Raj Kumar

A N I N T R O D U C T I O N

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non-instrumental conception of nature, and even of rationality itself. The present volume, in seeking to explore and examine the traditions of China and India as alternative sources of modernity, sees itself as a step in that direction.

An assumption shared by the editors of this volume is that moder-nity, which has popularized such cherished values as social equality and the inherent dignity of individual human beings, is not tied exclusively to the capitalist mode of production. As a concept, modernity does not have a singular core or essence, a causal center. Modernity’s many key features, we propose, need to be disaggregated and new configurations and combinations imagined. This requires both historical and theoreti-cal work as well as a revivification of the intellectual imagination.

Modernity: the conventional narrative

The conventional narrative of modernity has largely been the narrative of the ascendancy of the west to a position of global dominance in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Much of this narrative has been cast in the form of the west versus the rest, and it is always premised on the following question: why was this breakthrough – namely the passage to capitalist industrialized society and other related develop-ments in social and political realms – achieved only by Europe and not others? In seeking to account for this phenomenon, it posits the thesis of Europe’s uniqueness and tells the tale of European superior-ity. Europe becomes the active agent as well as the locus of history: it claimed not only to have discovered the rest of the world (through the great voyages of exploration and discovery) but also to have drawn the world into history. Modernization, in this narrative, becomes synony-mous with westernization, and the program of modernity becomes the program of diffusion of European modernity to the rest of the world.

Modernity, then, comes to be associated with a set of features that are proclaimed to be normative – the capitalist mode of production, a liberal market economy, the centralized bureaucratic nation–state, individualism, the sovereignty of reason, a scientific and secular out-look, historical consciousness, civil society, the public sphere and forms of republicanism and democracy. This phenomenon of modernity is considered not only ‘uniquely’ European but also altogether new, set-ting Europe off from both the rest of the world and its own past. Thus, this narrative introduces not only a temporal division, carving up his-tory into different epochs (ancient, medieval and modern), but also a spatial one between Europe/the west and non-Europe/the rest of the world. It creates a polarity between tradition and modernity in which

S A N J AY K U M A R E T A L .

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tradition has come to be associated with all that is primitive, unchang-ing and static, and modernity with change, dynamism and progress.

One dominant strain in this narrative, of both the Marxist and Weberian kinds, has been that modernity is a single, homogenous pro-cess or a single unified package comprising various sub-processes; and its rise is attributed to a single causal principle – the capitalist mode of production in the case of Marx and a more abstract principle of rationality of the world in the case of Weber. Further, it predicts the convergence of all societies into a uniform modernity of the European type. Given the universalist claims of modernity, it is assumed that as this modernity spreads from Europe to other societies, the latter – which are made to discard their archaic and pre-modern institutions, practices, beliefs and values – will come to resemble modern European societies. This dominant strand of thought has spawned numerous versions of this narrative, but all are variations on the same general theme.1

This discourse of modernity is similar to the Orientalist or mis-sion civilisatrice discourse. These discourses construct a whole host of conceptual categories based on the binaries between plenitude and lack, presence and absence. Thus, Asia is constructed as the other of Europe, as being radically different from Europe, and this difference is translated and read as a disability. Asia is portrayed as a moribund continent characterized by the Asiatic mode of produc-tion or oriental despotism that kept it backward and stagnant. One just needs to recall here the famous observation Marx made regard-ing India in 1853, that it ‘has remained unaltered since remotest antiquity’. What Marx said about India was symptomatic of the rest of the world, except Europe. But while the difference with Europe was highlighted (a whole body of works was undertaken to pro-duce knowledge of the Orient), differences within the non-Euro-pean world were considered to be inconsequential or not significant enough to merit any attention. Thus, both Europe/the west and non-Europe/Asia (and together with Asia, the rest of the world) were respectively reified and hypostatized as homogenous and coherent entities.

These discourses are overlapping and often informed by similar assumptions; only the rhetoric changes. The classical ‘modernization theory’ (which, in fact, comprised a number of related theories) of the 1950s and 1960s, as the narrative of modernity came to be called in the American social sciences (with translation of Weber’s ideas into American sociology by scholars like Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, Reinhard Bendix, Hans Gerth, C. Wright Mills and W. W. Rostow),


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is only the latest version of the earlier discourses, and it corresponds to the postcolonial moment just as the earlier discourses corresponded to the colonial moment. While the earlier discourses promised salva-tion first by conversion to Christianity and later by the civilizing mis-sion, the modernization discourse promised salvation by development (Mignolo 2011).

Modernization theory gains academic currency around the same time when the European colonial empire is dissolving; the center of power shifts from Western Europe to the United States; and there is an ensuing Cold War rivalry between the First World, led by the USA, and the Communist bloc, led by the USSR, over the domination of the newly emergent independent nations of Africa and Asia (now rechris-tened as the Third World). In this rivalry, the claim of the superiority of the American and Western European model of capitalist democracy is asserted over the regulated autocratic socialist model of East Euro-pean Communism.2

It is important to recognize, however, that modernity in the west was not uniform. There were substantial differences within the west-ern societies in their paths to modernity. Referring to North America and Western Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bjorn Wittrock argues that ‘it is simply not true that all these countries have roughly similar types of economic and political institutions in this his-torical period’ (2000: 33). He points out how most of the European countries not only had an interventionist, state-oriented economic order as opposed to liberal market economy and free trade, but also a civil society that acted in concert with and aid of the state rather than in opposition to or independent of it.

The antinomies of modernity?

What Wittrock refers to as deep differences within western moder-nity are called ‘antinomies’ or ‘irreducible dilemmas of modernity’ by Shmuel Eisenstadt (2000). Eisenstadt points out various kinds of ten-sion within modernity, conflicts between different visions of moder-nity and how they have played out differently in the western context: for example, tension between freedom and control; between reason and emotion; between equality and liberty; between various forms of liberalisms and republicanisms; between the discrete self-interests of individuals or groups and the common good; between state control or intervention and free market economy. Were Jacobinism, National Socialism and fascism not just as much products of modernity as was electoral democracy? Were Montesquieu and Rousseau not convinced


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that excessive emphasis on economic growth is detrimental to the democratic spirit? And what about Weber himself and his apprehen-sion about the ‘iron cage’ (‘stahlhartes Gehäuse’) (2001: 123) – that bureaucratization of society restricts and limits human freedom and potential?

Most important of all is the tension that Eisenstadt finds between various (totalitarian) universalist and pluralist visions in modernity. For example, the pluralist visions would require separation between civil society and political order; the totalitarian tendencies would con-flate both. More critical is the tension between totalizing and pluralist visions of rationality, as it was considered to be central to the project of modernity. Eisenstadt argued that we keep in mind the crucial dif-ference between

a view that accepted the existence of different values and rationalities and a view that conflated different values and, above all, rationalities in a totalistic way. . . . The most signifi-cant movement to universalize different rationalities – often identified as the major message of the Enlightenment – was that of the sovereignty of reason, which subsumed value rationality (Wertrationalität) or substantive rationality, under instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität), transforming it into a totalizing moralistic utopian vision.

(2000: 7–8)

In fact, what was passed off in the name of rationality was only a particular notion of rationality, namely instrumental rationality, which viewed nature as available to man for ceaseless appropriation and exploitation to serve his interests and thus implied man’s control and domination over nature. In this context, one could ask: is being rational, and hence modern, to be essentially like the capitalist west, or are there other forms of rationality and modernity? Did other non-western societies have no alternative than to replicate the model of modernity as it emerged in the west?

This issue becomes pertinent since Weber himself acknowledges that there are different kinds of rationality and multiple rationaliza-tion processes operating in different spheres/realms of life.3 Referring to different spheres of life – legal, political, economic, aesthetic, erotic, religious and ethical – Weber says that

each one of these fields may be rationalized in terms of very different ultimate values and ends, and what is rational from


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one point of view may well be irrational from another. Hence rationalizations of the most varied character have existed in various departments of life and in all areas of culture.

(2001: xxxviii–xxxix)

Substantively rational points of view may also differ within a single sphere. Furthermore, rationalization processes can take place in each sphere independently from others and at their own pace. The rational structures of law, for example, did not originate in England, the earliest country to have industrialized, but rather in ancient Rome, and were taken over in the Catholic countries of Southern Europe long before the onset of industrialization there. Similarly, worldly rational philos-ophies emerged earliest in France with the Enlightenment rather than in England or Holland, where economic ‘rationalism’ had reached its highest stages (Karlberg 1980).

This pluralistic conception of rationality (as Martin Fuchs points out in this volume) has not been pursued seriously in a comparative project. The idea is not to repudiate the western modality of rational-ity but rather to pluralize and contextualize it. While Weber attributes the rise of industrial capitalism in the west to the unfolding of particu-lar types of rationality and rationalization processes, he suggests by implication that rationality and rationalization processes – albeit of a different kind – are evident in non-western civilizations as well. The important thing to note here is the manner in which Weber frames his problem; his exclusive concern is to account for the rise of industrial capitalism in the west (and also to consider why it did not happen in China or India or other parts of the world). Weber says:

these studies do not claim to be complete analyses of cultures, however brief. On the contrary, in every culture they quite deliberately emphasize the elements in which it differs from western civilization. They are, hence, definitely oriented to the problems which seem important for the understanding of western culture from this view-point.

(2001: xl; emphasis in original)

As is evident from the above remark, Weber’s studies were not intended to be comprehensive analyses of different non-western cultures per se or developments therein but rather an attempt to look at these cultures only in terms of their differences from the western culture, and that too from the limited perspective of a specific form of capitalism as it arose in the west – what he calls bourgeois capitalism, with the rational organization


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of free labor. The problem with such an approach is that only a specific form of capitalism associated with the west and the particular type of rationality that led to the rise of this capitalism are accorded both a nor-mative status and universal significance; it also marginalizes other forms of capitalism. Weber himself talks about other forms of capitalism and about India and China possessing fairly sophisticated forms of rational-ity. But since other forms of economic development and other forms of rationality are neglected, the non-western world or cultures would, in such a case, figure only negatively as sites of lack.

The Weberian thesis or other narratives of modernity, despite their claims to being future-oriented, take the form of post-facto justification: accounting for the success of the west as capitalist industrialized societies/economies after it had happened. As Prasannan Parthasarathi argues,

Marx, Weber, North and other writers on divergence project a nineteenth-century imperative, an industrial economy, into historical periods when such a mode of economic organiza-tion was not a category of thought. Even the leading economic thinkers of the eighteenth century, including Adam Smith, did not conceive of industrialization as the direction for the eco-nomic change, as betrayed by Smith’s failure to anticipate the industrial order that emerged within decades of the publica-tion of the Wealth of Nations.

(2011: 8)

It was only with the emergence of the new economic and social order – industrial society – in the west in the nineteenth century, and not before, that this order came to be seen as the universally desirable developmental goal of all societies. But this is an example of anachro-nistic thinking, of reading history backwards from the vantage point of the present, of projecting the nineteenth century onto earlier periods.

One can clearly see that this move is ideological and that it assigns to the west a far greater unity of purpose than is warranted. It would appear that the west was consciously and systematically working towards the goal of a capitalist industrial society, which was cer-tainly not the case, as has been pointed out in numerous studies, most notably in Kenneth Pomeranz (2000), Roy Bin Wong (1997), Andre Gunder Frank (1998) and more recently in Prasannan Parthasarathi (2011). It is this particular outcome, and the manner in which Europe achieved it, that have, then, been presented as the future destiny of all non-western societies.


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Such ideological narratives of modernity are always constructed in binary terms, and they are historically inadequate. These narratives lead to either the rise of industrial capitalism or its failure. The non-European world has been excluded from this enterprise. Jack Goody argues that

Europe in the nineteenth century . . . undoubtedly had a comparative advantage. But to push that advantage back in early modern and medieval periods is to discount the many achievements, in the economy, in technology, in learning, and in communication, which these other societies had undoubt-edly achieved, including in the earlier stages of ‘capitalism’. The result is to appropriate the whole nature and spirit of capitalism (or in Braudel’s case ‘true’ capitalism) and to claim it uniquely for the west, or even for one component of the west, England or Holland.

(2006: 210)

In fact, there is an emerging body of scholarship that suggests, contrary to the conventional wisdom that Asian societies were stagnant and static before they came into contact with Europe, that they had been societies of vibrant economic and cultural dynamism, each progressing along its own modernizing course of development, in some instances even ahead of Europe. They had been undergo-ing processes of fundamental transformation and restructuring in all spheres of life – intellectual, social, cultural, political and economic – heralding new institutions, practices, beliefs and values. For example, China of the Ming period was characterized by not only a flourishing economy with rising productivity, widening networks of commer-cial exchange and a robust expansion in manufacturing activity, but also the restructuring of the social and intellectual spheres; it consolidated and drew on Neo-Confucianism as a rational and secu-lar system of thought with its new conceptions of human nature and a self-perfectible, morally responsible self, fostering new forms of learning and scholarship. This Neo-Confucianism spread to Korea and Vietnam in the fifteenth century and then to Tokugawa Japan in the seventeenth century and played a vital role in social and intellec-tual formations there. Similarly, in the Indian subcontinent, based on new realities of social and economic mobility, as evidenced in grow-ing and expanding commerce and production, the Bhakti movement became the means of articulation of a newly emergent sensibility with a new conception of the individual based on action, duty and


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work rather than socially ascribed station like varna and caste (see the chapters in this volume by Mohanty and Agrawal).

