Archive for the ‘reviews’ Category
Obdurate Urbanism
Anique Hommels, Unbuilding Cities: Obduracy in Urban Socio-Technical Change. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005.
While sharing a common intellectual genealogy, the contemporary disciplines of science and technology studies (STS) and urban studies have followed divergent paths of development, and flourished in largely separated academic compartments. Anique Hommels’s Unbuilding the City argues for the complementarity of the approaches of STS and urban studies in explaining the phenomenon of urban “obduracy” and strategies for “unbuilding” the city. Linking together the concepts drawn from actor-network theory and constructivist studies of socio-technical change, the book contains three case studies of postwar urban development in the Dutch cities of Utrecht, Maastricht and Amsterdam.
How can we understand urban structures as more than simple technical or physical artifacts? How can we explain the history of cities and their power relations as socio-technical ensembles? Does the urban built environment embed the tacit knowledge of its original planners and builders, such that their norms and values continue to shape the relations of city-dwellers in subsequent generations? In a well-known essay on the question “do artifacts have politics?”, Langdon Winner has cited the example of the low-lying bridges designed by planner Robert Moses in New York, whose passages were too low to permit movement by public buses between the freeways and beaches of Long Island. Moses’ bridges prevented access to these elite white spaces of recreation by inner-city black populations, thus inscribing a permanent spatial discrimination into the design of seemingly apolitical technical artifact.
Ravinder Kumar
In the final week of the semester,I have been avidly procrastinating by reading the major works of Ravinder Kumar, the social historian of western India. Apart from the phenomenal account of the rise of British power in nineteenth century Maharashtra in his magisterial Western India in the Nineeeth Century (1968), I have been dipping into his Essays in the Social History of Modern India (1983). His long article, “From Swaraj to Purna Swaraj: Nationalist Politics in the City of Bombay, 1920-32″, written in 1977, is remarkable in anticipating many of the later historiographic debates on the nature of nationalist politics, particularly the work of Shahid Amin on Gandhi as Mahatma. Indeed Kumar’s work combines the empirical depth and richness of Cambridge School social history with the sophistication and theoretical boldness of Subaltern Studies. And his major works were all completed long before either of these schools of historical writing took over the conversation.
History of Computing
In my own lifetime of thirty years, global society has been transformed by the widespread availability of inexpensive computing technology. Indeed, only within the past ten years, a new combination of commoditised hardware, software, and network infrastructure has put this technology within reach of millions of new people. A certain taint of presentism is, therefore, inevitable in any attempt to write the history of “computing” in our time, as we are positioned at a particular point in a dynamic of ongoing social and technical change. As with earlier historians of the “industrial revolution”, we must assess the historicity of the “information” or “digital revolution” both as historical narratives and popular common sense. This presentism presents particular challenges to the historian in his or her craft of framing a coherent narrative of technological development. Here I will consider different approaches to the history of computing which confront both the the familiar challenges of a historian of technology, as well as the unique aspects of computing as an object of historical inquiry.
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Frontier Dialectics
In the writing of nationalist histories of the United States, it is difficult to find a more succinct statement of space as an organising metaphor of nationhood than the “frontier thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner. In his famous address of 1893 to the American Historical Association meeting during the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Turner marked the end of the “first period” of American history and the “closure of the frontier” through the successful expansion of the United States through warfare, colonial land purchases, and the spread of new networks of railways, cities, and homesteads across the North American continent in the nineteenth century. Here I consider two contemporary histories of space in the early modern United States, Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology at the Pastoral Ideal in America and William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and Great West. Read together, the work of Marx and Cronon present us with a critical counterpoint to Turner’s celebratory narrative of the frontier as the fulfillment of American manifest destiny. Cronon’s historical geography of commodity markets in Chicago and the Great West, and Marx’s literary history of the “pastoral ideal” in America, suggest a two-pronged analytical approach to the historical imagination of space in capitalist societies.
Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India
Rob Jenkins, Democratic Politics and Economic Reforms in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
For better or for worse, in most countries of the post-Cold War world, a fairly generalised packaging of liberal-democratic state institutions and neoclassical market economics has now achieved hegemony as the prescription of the possible future. A host of international financial and trade institutions, aid agencies, global policy elites, and their state and non-state apparatuses now debate the dynamics of making “transitions” to this model, and the “reforms” necessary to “complete” this effort successfully. Neoliberal ideology constructs this as a universal and ineluctable process, eliding the complex politics of market-oriented reform by trumpeting an ideal notion of democracy, almost entirely emptied of meaning.
