On grafting the vernacular: The consequences of postcolonial spectrology

Boundary 2

Volumn 31, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 197-218

  Ghosh, Bishnupriya ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950068796     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-31-2-197     Document Type: Review

References (27)

1. See "Letter to the Administrators of the Commonwealth Prize," posted on Amitav Ghosh's Web site, www.amitavghosh.com; my emphasis.
2. Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium, and Discovery (Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1996). Subsequent references to this text are cited parenthetically by page number only.
3. S. M. Acton, review of The Calcutta Chromosome, by Amitav Ghosh, Under the Covers Book Reviews, September 24, 1998, 1.
4. This correspondence between Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty (simply titled "A Correspondence on Provincializing Europe"), available on Ghosh's Web site, was published in full in Radical History Review 83 (Spring 2002): 146-72, just as I was revising this essay. I was immediately struck by the two scholars' interest in the vernacular idiom as a central resource for postcolonial historiographies, an insistence that has earned both the label of "nativist."
5. One of Ghosh's major criticisms of Provincializing Europe is of Chakrabarty's inattention to the question of "race," that invisible category in South Asian postcolonial explorations. Ruminating on the shame and anguish of the postcolonial subject (with personal evocation of his father's experience of the colonial military regime), Ghosh returns to Tagore as the exemplar of the divided colonial subject, Tagore's self-reflexivity notwithstanding. Not a surprising preoccupation, given that race, especially in terms of military experience, had received extended treatment in Ghosh's The Glass Palace, a historical novel published the same year as Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
6. Ghosh and Chakrabarty, "A Correspondence," 160.
7. I will not pursue this point any further here, for it has received extensive treatment in Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
8. See also Priya Joshi's recent work on the vernacular fortunes of the novel in In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
9. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge exemplify an earlier moment of debate in postcolonial studies that addressed the bad marriage of the postcolonial to the postmodern. These debates interrogated the market stipulations that condition the production of postcolonial knowledge, with progressives crying foul. Mishra and Hodge called for the situated study of postcolonial contexts and the subsequent consolidation of vernacular and local knowledges to supplement analyses of postcolonial literatures. See "What Is Post(-)colonialism? " Textual Practice 5, no. 3 (1991): 399-414.
10. Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1993).
11. Ghosh, In an Antique Land, 17.
12. Amitav Ghosh, "India's Untold War of Independence," New Yorker, June 23, 1997, 105-21. Ghosh starts his essay by evoking popular memory - the contradictory stories about this untold war that he received from his parents motivated his historical digging. Popular gossip in Bengal has it that Bose's disappearance was actually a murder covered up by the British. In politically troubled periods, there were repeated Netaji sightings in Bengal that record a Bengali desire for lost political national hegemony.
13. More recently, Netaji has found literary evocation in Ruchir Joshi's The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2001), as a man whose famous disappearance (while flying to Japan in 1942) continues to plague the regional imagination.
14. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), xix. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as SM.
15. Wendy Brown, "Futures," in Politics Out of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 139-40.
16. Brown, "Futures," 144.
17. Brown, "Futures," 145.
18. Amitav Ghosh, "The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi," New Yorker, July 17, 1995, 35-43.
19. Ghosh, "The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi," 40.
20. See Chakrabarty, "Radical Histories and the Question of Enlightened Rationalism: Some Recent Critiques of Subaltern Studies," Economic and Political Weekly of India, April 8, 1995, 751-59. Chakrabarty takes on formidable critiques of radical left histories from more traditional Marxist critics, such as Sumit Sarkar. Sarkar has most famously criticized subaltern studies scholars for their undermining of the legacies of Enlightenment rationalism, an underscoring of rationality that celebrates all manner of the affective, the unsaid, the lived. This includes religious understandings of community, which, in the age of chauvinistic Hindutva, seem particularly dangerous to the goals of secularism. Chakrabarty defends his critical engagement with Enlightenment rationalism, which in no way entails a "wholesale rejection of the tradition of rational argumentation" (752). Rather, his work rejects the "hyper-rationalism of the colonial modern" that would deny anything affective - "pleasures, desires, emotions" - as being important to the tasks of historical investigation.
21. Chakrabarty, "Radical Histories," 751.
22. Tantra was most widely practiced by forest dwellers, "outlaws" who worshipped Kali and were often characterized as dacoits (bandits) in common Bengali lore. The British abolition of "Thugee" in 1837 attempted to clean up these populations, driving them underground with their tantric practices. No surprise, given that tantra was always perceived as popular religion by Brahmanical Hindus. Even more interesting, for our purposes, is the fact that these bands of thugs acquire heroic proportion as freedom fighters in the fiction of nineteenth-century novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (especially enshrined in his widely circulated Devi Chaudurani). Ghosh is interested in Chattopadhyay because the latter wrote the first Indian novel in English, Rajmohun's Wife, a novel Ghosh reads as a dress rehearsal for Chattopadhyay's more celebrated Bengali fiction. See Amitav Ghosh, "The March of the Novel through History: The Testimony of My Grandfather's Bookcase," reprinted in The Imam and the Indian (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002), 287-304.
23. Parama Roy, author of Indian Traffic, spoke from her new work at the Cultural Analysis Colloquium at the University of California, Santa Barbara, March 6, 2002. Her talk, titled "Figures of Famine," presented Mahasweta Devi's literary and journalistic "accounting" of famine, a phenomenon that troubles the postcolonial liberal state and its agents (bureaucrats). Fiction that captures the shock of this traumatic excess within the bureaucratic imaginary is what Roy pithily transcribes as "the bureaucratic gothic."
24. Rabindranath Tagore's "Kshudhita Pashaan" ("The Hungry Stones") was published in The Hungry Stones and Other Stories (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 1-15;
25. Phaniswarnath Renu's tale is set in the postcolonial era, and a translation may be found in The Third Vow and Other Stories, trans. Katherine G. Hansen (New Delhi: Chanakya Press, 1986), 133-51.
26. Consider, for example, the review of The Calcutta Chromosome in Science Fiction Weekly, where John Clute pitches British writer Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nightmare (1983) as the source for Ghosh's venture into science fiction (John Clute, "A Tale Decent Folks Can Buy," Science Fiction Weekly 56 [October 20, 1997], 1-2).
27. "Malarial Imaginings, The Kathmandu Post Book Review 3, no. 9 (August 30, 1998): 1-3.