Global History and the Politics of Language: Some Preliminary Reflections

Global History and the Politics of Language: Some Preliminary Reflections

By Dr Sreenanti Banerjee

Tahzib-i nisvan (Volume 35, Issue 19) [1932] EAP566/2/1/21/19[1]

This blog reflects upon the relationship between the act of doing global history and the politics of language. The key contention is that it is crucial that historians writing histories of erstwhile colonies speak and harbour some degree of curiosity about and grasp of the primary languages spoken in the regions that they are studying (especially the dialect spoken by the subalternised populations of the region). In the absence of this ethic of curiosity or wonder, their well-meaning desire to write global histories, contrary to their intentions, would be quite similar to, for instance, that of some of the prominent colonial officials during the period of British imperialism in India who, without knowing a single Indian language, took upon the task of writing elaborate and detailed books on and about India.

We can also go a step forward to say that such acts of history-writing, contrary to its objectives, also has the possibility of not being very different from the presuppositions founding the following (now oft-cited) proclamation made by the British historian and Whig politician Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1935:

I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.

Why is this extreme extrapolation necessary? A key reason, among others, as to why the extrapolation and the attendant linguistic literacy of the kind I am describing here is important is because to understand the career of the techniques of persuasion and justificatory premises of the knowledge-practices mobilised by the subjugator class in the non-West, it is crucial that the historian learns to appreciate, what the Welsh socialist writer Raymond Williams once called, the ‘structures of feeling’ that those techniques of persuasion evoked in the colonised, especially when perceived in the latter’s vernacular. What did the colonised do with the very idiom with which they were colonised/ dominated? Did they receive those idioms passively? Or did they transmogrify those very idioms (albeit unknowingly) into their own formations of thought?

Historian Ranajit Guha has an exemplary illustration of this in his formidable text ‘Dominance Without Hegemony’.[2] The first example that Guha comes up with is with reference to the implementation of the idioms of ‘Order’ and ‘Danda’ in colonial India. Guha shows how sanitization, public health, municipalization in the key urban centers, and all other citadels of ‘welfare’ were undergirded by the idea of Order under the rule of the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent. However, one of his most original and innovative interventions was to suggest that Order needed the help of and had to appeal to a heterogeneous idiom, an Indian idiom, for its legitimization and successful execution. This new idiom did not belong to Order’s own genealogy and its own life process. This, Guha notes, was the Indian idiom of Danda, which made coercion under British rule politically plausible and morally justifiable. The indigenous expression of Danda was central to performances of domination in India at the time. Guha gives the example of punitive measures that women were routinely subjected to for violating patriarchal and caste-based codes of morality (for example engaging in transgressive inter-religious or inter-caste marriages). Ancient Indian polity and governance was predicated on this idiom of Danda. Guha notes that the concept implied something that was much more than the apparently homologous English word ‘punishment’ (which is how Danda is often translated) and was conceived as ‘the manifestation of divine will in the affairs of the state’.[3] The mobilisation of this idiom by the dominant class meant that the ruling class (in this case the landlords), could present themselves as the ‘maharaj’ and thereby morally legitimise and justify the unjust extraction of begar (forced labour, for which no payment is made)[4] from their tenants. Danda, Guha shows with meticulous precision, rendered the liberal idiom of Order non-antagonistic and thereby also helped in the normalisation of the latter.

But, in relation to our present concern, the key question is, what were the semantic techniques via which Danda was exercised? Here in, the significance of the knowledge of the vernacular becomes important. Without this knowledge, all exercises of punitive measures (which were, in fact, a phenomenon of Danda) against the subordinate could be read vis-à-vis the political universe of Order.

