The sub-altern is dead interview “Jinnah was attempting to - TopicsExpress



          

The sub-altern is dead interview “Jinnah was attempting to build a state for Muslims rather than an Islamic state. That didn’t work” By Tahir Kamran Sir Christopher Alan Bayly is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at St Catharine’s College. He has authored many books, including ‘Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars’, ‘Empire and Information’, ‘The Birth of the Modern World’ and ‘Recovering Liberties’. Besides his immense contribution as a historian, he has supervised more than 70 PhD students in a career that spans 40 years. Despite being one of the best historians in the entire world, Chris Bayly is an incredibly modest person who gave his time generously to speak to me in his office in the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge. Excerpts of the interview follow: The News on Sunday (TNS): What is the role of archives in writing history, particularly after the postmodern turn? The postmodern emphasis has shifted from the colonial or the British archives to local sources. How has it impinged on the classical production of history? Christopher Alan Bayly (CAB): I think the so-called post-modern move is more radical than that, and it says that the archives should not be used at all; archives are virtually useless and you have to put together a whole range of different materials including popular memories and go beyond all archives. In her famous article Gayatry Charavorty Spivak “Can the subaltern speak?”, she was actually criticising the use of colonial archives against colonial thought, and that I think is very interesting. The other thing is that one can easily exaggerate the importance of so-called postmodernism and post-colonialism. I think now, because of the current financial global crisis, people are going back to the much harder constructive form of economic and social history. To give you an example, I am going to be giving a lecture in Denmark about this very interesting person called Michael Mann [‘The Sources of Social Power’]. He has written four volumes of world history entirely from historical sources but using what he calls “a macro sociological approach”. In other words, he uses sociological theory in the context of a very deep historical empiricism. His significance is notable, certainly, in the realm of sociology and history. Interestingly, he doesn’t mention any post-modernists; he just dismisses them. He hardly talks about subalternity. Now, that’s probably going too far but I think one has to beware of overestimating the influence of postmodernism and post structuralism etc. I think it [the influence] is beginning to decline and beginning to go back to possibly a modified form of Marxism in a Gramscian way. If you look at somebody like Slavoj Zizek, he is very much trying to combine classical Marxism with some of the insights of postmodernism or whatever. TNS: From 1980s onwards, it looked as if the upsurge of postmodernist historiography in the form of subaltern studies and a few others came to monopolise the field. Now, when the Subaltern Studies has been virtually dismantled, do you see any revival of the classical way of doing history, of the days of Lord Acton who emphasised on archives and objectivity as its fundamental aim? CAB: We should not confuse postmodernism, in the sense of Derridesque attack on ‘meaning’ or a statement, with post-colonialism. I think, at least to begin with, the subalterns were more post-colonial than postmodern, in the sense that they were arguing against colonialism, very often using colonial records and colonial archives. They then went through a period where they were more influenced by postmodernism. Again, in the last few years, they seem to be moving in a different direction. I don’t think Shahid Amin, for instance, ever became a full- fledged postmodernist. He was one of the best among the subalterns and is now working on the linguistic survey. Now, obviously Derrida and language is important for him in that context, but it is not a kind of postmodernist approach. Similarly, Dipesh Chakrabarty is another one of the prominent subalterns who is now working on issues of environment. There has been fragmentation on all sides, not just on the subalterns, postmodern, post-colonial side but also amongst other types of historians. So, I think we’re in a period of movement where we are searching for new paradigms and new overall structures. But I don’t think we are going back to have an Acton’s view on history. What has happened is that post-modernism, subaltern studies and even right-winged reaction against that has made people very aware of the need to think carefully about the way they are using archives, think carefully about the notion of objectivity, which is hardly possible. So the historians now say, “Well, I’m prejudiced in this way; this is the way I think”. People are much more open about what they are coming to history or archives with. But we can’t go back to the 1970s when a very famous historian here, who worked on the early modern period, said to an audience “I go into the archive, my mind is a tabula rasa [blank slate] and I come out with things imprinted on it.” Even though the Subaltern postmodernist moment has perhaps passed, nobody is going back to that sort of situation. Everybody will be more careful about the way they use archives and argue against the grain of archives. TNS: You just mentioned fleetingly about objectivity and its importance. Do you think the emphasis on objectivity has waned over a period of time and this is an era of multiple objectivities? CAB: Yes, I think there are multiple objectivities. While interpreting data that we find in different ways, we need to have balance in our argument. We are not going to have a God-like reason implanted on history. Going back to Mann, the things he emphasises even up to 2011 when his last volume was published are striking. He is still working in the paradigm of “class” and “nation state” and this is because he is Europeanist by origin. I think there is still a tendency amongst the historians whose work has been about Europe or have European origin to implant western European notions or American notions on to societies where it is not necessarily appropriate. So, for instance, he speaks hardly at all in the last two volumes about religion, then suddenly he notices the Arab Spring just before he publishes his third volume and sticks religion in. So, that’s a good implant and I think is quite objective. But what I am saying is that you can never be totally objective; you’re always coming from somewhere and you have to always