This recent book attempts to analyse this contingent, political dimension of the change in India’s development strategy since 1991, examining the commitment of governing elites to market reforms in a long-established democracy. Their commitment is by no means inevitable and irreversible, India’s liberalisation being undertaken in a competitive political system, where powerful interests could pose obstacles to thwart market reforms, unlike other “transitional” societies in Eastern Europe, Africa or Asia. In this, Jenkins intervenes in debates on the relationship between democracy and market liberalisation, arguing for the importance of political incentives, political institutions, and political skills.
The book is divided as follows: the first three chapters respectively introduce the book; map the history of economic reform in India — including the failed attempt by Rajiv Gandhi in the late eighties — and discuss methods and approaches to the political economy of reform. The following three chapters unfold the central themes of the argument on the political dynamics and durability of liberalisation.
Firstly, he argues for the incentives available to governing elites through new sources of profit and patronage in a scenario where state control of the economy is receding, and where they can carve out a new role for themselves in the market; additionally, the fluidity of the structure of interest groups makes it clear to politicians that resistance could be manipulated and new, pro-reform groups cultivated.
Second, the chapter on formal and informal political institutions examines Indian federalism and how the logic of reform has provided new life to state-level politics, where resistance to reforms is quarantined, while policy initiatives continue to come from New Delhi. States now compete against each other in the pursuit of more market-oriented policy measures. The salience of informal institutional mechanisms like party political arenas and networks of influence of power-brokers to the reforms process, neglected in analyses of liberalisation, is also addressed here.
Thirdly, the tactical skills of democratic politicians in managing the process of reform, obfuscating its effects, disarming its opponents and manipulating new short-term alliances to buy time for the rooting of the reform process is discussed. The final chapter contextualises India’s reform in a global context, critiques the naïve notions of democracy and good governance in development discourse, and discusses India’s institutional capacities in the wake of liberalisation.
Written at a time when these changes were being put in motion, and while in many ways outdated by the new policy initiatives since the 1999 general elections, this book retains useful insights into India’s democratic institutions and its policy apparatus. Most importantly, Jenkins highlights how liberalisation has been orchestrated by elites without much public fanfare or debate, and implemented in an ad-hoc, underhanded and opaque, but increasingly determined manner, belying the happy rhetoric of “democracy” and “civil society” in neoliberal ideology. The chapters are often plagued by heavy-handed repetition of the central thesis about the sustainability of liberalisation despite the rapid changes in governments in the past five years.
However, with its strong and representative sample data from four different states — Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Karnataka and West Bengal — this book is worthwhile reading for students of sociology, economics and politics, and development studies.
Originally published in Contemporary South Asia, vol.10, no.1, Carfax Publishing, Bradford, U.K., 2000
The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour
Jan Breman, Karin Kapadia, Jonathan Parry, eds., The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour (Contributions to Indian Sociology, Occassional Studies 9). New Delhi and London: Sage Publications, 1999
Marking both a renewal of interest in labour studies and an important disciplinary shift, the publication of this anthology is a significant event. Introduced by Jonathan Parry, the fourteen essays by sociologists, anthropologists and historians in the volume include two “book-ends” — introductory and concluding reviews of the respective literatures on the “organised” and “informal” sectors of the industrial economy in India, both by Jan Breman. These chart the shifts in labour studies from the narrow emphasis on the tiny formal sector of the economy — about workers’ “commitment” to the industrial setting, measures of productivity, the social profile of formal sector workers, and trade union strategies — to the much larger and unwieldy “informal” sector of the economy, incredibly neglected by research scholars. While questioning this dualism in the study of economic activity in India, Breman raises questions about the formation and coherence of the working-class or proletariat as an identity and analytical category, the diversity of forms of wage labour and industrial production — from home-based to small workshops to large factories — and the multiplicity of workers’ identities in both formal and informal occupations.
The essays are as follows. Dilip Simeon offers a history of the coal industry in Jharia, South Bihar, and the changing relations of capital, labour and state in the context of working class and tribal movements. Chistropher Pinney locates a pessimistic discourse on industrial modernity as “Kaliyug” for the managers of a large plant in Nagda, Madhya Pradesh, while for the local workers — the subject of these constructions of rural rusticity and traditionalism — there is a less nostalgic feeling towards the exploitation from which the factory has liberated them. Jonathan Parry examines the Bhilai Steel Plant and takes issue with E.P. Thompson’s thesis on the transformation brought about by industrial work discipline, arguing this effaces the variability of rhythms of industrial production.
