Moving Devi

How is "Moving Devi" linked to "Can the Subaltern Speak?" you ask. You also ask me to consider the authority of autobiography. Indeed, the link between the two essays is a life-link.

In "Can the Subaltern Speak?" I tried to engage precolonial Indic material for the first time. It meant pushing away my allegiance to "French theory." To keep working with Derrida, I had to endorse him, to make sure he survived my new engagement with that new material, which I saw not as identity but as making use of the extracurricular "knowledge" I had because of the accident of birth. I knew nothing of the Indic material in a disciplinary mode. I proceeded with my serviceable Sanskrit and little else. I located the "subaltern" in the middle class, in which I was myself "responsible." The essay itself was a resolute suppression of the autobiographical, in more ways than I can yet reveal.

By contrast, in "Moving Devi," some seventeen years later, the Western stuff is digested, for better or for worse. It does not oppress; it is not a thing to quarrel with. I am also at ease with the Indic material, not a little because of the calm guidance and encouragement of my late friend, Bimal Krishna Matilal, whose name I will take again in the essay proper. I am no longer beset by the need to occlude the traces of the irreducibly autobiographical in cultural speculation of this sort. It will be harder to take sides now. There are many subalterns in the pages of this essay; their speech is still unheard, but not a one of them resembles me.

In 1998, I was asked to write an essay for the catalog accompanying an exhibition on the great goddess (Devi) at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. "Moving Devi" was the response. A shorter version was published in the catalog. This unwieldy hybrid essay is as much about the authority of autobiography in the problem of reading as was "Can the Subaltern Speak?" although the earlier essay was not yet ready to betray this. My understanding of the autobiographical subject is a position without identity. How that computes in the writing is for you to judge.

I have just been reading a lot of writing samples for a postcolonial position. It seems that many younger scholars now refer to metropolitan migrant writers as "subaltern." Yet Gandhi and Nehru were not "subalterns" for the Subaltern Studies collective. (It goes without saying that the historians themselves did not claim subalternity.) The term "subaltern" has lost its power to indicate people from the very bottom layer of society, excluded even from the logic of the class structure. This may indeed be one of the reasons why I take the museum visitor from the model minority--sometimes myself--as a constituted subject that forgets the other in its haste to claim otherness, only with reference to the metropolitan majority.

Here, now, is the essay proper.

Every critical conviction persuades me that if I were representative of anything, I would not know that I was. Yet, surely, I must at least represent the passage, in migration, from ethnos to ethnikos--from being home to being a resident alien--as I write on the great goddess as she steps into a great U.S. museum ¹ I will allow "myself" to occupy this stereotype as I think about her. Surely, it is because of this stereotype that I was asked to be part of the catalog.

I have moved from a Hindu majority in the center of Hinduism to a Hindu minority in a new imperialist metropolis where Hinduism was, until day before yesterday, in the museum. Yesterday, when the active polytheist imagination accessed the mind-set of the visitor in the museum, a colloidal solution, shaken up between here and there, was surely the result. I want to ruminate upon this transference from careless participant to uneasy observer. I speak of Devi, from somewhere upon this transference circuit, although not as...