History at the Limit of World-History (review)

Lamartine--that mediocre poet but cunning politician in France during the revolutions of 1848--once remarked that history is a trick we, the living, play upon the dead. Part of Ranajit Guha's argument in these extraordinary lectures is to partially invert this by showing that at least some of the eminent dead--Hegel for example--can play some fairly nasty historiographical tricks upon the living. As we know now, the philosophy of history achieved with Hegel a level of rigor and grandeur that has influenced generations of philosophers and historians. Yet, the whole exercise, Guha makes plain, was an erudite and passionate attempt by the no-longer-revolutionary Hegel to foist upon history a certain logic of unfolding, a certain rhetorical strategy, and a certain world-historical project that would justify the ascent of Europe quite "rationally"--and therefore by the Hegelian dialectics all must be real and morally acceptable in an objective sense. Guha brings an equal and opposite rigor to the dissection of the Hegelian corpse, following the Wittgensteinian idea of approaching the limit from both sides. The limit in this instance is, naturally, world-history. Concretely, it also turns out to be a deep theoretical critique of "statist history," "the prose of history," and history as "experienced truth" centered on the narrator. Ultimately, as I will show, history also turns out to be his-story in several senses.

At the very outset Guha reminds the reader-listener of the integral purpose of his life-long project, "the plea for historiography's self-determination." (2) It is a project of self-emancipation. "A call to expropriate the expropriators, it is radical precisely in the sense of going to the root of the matter and asking what may be involved in a historiography that is clearly an act of expropriation"(2). He reminds us that "colonialist knowledge" is collusive through and through in every field from philology to political economy. Certainly, in my own field--economics and political economy--the mainstream echoes of songs of praise for the capitalist economy and social formations all but obliterate any attempts at an objective inquiry into the real causes of wealth and poverty in our world. Joan Robinson's caustic comments about young Indian economists being completely bamboozled by the so-called sophistication and rigors of modern economics, are, alas, even more apt today than when they were first made. As Guha has so tenaciously and honestly demonstrated, history and historiography suffer from similar pernicious practices.

It is to Guha's credit that he picks as his foil an intellectual giant of Hegel's stature. It could be said that this exasperatingly complex thinker waxes and wanes as he shines over the changing intellectual landscape, but he (or rather his shadow--both in an ordinary and the Jungian sense) never disappears, never goes "gentle into that good night." Thus, Guha's rigorous critique of Hegel is all the more impressive as he leads us through a fascinating deconstruction (and ultimately destruction--"destruktion," in the Heideggerian sense) of "the representation of the colonial past held in thrall by a narrowly defined politics of statism"(5). A further fascinating aspect of Guha's treatment is his contrast between Hegel's approach and the approaches developed in India both in the Indian past and present. He draws upon several important sources from Indian antiquity--Ramayana, Mahaabhaarata and the Brihadaaranyaka Upanishad in particular. He also draws from Tagore and, by extension, from a critical understanding of the imposed colonial modernity in India under the British rule.

As Debesh Roy, one of the most original thinkers in Bangla about novel and novelization, reminds us, there were at least two modernities in nineteenth century Bangla literature. The modernity of Bankim and Madhushudan, based largely on European models (more specifically, Romantic models) in fiction and poetry won out over a more carnivalesque, self-parodying version started by Ishwar Gupta and Hutom.¹ This was not accidental. As Roy explains:

In his [Gupta's] construction of a poetic foot...