Alternative modernities

Our exclusive preoccupation with western modernity has made us oblivious to these changes and to the possibilities for alternative or indigenous modernities being articulated through these changes. The fact that the non-western societies are at present developing differ-ently and producing their own versions of modernity has something to do with these earlier diverse histories and paths of development, which were thwarted by the imposition of western modernity through two centuries of imperial and colonial dominance. They should not be seen merely as extensions or different versions of western modernity or as projects of assimilating an alien modernity from the west into the various Asian contexts with their social and cultural specificities, as scholars like Eisenstadt (1998, 2000) and Dilip Gaonkar (2001) sug-gest; they are also products of the historical dynamics and processes of earlier times, as Mayfair Yang shows in this volume (see, in this context, Charles Taylor 2004).

This volume seeks to retrieve these marginalized or suppressed nar-ratives and histories in an effort to understand our present better. In the process, it leads to new conceptualizations and understandings of modernity by pointing to diverse trajectories and patterns, alerting us to the possibility of multiple experiences of modernity, of significant divergences capable of changing and transforming the practices of modernity.

In our view, modernity is a shared and transcultural phenomenon across Eurasia. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam says, arguing against the diffusion model,

modernity is historically a global and conjunctural phenom-enon, not a virus that spreads from one place to another. It is located in a series of historical processes that brought hitherto relatively isolated societies into contact, and we must seek its roots in a diverse set of phenomena.

(1998: 99–100; emphasis in the original)

Agreeing with Subrahmanyam, we contend that modernity did not develop in one remote corner of Eurasia (Northern Europe) in isola-tion on account of some exceptional or exclusive qualities that the latter possessed. Rather, it developed as a result of interaction among


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different societies and regions of Afro–Eurasia and the Atlantic. Thus, what we have in Europe is only one kind of modernity, for these inter-actions produced other kinds of modernity elsewhere. Indeed, as one of the editors of this volume, Satya P. Mohanty, has proposed, moder-nity is not a unitary phenomenon, and as a concept it does not have a singular essence. Rather, its ‘crucial features . . . can be disaggregated: they can even be recombined in a number of different ways, shaped by differences in sociocultural context’ (Mohanty 2011: 3).

The historical phenomenon we call modernity is, in fact, the product of what Subrahmanyam (1997) calls ‘connected histories’, or better still what Prasenjit Duara in this volume calls ‘circulatory histories’. Duara points out that

at different times, different cities or regions in Eurasia – whether joined by trading, and religious and technological networks, or separated by empires, disease, political insta-bility, piracy or climate change – created different nodes of absorption, innovation or isolation in this gradually expand-ing zone over the millennia.

The early modern world (Eurasia) was essentially a globally connected world with varying degrees of intensity of interaction among its dif-ferent entities.4

There were multiple levels of interaction in this network: intra-regional, interregional and supra-regional or global. These interac-tions at the interregional and supra-regional levels created forces that exerted varied pressures and challenges on different societies, to which they responded differently depending on their local contexts and needs. For example, the global trading system in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries generated different sets of opportunities, pres-sures and challenges for different societies/actors in various parts of Eurasia, which made them seek solutions that were radically different. One can cite here two well-documented instances of trade in cotton textiles and flow of bullion which had different consequences for dif-ferent societies. While much scholarly energy has been expended on documenting the exchange of goods and services through overland and maritime trading and commercial networks, not much attention has been paid to the flow and exchange of ideas, knowledge and men-tal constructs across this shared and interactive space. Subrahmanyam (1997) draws our attention first to such flows when he points out how the ideas of millenarianism and universal empire and monarch were shared, adapted and given local expression among different political


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dispensations and groups across Eurasia. Similarly, Arun Bala points to the patterns of exchange and cross-fertilization of ideas and prac-tices among different astronomical traditions in Eurasian civilizations which eventually led to the rise of modern astronomy in Europe. As a result, there was not one singular path but multiple paths to moder-nity. That is why Subrahmanyam argues for delinking ‘the notion of “modernity” from a particular European trajectory (Greece, Classical Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and thus “modernity” . . .)’ since ‘it represents a more-or-less global shift, with many different sources and roots, and – inevitably – many different forms and mean-ings depending on which society we look at it from’ (1997: 737).5

This volume, therefore, argues for a notion of polycentric modernity with many centers across Eurasia, with continual interaction between centers and peripheries and also among different centers, creating dif-ferent nodes of circulation, absorption and transformation. Exclu-sive focus on nation–state or civilization, or what J. M. Blaut (1993) calls ‘tunnel-history’, following the domination of western modernity has obscured from our view these patterns of interaction which were crucial to the formation of modernity/ies. Changing the optic from individual societies as self-contained entities with histories of auton-omous developments such as nation–states and civilizations to their trans-local and -regional relations of varying reach leads us beyond the exclusionary and hegemonic binarism of the earlier modernization discourses to an inclusionary and non-hegemonic approach. As Arif Dirlik puts it, ‘rethinking modernity in terms of transcontinental rela-tions de-centers the production of modernity in its formation. It also calls into question the historicist conceit of autonomous national and civilizational origins and development that is a common assumption of all centrisms’ (2011: 297). The advantage that such an approach offers is that one can thus engage with Asian modernities and speak of diverse Asian pasts and presents without lapsing into reification of Asia as a homogenous identity, or reversing and installing another hierarchy by promoting Asia-centrism. Asian societies are seen with all their plurality and multivocality as existing in an open network of relationships – both in and out of Asia.

On this view – that modernity is a shared and transcultural phenom-enon and that there is not one but multiple paths to modernity which different societies and cultures followed – it follows that modernity is not a single homogenous phenomenon or an integral and unified pack-age of features causally connected with one another, but rather that these features can be disaggregated and combined in various ways. European modernity is one such combination, but there can be and


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have been different combinations. It is also feasible and possible that not all features would be present in all societies in the same measure and that each of these features can shape up independently at their own pace. Here we would like to take our cue from Marx and Weber themselves. Sudipta Kaviraj (2005) points to two opposing and rather ambivalent strands between the economic and the political writings of Marx, one structural and the other historicist.6 For our purpose, it is the historicist reading that is important. He points out that two different ways of thinking can be discerned in his reflections on the his-tory of evolution of capitalist social forms. In his early writings, Marx proposes a kind of convergence theory that, despite their differences, all societies eventually tend historically towards a single structural form; however, in his later writings he takes an increasingly complex and nuanced view of a plural vision of historical paths, which makes him pronounce the distinction between the ‘first way’ capitalist devel-opment of England and France, which promotes political forces of democracy, and the ‘second way’ of Germany, Italy and Russia, which retards and obstructs them. Kaviraj says,

at least by implication, this is then the beginning of a theory of ‘multiple modernities’ within the western world itself, and inside the canonical traditions of western social theory. This would suggest that although the impulses towards a capital-ist economy, urbanization, and political democracy are all general tendencies in the history of modern Europe, there are different configurations of their complex figuration, and even differential trajectories within the history of European modernity.

(2005: 507)

Similarly, Anthony Giddens in his Introduction appended to the clas-sic work of Weber (PE) also draws our attention to the presence of historicism in Weber when he says that ‘the work expresses his con-viction that there are no “laws of history”: the emergence of modern capitalism in the west was an outcome of an historically specific con-junction of events’ (2001: xviii). We have also pointed out above how Weber himself suggests that not only are there diverse rationalities and rationalization processes but rationalization in each sphere also takes place independently of other spheres and at its own pace.

One can perceive in both Marx and Weber the element of contin-gency in the constitution of modernity. Such being the case, modernity need not be seen in terms of specific institutions and practices of the


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European kind since the institutions and practices will vary from soci-ety to society and context to context. The basic flaw in this approach is that it conflates different dimensions of modernity – structural, insti-tutional and cultural – with the values/ethos of modernity, and as a consequence all these dimensions become universal and normative. We often talk of the one by way of the other. Thus, nation–state is modern while empire is pre-modern; industrial capitalism is modern while mercantile capitalism is pre- or proto-modern; and so on. Fur-ther, if one talks of individualism, then it is always individualism of a certain kind as it has emerged in the west; if it is democracy, it is always democracy of a certain type. We always have in mind certain idealized criteria of modernity, ideal–typical western modernity.

Redefining socio-cultural modernity

In order to avoid this pitfall, we propose that socio-cultural modernity should be perceived in terms of ethos and values, and not be too closely identified with particular institutions and practices. Of course, values cannot exist apart from practices and institutions. They are always embodied in institutions and practices. But we need to separate practices, processes and institutions from values for heuristic purposes, since focus on particular institutions and practices have in the past proved to be a limiting and inhibiting exercise. If modern ethos and values have been present in non-European societies, even though they are articulated differently and through institutions and practices different from those of European societies, they should be considered modern. As Satya P. Mohanty says, after proposing that the concept of modernity be ‘disaggregated’ and studied in more context-sensitive ways,

if we can find modern values and ideas articulated in socioeco-nomic systems very different from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European capitalism, part of the challenge for us as scholars is to trace the provenance of such values and ideas in these non-European contexts and to examine the alternative institutions and cultural forms that supported them.

(2011: 3)

We would like to point out here that all modern values are anchored in two fundamental premises which provide an overall framework to these values. They are the notions of human self-making, or human agency, and the sovereignty of reason. Humans are capable of shaping their world in a rational manner. The capacity for human autonomy,


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together with the spirit of rational inquiry or questioning, forms the bedrock of the values of modernity. Since these two notions are appre-hended and experienced differently in different societies or even within different sections of societies, they find numerous and divergent expres-sions in terms of values, institutions and practices in their conception of self, society, nature, cosmos, time and history. It is within this broad, pluralistic framework that this volume seeks to try locate the modern values and ideas in the Asian context, more specifically India and China, and to explore the provenance of these values and ideas and what spe-cific institutions and practices support them. This approach has led, as many of the chapters in the volume (see especially Arjun Appadurai, Martin Fuchs, Tu Weiming, Mayfair Yang, Satya P. Mohanty and Puru-shottam Agrawal) show, to revisiting devalued terms and concepts like tradition, religion, authoritarianism, rural and provincial as resources for modernity rather than as essentially opposed to it.

The Essays

While the chapters in the first section engage with modernity on a theoretical plane, not only evaluating its premises from a transcultural perspective but also suggesting a polycentric conception of modernity, the chapters in the second and third sections focus on China and India in particular, pointing to various trajectories and divergent patterns. A common strand that runs through these chapters is that imagining alternatives to Eurocentric notions of modernity is inextricably linked to retrieving resources that modernity rejects or forgets and to rethink-ing these forgotten resources in light of the present.

One of the most persistent puzzles that has plagued modernity is its intimate connection with colonialism (Bhambra 2007; Mignolo 2011; Pagden 1982; Toulmin 1990). But most narratives of modernity often gloss over the contradictions between the ethical ideals of the Enlight-enment (including its central emphasis on the universality of reason) and its imperial project. The opening chapter by Arjun Appadurai points to the connection between modernity and colonialism by argu-ing that ‘post-Renaissance European idea of modernity . . . requires complete global expansion for its own inner logic to be revealed and justified’. This notion of modernity is an outcome of what he calls ‘trajectorism’ in European thought, a tendency to always see its his-tory as some sort of predetermined journey to a desirable destination. A deep epistemological and ontological habit, ‘trajectorism is the idea that time’s arrow inevitably has a telos, and in that telos are to be found all the significant patterns of change, process and history’. This


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is the overarching conceptual frame (Appadurai calls it the meta-trap of the west) within which the self-imagining and self-understanding of Europe developed. In this optic, Europe is the singular expression of time’s arrow, and the world written in the image of Europe is the known destination. But the self-image in which Europe seeks to cast the rest of the world is not itself a unified one. It is pieced together by drawing many competing and often contradictory genealogies into the optic of the trajectorist narrative, and the colonies become the sites to stage the unresolved contradictions and tensions of metropolitan Europe. Appadurai proceeds to examine the way in which one such unresolved debate over secularization, the place of religion in the public sphere and the relative importance of church and state in public life in Europe, was projected and played out in India through British colonialism. This had led, he points out, to rewriting and organizing what was essentially a heterogeneous and diverse religious landscape of numerous sampradayas with their institutions, beliefs, customs and practices into a single conceptual category together with a community of believers crystallized around this category – Hinduism and a Hindu community. This process of conceiving of a single Hindu faith/religion and a Hindu community led to the suppression and marginalization of the way in which Indians perceived, experienced and organized their religious life and interactions. He argues for the redemption of these suppressed formations, which could be the basis of alternative roads to contemporary modernity in India, while cautioning us that ‘the path to such a rediscovery is neither easy nor linear’.

