The Power of Postcolonial Thinking
Why have discussions about South Asian history and culture become so prominent in theoretical discourse in recent years? As someone who writes and teaches at an American university about the visual cultures of modern South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, I find that I am asked this question on a regular basis. It does indeed seem that the debates emerging from South Asian studies have gained a foothold in the field of cultural theory, increasingly defining its directions and agendas in largely productive ways. In anthropology, history, literature, and art history, for example, theorists like Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Arjun Appadurai, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Geeta Kapur – who have all taken as their subject matter the problems presented by Indian modernity – have been enormously influential in setting the paradigms for postcolonial thinking and criticism more broadly. Although they differ vastly in their intellectual approaches and scholarly styles, these theorists nevertheless appear to share a central common concern: namely, a concern with the problem of the difference of Indian modernity, with mapping its distinctly colonial and/or postcolonial career, and with uncovering the alternatives presented by marginal or subaltern groups to the totalizing narratives of a dominant Euro-Western order and its bourgeois beneficiaries in the non-Western world.Why, then, have these kinds of concerns, specific to the South Asian case, become so powerful in shaping our theorizations of the present? And what is the relevance of postcolonial thinking from South Asia for understanding the processes of globalization in the 21st century?It is important to remember that the theory, criticism and cultural practice emerging from the South Asian context today has come of age during a period of rapid social, political and economic transformation in the subcontinent. Twenty-five years of economic liberalization in India, for instance, has led to an unprecedented opening of the Indian economy to foreign investment and technology, exemplified by the dot.com culture of Bangalore, India’s so-called Silicon Valley, or the outsourcing of jobs by multinational corporations and the rise of the phenomenon of call centres in India. While this has meant a new era of cosmopolitanism, the same processes have generated some of the most sobering geopolitical realities witnessed in the region: the rapid globalization of a third world economy, the rise of religious nationalism, the escalation of violence and ethnic conflict, the assaults on the rights of women and other minority groups, and the threat to the environment by rapid and uneven industrialization, and most recently, nuclear militarism. These multiple crises have also inaugurated a new terrain for contemporary cultural practice within South Asia, characterized itself by the paradoxes and contradictions of religious-political conservatism and a capitulation to market conditions on the one hand, and a distinctly invigorated environment for art practice and a renewed relevance of the arts in the political domain on the other. Clearly, the social issues that have emerged from this landscape – concerning questions of citizenship, minorities, human rights, refugees, secularism and neo-liberalism, to name a few – are not merely problems that ‘belong’ to South Asia. Rather, they mark the urgent, challenging new frontiers for humanist understanding on a global scale. Geeta Kapur, the well-known critic, curator, and cultural thinker based in Delhi, has often reflected in her intellectual practice on this dialectical relationship between South Asian criticism and the global situation. For Kapur, South Asia – and the third world, more broadly – ‘wedges itself into the global bind’: using its history ‘as a lever’, it brings an ‘existential urgency to questions of contemporaneity’.[1] Its very presence demands that theorizing be more complex and sophisticated. And its own cultural practitioners must be especially vigilant as they negotiate the new national-international equations.It is no wonder, then, that students of culture around the world have turned to the paradigms developed out of the subcontinent as part of their entry into the globalization debates. At another level, however, the question of ‘why has South Asia now ascended into the ranks of metropolitan theory?’ raises the issue of reception across deep historical divisions of power, and the question of visibility and invisibility within a notoriously Eurocentric theoretical field. It recalls, for instance, the long history of colonial authority over India, which saw its knowledge as essentially irrelevant to the European Enlightenment project, and the massive historical retaliation to such authority in the form of Indian nationalism in the twentieth century. A cynic might ask: does the current recognition by the knowledge centres of the West make South Asia the ‘flavour of the month?’ Is postcolonial theory yet another art world fashion, destined to pass out of favour over time? Perhaps. But I would also suggest that the influence of thinking about ‘other’ modernisms and modernities – histories outside the physical geographies of the West – is itself a phenomenon that represents some fundamental realignments of global power within an historical frame. These are redefinitions of the contours of our social landscape, a redrawing of the boundaries between centre and periphery, between ‘us’ and ‘them’, which have come in part through the massive displacement and migration of people that is part of the process of globalization. Theorists like Kapur, Bhabha, Spivak, and Appadurai all remind us that the history of the colony was always important – that it was not a marginal aside to the dominant history of the West, but one that, when read back into the history of the centre, can begin to undo its hermetic seals and expose a number of profound contradictions in the totalizing narratives of European modernity. This critical project, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has stated, is not some form of retaliation or ‘postcolonial revenge’: it is rather a project of ‘provincializing Europe’, which has implications for narratives of the past, present, and future from multiple perspectives and geographic locales. [2] Significantly, Chakrabarty’s intellectual project does not mean less of a focus on Europe, but more; not a decentring of Europe, but rather a re-positioning of its knowledge practices, and a closer look at its interpenetration into all aspects of life in the non-European world. The history of European thought must be engaged at the broadest, collective level, because it is, after all, to borrow Chakrabarty’s emancipating phrase, ‘everyone’s history and it affects us all’. Where these ideas and theories may take us in the future is of course impossible to predict. But given the current global situation, beset by crises and violent unrest, such an open and expansive invitation to enter the international by way of South Asia has an undeniable intellectual appeal.
Saloni Mathur