Another key dyad that Guha broached, to understand the dynamic of power-relations that were operative between the subaltern and the elite in colonial India, was that of Obedience and Bhakti. According to the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher and historian David Hume, particular governments are legitimate, and people continue to obey and pay allegiance to these governments, not because they have entered into a social contract with the state or because of individual natural rights, but rather because of the usefulness of these governments in preserving the social order. According to both elite nationalist historiography as well as Marxist historiography, Guha suggests, the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised was one of non-antagonism and collaboration, primarily because of this Humean notion of Obedience.[5] According to this reading, the colonised did not resist the oppressor because there was an assumption that the British rule was useful for maintaining civil-societal norms in India. Guha’s most imaginative intervention lies in the fact that he shows how this Humean notion of Obedience, just like the aforementioned notion of Order, could only sustain itself because it was grounded upon a different Indian idiom which, just like Danda, belonged to a heterogeneous politico-linguistic universe. This was the idiom of Bhakti. Mainstream historiography is tempted to translate Obedience as Bhakti.[6]  However, what is key to remember is that while both (i. e. Bhakti and Obedience) entail the paying of allegiance to the ruler, the reasons and justificatory premises of the act of paying allegiance are markedly different in the two structures of thought. While Obedience, as suggested, is based on being committed to the ruler’s usefulness in maintaining civic-societal norms, the roots of Bhakti do not lie in being loyal to the ruler because of the latter’s societal use-value. It rids itself off any utilitarian logic (even if that logic is based on egalitarianism) and instead appeals to the Hindu aesthetic theory of rasa.[7] The devotee in this tradition, emphasising dasya (‘the quality of being a servant’)[8], pays allegiance pegged to pre-capitalist idioms of devotion; and traditional elite historiography cannot but appeal to such idioms of devotion in their understanding of collaboration between the coloniser and the colonised.

However, once again, in relation to our present argument, the key question we need to ask is, how is a historian to fathom this complex notion of Bhakti without taking the integral relationship between religious literacy and literacy in the vernacular seriously? What Guha describes as the ‘prose of counter insurgency’ embedded within the tradition of Bhakti is impossible to decode without this kind of literateness. In the absence of this idea of literacy, the enquirer of global histories, in spite of their best efforts and the noblest of intents, might continue to read Bhakti as Obedience (just as they might continue to read Danda as Order).

It is precisely keeping these questions in mind that a crucial Early Career Workshop was organised by the Global History and Culture Centre at the University of Warwick in the UK in 2023. It was entitled ‘Non-English Sources for Global History’. The key suggestion of the workshop was that when a scholar is engaging in the act of writing global histories, they need to bear in mind two things: first, the need to interrogate the primacy of sources that are almost always in the English (or in some cases, a European) language; and second, the methodological and conceptual hurdles that working on non-European sources entail.

The two main questions that the Workshop asked are the following:

How do we deal with the concepts that emerge from our sources in our own writing? What are the (linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary) skills, knowledge, and resources required to conduct multi-lingual research and embed multilingualism more fully into global history?

A further key reason why this idea of multilingualism should be fully integrated while conducting histories that identify themselves as global or decolonial is because of the ways in which the concept-metaphor of ‘itihasa’ (what is often translated in English as ‘history’) is conceived in certain non-European traditions. Historian Prathama Banerjee, for example, has recently argued that for Ranajit Guha, the European genre of the novel and history is distinctly different from the homologous Indic genres of katha (narration or storytelling) and kavya (elaborate poetic composition); elements that form the core of the writing of itihasa in the Indic traditions.[9] While history grounds ‘truth’ exclusively on the narrator’s or the author’s own experience in time, itihasa grounds truth also on the initiative of the listener/ reader.[10] Within the tradition of itihasa, just like the listener of the narrated event is distant from the said event, the narrator who has experienced the event is also distant from it; and most crucially, for Guha, because of this distance, both relate to the past through the affective-emotive idiom of ‘wonder’.[11] In other words, itihasa acknowledges the mediated nature of an experienced event, both on the part of the listener as well as of the narrator.

Further, a key reason for historians to acquire this kind of linguistic literacy is to gain a deeper understanding of, what in Indian history writing is known as, the domain of ‘old social history’. As historian Partha Chatterjee had shown us in his insightful piece ‘History and the Domain of the Popular’, this is a form of history which is written mostly in the vernacular (i. e. non-English languages), not geared towards submissions for peer review, fosters key political and cultural movements in erstwhile colonies, often has tertiary (and not direct) connections with academic history writing and is therefore in the domain of, what gets identified as, ‘the popular’. If a decolonial (academic) historian is interested in knowing (as they should) how non-anglophone history writers in the domain of the popular recount the past (predominantly in non-positivist ways), then familiarizing oneself with these forms of history writing in the vernacular is crucial.[12] Most significantly, this is a domain of writing and publishing that, in the act of doing public history, simultaneously engages in the performance of public philosophy, i. e. the deliberate and scrupulous discussion, predominantly in non-turgid language, of issues that are essentially historico-philosophical in nature.