Prasenjit Duara, too, addresses the problématique of trajectorism, but he does it from the perspective of temporality and poses a differ-ent set of questions: under what conditions did linear notions of time and history rise to a hegemonic position during the modern period; how did linear histories become territorially bounded into national histories; and how was it deployed in the service of capitalism? He attributes the rise of the linear notion of time and history to the envi-ronment of the competitive state system in Europe between 1450 and 1650, which viewed all resources and bio-power in its territory as sus-ceptible to mobilization. Subsequently, this competitive state system, combined with the ideals of the secular state and popular sovereignty in the wake of the French Revolution, led to the rise of nation–states. The modern conception of time/history sought its metaphysical roots in the authenticity of nation, the unchanging subject in the course of a changing history. In the disenchanted world, the nation comes to acquire a quasi-divine moral authority and is elevated as a transcend-ent entity much like the God or Heaven of earlier times. His contention


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is that the authenticity of the nation is necessary not just to overcome the uncertainties and disruptions caused by the accelerating pace of changes but also to anchor these changes. Duara underlines the neces-sity for replacing linear, tunneled histories of nations with circulatory histories. Circulatory histories are shared histories, he explains, which take into account both the different experiences of events by different people and the often oblique routes through which histories and ideas travel.

Not unlike Duara’s circulatory histories, Arun Bala presents a dia-logical account of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions and relo-cates them in a Eurasian rather than a narrowly European context. It has several implications for our understanding of modernity. If these revolutions are dialogical phenomena, and modernity itself is rooted in them, then we would have to construe modernity as a dialogical phenomenon and one that is moreover transcultural. This makes the notion of the roots of modernity as solely European questionable – modernity is as much a phenomenon of Asian as of European origins. We have to conclude that transcultural Asian modernity need not be construed only as a project of assimilating an alien modernity from the west into the various Asian contexts, but also as a project of rereading modernity through its Eurasian roots.

In the final chapter of this section, Martin Fuchs takes up the notion of human agency or human self-making as the foundational assump-tion of modernity and explores it in terms of three process categories of modernization – rationalization, secularization and individuali-zation. Pointing to the polymorphous nature of rationality and the multiplicity of rationalization processes, he contends that the historic rationalization process that the west went through in the wake of the Enlightenment is not the only form of rationalization but only one among numerous others which could be evidenced in other societies. But due to the rise of the west to a position of dominance, the ration-alization process associated with the west came to acquire universal and normative status, and the other rationalization processes were eclipsed. He calls for a retrieval of the pluralistic concept of ration-alization process(es) in an effort to contextualize and relativize the now dominant form of rationalization. As regards the second process category of secularization, he suggests that we should conceive of it as part and parcel of a socially dominant and therefore contestable imaginary – supported by some people and not by others – and not so much see secularization as an overall process that has or has not led to full-fledged secularism, or has done so unevenly only. Making a distinction between (institutionalized) religion and religiosity, Fuchs


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argues that religiosity is not opposed to secularization, but it can very well accompany the process of secularization. Citing the examples of Ambedkar and Gandhi, whose social and political action had strong religio-ethical underpinning, he further asserts that ‘it is in my eyes fully feasible that a religious person is reflexive and critical, and a concerned citizen’. This takes him to the third process category of individualization, and he argues that there have been notions of indi-vidualization developed in contexts other than those of Europe. Citing the examples of the Bhakti movement and Ambedkarite Buddhism, he shows that they present an inter-subjective notion of individualism – constituting of one’s self in the act of experiencing the other – which makes it different from the possessive, moral and expressive indi-vidualisms of the modern west. Satya P. Mohanty and Purushottam Agrawal also deal with the notion of individualism developed during the Bhakti movement in their chapters.

The second section of the volume has three chapters, all focused on Asian societies – two on China and one on Southeast Asia. Weber blamed religion in societies like China and India for their inability to develop capitalism. While accepting the broad culturalist framework of Weber in accounting for socioeconomic development, Tu Weiming refutes the specific Weberian thesis of Confucianism being an impedi-ment to modernity. Tu proposes the idea of Confucian democracy in the context of Cultural China (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and Mainland China) and Singapore. The idea of Confucian democracy may appear to be self-contradictory since Confucianism as an ide-ology is commonly held to be incompatible with, even opposed to, democracy. But this view, he suggests, rests on two false assumptions: i) that Confucianism is a stagnant, fixed and outmoded ideology and practice, not capable of change and adaptation; and ii) that the west-ern style of democracy, based on multi-party electoral systems, is the only form of democracy possible. He points to the dynamic, resilient and adaptive nature of Confucianism by showing its complex inter-play with modernization in Cultural China and Singapore over the last century, and especially in the last three decades. He shows how in each case, even as these societies adopted western practices and insti-tutions, Confucian values like civility, rightness and justice, wisdom, filial piety and trust continued to form the bedrock of these societies. As for democracy, what is essential, according to Tu, is not a multi-party based electoral system but rather a culture of vigorous public reasoning in a vibrant public space which becomes the arena for public reasoning with dialogue, discussion and debate among citizens, with such reasoning influencing public policy. For such a public space to


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exist, it is essential to have a healthy civil society, which, in turn, must meet two conditions:

first, it must have a multi-centered power structure; that is, all spheres of interest must have their authority independent of the political center. Second, each sphere of interest must be able to exert pressure on the center according to its own agenda.

Such a public space, when combined with Confucian leadership, yields the template for a Confucian democracy in which conscientious, public-spirited elite-leaders work for the public good with little regard for their self-interest, and their policies and actions are subject to public scrutiny. He claims that while it is difficult to predict what style of democracy will emerge in Cultural China, ‘the emergence of an institutionalized “public reasoning” in a widely accessible public space buttressed by a vibrant civil society and supported by a responsible leadership is a wholesome style of democratization’.

What the experience of development in industrial East Asia suggests is not the passing of a traditional society but the continuing role of tra-dition in providing rich texture of an evolving modernity. An exercise in micro-history, the second chapter of the section by Mayfair Yang shows ‘what . . . older alternative models of indigenous economy may offer to the modern capitalist world of hegemonic nation–states, mul-tinational corporations, and Protestant ethic rationalities’. The point of departure is the ‘Wenzhou Model’ of China in the coastal Zhejiang Province, a model of dramatic rural development based on small fam-ily enterprises engaged in light industrial manufacturing or commercial ventures in the post-Mao era. Yang argues that long before western imperialism arrived at China’s shores, China had already developed its own internal historical dynamics based on a tension between two modes of power – agrarian sovereignty and maritime coastal economy. Maritime coastal economy, with its porous borders and potential mix of natives with foreign others, admitting a continuous flow of traders, travelers, goods, money and culture across territorial boundaries, was perceived as a threat to the agrarian, land-based territorial impera-tive of sovereign power. She shows that the post-Maoist Wenzhou Model of rural economy is informed by these deep structural patterns that have been played out in China since at least the eleventh century; Wenzhou’s social transformation today is not so much a reaction to the challenge of western capital, but is in many ways a reinscription of a key dynamic of power that extends back to the beginning of the


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Ming dynasty in the fourteenth century. What the west did do was to trigger a major reassertion of agrarian sovereignty in the twentieth century, the systematicity and pervasiveness of which far outstripped that other assertion at the beginning of the Ming dynasty. This alter-native narrative of history has the benefit of assigning primary agency to Chinese forces rather than the west. It also de-centers the west from the human history of globalization and capitalism by pushing history back a few centuries from the European Age of Exploration.

Geoff Wade questions the current periodization of history, espe-cially the period between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, which has been dubbed the early modern period by historians. According to Wade, this was done from the narrow point of view of European his-tory, and its application to the history of other regions of the world outside Europe is problematic. He chooses to focus his attention on Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century as the beginning of the early modern period and examines the range of changes – economic, politi-cal, social and ideological – that took place in the region during that century. By juxtaposing the changes and developments that took place during this period with those during the tenth to fourteenth centuries in Southeast Asia, he argues that the changes and developments in the fifteenth century can be traced back to the earlier period and are the continuation of those processes of change and development. In other words, the changes and developments in the fifteenth century were not radically new, and they did not represent a break from the past. In light of this, Wade then asks whether we can extend the early modern period back to the tenth century, or whether this earlier period, i.e., the tenth to fourteenth centuries, should be called as the ‘early’ early modern period. Wade’s argument comes very close to the argument made by scholars like Janet Abu-Lughod (1989), Jack Goody (2006), Kenneth Pomeranz (2000), Andre Gunder Frank (1998) and others, who suggest that Southeast Asia has been early modern since the tenth century and had bustling trade and commerce, which Europe joined only as a latecomer in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Claiming that the changes that occurred during these two periods in Southeast Asia were real and hugely influential, Wade suggests that we need to ‘begin to think about how to periodize Southeast Asian history in ways which do not draw on categories created for examining the European past’.

Fuchs’s chapter calls for revisiting the pre-modern and precolo-nial and searching for trends and strands that speak to questions and issues concerning modernity. The chapters in the third section of the volume, focusing on India, are in some ways a response to this call.


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The opening chapter of the section by Satya P. Mohanty focuses on a sixteenth-century Odia text, Lakshmi Purana by the radical saint–poet Balaram Das, and shows how neglected genres like the puranas can yield insights into radical social and cultural values, values that scholars have not always expected to find in precolonial India. The Lakshmi Purana is both a feminist and an anticaste text, and what makes it unusually interesting for scholars is that Das intended it to be recited every year during the harvest season by women in every Hindu household – and that practice has continued for five centuries, even to this day. Mohanty’s close textual analysis shows how Das’s narra-tive develops the notion of a self-critical individuality that is distinct from – rather than merely embedded in – the dominant social struc-ture and its patriarchal and caste-based value system. He argues that such analyses of precolonial cultural texts can help ‘provincialize’ the European experience and provide the grounds for a genuine compari-son across cultures, building on Charles Taylor’s important intellectual archeology of the west. Such analyses can show how quintessentially modern values like human equality, based on the ideal of a critical and self-reflexive individual, are not necessarily Eurocentric notions, and that they have been articulated in some precolonial, non-European contexts. The chapter also suggests ways of doing comparative his-torical and cultural studies of what we call ‘modernity’ by expanding the range of texts we traditionally examine. It indicates how literary analysis, especially of traditional South Asian texts, can contribute to a multidisciplinary collaborative project of historical retrieval, lead-ing to a reinterpretation of what we often condescendingly call the ‘pre-modern’.

Citing the example of emergence of vernacular modernity through the Bhakti movement in India, Purushottam Agrawal claims that to think in terms of vernacular modernity, or even of alternative to modernity itself, is to recognize that the precolonial past of non-European socie-ties was not being made only by prescriptive forces of depersonalized systems such as cultures and religious beliefs or, in the case of India, by compulsive caste identities. It was being made by self-conscious people who were acquiring the status of individuals and collective historical actors through their interactions. The public sphere of bhakti was the site of the voice of such individuals in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century north India. The idea of bhakti was certainly not new, but the idiom of its articulation and the social base of its practitioners were certainly new in this era. Agrawal argues that the ‘newness’ of this historical phenomenon can be better grasped through the category of the public sphere. In doing so, he critically engages with such questions as: did


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bhakti really help create a set of social spaces distinct from private ones and autonomous from the state? And did such spaces really com-municate public sentiments to the state apparatus and in some way influence it? Answering these questions, according to him, obviously does not depend on finding a replica of the European bourgeois pub-lic sphere. Instead of looking for something like the European pub-lic sphere and the processes causing its structural transformation, he explores the interactive dynamics of notions, ideas, institutions and practices that made the perceptible change in attitudes and practices in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century north India possible.

Rajat Datta’s chapter argues that the genesis of modern economic (capitalist) relations has always been located in the urban sector, much to the neglect of the agrarian sector, which, according to him, has an equally significant role to play. Focusing his attention on Bengal in eastern India during the early modern period, especially the six-teenth to eighteenth centuries, he shows that early modern globaliza-tion, which saw an unprecedented rise and growth in maritime trade and commerce centers in the Indian Ocean and an intensive monetiza-tion of economies, acted as a catalyst for change in economic relations in the agrarian sector. Rural areas no longer remained isolated but were drawn into the burgeoning trade and commerce network, which extended from large cities downwards to villages through a series of intermediate townships and gunjes. As a consequence, commercial farming and craft production percolated deep into the countryside. Not only was there a great diversification in agricultural products with the introduction of cash crops, but production centers for textiles and crafts also spread out to the hinterlands of Bengal. Complex tenurial relations, with land being largely owned privately; capital investment in land and agriculture; and complex division of labor, together with market-oriented agriculture with innovative and intensive farming, came to characterize the agrarian economy of Bengal. Datta shows the performance of the agriculture sector in Bengal to be comparable with those of the two most advanced regions of Western Europe, England and the Low Countries, including the Netherlands, with many simi-larities in their agricultural systems and techniques. According to him,

all these features provide sufficient reason to suggest that new impulses had begun surging into India’s early modern econ-omy, and one could even go further and argue that ‘capitalist’ features, to the extent that they existed in sixteenth-century Europe, then had begun seeping into both manufacturing and farming in India through this period and later.


