The subaltern numen: Making history in the name of God

History of Religions

Volumn 46, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 99-126

  Novetzke, Christian Lee ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 43449109742     PISSN: 00182710     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/511446     Document Type: Review

References (91)

1. Ranajit Guha, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency," in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 46, with my gloss of hool as "rebellion," which may more correctly be translated as "sudden attack."
2. From the introduction to Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1844), in Karl Marx: A Reader, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 301
3. Ranajit Guha, "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India," in Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 7
4. Rosalind O'Hanlon, "Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia," Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 1 (1988): 189-222
5. Jim Masselos, "The Dis/appearance of Subalterns: A Reading of a Decade of Subaltern Studies," South Asia 15, no. 1 (1992): 105-25
6. See the edited volume by David Ludden, Reading Subaltern Studies (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), for several essays that make this point, especially those by Sumit Sarkar, Jim Masselos, and Rosalind O'Hanlon
7. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994)
8. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1917), trans. J. W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958)
9. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 314. See also a critique of the politics of this "strategic essentialism" and an abandonment of the history of the subaltern by Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997)
10. Vinay Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 20
11. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 14
12. The Collective seems to have begun to address this criticism. See, e.g., Satish Deshpande's essay, "Hegemonic Spatial Strategies: The Nation-Space and Hindu Communalism in Twentieth-Century India," in Subaltern Studies XI, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 167-211
13. as well as S. Mayaram, M. S. S. Pandian, and Ajay Skaria, eds., Subaltern Studies XII (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2005)
14. See Partha Chatterjee, "Agrarian Relations and Communalism in Bengal, 1926-1935," in Guha, Subaltern Studies I, 9-38
15. Partha Chatterjee, "Caste and Subaltern Consciousness," in Subaltern Studies VI, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 169
16. Partha Chatterjee, "A Religion of Urban Domesticity: Sri Ramakrishna and the Calcutta Middle Class," in Subaltern Studies VII, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyah Pandey (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 40-68
17. See Partha Chatterjee's other essays in the series' volumes, such as "Gandhi and the Critique of Civil Society," in Subaltern Studies III, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 153-95
18. and "Claims on the Past: The Genealogy of Modern Historiography in Bengal," in Subaltern Studies VIII, ed. David Arnold and David Hardiman (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1-49
19. David Arnold, "Rebellious Hillmen: The Gudem-Rampa Risings," in Guha, Subaltern Studies I, 88-142
20. David Arnold, "Famine in Peasant Consciousness and Peasant Action: Madras, 1876-1878," in Guha, Subaltern Studies III, 62-115
21. David Hardiman, "Adivas: Assertion in South Guharat: The Devi Movement of 1922-1923," in Guha, Subaltern Studies III, 196-230
22. Saurabh Dube, "Myths, Symbols and Community: Satnampanth of Chhattisgarh," in Chatterjee and Pandey, Subaltern Studies VII, 121-58
23. Tanika Sarkar, "Jiru Santal's Movement in Malda, 1924-1932: A Study in Tribal Protest," in Subaltern Studies IV, ed. Ranajit Guha (Dalhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 136-64
24. Sundar Kaali, "Spatializing History: Subaltern Carnivalizations of Space in Tiruppuvanam, Tamil Nadu," in Subaltern Studies X, ed. Gautam Bhadra, Gyan Prakash, and Susie Tharu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 126-69
25. Particularly Chatterjee's multiple investigations of Ramakrishna, of which I would highlight Chatterjee, "A Religion of Urban Domesticity," 40-68, as well as his monograph The Nation and Its Fragments
26. Sumit Sarkar, "The Kalki-Avatar of Bikrampur: A Village Scandal in Early Twentieth-Century Bengal," in Guha, Subaltern Studies VI, 1-53
27. see also Sarkar, "The Conditions and Nature of Subaltern Militancy: Bengal from Swadeshi to Non-co-operation, c. 1905-22," in Guha, Subaltern Studies III, 271-320, esp. 308-17
28. S. Sarkar, "The Conditions and Nature of Subaltern Militancy," 309
29. Marx's study is also sometimes entitled "Contributions to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law," the attribution given by S. Sarkar in his article. See the translation by Annette Jolin and Joseph O'Malley of Marx's Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970)
30. S. Sarkar, "The Conditions and Nature of Subaltern Militancy," 308
31. See Sumit Sarkar, "Social History: Predicaments and Possibilities," Economic and Political Weekly 20, nos. 25-26 (June 22-29, 1985): 1081-86
32. Gyan Prakash, "Science between the Lines," in Subaltern Studies IX, ed. Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996)
33. See, e.g., Chakrabarty, "The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British India," in Arnold and Hardiman, Subaltern Studies VIII, 50-88
34. and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), esp. chaps. 2 and 6
35. Gyan Pandey, "Rallying Round the Cow," in Guha, Subaltern Studies II, 60-129
36. Gyan Pandey, "The Prose of Otherness," in Arnold and Hardiman, Subaltern Studies VIII, 188-221
37. Shahid Amin, "Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-1922," in Guha, Subaltern Studies III, 1-71
38. Ishita Banerjee Dube, "Taming Traditions: Legalities and Histories in Twentieth-Century Orissa," in Bhadra, Prakash, and Tharu, Subaltern Studies X, 98-125
39. Shail Mayaram, "Speech, Silence, and the Making of Partition Violence in Mewat," in Amin and Chakrabarty, Subaltern Studies IX, 126-64
