Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility

Introduction: Tracking Modernity

· 1 ·· INTRODUCTION · Tracking Modernity What Is Modernity? The simplest definition of modernity equates it with the new and suggests a determinate rupture with what came before. Although scholars use the notion of modernity to characterize transformations in sixteenth-, seventeenth -, and early eighteenth-century Europe as early modern, others have defined the term around post-eighteenth-century European transformations . Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault, for example, have focused on how the term underwent a significant shift in meaning during the period of Enlightenment. Habermas describes how modernity became a mode of relating to contemporary reality; in this mode, the present is continually interrogated by self-conscious subjectivity,1 creating a forward -driven paradigm that rejects the immediate past and, perhaps more distinctively, propels the present towards a possible future.2 Foucault advises that modernity represents not only a particular temporality, but also an ethical imperative to change: Modernity anticipates an imminent future as both a task and an obligation.3 For many, the idea of modernity has seemed self-evident, yet the term is, in theory, wide open. Modernity is ultimately ambiguous, connoting at once, John Tomlinson suggests, “a category” that emerges from a distinct kind of social formation and its institutions; “a form of cultural imagination” grounded in the epistemology of reason and certain notions of space and time; and “a definite historical period.”4 But although the term “modernity” is indefinite and its meaning contested, the concept has had a powerful historical presence. Modernity appears as an object to be attained (to acquire modernity) and a condition to be achieved (to be modern). In Britain, the notion of modernity has been given substance since the eighteenth century through a series of ideas, practices, and institutions clustered around it. These include notions of science and technology that became important in the colonial context. This amalgamation 2 INTRODUCTION also incorporates a new mode of production—capitalism—as well as social processes, such as urbanization, that helped produce a new kind of national identity. New subjectivities have emerged from the ideas, practices , and institutions associated with modernity, bound about the ideals of individualism, secularization, and instrumental rationality. Culturally, they have given rise to new symbols, such as the train symbolism explored in this book, as well as to notions of alienation, meaninglessness, and a sense of impending social dissolution.5 Modernity and mobility are closely connected in a relation charged by the power of rhetoric and representation. Modernity has often been allied with mobility through representational forms—textual, spatial, and temporal . A journey, for example, functions as the means and metaphor for personal transformation. A city street filled with people and objects on the go appears as the sign of a society undergoing transformation. “From the democratic spatialization of the public sphere to the interiorized consciousness of the bounded individual subject,” Caren Kaplan writes, “Western modernity since the Enlightenment tends to privilege mobility of one kind or another.”6 Despite this, modernity cannot be reduced to mobility. The cluster of numerous concepts, practices, and institutions associated with the modern substantiate modernity even as its meaning remains fluid. Leaving aside for a moment the problem of defining modernity as such, there is also the issue of defining a modernity. Recent critics have challenged the philosophical definition of modernity as derived from particular historical experiences in Europe. They re-situate the idea of modernity to places torn by debates about cultural affiliation, theorizing a modernity of alterity, produced by a “constitutive outside,”7 —usually an imperial power. In describing this alterity, some scholars show an ambivalent modernity or a dialectical modernity riven by difference. Gyan Prakash, for example, sees a colonial modernity as an “internally divided process,”8 and Paul Gilroy describes a double consciousness that places modernity inside a European tradition of Enlightenment thought as well as outside of it, in the sense that the West is forged by relationships with outsiders during the history of the black Atlantic and African diaspora.9 Timothy Mitchell, like Gilroy, depicts a process by which Western modernity is composed of elements subordinated or excluded, “such elements continually redirect, divert, and mutate the modernity they help constitute .”10 Other critics have argued that European versions of modernity INTRODUCTION 3 become reshaped along the contours of different and even oppositional local spaces by imaginative and material practices that are both individual and collective, along the lines of Dilip Gaonkar’s “creative adaptation,”11 producing “alternative...