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Key features of modernity have been bureaucratic centralization and the replacement of customary law with formal and statutory laws based on abstract principles of justice. British rule, often seen as usher-ing in modernity in India, sought to introduce statutory law in India. But instead of being a straightforward imposition, it often involved a complex process of negotiation and compromise with different social actors, resulting in the incorporation of customary laws into statutory law, as is evident in the codification of Hindu and Muslim personal laws. This process of negotiation was not confined just to custom-ary laws; it was a much wider process including the incorporation of the Mughal institutions and idiom of rule (Subrahmanyam 2006). Lakshmi Subramanian looks at this complex process of negotiation in the early years of colonial rule through the lens of the merchant com-munity. With the East India Company assuming control and rule of certain parts of western India, especially the coastal enclaves and cities in the latter half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, an informal Anglo-Bania (merchant) order emerged as the merchants chose to throw their weight behind the Company and sup-port it in its military as well as commercial ventures in return for pro-tection offered by the Company for their business interests. The nexus between merchants and the Company led, on the one hand, to the for-mer’s growing involvement in the political dealings of the latter with other ruling powers, most notably the Mughals and the Marathas; on the other, it led to changes in merchant practices as the merchants increasingly submitted to the new laws and regulations introduced by the Company as a means to settle their commercial disputes. Subra-manian argues that these changes, which entailed an enlarged public role for the merchants as well as adoption of the new idiom of rule of law based on the principle of equity and fairness, point to a newly emergent merchant rationality in response to the transitional politics of the times.

But even as this new rationality partook of the new idiom of law, it did not abjure the traditional idiom of customary law based on caste and social hierarchy. In fact, the adoption of the new idiom was only partial and selective and was based on pragmatic considerations. The merchants rationalized the coexistence of the customary and the modern, and they selectively invoked one or the other to suit their particular interests. This is evident from the case of Tarwady Arjunji Nathji, the prominent merchant banker and principal financier of the Company in western India in the 1780s, who, while routinely resort-ing to the new idiom of law in his commercial dealings with the Com-pany, successfully invoked the customary law to defend himself from


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charges of manslaughter. On its part, the Company, dependent on the merchants to meet its financial needs, also relented and did not insist on the implementation of abstract law. As opposed to the rigid govern-mentality that is often taken to mark British rule, Subramanian points to its negotiated and flexible character as it was made to reckon with local demands and conditions.

The concluding chapter of the volume, by Avadhesh Kumar Singh, conceptualizes modernity in two contrasting senses: as a novel hap-pening within tradition and as a novel being without tradition. The dominant European sense of modernity is captured by the latter con-ceptualization, which points to a distinct break from the past. In some cases, this is compounded by not just the break from the European past but also the break from the indigenous past in the new site of modernity. Singh brings to the fore an alternative sense of modernity, drawing on the idea of sanatana and nutan/navin. Citing the example of India, he argues that modernity may be understood in terms of punaranavta (renewal mechanism). It renewed the society in different periods without necessarily severing the link with the past. For this, the philosophers of new logic in the middle of the seventeenth century used the term navin (modern) or navinata (modernity). Singh examines the issue of new logic or renewal mechanisms in different periods in the Buddhist, Bhakti, colonial and postcolonial periods in India.

The volume turns the classic modernization question – why did a capitalist breakthrough not occur in China, India and the rest of the world? – on its head. Instead, the chapters in the volume seek to address what changes and transformations were taking place in these societies and how to account for these changes. How does one read these changes, not in terms of an overly idealized notion of modernity, but in terms of what these changes imply and how they contribute to our understanding of modernity as a shared phenomenon? It seems arguable that European modernity was not quite the exception with reference to either its own ‘medieval’ past or, more emphatically, the rest of the world. It is possible to envisage it as a continuous pro-cess, one that has evolved through multifaceted global interaction – economic, technological, cultural, ideational or aesthetic. And in doing so, the volume challenges the basic assumption of western or nationalist historiography that development is solely a product of internal dynamics of societies. It does not deny the importance of his-torical formations such as nations or civilizations. But it broadens the scope of the forces that go into their making and, more profoundly, introduces greater contingency to their historical formation. It also transforms the boundaries around which history is organized.


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The focus of the most of the chapters in the volume is the early modern period, the time when modernity began. But this was precisely the time when there were different trajectories of change and develop-ment, with the European one just one among many. These different trajectories were overshadowed by the dominance of western capi-talist modernity in the last two centuries. This volume is an attempt to recover some of the ‘lost modernities’ (Woodside 2006), not for reactionary purposes of restoration or revival, but as resources to understand the (postcolonial) present and imagine a more just, more genuinely global and interconnected future.

Notes1 On the dominant model, see Rostow (1960). Charles Taylor (2004) pro-

vides a good philosophical account of the best aspects of European moder-nity. For perceptive discussions of versions/variations on this narrative of modernity and other related issues, see Gurminder Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity (2007) and Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘An Outline of Revisionist Theory of Modernity’, Archives of European Sociology, XLVI(2005): 497–526; especially section IV, Two Views of Western Modernity, pp. 508–14.

2 Interestingly, Wang Hui (2004), one of the foremost New Left intellectuals of China, suggests that state socialism should not be seen as opposing capi-talism but as part of the capitalist framework. In his view, there are struc-tural similarities between state socialism and market capitalism. According to him, ‘the practice of socialist societies originally was believed to be an escape from market society or capitalism, but in the end they only played the role of a specific political and economic form of market society’ (cited in Viren Murthy 2006: 160–61).

With the decline of communism in the late 1980s, the modernization discourse was to receive a major boost since its claim about the superiority of the western model seemed to have been proven right after all. This was evident in formulations and pronouncements like the End of History and the End of Ideology. But then this period also saw the emergence of rival claims in the form of multiple and alternative modernities.

3 There are deep ambivalences in Weber. On the one hand, he proposes a uni-linear, quasi-evolutionary process of rationalization; on the other, he also proposes multiple rationalities and rationalization processes.

4 This is not to deny that in earlier times the world was not connected, but certainly the intensity of interaction during the early modern period became much greater than that of earlier times, which distinguishes the early modern period from the earlier periods, just as the heightened level of interaction during the present phase of globalization sets it apart from the early modern or modern period. See especially world system historians like Fernand Braudel (1995) and Andre Gunder Frank (1998), and also Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) and Jack Goody (2006) regarding the connectivity of the world, which stretches over long durée. Scholars like Jack Goody and David Pingree (1992) take it much further back in time and argue that


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Eurasia has been unified since the Bronze Age. For a dissenting view regard-ing the characterization/periodization of the early modern, see Geoff Wade’s chapter in this volume.

5 Gurminder Bhambra (2007) also argues for the idea of connected histories and sociologies and proposes ‘de-linking our understanding of the socio-historic processes from a European trajectory and focusing on not only the different sources and roots, but also on the ways these interacted and intersected over time would provide us with a richer understanding of the complexities of the world in which we live and the historical processes that constitute it’ (76).

6 Kaviraj clarifies what he means by the term historicist/m: ‘historicist in the strict sense used by German thinkers like Dilthey, not in the very different sense used by Popper in his Cold War study: Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1945). In the first sense, historicism means staying away from law-like generalizations specific to natural sciences, and treating each historical situation as unique. Popper’s idiosyncratic use means almost the opposite – a belief in inexorable his-torical teleology. Unfortunately, in much contemporary writing, the second sense has overshadowed the first’ (2005; 505, fn 27).

References

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2007. Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Blaut, J. M. 1993. The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffu-sionism and Eurocentric History. New York: Guilford Press.

Braudel, Fernand. 1995. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. I. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Chen, K. H. and B. H. Chua. 2007. ‘Introduction: The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements Project’, in K. H. Chen and B. H. Chua (eds.), The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader, pp. 1–5. New York: Routledge.

Dirlik, Arif. 2011. ‘Revisioning Modernity: Modernity in Eurasian Perspec-tives’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 12(2): 284–305.

Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2000. ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus, 129(1): 1–29.

Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. and Wolfgang Schluchter. 1998. ‘Introduction: Paths to Early Modernities – A Comparative View’, Daedalus, 127(3): 1–18.

Frank, Andre Gunder. 1998. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Gaonkar, Dilip P. 2001. Alternative Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke Univer-sity Press.

Giddens, Anthony. 2001. ‘Introduction’, in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. vii–xxiv. Routledge Classic Series. London and New York: Routledge.


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Goody, Jack. 2006. The Theft of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hui, Wang. 2004. Zhongguo xiandai sixiang de xingqi (The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought), 4 Vols. Beijing: Sanlian Shudian.

Karlberg, Stephen. 1980. ‘Max Weber’s Types of Rationality: Cornerstones for the Analysis of Rationalization Processes in History’, The American Journal of Sociology, 85(5): 1145–79.

Kaviraj, Sudipta. 2005. ‘An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity’, European Journal of Sociology, 46: 497–526.

Marx, Karl. 1853. ‘The British Rule in India’, The New York Daily Tribune. 25 June, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm.

Mignolo, Walter. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Mohanty, Satya P. 2011. ‘Introduction: Viewing Colonialism and Modernity Through Indian Literature’, in Satya P. Mohanty (ed.), Colonialism, Moder-nity and Literature: A View from India, pp. 1–21. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Murthy, Viren. 2006. ‘Modernity Against Modernity: Wang Hui’s Critical History of Chinese Thought’, Modern Intellectual History, 3(1): 137–65.

Pagden, A. 1982. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Ori-gins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parthasarathi, Prasannan. 2011. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press.

Pingree, David. 1992. ‘Hellenophilia Versus the History of Science’, Isis, 83: 554–63.

Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-sity Press.

Rostow, W. W. 1960. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1997. ‘Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Recon-figuration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31(3): 735–62.

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1998. ‘Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400–1750’, Daedalus (Special Issue on Early Modernities), 127(3): 75–104.

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 2006. ‘A Tale of Three Empires: Mughals, Ottomans and Habsburgs in a Comparative Context’, Common Knowledge, 12(1): 66–92.

Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-versity Press.

Toulmin, Stephen. 1990. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press.

Weber, Max. 2001. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans-lated by Talcott Parsons and Introduction by Anthony Giddens. Routledge Classic Series. London and New York: Routledge.

http://www.marxists.org


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Wittrock, Bjorn. 2000. ‘Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition’, Daedalus (Special Issue on Multiple Modernities), 129(1): 31–60.

Wong, Roy Bin. 1997. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Woodside, Alexander. 2006. Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea and the Hazards of World History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Part I

TRANSCULTURAL ASIAN MODERNITIES

3

The self-making of Europe1

In a different context (Appadurai 2013), I proposed that it would be useful to look at the trajectory of Europe’s self-making through the lens of what I called ‘trajectorism’. Trajectorism has an old history in the west, traceable at least to the Bible with its ideas about the journey from sin to salvation, from this world to another, from blindness to redemp-tion – all exemplified in the life of Jesus at one level and in the road to Damascus at another. The Greeks were not exempt from this way of thinking, and Plato’s famous allegory of the Cave is an early version of the journey from darkness to light, from shadow to substance. And ever since, the idea of a trajectory has formed and framed western thought, even to the extent of creating a retrospective narrative of the inevitability of the west itself, constructed out of the bits and pieces of Greek philoso-phy, Biblical mythology, Roman law, Gothic architecture, Renaissance humanism and many more minor elements, constantly composed into a retrospective story of ‘rise and fall’, of progress and stasis, of dark and bright episodes, all framed in a grand trajectory that we still see, with remarkable lack of distance, as the story of the west. But the story of the west is no more than one version of our deep bias towards what I call trajectorism. And this is the meta-trap that social science has inherited most powerfully from its great prior ancestors in religion and pre-indus-trial humanism.

Trajectorism is not the same as evolutionism, triumphalism, predesti-nationism, the myth of progress, growth or convergent modernization, though each of these relies on the hidden ontology of trajectorism. Trajectorism is a deeper epistemological and ontological habit, which

1

EUROPEAN SELF-MAKING AND INDIA’S ALTERNATIVE

MODERNITIES

Arjun Appadurai

A R J U N A P P A D U R A I

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always assumes that there is a cumulative journey from here to there, more exactly from now to then, in human affairs, as natural as a river and as all-encompassing as the sky. Trajectorism is the idea that time’s arrow inevitably has a telos, and in that telos are to be found all the sig-nificant patterns of change, process and history. Modern social science inherits this telos and turns it into a method for the study of humanity.

In other places, such as China, India, Africa and the Islamic Belt, not to speak of the islands and forests of anthropology, the trap of the trajectory never became the framing conceptual trap, although its presence can sometimes be detected, especially in Islam. These places have their own meta-traps, such as the idea of the nothingness of the world, or the myth of eternal return, or the idea of multiple births, or some other driving meta-narrative. But trajectorism is the great narra-tive trap of the west and is also, like all great myths, the secret of its successes in industry, empire and world conquest.

So far, I have perhaps conveyed the assumption that trajectorism is mainly an episteme about time’s arrow and has only to do with sequence, cause, duration and chronology, the normal hallmarks of our current scientific assumptions about temporality. This is true, but it is not the most important truth for my purposes.