40. Deshpande, "Hegemonic Spatial Strategies"; Qadri Ismail, "Constituting Nation, Contesting Nationalism: The Southern Tamil (Woman) and Separatist Tamil Nationalism in Sri Lanka," in Chatterjee and Jeganathan, Subaltern Studies XI, 212-82
41. Ranajit Guha, "Chandra's Death," in Subaltern Studies X, ed. Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 135-65
42. and "Discipline and Mobilize," in Chatterjee and Pandey, Subaltern Studies VII, 69-120
43. See also Shahid Amin, On Representing the Musalman, SARAI Reader 04: Crisis/Media (Delhi: SARAI, 2004), 93-97
44. Gyan Prakash, "Position Paper: The Impossibility of Subaltern History," Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 2 (2000): 293
45. Gyan Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World Perspectives from Indian Historiography," Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 2 (1990): 383-408
46. Prakash, "Position Paper," 293
47. Prakash, Another Reason, 202
48. Guha, "Prose of Counter-Insurgency," 2
49. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 102-3
50. Invoking the supernatural to explain history is ironically what Hegel does in The Philosophy of History - ironically because Hegel is the starting point for many postcolonial critiques of the "people without history" thesis
51. Lal, History of History, 14
52. Lal, of course, is not alone in this critique; see the essays by Jim Masselos ("The Disappearance of Subalterns"), and Sumit Sarkar ("The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies") that are reprinted in Ludden, Reading Subaltern Studies, 187-211 and 400-429, respectively
53. V. Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600-1800 (New York: Other Press, 2003), 252
54. See Romila Thapar's essay "Society and Historical Consciousness," in Interpreting Early India (1986; New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 137-73
55. cf. Sudipta Sen's essay "Imperial Orders of the Past," in Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia, ed. Daud Ali (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 233
56. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire," in Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7-24
57. Rao et al., Textures of Time, 19
58. See also the excellent essay by Sumit Guha titled "Speaking Historically: The Changing Voices of Historical Narration in Western India, 1400-1900," American Historical Review 109, no. 4 (2004): 1084-1103
59. Daud Ali, "Royal Eulogy as World History," in Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia, ed. Ron Inden, Jonathan Walters, and Daud Ali (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 166, 225
60. Partha Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh, History and the Present (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002)
61. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv
62. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978)
63. Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987)
64. Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)
65. Inden, Walters, and Ali, Querying the Medieval
66. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, and The Nation and Its Fragments
67. Nicholas B. Dirks, "History as a Sign of the Modern," Public Culture 2, no. 2 (1990): 25-32
68. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (1837; New York: Dover, 1956)
69. James Mill, The History of British India (1826; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975)
70. Shahid Amin, "On Retelling the Muslim Conquest," in Chatterjee and Ghosh, History and Present, 31, 42
71. Dirks, "History as a Sign of the Modern."
72. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. T. Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)
73. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)
74. For Hegel, see Hegel, The Philosophy of History
75. and Inden, Imagining India
76. For Marx, see Karl Marx, "The British Rule in India," New-York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853
77. Said, Orientalism, 153-57
78. and a response to Said in Ajiz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 221-42
79. See Max Weber, The Religions of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, ed. and trans. H. Gerth and D. Martindale (1921; Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958)
80. as well as David Gellner, The Anthropology of Buddhism and Hinduism: Weberian Themes (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001)
81. Note how R. G. Collingwood suggests that science and religion share the same ground of "theology": R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. Jan van der Dussen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 255-56
82. Indeed, Collingwood's first work was on philosophy, religion, and science, where he argued that religion and philosophy are united in their inability to be explained through science: see Collingwood, Religion and Philosophy (1916; Bristol: Thoemmes, 1994)
83. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), xvi
84. Geertz seems to hint that "knowing" is preceded by "belief" and replaces the latter (The Interpretation of Culture [New York: Basic, 1978], 110, 112)
85. In contrast, notice how Bourdieu uses the idea of belief in his work as the unifying principle of a cultural field: see Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 74-111
86. It seems to me that Orientalist scholarship that self-consciously advocated colonialism, or those scholars who drew upon such scholarship (like Hegel and Marx, for example), often found a characterization of India as "religious" to be a moral position upon which to justify colonial rule. For Huntington, see Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (summer 1993): 22-49, and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996)
87. Otto, Idea of the Holy, 7
88. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, 237
89. A. K. Ramanujan, "Is There an Indian Way of Thinking? An Informal Essay," Contributions to Indian Sociology 23, no. 1 (1989): 4
90. Michel Foucault, "Is It Useless to Revolt?" in Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault, ed. Jeremy Carrette (1979; New York: Routledge Press, 1999), 131
91. For a study of Marx and religion, see Marx on Religion, ed. John Raines (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002)