The Place of India in Postcolonial Studies: Chatterjee, Chakrabarty, Spivak

The prominence of postcolonial studies in academia today is belied by persistent misunderstandings over its aims. The reasons for this are too various to be treated here, but what follows is a brief list of charges: that postcolonial studies caricatures “Enlightenment reason”; that it embraces nativism and identity politics; that it dresses political resentments in academic language; that it is a watered-down, depoliticized form of anticolonial thinking; that it is obsessed with nineteenth-century colonial institutions to the neglect of current forms of political and economic domination; that it is a tool of self-promoting immigrant academics.

In this essay I do not respond directly to these allegations but will attempt to lay some of them to rest by exploring what I take to be the animating question of postcolonial studies: whether it is possible for formerly colonized or underdeveloped peoples to articulate a creative, that is, textured, response to the institutions of modernity. I argue that recent scholarly writing on India teaches us how to think about this fundamental issue, and will demonstrate that it holds valuable insights for those of us who are students of places other than India.

Elaborating Indian history and cultural politics, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, and Dipesh Chakrabarty are among the most influential of those scholars who have generated the style of thinking called “postcolonial.” To help us understand this term as it has come to be associated with these scholars, we might begin by distinguishing post-colonial from the term anticolonial. Anticolonial thought refers to forms of ideology critique that expose as false the colonizer’s claim that colonial values are properly enlightened or universal. Postcolonial thought is a reflection on the categories and reflexes through which anticolonial resistance takes place. Postcolonial thought asserts that anticolonial resistance tacitly reproduces the culture and values of imperialism. A good example of this, it is argued, is elite anticolonial nationalism, where native elites (for example, Nehru or Sukarno) criticized their masters while reproducing colonial norms and schemata to articulate their political and economic goals.

As such, we can name the difference between anticolonial and post-colonial thought as follows: anticolonial thought is the ideology critique of colonialism, whereas postcolonial thought signals a critique of the anticolonial conformism to the culture of imperialism (its premises, norms, styles of valuation, schemas, and categories). Postcolonial thought therefore scrutinizes the dominant rules of representation set in motion by knowledge production in academia and beyond. If the colonial and anticolonial subject has been trained to produce truth effects within a particular regime of truth, it is tacitly understood that other ways of seeing and saying must now be imagined, not the least part of which is to infiltrate and recode the received terms of disciplinary knowledge.

In other words, the distinction of postcolonial studies lies in its attempt to revalue the phrase “India and the West” as an epistemic problem, rather than as an encounter between two self-evident empirical entities. The terms India and the West are both equally the result of a single representational schema that believes its truth effects. It is precisely this schema as well as its presuppositions that postcolonial studies subjects to questioning. This forum offers us an opportunity to scrutinize the reflexes by which we are trained to produce truth about objects—India and the West—rather than on the objects themselves. Comparative exercises implied by phrases such as “India and the West” generally presuppose a conformism to existing forms of thinking, most notably those inculcated during the colonial period. We will do well to defamiliarize this comparison by supplementing it with epistemic questioning. “India” and “West” ought not be made the unthematized point of departure for the production of truth-effects.

This insight enables us to grasp the importance of Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse.² Chatterjee believes that anticolonial thought in the strict sense combines a critique of colonial ideology with an embrace of the norms and valuations of the colonizer. The “India” so produced is continuous with the values and culture of imperialism even or especially where...