Let me back up. One of the persistent puzzles about the European world journey has been the question of the link between the universal-ism of the Enlightenment (which argued for the necessity of worldwide equality through the spread of knowledge, among its other key argu-ments) and the European imperial project, a project of spatial domin-ion that ended up as a project of world conquest as well. In spite of many efforts to cast light on this inner affinity between the project of Aufklarung (Enlightenment) and the project of world dominion, by authors like Edward Said (1978), Valentin Mudimbe (1988), Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein (1982), and many others, we have made no real progress on this problem. Foucault, who might have had something to say on this matter, did not speak much of the French imperial project, and even the great Max Weber did not elect to link the global journey of capitalist ethics to the project of empire.

Suffice it to say that it does not seem likely that the journey from Renaissance humanism to Kantian universalism, roughly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in Europe, could not have been connected to the project of Vasco da Gama and his many maritime suc-cessors to find the New World in searching for the Old World and also vice versa. Well before the age of industrial capitalism and the imperial adventure of Europe in the nineteenth century, the Iberian sailors and conquistadors had connected the projects of conquest, conversion and

S E L F - M A K I N G A N D A L T E R N A T I V E M O D E R N I T I E S

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economic plunder in the New World, a connection touched upon in the work of writers like Anthony Pagden (1982) and Peter Hulme (1986).

Perhaps this is not the first time in human history that a project of ethical universalism was tied to a project of conversion and conquest: two large earlier examples are the Roman Empire and the early his-tory of Islamic expansion. But there is something special about the European understanding of its ethical universalism (rooted in Enlight-enment ideas of knowledge, education and common humanity) and the urge for world exploration and global expansion that characterizes the Dutch, English and French projects after 1800, and later the Ger-man, Belgian and Italian adventures, especially in Africa. What is this special quality?

I propose that this quality has something to do with the post- Renaissance European idea of modernity, which requires complete global expansion for its own inner logic to be revealed and justified. In both the Roman and Islamic examples, the ethical project was self-standing and conquest was a secondary extension of this project. But European modernity could not regard itself as complete without covering the surface of the globe. This proposal does not pretend to address the myriad ways in which ethical visions seeped into mercan-tile, military and political ambitions, sometimes of the most violent and greedy varieties. Another way to put this proposition is that the idea of the cosmopolis as it took shape in the seventeenth century in Europe (see, for example, Toulmin’s useful overview of this process (1990)) was in some ways integrally linked to the imperial vision.

Until very recently, European cosmopolitan impulses, whether expressed in travel, adventure, mapping, surveying, trading or warfare, were characterized by an inner contradiction between the urge to translate and interpret other worlds, and the urge to colonize and to convert, often by means of violence.

What I have called trajectorism is thus not only a parochial vision of temporal processes but also a problematic ideology of spatial expansion. Empire, specifically the European imperialism of the last three centuries, is a transverse spatial enactment of a defective vision of temporality in which time’s arrow always has a single direction and a known desti-nation. That destination is the world written in the image of Europe. Europe, in this mode of thinking, is unthinkable except as the singular expression of time’s arrow, and this arrow is so conceived as to require its dominion over the globe. Thus, the world and the globe become one and the same, and each is seen as Europe’s tomorrow and Europe’s elsewhere.

The inner problem of European cosmopolitanism in the past three centuries has something to do with its contradictory and alternative


6

genealogies. We must recognize, to start with, that contrary to the dominant meta-narrative of western modernity, it is not itself a cumu-lative, predictable or inevitable outcome of any discernable history. This meta-narrative is itself an expression of a trajectorist ideology, which tends to see Europe itself as a logical outcome of ideas that led from one phase or idea to the next, in some sort of destinarian manner.

The fact is that the self-construction of Europe, itself a selective later image of certain possibilities in the idea of western Christendom, is a product of continuous triage and selective retrospective histori-cization. Parts of Europe’s special mix of confidence, ethnocentrism and world adventure come surely out of the modern debt to the mis-sionizing logic of western Christendom, a genealogy that is still vis-ible in current debates over the future of secularization. Other parts owe themselves to a conscious orientation to the Roman vision of the world, which centers on law, technology and military force as key ele-ments of the relevant past. Yet other parts favor the classical Greek heritage, notably those modern self-images of Europe in which reason and its empire take precedence over all other forms of argument and imagination. Still other images are deliberately shortsighted and see in modern Europe a history that most importantly begins in the Renais-sance and its ideas of humanism, individual expression and a highly aestheticized vision of what is properly Europe’s real past. There are, of course, many other streams of European self-fashioning, which stress more obscure referents in the past, ranging from its early scien-tific traditions to more arcane poetic, mystical and political moments and texts in its past. Thus, the idea of Europe, in the modern period, always builds the meta-narrative of the European trajectory from a varied and sometimes contradictory archive, a rearview mirror that is continuously adjusted as different classes, estates and regions seek to see in their own claims a larger unfolding of the European story.

Thus, when the Enlightenment becomes the dominant ideology of the political present in Europe, it never fully displaces alternative images of the European trajectory. The battle between the varieties of trajectorist meta-narratives never really abates, and we can see this in a series of debates, sometimes strictly intellectual and sometimes bloody struggles for power and place among groups and classes in Europe. Thus, when the idea of the cosmopolis takes shape in Europe after the seventeenth century, what it exports to the rest of the world is less a unified value system or world-picture and more a series of efforts to paper over the cracks in the European meta-narrative, the struggle between its contradictory trajectorist narratives. The battle between church and state (which is addressed in more detail in the second half


7

of this chapter), the struggle between private property and various visions of collective ownership, the tension between the rule of law and the rule of the masses, the opposition of this and otherworldly impulses in European religiosity – these are all examples of the unre-solved contradictions that Europe played out in the imperial project, in which these deep conflicts encountered societies and ideologies that contained their own, often very different visions of these very matters. For cosmopolitanism is ultimately a matter of ideas, and what Europe exported in its imperial projects was its own demons, divisions and unresolved anxieties, this time on a global terrain.

This is the most serious problem with European ethnocentrism as it played out in the colonies of Africa, Asia and the Islamic world in the age of empire: not its clarity or arrogance, but its numerous con-tradictions, all of which found their genealogies in different versions of trajectorism. In a word, European cosmopolitanism – as spread throughout the world through books, speeches, icons, images and nar-ratives – imposed profound European conflicts onto an unpredictable series of colonial spaces, each of which had their own forms of intellec-tual culture and world imaging. In short, European cosmopolitanism was not primarily an effort to impose some European consensus on the rest of the world; it was an effort to find consensus by the staging of unresolved European debates on a world that had not invited this engagement. What do we do with this troubled project of cosmopolis?

India and the drama of European trajectorism

I have argued so far that the long-term self-making of Europe, under-girded by what I have called ‘trajectorism’, expressed itself in the period after 1700 CE in the search for a world stage, or rather a series of world stages, on which to enact those internal struggles and debates that Europe could no longer solve within the limits of its own geography. Europe after 1700 CE comes to need a global empire not so much to find new markets for its goods, new commodities for its elites or new labor for its expanding economy, but rather because the struggles of European trajectorism could no longer be confined within the space of Europe. The colonies were now needed to enact Europe’s internal contradictions and debates.

The chronology of European domination of the non-western world is the subject of a veritable library of scholarship and cannot be addressed in detail here. Suffice it to say that it begins with the Spanish search for ‘India’, which resulted in the colonization of much of the Caribbean and Latin America, first by the Spanish and then by the Portuguese. The maritime extension of the European horizon to the rest of the world is


8

marked in the Indian subcontinent by the arrival of Vasco da Gama in Calicut in 1498, six years after Columbus landed in the Caribbean islands. The period between these events and the French Revolution of 1789 is marked by the global dominance of Spain and Portugal and is characterized by a mixture of commercial, political and religious moti-vations within the framework of pre-industrial European capitalism.

The period of European expansion after the French Revolution is of special relevance to my argument, since it is after this event that the northern European nations, especially France and England (but also the Dutch, Danes and other minor players) begin to push Spain and Portugal into the background as world conquerors, largely because of the rapid advancement of their capitalist economies. It is only after the Enlightenment that the radical contradiction between European ideas of equality, freedom and reason at home and racialized, hierarchical and exclusionary protocols in the colonies emerges and flourishes.

In this context, the British gradually became the principal European players in the Indian subcontinent, pushing the French, the Dutch and the Portuguese to the edges of Indian politics, leaving today only small traces of their presence in such places as Goa and Pondicherry. Much has been written about British rule in India, and the historiography of this period is marked by an internal tension between scholars who stress the economics of empire (often Marxist scholars) and those of a more social and cultural bent, who have stressed knowledge, information and ideas as the driving engines of British rule in India (Bayly 1996; Cohn 1996; Chakrabarty 2002). I identify myself with this second group of scholars.

With this brief review of the complexities of the European imperial project, I turn to look more closely at India as a major site in which European ‘trajectorism’ played itself out, primarily through British rule in India, which began with commerce (mainly the activities of the East India Company) and, after 1858, was followed by full-fledged rule over India by the British monarchy and later by the British parlia-ment and its executive branch. How can we connect the known history of British rule in India to my argument about European trajectorism?

I have already suggested that after the Enlightenment, Europe’s project of self-making required the colonies in order to enact its own metropolitan contradictions. Let us consider the British in India in this light by focusing on a single issue: the problem of church versus state in Europe, which was resolved in the late eighteenth century on behalf of the emerging bourgeois classes and appeared to put clerical authority, Christian ideology and religious values on the backstage in Europe, and specifically in Britain. The name for the broad social process that encompasses these various expressions is ‘secularization’.


9

As a process, scholars tended to associate secularization with mod-ernization, science, rationality and the spread of cosmopolitan values. As we now know, the hoped-for victory of secularism in relation to religious values, elites and institutions never came. In many western societies, religion continues as a powerful force, and there is a grow-ing sense that religion is still a dominant force in these societies. In this sense, secularization has not been the twin of modernization, and religion has proved that it can coexist with modernization and change its forms and vocabularies sufficiently as to survive and even thrive in the context of modernization. The worldwide renaissance of Islam, the massive power of the Christian evangelical presence in the United States, the militant Buddhism in Sri Lanka and other countries in the Theravada belt, the turn to the Hindu right in India, the prestige of the Pope among the world’s large Catholic population – all of these point to the vigorous life of religion in much of the world.

In India, the many struggles over secularism that have taken place since Indian independence have been seen as symptoms of the clash between imposed western values and traditional Indian ones, espe-cially by those on the Hindu right, who have coined the pejorative term ‘pseudo secularism’ to bait their opponents. Jawaharlal Nehru’s secular commitments are among the main reasons he is so despised by the Hindu right and the ruling party in India, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which sees Nehruvian secularism as the main reason for India’s failure to develop a strong economy and globally recognized political power.

India after 1800, when the British East India Company was expand-ing its dominion and turning mercantile advantage into political power, was a perfect site for playing out the British version of European strug-gles over the place of religion in the public sphere and the relative importance of church and state in public life. There is an extensive literature on the ways in which the British in India described, analyzed, interpreted and managed religious ideas and practices in India in the nineteenth century, and the highlights of this emergent British ideol-ogy were as follows: that the roots of Indian weakness and degeneracy lay in Hinduism; that Hinduism was a religion of superstitions, myths and prejudices peculiar to the Orient; that the major beneficiaries of Hindu domination were the priestly Brahmin caste; and that caste and Hinduism were the source of India’s moral and material backwardness (Breckenridge and van der Veer 1993; Dirks 2001; Pennington 2005; Bloch, Keppens and Hedge 2010). Of course, there were also other elements of the British ideology about India that evolved in the first half of the nineteenth century, including the ambivalent British view of India’s Mughal rulers, seen as more familiar to the west than the Hindu


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elites (as warriors, monotheists and imperial conquerors who set the stage for British rule); the wholesale takeover by the British of Mughal systems of land revenue, tax administration and law enforcement; the mapping and measurement of India’s geography, ethnology and ancient monuments; and the development of specialized knowledge of India’s languages, cultures and customs, starting with William Jones’s scholarly projects in Bengal. All of this is well known and belongs to the study of British Orientalism and the administered exploitation of India’s econ-omy, polity and society from the early nineteenth century until well into the twentieth century. But what does all this have to do with the strug-gles over European secularization and the European imperium in India?

In England, the issue of church versus state was the primary political expression of the struggle for secularization as an overall direction for British society. Unlike in France and the United States, the British mon-archy remained the symbolic apex of the Church of England, and the relationship between the British state and the Church of England (the major site of religious authority in England) was not a stark struggle between old and new, modernity and tradition. From this point of view, the church was deeply intertwined with the public life of Britain at every level, from the parish to Parliament, a situation in sharp contrast to both France and the United States, where the division between church and state was a primary part of the vision of their democratic revolu-tions. Thus, secularization in England was a less dramatic process than in these other countries, but in the course of the nineteenth century, it did become a contentious issue in the colonies, particularly in India.