bear that in mind. After all, that’s what we teach the undergraduates to do; they read 10 books a week and a few articles and they are supposed to put them together in a balanced way which is also a decent argument. Sometimes, the need for an argument overrides objectivity because the danger is otherwise ending up with bits and pieces, fragments of a historical argument. You should just bear that in mind and do your best to organise an argument which takes the reader or listener along and, at the same time, talks about nuanced differences etc. TNS: From a Pakistani perspective, where the nation state is conceived in the name of religion, religious ideology overrides everything else, which results in a crisis situation in the social sciences and humanities because everything has to be Islamised in order to make it amenable to the general public. Can History, in such a situation, play any meaningful role for multiple ideologies to nurture? CAB: I think it is not only Islamisation; if you look at some right-wing American Christian interpreters, they too are doing something similar and I suspect the people influenced by Hindutva are doing almost the same. So it is not a specific problem with Islamic ideology but there is room for rigour within the Islamic historical thought for different sorts of arguments. The obvious parallel is to go back to the days of Soviet Union and its attendant Socialist atheism. If we look at what it has produced during that period, whether we are talking about Solzhenitsyn or some other historians, [we find that] intelligent writers can actually circumvent that kind of ideological block which is bearing down on them and say something interesting. History is extremely important, particularly in order to get the sense of change whereby Islamisation has become so fashionable and state-driven at a particular period of time when these societies are facing economic crises and lots of young people are unemployed or there are imbalances of the world economy. In such a situation, state pushes an ideology in order to survive — just like Soviet Union did it in 1970s and 1980s before it collapsed. So History is not irrelevant. TNS: When this Waziristan insurgency came to pass, many of us thought that one reason for that insurgency is that in Pakistani curriculum, areas like Waziristan or even Balochistan were not given their deserved niche. What is your take on the ramifications of such exclusion of particular areas from public instruction and the role of history to bring about cohesion in culturally or socially disparate societies like Pakistan? CAB: The role of history in providing cohesion for any society is very vital. Once again, I will say that it is a matter of balance. One can easily say that a particular society is very diverse and one needs to understand its different origins. In one of my articles, I have spoken about ‘local patriotisms’ on which nationalism is predicated. The existence of ‘local patriotisms’ does not mean that they are the enemy of nationalism; in fact national understanding can be built on them rather than anything fragmented. So I think it is an unnecessary fear — of emphasising localism. In the UK, the Scots can monopolise their own history and write about themselves which, I don’t think, will impinge upon the debate about whether Scotland should be independent or not. It is a fact that up till 1704 the Scots were virtually independent within a much broader monarchical structure. Once you can get that across to school children, it takes some heat out of the debate. So history, to my mind, is quite useful in that respect. TNS: Can you say something about your new book, ‘Recovering Liberties’ for the readers in Pakistan? CAB: Recovering Liberties is a move towards intellectual history which I felt was, in a way, overwhelmed in the 1980s and 1990s on one hand by Marxist Social History and on the other by Subaltern Studies, which looked at resistance but without looking very hard at the ideas underlying resistance. And so there has been a movement, on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in South Asia, which says, “Let us think about intellectual history not as an idea which floats above social history, but interacts with it, and how ideas are very important in creating and relating to social change”. The reason I focussed the book on liberals is that I felt there is a tradition which still remains viable, even in India and to some degree also in Pakistan. It became vital again with debates about economic liberalism and neo-liberalism in the 1980s and 1990s. But I think that for the Indians (and this would also include the people who were to become Pakistanis) in the nineteenth century, liberalism meant something more than simply free trade and free access for foreign capital; it also meant an attempt to build a consensual society — a humanitarian liberalism. It seemed to me that that is a really remarkable thing that this tradition emerged in the context of colonialism; actually turned many of colonialism’s tropes on their head, using them against the colonial government. This is why I talk about these people as “statistical liberals”, people like Dadabhai Naoroji, but also some of the Muslims of the period. I felt that that tradition should be recognised and that there is still some vitality in it. So that’s why I wrote the book. But other people are working too. As you know Shruti Kapila is working on much more aggressive types of national formations which broke away from liberalism or Gandhianism which is another very different thing. I regard Gandhi as a counter-liberal, in the sense that he is very hostile to some aspects of liberalism, but he is very inclusive at the same time, or tries to be inclusive. TNS: And where would you fit Jinnah in the whole scheme... CAB: Well, Jinnah is a disillusioned liberal, in a way. After all, as you told me, the only time he pushes for any engagement with Sharia is in order to try to create women’s rights, which I think is very interesting. It is very easy to create Jinnah as some kind of cynical power manipulator, which many historians, Indian and otherwise, have done. But I think he had a very strong sense of liberalism, and I also think that, in a way, he was attempting to build a state for Muslims, which you could view as a liberal project, rather than building an Islamic state. But that didn’t work. Dr Tahir Kamran is a notable Pakistani historian, currently the Iqbal fellow at the University of Cambridge, as professor in the Centre of South Asian Studies
Posted on: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 07:09:22 +0000

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