Finally, it is imperative that a blog piece on the politics of language in the act of writing global histories includes some ruminations on the idea of cosmopolitanism. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his 2022 Dewey Lecture on Law and Philosophy, argued that for a Bengali person, the experience of being a Bengali is an erotic experience (just like being an Australian, for example, is an erotic experience for an Australian person).[13] And, as he further added, he feels this way primarily because of Rabindranath Tagore (the Bengali poet, artist, educator, writer and the first non-European to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature), and the ways in which Tagore taught us the ‘expansive ways of being a Bengali’; how you can take profound pleasure in the rich diversity of the world and be a Bengali at the same time. Your Bengaliness, Chakrabarty notes, does not hold any ressentiment against the idea of diversity and therefore only embellishes (and does not scare) your cosmopolitanism.

It is important to bear in mind that Tagore’s vernacular cosmopolitanism was by no means parochial. In fact, in 1918, when Mohandas Gandhi wrote a letter to him asking about his views on making Hindi the language that is ‘principally used in the forthcoming Congress’[14], this is what Tagore had to say:

The difficulty will be not only for want of practice but also because political thoughts have naturally taken form in our minds in English. So, Hindi will have to remain optional in our national proceedings until a new generation of politicians fully alive to its importance, pave the way towards its general use by constant practice as a voluntary acceptance of a national obligation.[15]

It is in this spirit of the need to retain an ethic of vernacular cosmopolitanism and simultaneously retain the aforementioned idea that the richness of the languages of the world is not a confusing hassle which ought to be swiftly translated (or worse, removed), that we embark upon our journey of researching on global histories of welfare feminisms. And, in the process, the two key questions that our project asks are the following: First, is it just to say that one is engaging in ‘decolonial’ historiography and doing ‘global’ history without the knowledge of a single non-European language? Second, without this knowledge, how does an Anglophone practitioner of decolonial history in a university located in the Global North identify their (in this case, linguistic) privilege as their complicity (in acts of historical damage); an act of identification and admission (and thereby atonement) that is ‘impossible and’ yet ‘necessary’ for engaging in critical historiography of any kind?[16]

Footnotes

[1] ‘Tahzib-i nisvan (Volume 35, Issue 19) [1932]’, British Library, EAP566/2/1/21/19, https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP566-2-1-21-19

The image is from the Musfiq Khwaja Library and Research Centre, Karachi, Pakistan, digitised by the University of Chicago; and the digitisation was funded by the Endangered Archives Programme supported by Arcadia.

[2] Guha, Ranajit. 1997. Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press.

[3] Guha, 1997, 29.

[4] In Bengali households, even to this day, the word is used in common parlance and even in spaces of intimacy, to refer to extractive labour.

[5] Guha identifies both elite nationalist historiography as well as Marxist historiography as liberal historiography.

[6] As mentioned earlier, Guha denotes this mainstream historiography as ‘liberal’ historiography.

[7] The word refers to Hindu aesthetics and is considered a key element of literature (especially poetry), different dance forms and classical music.

[8] Guha, 1997, 47.

[9] Banerjee, Prathama. 2023. ‘The Modern, the Untimely, and the Planetary: One Hundred Years of Ranajit Guha’. Critical Times, 6(3), pp.464-492.

[10] Banerjee, 2023, 478.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Chatterjee, Partha. 2003. ‘History and the Domain of the Popular’. In Seminar-New Delhi, pp. 31-34. https://www.india-seminar.com/2003/522/522%20partha%20chatterjee.htm

[13] It is perhaps key to highlight that, as already suggested by showing the parallel between a Bengali and an Australian person, the idea that the experience of speaking and dwelling in the lifeworld of one’s own language is an erotic experience, is not exclusive to non-western cultures. Rather, the point that is made here is that all cultures inhabit their own languages in a manner that, according to Chakrabarty’s suggestion, often comes very close to a psychosexual experience. I thank Dr Saima Nasar for suggesting me to clarify the politico-theoretical charge of the analytic of the erotic (especially since, as we know from Edward Said’s canonical text Orientalism, the ‘Orient’, both via the rhetorical techniques of historicism as well as that of cultural essentialism/ culturalism, has often been characterized as possessing ‘unbridled sexuality’).

[14] Tagore, Rabindranath and Gandhi, Mohandas. 1997. The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore 1915-1941. Compiled and Edited by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. New Delhi: National Book Trust, India, 49.

[15] Ibid., 50.

[16] See Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, for an elaboration on this idea of privilege as complicity.