The primary tension involving religion and the secular realm, which was initially an internal issue in the metropolis and which England exported, imposed and enacted in India, was a consequence of the difference between the principle of ‘non-interference’ by the state in the religious life of ordinary citizens and the logic of proselytization as understood by the Church of England. Starting in the early nine-teenth century and then throughout the rest of the century, there was an intense debate about how to reconcile the East India Company’s interest in minimal interference in the religious life of Indian natives with the Anglican missionary interest in proselytization and conver-sion of Indians. After 1858, when the East India Company ceased to be in control of India and India officially became subject to the Brit-ish monarchy, the British government found itself increasingly drawn into issues about the management of Hindu religious institutions and the adjudication of debates to do with social reform movements that arose among Indians wishing to modernize Hinduism (Presler 1987). The Church of England was never a major force in the politics of the


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Empire, but the question of how to reconcile the imperial interest in leaving the Hindu religion as free of state interference as possible with the acknowledged interest of British (as well as other European mis-sionaries) in converting Indians to Christianity was never fully resolved.

The gradual secularization of English public life starting in the seventeenth century was enacted in India through the effort to regulate Indian religious institutions and practices without active interference in Indian religious beliefs and practices. This ambivalent policy had far-reaching effects on the Indian subcontinent and affected society, politics and public morality in several long-lasting ways. Among the most important of these effects were the following.

Most important, the East India Company and later the Indian rep-resentatives of the British Crown created a way of conceptualizing Hindu identity which had no precedent in India’s past. What was in fact a tremendously varied mosaic of beliefs, institutions, traditions and practices across the continent was reduced to, in Romila Thapar’s famous phrase, ‘syndicated Hinduism’ (Thapar 2010). Hindus were encouraged to think of themselves as belonging to a single overarch-ing community across the subcontinent, a community which could be counted, defined, mobilized and managed as a coherent sociological entity. Indeed, the very idea that there was a Hindu ‘community’ was itself a projection of British (and generally European) ideas of reli-gious faith, confession and organization. What existed across India was a vast array of sampradayas (followings or traditions) defined by an original saintly figure, whose followers and descendants identified with each other, with certain specific texts and with certain places and patterns of worship. Turning these sampradayas into communities, or varieties of samaj, was a colonial projection of the battles between Protestants and Catholics in Europe, as well as between European Protestant denominations. In a frequently used colonial idiom, dif-ferent traditions were turned into ‘sects’, and sects only make sense against the backdrop of some sort of church, the latter being an idea which was completely alien to Hindu thought and to Indian society.

This transformation was a paradoxical effect of the secularizing ide-ology of the British rulers of India, and it was to have other, even more troubling and long-lasting effects. The reification of Hindus into a count-able community in the middle of the nineteenth century was a major impetus to the birth of Hindu nationalism, and, along with later efforts to create separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims in the early twen-tieth century, it was the basis for the communalization of Indian politics, which, in turn, was a precondition of the Partition of 1947 as well as the rise of the Hindu rightwing parties of independent India, including the


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currently ruling BJP (Pandey 1990; Jaffrelot 1996, 2005, 2010). None of this could have happened without the sociological invention of the Hindu community in the middle of the nineteenth century, and this, in turn, would not have happened except by the projection onto the Indian canvas of the church–state tensions of early modern Europe.

What is less appreciated and more important to my argument is that the secularizing ideology of the British state and the projection onto India of the idea of the ‘Church’ as the counterpoint to the State also had the effect of burying or truncating a series of Indian insti-tutional formations which could have been the basis of alternative roads to contemporary modernity in India. These ‘roads not taken’ cannot be fully understood without understanding the enactment on the Indian stage of conflicts having to do with the ambivalent and incomplete process of secularization in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What were some of these roads not taken?

Because Hindu India never generated a central ecclesiastical organiza-tion of the sort that could be called a church, Indian religious life was a cross-pollinating series of sampradayas, holy places and revered reli-gious figures. Insofar as there was an overarching sociological structure in the Hindu world before the arrival of the British, it consisted of the networks of temples, monasteries and sampradayas that characterized south India at least after the eighth century. In the north, the sociologi-cal framework of Hinduism was provided by the interactions between monastic institutions, ascetic orders (akhadas) and pilgrimage centers and specialists (Ghurye 1953; Bhardwaj 1973; Appadurai 1981; van der Veer 1988). To some considerable extent, Indian Muslims participated in these networks across religious lines and replicated them in their own patterns of religious organization and affiliation in pre-British India.

This continental sociology of temples, monasteries, religious fol-lowings and ascetic orders, with no central authority, leadership or doctrine, was supported and enlivened by a complex continental geog-raphy of sacred centers and pilgrimage routes and calendars. These pilgrimage centers, which gave Hindu India much of its coherence and connectivity in pre-British times, was built on a puranic geogra-phy which connected sites from Rishikesh to Rameswaram and from Nathdwara to Bhubaneswar. These centers were administered by a great diversity of specialists, including priests, pandas and monastic groups, who did not control any of these centers exclusively. Pilgrims traversed these centers across remarkable geographical distances, and these centers were in many ways the hubs of a Hindu cosmopolis that was nevertheless not a church, a denomination or a single faith. In the precolonial world, these pilgrimage centers were the basis for complex


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trans-regional networks of trade, learning and linguistic diversity, and many of them continue to play such a role today.

Under the British, this civilizational geography of pilgrimage was radically transformed, and its potential for providing an alternative to ‘syndicated Hinduism’ was arrested. This arrest was itself the product of many independent strands of British ideology and administration, and the trend towards imagining the existence of a ‘Hindu commu-nity’ had the paradoxical effect of truncating a different vision of connectivity, interaction and organization from that of a uniform and majoritarian Hinduism. Among these strands was the British tendency to see India as fundamentally a land of villages (as in the writings of Marx, Munro and Maine on the ‘village community’). This vision of India’s essentially rural character erased India’s tradition of urban centers, long-distance urban networks and overlapping religious geog-raphies. India gradually became rendered as a landscape of villages, castes and local communities, rather than a civilization of networks, cities and trans-regional commerce. Among the casualties of this local-izing ideology was the fabric of religious cosmopolitanism which was a hallmark of pre-British India, in which, for example, disputes among ruling castes in Maharashtra were settled in religious parliaments in Banaras (O’Hanlon 2010); small kings and nobles from southern and western India maintained religious establishments in northern pilgrimage centers; and Jain communities in Karnataka maintained active ties with their counterparts in Gujarat and Rajasthan (Carrith-ers and Humphrey 1990; Cort 2011). Some of these ties and affilia-tions remain today, but they are minor elements of an entirely different sort of ‘national geography’ built on rigid boundaries between India’s major faiths, such as Hinduism, Jainism, Islam and Sikhism, and on fabricated conceptions of ‘sect’ and ‘church’ which were imposed on a much more fluid and decentralized Hindu world. Another strand of this truncation and localization of Hindu institutions was the push to create a legal regime for the management of Hindu religious institu-tions, a process that has yielded, especially in south India, an entirely new form of state-level bureaucratic departments, which are in charge of Hindu temples (Appadurai 1981; Presler 1987).

Just as at the sociological level, a distinctly Indic way to organize large-scale connectivity and dialogue between myriad religious follow-ings and traditions across the subcontinent was suppressed and overlaid by a much more centralized and bureaucratized mode of governance, so too at the level of ideology and cosmology was a complex and dynamic structure of conviviality, cohabitation and coexistence between differ-ent religious traditions and doctrines arrested and suppressed by British


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ideas and regulations. In the multiple traditions of the subcontinent, there was no counterpart to the modern, western idea of ‘tolerance’ as a governing value for the relationships between members of differ-ent faiths. Tolerance is an idea which cannot be understood outside of the general trend towards secularization in Europe, in which a secular state was the referee of the relationships between different religious faiths. This secular state could insist on ‘tolerance’ between religious communities while its own practices of defining, counting and binding ‘communities’ had created a sociological state of affairs which required tolerance as a value to maintain civil order in the relationship between these manufactured ‘communities’ (van der Veer 1994).

The pre-British order in India was not organized around the idea of tolerance; it was rather built on very different but quite effective methods for minimizing major conflicts between religious faiths, followings and collectivities. The primary mechanism for this sort of religious conviviality was the widely understood power of Hindu kings (of whatever scale of kingdom) to make substantive and binding decisions on issues involving conflict between castes, religious groups or other social groups. This power often took the form of highly specific rulings involving sumptuary privileges, processional routes and property issues. There was also a vigorous royal and courtly pattern of assembling scholars and thinkers from different traditions to express their views, to translate their works into different languages and to debate their differences under the royal jurisdiction. Nor was this only a pattern among Hindu kings. Recent scholarship shows that these ways of negotiating, translating and mediating across religious traditions also crossed the Hindu–Muslim line and was a marked feature of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries of Mughal rule in India (Busch 2011; Grewal and Habib 2011; Truschke 2016). It now seems clear that what had evolved in India to mediate religious differences and conflicts across the subcontinent did not depend on reified religious communities or ideas about a church–state division or even ideas about ‘tolerance’, which is itself a highly specific western idea tied up with western secularization after the Enlightenment. This is the history of royal patronage and arbitration, complex and overlapping pilgrimage geographies and decentralized religious followings and networks that characterized India and were undermined and transformed by the ideas and protocols of British rule.

This argument should not be taken to mean that pre-British India was a land of peace and harmony, that there was never bloodshed in the relationship between followers of different religious ideas or that India had a hidden tradition of secularism avant la lettre. There is good historical evidence to doubt all of these characterizations. What is true is


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that the Indian subcontinent had a different way of defining, managing and regulating relationships between religious faiths and followings, and this format was not allowed to develop its own logic after the period around 1800. This truncated and alternative history belongs to a series of other roads not taken, including those which involved potential paths in monetization, urbanization and technical innovation that were equally suppressed, deflected or marginalized in the course of British rule. These other roads are not within the compass of my argument in this chapter, but they would all be relevant to the question of alternative modernities and suppressed histories on the Indian subcontinent.

Risks, possibilities, alternatives

There is today a major struggle in India over the ownership of moder-nity. In this struggle there are two major contenders. The first is the Hindu right, and the ruling party of India, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which seeks to impose a regime in India combining a neo-liberal ori-entation to globalization, foreign investment and entrepreneurial capi-talism with an authoritarian approach to matters of culture, religion and public life in which dissent from Hindu norms is under heavy and explicit attack in many realms of everyday life, including diet, sexual-ity and education. The major opponent to the Hindu right is a loose coalition of secularists who seek to uphold some version of the ideals of Jawaharlal Nehru, which linked science, socialism and secularism. There are other voices, too, but they are too scattered and disorgan-ized to count as major players in the struggle for an Indian modernity.

The argument developed in this chapter opens up the possibility of yet another claim on Indian modernity, one that could be built on the elements of an Indic way of assembling faith, practice and geography in a framework of institutions and ideas which is neither secularist nor fundamentalist. This alternative was suppressed and marginalized by the playing out of European trajectorism in India, especially in respect to the European drama of secularization as enacted by the British in India. But it is nevertheless alive and available today. It is an assem-blage of faith, pluralism and conviviality that is pre-modern but not anti-modern. It was the basis of a world of Indic conviviality which was not devoid of violence, bloodshed and warfare. But this world was also the basis for a complex dialogue between Hindu, Muslim, Bud-dhist, Jain and Sikh faiths and, even more recently, with Christianity in India. It rests on a sociology of followings, networks and places, which is opposed to the idea of communities, churches and sects. It is also multi-linguistic and pan-regional, with networked elements that link


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south and north, as well as different castes, territories and doctrines. It is an Indic cosmopolis, in which languages such as Sanskrit, Per-sian, Tamil, Telugu and many others produced translations, hybrids and crossover forms which have continued to resist the categories and exclusions of bureaucrats, politicians and demagogues (Pollock 2006). It is available for rediscovery and restoration.

The path to such a rediscovery is neither easy nor linear, and it will have to address the numerous challenges of contemporary India, including those of caste-based violence, sexual predation and corrup-tion at every level of state and society. But it certainly offers an alterna-tive to syndicated Hinduism as well as to elite secularism. It has been marginalized by the march of European trajectorism under British rule in India. But India is no longer a colony, and the only form of violent trajectorism that Indians need to fear is that of an authoritarian Hin-duism, which is itself a by-product of European trajectorism and does not deserve to dominate the space of India’s possible modernities.

Note1 This section is a slightly revised section of Chapter 2, ‘The Spirit of Weber’,

in my book, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London: Verso, 2013). The original chapter benefited from the comments of Sheldon Pollock, whose work on the Sanskrit cosmopolis (Pollock 2006) is also relevant to the current chapter.

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I believe a profoundly significant dimension of ‘early modernity’ was precisely deepening circulations, interconnections and interde-pendence, especially from 1500 onwards. The historical reality of the early modern world as a collective heritage that was interactive and polycentric has been systemically obscured by the dominance of lin-ear narratives of historical process. Exclusive histories of nations and civilizations underpinned unequal relationships in the capitalist world even as capitalist relations were integrating the basis of historical developments globally as never before in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The misrecognition of historical flows tied to goods, ideas, microbes, finances and networks has finally become unsustainable as the consequences of these real flows can no longer be controlled by a self-sufficient nation–state.