Two pieces explore memory and the construction of the past. Douglas Haynes, in a piece on the textile industries of Surat and Bhiwandi, discusses the idioms of industrial relations and their inflection by languages of morality, caste and kinship, in different ways deployed by both employers and workers to articulate contemporary concerns. Chitra Joshi, writing on the crisis-striken textile mills of Kanpur — today mostly closed — explores the narratives of industrial decline of a decimated workforce with a memory of the labour militancy in the 1930s.
Raj Chandavarkar, in a rich meditation on labour historiography — with material on the Bombay textile strikes of 1928–9 — offers a critique of mechantistic narratives of industrialisation and proletarian consciousness, and their insufficient treatment of the contingencies in the formation of class identity. Samita Sen, in a history of the Calcutta jute mill industry, foregrounds the position of women in the urban industrial workforce, documenting how their labour and lives were marginalised and domesticated by colonial capitalism and patriarchy.
Several pieces directly address the “informal” sector. One of the weaker contributions is Arjan de Haan’s piece on evolution of the badli, or substitute, labour system in the Calcutta jute industry, in which he unconvincingly argues that the badli system, labour recruitment, and migration patterns need to be seen as an aspect of workers’ agency, their “choices” and “values”, rather than as a business strategy to retain a flexible and exploited labour force. Peter Knorriga maps the unstable industrial relations in the small-scale, mostly home-based production units in the Agra footwear industry.
Karin Kapadia contests traditional arguments about class formation in her study of the synthetic diamond industry in rural Tamilnadu, arguing that workers’ identities are mediated, and the “flexibility” of the globalising labour market maintained, through gender discourses and practices. Miranda Engelshoven analyses the formation of the urban Saurashtra Patel community through the the production relations of the diamond industry in Surat, and discusses obstacles to workers’ organisation. Geert de Neve analyses the practice of tying labour to maintain a stable workforce in powerloom industry in Tamil Nadu, and how what was once an employers’ strategy of bondage has become a reciprocal relation for workers in search of a better livelihood.
The revival of interest in labour studies in India — distinct from the post-Independence intellectual and policy interest in labour — comes both at a time when the foundational categories of the disciplines concerned with the study of labour are being contested, as well as in a political conjuncture when working-class radicalism is at a low ebb and capital at its most expansive. The contributions to this exceptional volume confront the conceptual challenges faced in the study of the historical and contemporary working landscape in India, and offer exciting new possibilities for research by all social scientists.
Originally published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, Fall 2001.
The Historical Past and Political Present
Constructing contingent memories as authoritative, and transforming the many threads of the past into a coherent narrative, the discipline of history is one of the most important fields of modern social thought. As an endeavour of the present, with its ongoing debates and revisions, history is inevitably concerned with claims to present-day power and representation. The controversies which have recently dogged the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) in the past several years are thus not simply an academic issue, but a fight for control of our collective memory and identity.
Let us not misunderstand this dispute, as many have, as one between the “Western” and “Indian” versions of history. Nor is it really a fight over saffron or secular historiography. While no one can deny that the intensified assault on administration, education and public life by the Hindu Right in the past few months is a terrifying phenomenon, this issue goes beyond simple ideological postures and academic methods.
Sarkari or Sarvajanik History?
Last week, two volumes of the ICHR-sponsored Towards Freedom series of books on the freedom struggle, edited by the noted social historians Sumit Sarkar and K N Panikkar, were withdrawn from publication by the Oxford University Press under official pressure from the nodal ministry for education, Human Resources Development (HRD).
The General Editor of the series, Sarvapelli Gopal — son of Dr S Radhakrishnan and a distinguished biographer and historian in his own right — clearly stated that this was “a violation of the terms under which the project was conceived and executed. It also amounts to an infringement of the academic rights and freedom of the authors who were invited by the ICHR to undertake this work…It is disturbing and unethical that a purely academic exercise should involve intervention by officials.”
While many of the historians and academics who led protests against the HRD and ICHR last week raised the cry of intellectual fascism and saffron authoritarianism, which are undoubtedly valid, there is a larger issue at stake. That is the tendency for more and more of our public institutions to be taken over by small coteries of extremists and sycophants, who are unaccountable to anyone, and into whose hands have fallen many of the most crucial aspects of our polity, public life and historical memory.