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Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Reproduced with permission from CUP.

2 The next five paragraphs summarize my thesis in Duara, Prasenjit, Rescu-ing History from the Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chapter 1.

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Notes1 Dijksterhuis continues:

After a stagnation of about fourteen centuries the evolution of astronomy continued at Frauenburg [where Copernicus resided] at the point where it left off in Alexandria . . . he considered the greatest gain it had brought astronomy was not the changed position of the sun in the universe and the resulting simplification of the world-picture, but the abolition of the punctum aequans, the atonement for the sin against the spirit of Platonic philosophy which Ptolemy had committed in an evil hour.

(1961: 288–89)

2 In the Confucian Analects 2.1, it is written: ‘Governing with excellence (de) can be compared to being the North Star: the North Star dwells in its place, and the multitude of stars pay it tribute’.

3 See Bala (2006) for a more detailed study of these interactions.4 The Urdi lemma enabled astronomers to retain the effect of the equant in

Ptolemy’s astronomical model without using the equant, and thus produce uniform motions that conformed to natural physical principles. The Tusi cou-ple allowed astronomers to enlarge and shrink the size of the epicycle radius using only combinations of uniform circular motion (Saliba 1996: 125).

5 However, there were other Chinese theories. The earliest of these is gener-ally considered to belong to the gai tian tradition developed in the first century BCE. The theory holds that the sky is a round disc; this rises up as a dome in the center, covering the earth, which is a square and also rises up in the center like an inverted plate. The sky disc is fixed to an axis at its center located near the Pole Star, about which it rotates, carrying the other heavenly bodies with it. A more sophisticated Chinese theory was the hun tian theory elaborated by Zhang Heng (78–139) in the early second century. He describes it as follows:

The heavens are like a hen’s egg; the earth is like the yolk of the egg, and lies alone in the center. Heaven is large and earth small. Inside the lower part of the heavens there is water. The heavens are supported by qi, the earth floats on the waters.

(Sun 2000: 441)

Zhang Heng then proceeds to present the heavens in the form of a celestial globe as we do today.

6 According to the historian of Indian astronomy, David Pingree (1976), at least four different Greek texts on astronomy were transmitted to India in the second, third and fourth centuries. Since many Indian texts were composed in Sanskrit based upon these transmissions, it is now possible to recover early Greek non-Ptolemaic astronomical texts by studying Indian Sanskrit texts.

7 These advances were made possible because the Indians had, from the time of Aryabhata, the contemporary place value decimal system whose poten-tial came to be articulated in all of the above developments. Its value was aptly summarized by Laplace in 1814 thus:

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The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an abso-lute value) emerged in India. The idea seems to be simple nowa-days that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated. Its simplicity lies in the way it facilitated calculation and placed arithmetic foremost amongst useful inventions. The importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyond the two greatest men of Antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius.

(Cited in Ifrah 2000: 361; also Dantzig 1967: 26)

References

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bag, A. K. 1979. Mathematics in Ancient and Medieval India. Varanasi and New Delhi: Chaukhambha Orientalia.

Bala, Arun. 2006. The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Sci-ence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Braudel, Fernand. 1984. The Perspective of the World. New York: Harper & Row.

Braudel, Fernand. 1995. A History of Civilizations. London: Penguin.Butterfield, Herbert. 1957. The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800. New

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and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge’, Journal of Global His-tory, 8(1): 1–24.

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equality, self-respect and human dignity – as we have to bear in mind the limits of a processual approach to the development of ‘modernity/ies’. Insofar as we can at all observe such processes as dominant pro-cesses, we have to also take into account other modalities and processes, including but not limited to oppositional ones. Thus, what I suggest, simply put, is to use some of today’s leading concepts and imaginar-ies as heuristics to then be able to transcend and re-frame or criticize them. Even if unhappy about taking those core ideas of western-led modernization as our points of reference, our best bet for the time being would be to explore them further – or more exactly, explore more thor-oughly the diverse contingent versions which process categories, like the three briefly discussed here, have developed or exhibited. The guiding question would be: to what extent and in what respect do these reflect universal trends? Are they part and parcel of only the western, now glo-balized, model, or do we find different versions of the three elsewhere, so that the dominant versions of modernization and the dominant uni-versalisms would just appear as selective, and thus limited and biased? Would this then open up new horizons, which provide space for other trajectories and narratives ‘to and through modernity’, including per-haps other, contrasting universalisms?14

Notes 1 ‘take a deliberate attitude towards the world’ (Weber 1968 [1904]: 180; the

English translation by E. A. Shils and H. A. Finch [Weber 1949: 81] is here given as modified by Johann Arnason [2003: 89]; comp. Weber 2004c: 380f).

2 For Castoriadis, only two societies – ancient Greece and the modern west-ern world, although still ‘imperfect and incomplete’ – represent constella-tions in which autonomy becomes a possibility. All other societies are under the influence of religion, and ‘all religions’ are, for Castoriadis, identical with heteronomy and ‘idolatry’ (1997: 316, 319, 325).

3 Taylor, in particular, insists that a social imaginary ‘is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society’ (2002: 106) and tends to inflate the social imaginary to a practically encompassing, holistic structure of sig-nification that resembles Clifford Geertz’s (1973) notion of culture. Clifford Geertz proposes a generic western concept of personhood (that of a strictly bounded self as center of judgment and action) (1983; for a critique see Spiro 1993). What such an approach can lead to can be seen in the case of Max Weber with regard to ‘pre-modern’ contexts. Weber, in his compara-tive studies on world religions and civilizations, tends to consider civiliza-tions as discrete cultural and social entities, each characterized, more or less in toto, by a specific worldview or attitude towards the world (represented exemplarily by the leading stratum or the ‘carriers’ of a civilization) (Weber 1972, 1976, 1978; for a critique, see Fuchs 1988 and 2017, among others; see also note 4 below).

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4 For a more detailed discussion of the concept of multiple modernities, see the Introduction in Randeria, Fuchs and Linkenbach 2004.

5 Of central relevance here is Weber’s Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religions-soziologie (GARS; Weber 1972, 1976, 1978), i.e., Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion, a work in three volumes, never translated as an integrated body into English. See especially the conceptual and theoretical sections in volume 1 of GARS (Weber 1972; these sections were published individually in English translation, see Weber 2004a, 2004b, 2004d).

6 See especially Habermas 1984, 1987. For a critique of Habermas’s evolu-tionist approach, see Antje Linkenbach 1986.

7 Cf. Fuchs 2001. 8 For these three conceptualizations, see, e.g., Crawford Macpherson 1970;

Charles Taylor 1989, 2007; Michael Sandel 2009; Magnus Schlette 2013. 9 E.g., Michel Foucault 1991. 10 For an outline of comparative studies of religious individualization, see

Fuchs 2015; Fuchs and Rüpke 2015. Other contributions to the volume of the journal Religion, of which these two articles are part, deal with particular examples of pre- and early modern religious individualiza-tion, from European antiquity (Gordon 2015), early modern Western Europe (Reinhardt 2015), India, both renunciation and bhakti (Mal-inar 2015), and the entanglement of bhakti with Christianity (Höke 2015) and modern Jewish thinking leading to sociological approaches (Sander 2015).

11 For an application of the idea of different religious imaginaries to Indian religious history, see Fuchs 2018.

12 There are numerous forms of bhakti, in which one prominent bhakta is regarded as representing the divine or as helping to approach and expe-rience the divine. However, the prime objective remains the individual bhakta’s experience of the divine, or of one’s personal (and bodily) partici-pation in the divine.

13 Adapting thus the title of an article by Göran Therborn (1995). 14 Regarding the concept of universalisms in the plural, see Bernhard Wal-

denfels’s ‘Universalisierung im Plural’ (Waldenfels 1993: 63) and Fuchs 2000. The path suggested here, while showing some affinities to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) deliberations on European abstract universalism and the search for alternative universalisms, suggests looking for histori-cally grounded diversities of universalisms, of which bhakti and Buddhism would be examples.

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officials from engaging in corruption and to oversee the routine gov-ernment performance. A feedback mechanism would also be imple-mented to monitor officials’ conduct. The functional equivalent of human rights will be derived from the responsibility of the elite. This may provide the rudimentary elements for a ‘Confucian democracy’.

Notes 1 About the concept of Cultural China, please see Tu Weiming, ‘Cultural

China: The Periphery as the Center’, Daedalus, 120.2 (1991): 1–32. 2 There are several ways to periodize the Confucian tradition. The Chinese

Sinological convention is to use dynastic designations such as Pre-Qin, Han, Tang, Song, Ming, Qing and so forth. A common practice in the English-speaking scholarly community is the tripartite division of Classical Confucianism, Neo-Confucianism (Song–Ming) and New Confucianism (the Confucian revival in the twentieth century).

3 I am critically aware that westernization is not synonymous with modern-ization; however, the modernization process of China that began almost one century ago has been characterized mainly as westernization, a word connoting not only a material but also a cultural transformation.

4 For a fuller discussion of the issue, see Tu Weiming, ‘Implications of the Rise of “Confucian” East Asia’, Daedalus, 129.1 (2000): 195–218, esp. pp. 200–03.

5 For more on this, see Tu Weiming, Confucian Ethics Today: The Singapore Challenge (Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore, Singapore: Federal Publications, 1984).

6 See China Forum, 15.1 (1982). China Forum is a journal sponsored by the United Daily News, which was founded in 1951 and is one of the biggest newspapers in Taiwan.

7 The notion of mechanical solidarity comes from Emile Durkheim, The Divi-sion of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1997).

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into the world’s top multi-billionaires. Most Wenzhou private family-owned enterprises have not been able to obtain any loans from the state-owned banking system, which mainly lends to large businesses or industries owned and run by the central, provincial, prefecture or county governments. Although Wenzhou’s small businesses have mainly acquired start-up capital through loans from kin and tradi-tional rotating credit societies, once established securely, they have been fueling the rapid revival of traditional popular religion with their generous donations.

The enthusiastic movement outward that we find in places like rural Wenzhou stems from a long history of suppressed coastal economy. Thus, the arrival of the west did not introduce capitalism to China; it merely introduced an additional factor into a long history of a dynamic between agrarian sovereignty and coastal economy. Nor can represen-tations of these recent encounters between western capital and China reduce Chinese commercialization to a single homogeneous force. As I have tried to point out here, the Wenzhou Model cannot be confused with the developmentalist state nor its state-dominated market econ-omy, for its ritual economy and ritual expenditures offer an interesting indigenous alternative to them. Whereas imperial agrarian sovereignty has today been transformed into a state-dominated form of global capitalism which is not beholden to local communities, the renewal of imperial coastal economy in Wenzhou, with its embedded deity and ancestor cults, has been the major impetus behind local economic and social development. As Wenzhou entrepreneurs fan out across all areas of China and the world with their commercial and industrial pursuits, these modern merchants continue to make donations to their ancestor halls and temples back home in their local communities.

Notes 1 The ‘Wenzhou Model’ (Wenzhou moshi) of rural economic development in

China is often contrasted with two other models of rural development: the ‘Sunan Model’ of Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang Province, and the ‘Zhu River Triangle Area’ (Zhujiang Sanjiaozhou) down in Guangdong Province. Whereas the Wenzhou Model is based on privately owned family enter-prises, the Sunan Model is based on township-owned enterprises planned and invested by local governments, and the Zhu River Model is based on investment by Hong Kong and overseas Chinese capital.

2 See Timothy Brook’s The Confusions of Pleasure (Berkeley, CA: Univer-sity of California Press, 1998) for an extensive discussion of the extent of commercialization and social transformation in the Ming dynasty. ‘Seek-ing to take over the extensive maritime trading networks that Muslims and Chinese operated before they arrived, the Portuguese plundered or

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sank almost every trading vessel they encountered between 1500 and 1520 in order to force their competitors out of the market. When the Portu-guese captured the major regional trading center of Malacca in 1511, they butchered the large community of Chinese merchants living there’ (Brook 1998:122).

3 Yang Family Elder is also called by his honorific title, Yang Family Immortal Lord (杨府真君) or Yang Family Lord and King (杨府侯王).

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or ‘ideas of universal empire’ which China had long held. ‘Ideas of universalism and humanism’ certainly were seen in China but were not apparent in Southeast Asia in either of the ages we examined above. ‘New powerful myths and ideological constructs relating to state formation’ are seen from the earliest times of Indianization in Southeast Asia, well before the tenth century, and ‘greater connect-edness and circulations’ were indeed in evidence during the Early Age of Commerce.

Thus, we might conclude that neither Reid’s Age of Commerce in Southeast Asia or my Early Age of Commerce were early modern in any full sense. But the changes that occurred during these two periods were real and hugely influential. We might thus, it is suggested, need to answer the question posed in the title of this chapter with the latter answer ‘what’ and begin to think about how to periodize Southeast Asian history in ways which do not draw on categories created for examining the European past.