Rationality, Nationality, and Public Life
The ICHR was constituted by an Act of Parliament in 1972, with the objectives of giving a forum for historians to exchange views and promote and disseminate balanced and comprehensive historical research, “to give a national direction to an objective and rational presentation and interpretation of history.”
Arun Shourie, BJP MP, Union Minister, and otherwise known for his vitriolic and shoddy tracts attacking anyone opposed to Hindutva, has in a recent book alleged that the historians of ICHR often used the body for nepotistically advance their own academic profiles and publication agendas. Contrary to the lofty principles proclaimed in its charter, it was never a representative body nor was it run democratically, and the protests raised about saffronisation is nothing compared to the corrupt ways of the old Left intellectuals.
While Shourie’s is obviously a motivated attack, in 1998, when the BJP reconstituted the ICHR by appointing new members sympathetic to their communal version of history, a Marxist academic who lectured in Delhi for more than two decades commented to me despairingly that Shourie is in his own way correct. Since its inception, the historians of the ICHR were political sycophants of Indira Gandhi who used the slogan of socialism as an exoneration for crude personal patronage.
According to this lecturer, the real issue at stake is not just one of saffronisation, but of the how we can run our public institutions to avoid control by individuals and coteries who are unaccountable and undemocratic. The larger issue with the ICHR, as perhaps with much of our institutional structures, is of the authoritarian and manipulative habits that have been corroding our public life since Indira Gandhi’s attacks on democracy in the sixties and seventies.
A Battle for Ideology or for Institutions?
B R Grover, recently appointed ICHR Chairman by the BJP Government, has appeared as an advocate for the VHP, substantiating their claim to the site of the Babri Masjid and implicitly justifying the violence at Ayodhya in 1992. Like the previous regime, we can expect that the sycophants and coteries of the Sangh Parivar will use the ICHR for their own purposes of patronage and largesse, at the cost of further erosion of academic integrity, and the independence of our educational and research bodies.
Perhaps the biggest dilemma is one of formulating a public strategy to deal with this situation. Unfortunately, in opposing the new attempts at packing the ICHR, Left-liberal social scientists have raised a hue and cry over the meanings of rationality and nationality in history-writing, and by turning the issue into a battle for ideology. They seem to have avoided the longer-term issue of who controls our public institutions — the small bands of politicking saffronites or socialists, or the people at large.
Originally published in Satyam Online.
Wages of Freedom: 50 Years of the Indian-Nation State
Partha Chatterjee, ed., Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-State, Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1998.
Recent years have seen a significant enrichment of the theoretical depth of Indian political and social analysis, inspired both by revised disciplinary perspectives — most notably, the work of the Subaltern Studies collective — and by contemporary political changes. This volume, edited by one of the most outstanding of such recent theorists, brings together both seasoned analysts and new contributors from the fields of social, cultural and political analysis in a solid collection of essays that examine the experience of postcolonial democracy and nationalist modernity.
Partha Chatterjee’s editorial introduction sketches a contribution to the debate on civil society, lucidly explaining a framework that incorporates a domain of political society mediating between the elite institutions of nationalist civil society and the state. Making clear a concern with governance and power which underpins all of the essays, Chatterjee suggests a new founding perspective for critical analysis of politics and society in the processes of democracy. In the first section, concerned with more conventional discussions of state policy apparatuses, Rajni Kothari (“The Democratic Experiment”) narrates the democratisation of the polity over the past fifty years; Prabhat Patnaik (“Political Strategies of Economic Development”) discusses political economy; and Achin Vanaik (“India’s Place in the World”) examines the course of foreign policy and India’s future role in a multipolar geopolitical order as an aspiring great power.
The second, most compelling, section extends the guiding concern with democracy and national identity to cultural forms – Tapati Guha-Thakurta (“Instituting the Nation in Art”) analyses of the modern canonisation of Indian tradition in cultural and artistic representations. Sudipta Kaviraj’s lecture (“The Culture of Representative Democracy”) contains rich and eloquent observations on the cultural and social consequences of egalitarian principles in a hierarchical society. Madhav Prasad’s discussion of the film industry (“The State In/Of Cinema”) examines the constitution of popular subjectivity and configurations of the state and community through one of the most effective technologies of nationalist discourse, the cinema.