Notes 1 Including Pegu, Arakan, Patani, Aceh, Banten and Makassar. 2 By which peripheral zones and autonomous enclaves were ‘assimilated’ to

the status of intermediate or core provinces. 3 Liaw Yock Fang’s text is a synthetic edition based on critical readings of five

principal manuscripts, none dating earlier than the nineteenth century, and reference to others.

4 The successive maritime trade port offices were established in the following order: Guangzhou 廣州 (971); Hangzhou 杭州 (989); Dinghai 定海 (992); Quanzhou 泉州 (1087); Banqiao 板橋 (1088); and Huating (Shanghai) 華亭 (1113). After the Song were pushed south of the Yangtze, a further two offices were established: Wenzhou 溫州 (1131) and Jiangyin 江陰 (1146). The majority of these offices were engaged with trade to and from Southeast Asian ports.

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My analysis of the rise of the notion of a self-aware individual-ity (grounded in the capacity for social evaluation and criticism) in a sixteenth-century Odia text suggests that we need to reread medieval Indian vernacular literature through new lenses, looking in particular at the way traditional religious idioms are being deployed for novel explo-rations. New questions are being asked during this transitional period, from new perspectives, and new social values are being explored. Medi-eval Indian literatures reveal a picture of a dynamic society in flux, a very different image from the one we have inherited from James Mill. And the view of modernity that emerges in them is at odds with the capitalist modernity that dominates in the European context. Much work needs to be done on literary and nonliterary texts from this period before we can generalize usefully, but the central questions suggested by such analyses as mine are tantalizing ones. What would a critical and self-aware individuality look like if it were not tethered to capital-ist values? The emergence of individuality in the text I have examined reveals what has been called a ‘disembedding’ from primordial commit-ments (see Taylor 2004); it begins to conceptualize individual actions as logically prior to, and not dependent on, ascribed social duty. Similarly, in this new perspective, self-making and remaking are fundamental to social critique. A new radical identity politics based on the solidarity of the subaltern groups challenges the hegemonic identity constructs of Brahminical ideologies, specifically of varna and caste. Is it possible to see in these new cultural imaginings a non-instrumental form of ration-ality, a new set of generalizable critical principles through which the poor and the marginalized challenge unjustified power and authorize their own insurgency? How do we understand the role the social strug-gles of oppressed groups have played in the development of such uni-versal modern values as egalitarianism and individuality? The pursuit of these far-reaching questions calls for research that is both comparative and multidisciplinary, and I hope to have suggested through my analysis of one medieval Indian narrative that literary criticism can play a crucial role in shaping such a project.

Notes 1 A version of this chapter appeared in Diacritics, 38.3 (2008): 3–21.

Mohanty, Satya P., ‘Alternative Modernities and Medieval Literature: The Oriya Lakshmi Purana as Radical Pedagogy’, Diacritics, 38:3 (2008): 3–21, John Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of John Hopkins University Press.

2 Puri’s main deity, Lord Jagannath (‘Lord of the Universe’), originated in tribal cultures but was gradually Hinduized. The temple complex we see

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today was built in the twelfth century. Puri, and Odisha in general, have been researched and written about extensively in recent decades; for a sam-pling of the most impressive body of work, see the collections Cult of Jagan-nath (1978) and Jagannath Revisited (2001).

3 This unpublished poem is quoted by Mallik (1996); see Medieval Odisha 44. The orthodox Brahminical notion of dharma as tied to varna is articu-lated most famously by Lord Krishna in chapter 2, verse 31 of the Bhagavad Gita. Buddhism provided egalitarian and universalist alternatives to this Brahminical interpretation of dharma, and since medieval Odishan society had a strong Buddhist cultural tradition, it is likely that Achyutananda Das was drawing on it. Santina provides a critique of Krishna’s Brahminical view of dharma and karma, as expressed in chapter 2 of the Gita.

4 For a brief account of Achyutananda Das and the panchasakha as mys-tics and thinkers, see C. Das’s (1951) Studies. Mallik’s (2004) Paradigms provides a more comprehensive and detailed historical account, with an emphasis on the Odia sudra-muni tradition, which began with Sarala Das. On Balaram Das, see C. Das’s (1982) Balaram. Unlike many Indian writers of the period, Sarala Das and the panchasakha did not have court patron-age. They were almost all from the lower castes, and the one Brahmin in the group – Jagannath Das – sided with the lower castes in his writings. They and other Indian writers used the name ‘Das’ or ‘Dasa’ (which means slave or servant) to disown their caste identity; they saw themselves as servants of the Lord and hence less accountable to kings and priests.

5 A good brief introduction to the classical puranas is Narayana Rao’s (2007) ‘Purana’; Rocher (1986) provides extensive summaries and a comprehen-sive analysis of the genre. Balaram Das incorporates the traditional content of the puranas into the more focused form of the vrata katha. Since vrata kathas were meant to be read ritually by women, this choice was politically and strategically quite astute.

6 The Lakshmi Purana is not a translation or transcreation of an existing model in Sanskrit, although it may have drawn on oral traditions in Odia. Das’s Odia text is very popular and can be found on the web at: www.odia.org/books/LaxmiPurana.pdf (last accessed on 28 November 2018). No critical editions exist, but there are two translations into English. The first is an excerpt, translated by Rajendra Prasad Das (1999). The second is the complete text, published in 2007. I rely mainly on the second translation, done by Lipipuspa Nayak, modifying it in many places. When I quote from the Nayak translation without any changes, I provide just the page number. When I draw on the Das translation as well, I provide both page numbers, indicating the Nayak pagination with an N and the Das with a D (I also indicate if I have modified the translations).

7 There is a vast (and somewhat confusing) body of recent work on the notion of colonial and alternative modernities. A helpful survey of some basic questions is Dube and Banerjee-Dube’s “Introduction” to Unbecoming Modern; that collection and Alternative Modernities convey a sense of the range of issues involved. Chakrabarty’s is an influential account, and his title Provincializing Europe provides a non-nativist flag under which students from all cultures can rally. Taylor’s Modern, building on his non- relativist philosophical approach, has cleared the ground for non-ethnocen-tric comparative studies.

http://www.odia.org

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8 Jati is the word that corresponds to caste; the earlier word varna is closer to ‘station in life’ (based on occupation), since it is not as rigidly deter-mined by birth (see Jaiswal 1998).

9 For a discussion of a purana devoted to Assam’s famous Tantric goddess Kamakhya Devi, see Biernacki (2007). On the mangalkavya tradition in Bengal, devoted to the local village goddesses Manasa and Chandi, see Clark (1955). In Odisha, Sarala Das wrote his Chandi Purana in the fif-teenth century, but it is different in tone from Balaram Das’s text devoted to Lakshmi. The Odia Lakshmi Purana builds on the feminist genre devoted to strong tribal and tantric goddesses, but changes it drastically by focusing on a classical goddess and by developing universalist ethical notions.

10 Tatsama words, favored by the educated elites, were vernacular words derived from Sanskrit and changed only very slightly.

11 In other words, this is a vernacular formulation of ideas that are cosmo-politan in reach. Pollock (1995, 1998, 2006) has done valuable work on the idea of Sanskrit and vernacular ‘cosmopolitanisms’, and he suggests new ways to analyze vernacularization and the role of literature across regional and national contexts.

12 Even though there is no hard textual evidence, it is very likely that the Odia panchasakha writers are echoing the southern Indian anticaste movement called ‘Virasaivism’, which originated in Karnataka in the twelfth century and became a popular social force there and in Andhra. Worshippers of Lord Siva, the Virasaivas questioned notions of dharma based on social rank and emphasized the importance of work done with devotion. For a basic historical account of Virasaivism, see Desai (1968), and for a discus-sion of doctrine, Malledevaru (1973). On the theme of the dignity of work in Virasaiva thought, see Michael (1982).

13 Cynthia Talbot (2001) talks about the ‘fluidity of social identities’ in medi-eval Andhra and elsewhere (84–86 and ff.) and provides lucid discussions of issues in medieval Indian historiography (esp. 1–17; 208–15).

14 Contrast this muted description with, for instance, the Sri Sukta in the Rig Veda, the earliest invocation of the goddess, where she is described more precisely using the following Sanskrit adjectives: she is (among many other things) jvalanti, lustrous like fire, and yasti, slim and slender; she is described as padmavarna: she has the color of the lotus flower. For a com-plete translation and some discussion, see Dhal (1978: 47–62).

15 In my view, the willed making and unmaking of identities is often an implicitly rational response to changing contexts, and so identities, while constructed, are not thereby arbitrary. New identity choices are justified when they are based on an accurate understanding of (changing) social relations and political needs, and of the values and principles that are most appropriate for those needs. This view of the transformation of identities is similar to the approach defended in the collection Reclaim-ing Identity (2000) and by Babbitt (1996). This chapter on the Lakshmi Purana can be read in part as an extension of the theory of identity I have been elaborating since the early 1990s (see Mohanty 1993; 1997, chapter 7).

16 All that we hear from Lord Jagannath is that he acknowledges Lakshmi’s power and glory after having been humiliated by her; he endorses the


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practice of inter-caste mingling in the temple courtyard but says nothing about its significance (see N 74–5).

17 How much the lords of the world listen or yield to us is of course a his-torically contingent and contextual matter. An analysis of the changes in the practice of caste-intermixing within the Puri temple would be valu-able, especially if it follows the multidisciplinary methodological model Dash (1998) provides for his analysis of struggles within the priestly com-munity. Another valuable project would be to examine the way the Lak-shmi Purana has been deployed in subaltern social mobilizations over the ages. This would also involve tracking the shifting power relations in the general polity (the British, for instance, gave more power to the Brahmin priests than the priests had before – for strategic administrative reasons; see Mubayi (2005), esp. 152–90; for an important related account, see Kulke (1993), esp. 1–136).

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emergence of the notion of the individual,3 as is the case with Kabir and so many others.

The texts and practices of bhakti clearly indicate the emergence of the individual as distinct from the type, but one can notice this and other such significant processes only if one looks carefully at the vernacular expressions of Indian modernity. In fact, vernacular (i.e., Deshaj in Hindi) is the most apt expression for the modernity we see emerging through the public sphere of bhakti – a space of voice, which is distinct from private space and autonomous from but not indifferent to the political arena.

Notes 1 For a fascinating account, see Mark Sedgwick (2004). 2 जौ कलिनाम कबीर न होत/ेतौ िोक बदे अरु कलिजगु ममलि करर भगतत रसाति देत/े. . . भगतत प्रताति राखिब ेकारतनतन

जन आि िठाया/नाम कबीरा साच प्रकासा तहा ँिीिै कुछ िाया। 3 A very good translation along with the original text and an introduction

has been prepared by Mukund Lath, Half a Tale: A Study in the Interrela-tionship Between Biography and History (Jaipur: Rajasthan Prakrit Bharti Sansthan, 1981). For a critical appraisal of the text, see Vasudha Dalmia (2008).

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and hence higher per capita output (perhaps incomes too) as well as total growth. These could come from specialization across different societies that accompanied increased long-distance trade, or from regional or urban/rural specialization through augmented domestic trade and urbanization, or from sharper occupational specialization accompanying expanding population densities and local circulation of goods and services. In proto-modern India, all three variables were working in tandem.

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this will obscure an understanding of the conditions in which the indigenous subject had to operate. This chapter has tried to capture the conditions of transition for both state and subject that made pos-sible a qualified embrace of the processes and features that came to stand for a new rationality.

Note 1 After this, I use the Company in the rest of the chapter. 2 Official consultations of the Company in Benaras yield valuable informa-

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(nonbeliever) traditions, different schools of Indian philosophy, the Buddhists and Jainas, the Lokayatas and Bhaktas and modern thinkers used rationality. However, they did not use it for scientific and tech-nological developments because the basic purpose of knowledge was mukti (freedom from the cause of suffering). In this sense, the main objective of knowledge in India was to know man, universe and man’s place in the universe, and not to intervene in the ways of the universe or bend nature to suit human ends.

To sign off, it needs to be iterated that western modernity in practice has been an aggressive hegemonic discourse and is essentially interven-tionist in nature. The Punarnava model of modernity might appear slow and less tangible in terms of outcome but is a viable alternative, as it is non-interventionist and relies on the inner resources and logic of a society and has space in it for ‘little’ and other modernities within and outside. Human civilization, from its prism, is not a discourse of binarism but a continuum of inter-altermodernities to be followed by eclipse and rise of others like the waves of the ocean.

Notes 1 The term rtu, which means ‘season’ is derived from the root rt. 2 For a discussion of the Bhakti movement in India, see Avadhesh Kumar

Singh (2008). 3

Begumpura shahar ko naun, dukhu amdohu nahi thihi thauhNa tasavis khiraju na malu, khaufu na khata na tarasu jwalu.Ab mohi khub vatan gah pai, uhan khairi sada mere bhai.Kayamu dayamu sada pata sahi, dom ne sem ek so ahi.Abadanu sada mashur, uhan gani basahi mamur.Tiu tiu sail karahi jiu bhavai, mehram mahal na kau atkavai.Kahi Raidas khalas chamara, jo sahari su meet hamara.

(Jagdish Sharan, Raidas Granthawali, 181)

4 For its discussion, see Avadhesh Kumar Singh (2004).

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