The third section joins essays by Javeed Alam (“Communist Politics in Search of Hegemony”) and Aditya Nigam (“Communist Politics Hegemonised”), exchanging views on the decline of the Left in India, accounted to the failure to effectively manage the terrain opened by the deepening democratic process, to articulate the cultural and social demands of new social identities to a collective will and hegemony. Both authors underline the narrow class reductionism of the organised Left, its strategic inflexibility, and the dismissal of democracy and culture as politically unimportant, thereby allowing the neutralisation of the Left by the dominant nationalist discourse.
The final sections gathers reflections on specific issues of recognition, inclusion and identity — of caste, gender and region. Kancha Ilaiah’s polemic (“Towards the Dalitization of the Nation”) describes the ambitions of the newly activated groups arising from the new lower-caste and Dalit political ferment, while M.S.S. Pandian (“Stepping Outside History?”) analyses new Dalit literature from Tamil Nadu which challenge conventional notions of historical memory. Nivedita Menon (“Women and Citizenship”) problematises the ability of the state to effect change for women in the face of other domains of patriarchal authority in the family and community, through an examination of arguments for an Uniform Civil Code. Subir Bhaumik (“Northeast India: The Evolution of a Postcolonial Region”) examines the changing relations within the Northeastern States and in their relationship with the Centre.
While intended for publication in 1997 to commemorate the golden jubilee of Independence, the volume appeared a year after the anniversary. But it is no less timely a contribution to the study of Indian politics and society, and can be recommended to almost anyone concerned with the processes and consequences of postcolonial modernity in the subcontinent.
Originally published in Contemporary South Asia, vol.8, no.3, Carfax Publishing (Bradford, U.K.), 1999.
Untouchable Pasts
Saurabh Dube, Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780-1950. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
The prevailing narrowness of disciplinary boundaries in history and anthropology have prompted a now well-developed critique of the isolation of the archive and the field, respectively — the privileging of elite archival sources, textual authority, and their master narratives on the one hand, and the ahistorical essentialism, questionable epistemic and cultural perspectives of fieldwork on the other. The effort undertaken by the Subaltern Studies collective to use the anthropologist’s tools in the writing of history has, in the study of Indian society, introduced questions of culture and power, identity formation and representation, and everyday cultural and social practices into the historiography of modern India. This recent book deepens this project of ethnographic history through a study of the Satnami community of Chhatisgarh in contemporary Madhya Pradesh.
Dube navigates his analysis through the “overarching oppositions” of ritual and reason, myth and history, tradition and modernity, community and state by showing how each of these concepts is interwoven in the signification of its opposite in the historical and symbolic processes of identity formation of the Satnamis. The work documents the founding of the sect and elaboration of their organisation, the changes undergone in the community through shifts in land settlement, patterns of governance under the Marathas and British, and the experience and recasting of the community’s identity through contact with colonial administration, evangelical missionaries, and nationalist reformers. This historical detail is enriched by an ethnographic perspective which places these wider processes within their everyday significance in local arenas of village life, ritual practices, and gender and caste authority. In the latter part of the book Dube explores the configurations of the past in the community both as mythical and historical truths, building on his explanations of the discursive construction of the caste-sect in earlier chapters and the formation of the group as modern self-recognising community in the field of modern politics opened by the colonial regime.
Within this narrative Dube intervenes in several important debates in different disciplines. Addressing the central category of Hindu religious identity and community, Dube argues for an understanding of the contested and negotiated nature of this category by marginal groups like the Satnamis. In the debate on caste, he argues against the rigid separation of definitions of caste and sect, ascetic and householder, and synthetic theories of caste based either on principles of ritual purity or kingship, claiming that they are intermeshed in their actual practices and symbolic constitution. Arguing against the tendency in recent political and historical work to portray a too-rigid separation between state and community, Dube both argues for the internal differentiation of the community on issues of law, property, and gender, and he endorses a view that sees the community as fashioning itself through the symbols and metaphors of colonial governance in its notions of order, law and identity, and casting itself in the form of modern civic associations like the Satnami Mahasabha.
Dube’s elegant work is notable for its methodological insights most of all, complemented by solid archival research and fieldwork, both often narrated with a refreshing self-consciousness about the limits of knowledge production in the archival-ethnographic encounter. At times his arguments are unnecessarily repetitive, sometimes making an unnecessary theoretical flourish or clever turn of phrase at the expense of an otherwise clear and lucid work — an irritating tendency in much work in cultural studies, though here only a minor distraction. Additionally, there is an slight unnevenness in his prose style between some chapters, which could have been eliminated by a better arrangement and editing of the separate papers that composed this volume. However, despite these slight defects, the book is very worthwhile reading for students of history, anthropology and sociology, religious studies and social and cultural theory.
Originally published in Contemporary South Asia, vol.8, no.3, Carfax Publishing (Bradford, U.K.), 1999.
The Concept of Race in South Asia
Peter Robb, ed., The Concept of Race in South Asia (SOAS Studies on South Asia, Understanding & Perspectives Series), Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1997.
Sponsored by the School of Oriental & African Studies in London, this anthology is part of an series seeking to intervene in present debates on the problem of Eurocentric representations-constructions. The fourth volume of the series edited by Peter Robb of SOAS’s History Department, this volume collects eleven essays which interrogate the concept of race, defined by Robb (in his useful and comprehensive Introduction) as ‘any essentialising of groups of people which held them to display inherent, heritable, persistent or predictive characteristics, and which thus had a biological or quasi-biological basis.’
A general lecture by Kenneth Ballhatchett (‘The language of historians and the morphology of history’) rehashes familiar issues in recent post-Orientalist historiography, while setting the tone for the volume with an anti-essentialist plea. Dagmar Hellman-Rajanayagam (‘Is There a Tamil Race?’), in an investigation of the modern Tamil cognate for the English “race”, inam, shows the mutability of this term in describing Tamil identities in different circumstances, concluding that cultural and linguistic factors predominate in the essentialising of Tamil identity more than biology. John Brockington (‘Concepts of Race in the Mahabharata and Ramayana’) presents a genealogy of the classical notion of varna from its beginnings as a flexible philosophy of recognition, to its hardening into a system of exclusion, race-like in its patterns.
Four contributions analyse colonial discourse. John Rogers (‘Racial Identities & Politics in Early Modern Sri Lanka’) discusses the continuities of precolonial ideas of a fluid Sinhalese identity with later, rigidified ideas of a Sinhalese ‘race’, which partially appropriated aspects of Victorian racial ideology. Susan Bayly’s long essay (‘“Caste” and “Race” in the Colonial Ethnography of India’) challenges current post-Orientalist caricatures of colonial ethnography, detailing the important differences between individual ethnographers and the contemporaneity of some of their work, and placing their often-ridiculed theories within their political-intellectual milieu. Crispin Bates’ investigation of colonial anthropometry (‘Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India’) calls into question the cognitive status of present categories of analysis of castes and tribes by showing the origins of much present ethnographic methodology in the pseudo-scientific theories of nineteenth century racial anthropology. Lionel Caplan (‘Martial Gurkhas’) offers an account of the concept of ‘martial’ races and tribes in recruitment for the Indian Army from Nepal, showing the formation of an ideal “martiality” through essentialised ideas of race and tribe, prejudices about climate and environment, and notions of masculinity — a racial discourse with very real material effects for its subjects.
The final three essays address the connections between racial ideology and nationalism. Through a reading of a biography of a Bengali colonel, Indira Chowdury-Sengupta (‘The effeminate and the masculine’) describes the constitution of an nationalist self through the appropriation of colonial knowledge about the Aryan racial heritage of Hindus over colonial stereotypes of Bengali effeminacy. Javed Majeed (‘Pan-Islam and “Deracialisation”’) discusses the tension in the work of Mohammed Iqbal between a repudiation of European racialism and nationalism, and the acceptance of European terms of discourse which structured his own vision of pan-Islamism. Christophe Jaffrelot (‘The Idea of the Hindu Race’) shows the ambivalent appropriation by early Hindu nationalists of European racial and fascist theories, discussing the persistence of traditional ideas of hierarchy and subordinate inclusion over exclusive eugenic conceptions of the Hindu ‘race’.
The lack of any discussion on present-day South Asia or its diaspora, where issues of race are very much alive, is unfortunate. The lack of an index, some typographical errors, and a bland typeset are troublesome. Overall though, with strong and diverse discussions by established scholars, this volume will serve as an useful critical intervention in modern South Asian history, cultural studies and anthropology, and postcolonial theory.
Originally published in Contemporary South Asia, vol.8, no.1, Carfax Publishing (Bradford, U.K.), 1999
