Abstract
Vasant Kaiwar’s The Postcolonial Orient offers a sharp and perceptive Marxist assessment of a dominant concept in postcolonial theory: that the histories and peoples of the formerly colonised ‘East’ are utterly different from the colonising ‘West’, and therefore cannot be understood by concepts and analytical methods that emerge from that ‘West’.
Focusing his critique on the book, Provincializing Europe, by Dipesh Chakrabarty, 1 but also addressing work by Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee and others, Kaiwar argues that the monolithic ‘West’ constructed in postcolonial theory is a fiction, revealing a lack of knowledge about European history and its class dynamics, a poor understanding of the historical development of colonialism and capitalism, and a flawed methodology that privileges the analysis of culture and discourse over that of history, economics and society.
Rather than fetishising the alleged difference of the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ and renouncing historicism and Marxism, Kaiwar demonstrates, it is only a focus on the foundational status of capital that can explain both the proliferation of difference and unevenness across the world and the emergence of capitalism as a system that continues to penetrate every part of the globe, and every aspect of life. Culture and discourse remain crucial, but are best explained in relation to the totality of social relations. Marxism emerges explicitly in The Postcolonial Orient as the ‘unrenounceable’ project: the key to understanding the links between exploitation and oppression and to forging solidarity across the world.
Such an approach may remind readers of Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013), published before The Postcolonial Orient. Both books, making similar arguments, speak to an academic and non-academic audience that wants to engage with the histories, cultures and literatures of the colonised and post-independence world but is tired of postmodernist dominance of the discussion. Like Chibber, Kaiwar discerns the presence of a reverse Orientalism in postcolonial theory, criticising the idea that to see capitalism as central to history is inherently Eurocentric. Indeed, both Chibber and Kaiwar explain that the universalising tendency of capital actually produces difference, and should not be counterposed to it.
Chibber’s and Kaiwar’s books are two recent examples in a long history of Marxist critiques of postcolonial theory, stretching back more than two decades. But despite similarities, The Postcolonial Orient stands apart from Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital in two specific ways that make Kaiwar’s text more useful in developing a holistic sense of the world that has produced postcolonial theory, as well as the world that the field aims to understand.
First, Kaiwar’s theoretical critique of postcolonialism is situated within a larger historical discussion of how colonial modernity developed in relation to capitalism, and how the post-independence world (especially in Africa and Asia) arose out of the crises of the second world war. This has the effect of both historicising postcolonial theory and also allowing the reader to compare the differences between Marxist and postcolonialist understandings of colonialism.
Second, Kaiwar self-consciously links his work to that of other Marxists in literary and cultural studies, including Aijaz Ahmad, Timothy Brennan, Arif Dirlik, Antonio Gramsci, Fredric Jameson, Neil Lazarus, Benita Parry and E. San Juan, Jr – and connects himself to a rich tradition of thinkers inside and outside postcolonial studies. While Chibber largely conducts a close reading of texts from Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory, Kaiwar offers an explicitly Marxist framework for understanding the cultural practices, identities and discourses that allegedly cannot be comprehended in a Marxist framework.
The greatest contribution of The Postcolonial Orient is that it combines the work of critiquing postcolonial theory with that of building better understandings of history and culture in the colonised and postcolonial world. As such, The Postcolonial Orient can be fruitfully read alongside texts like Ahmad’s In Theory (1992) and Lazarus’ The Postcolonial Unconscious (2011), which are as committed to building alternative understandings of culture and literature as they are to historicising and challenging the foundational arguments of postmodernised postcolonial theory. Indeed, the best Marxist work in the field today does not simply challenge postmodernised postcolonial theory but offers new archives to examine and methods that illuminate not only fragments of history but the social totality that can offer an explanation as to how these fragments emerge and relate to one another.
Such overtly materialist analyses of the culture of the colonised and postcolonial words become the basis, then, for theoretical generalisations that accurately capture what is happening on the ground. Like Kaiwar, they offer critiques of postmodern idealism through a method that is itself unremittingly materialist and historicist.
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The Postcolonial Orient is divided into six parts. The first three chapters introduce and define terms – colonialism, modernity, capitalism – and put forth a Marxist understanding of them in order to assess concepts in postcolonial theory, including the rejection of historicism as Eurocentric, the concept of subalternity, and the assertion of postcolonial difference. These build up towards the powerful theoretical arguments in the second half of the book: ‘Provincialising Europe or Exoticising India?’ (Part 4), ‘The Uses and Abuses of Marx’ (Part 5) and ‘The Postcolonial Orient’ (Part 6). While covering very dense historical and theoretical topics, Kaiwar’s writing is smooth and his approach is measured. Pointed rhetorical flourishes appear sporadically, but the driving force of the book is its effort to patiently explain histories and concepts.
The early chapters ground readers in ways that are absolutely refreshing, by asking big questions that move us away from narrow turf-war debates in academia. What happens, Kaiwar asks, when we approach the history of colonialism through the lens of Karl Marx’s insistence in Capital that the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the enslavement of Africans and the colonisation of Asians were crucial to the formation of industrial capitalism in Europe? Quotations from Marx that are familiar to Marxist activists and scholars but virtually unknown or unexplored in postcolonial studies, appear throughout The Postcolonial Orient, like this one from Capital Vol. I, linking the historical origins of industrial capitalism with colonialism and slavery: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of India, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.
Indeed, The Postcolonial Orient does not wear Marxism just as an academic label but demonstrates its usefulness and explanatory power with the aim of applying it and developing it in new directions.
Offering a history in which capitalism, colonialism and slavery are part of the same complex totality, Kaiwar can challenge the notion that, since difference and heterogeneity are evident across the world, we must live in multiple worlds. In postmodernised postcolonial theory and Subaltern Studies, recognition of ‘[a] fragmentary history has been replaced by substantive fragments, held together conceptually by the notion of alternative, different, hybrid modernities’ (p. 24). This is a result of the complete disappearance of capital in the understanding of colonialism. Citing Stuart Hall, Kaiwar argues that, after rejecting ‘deterministic economism’, postcolonial theory has failed to give us alternative ways of ‘thinking about economic relations and their effects … but a massive, gigantic, and eloquent disavowal’ (p. 38). Rather than dismissing talk about capital as ‘economism’, Kaiwar argues, properly accounting for the historical difference and specificity of colonialism means tracing ‘a local development of a global mode of production’; not putting the local in opposition to the global, or declaring any global approach to be a simplistic ‘meta-narrative’ (p. 110).
At one point, for instance, Kaiwar asks what sort of global history would emerge if we saw the bourgeois revolutions’ overthrow of feudalism in Europe and colonialism’s churning up of pre-capitalist economies in the colonies as part of the same story, with vastly different political, social and economic outcomes (p. 37). Such a multifaceted history would recognise the parallels between the socio-economic upheavals in two different places while acknowledging the specificity of colonial occupation.
By understanding the foundational role of capitalism, Kaiwar suggests, we can better identify what was uniquely specific about European colonialism, and what made it different from so many forms of colonialism that have ravaged the earth, well before capitalism. Understanding capitalism is therefore crucial to understanding colonial and postcolonial modernity. He argues in Part 3, for instance, that ‘[t]he terms “colonial” and “colonialism” have never been exhaustively explanatory in themselves … The only way to make “colonial” into a decisive moment is to bring capital into the analytical framework, not occasionally [in order] to make a point about modernity or secularism or what have you, but as a central structuring and anchoring concept, in which case the “postcolonial” merely indicates a punctual transition within that mode of production’ (p. 138). To do so allows us not to deny difference and heterogeneity in the modern world, but to better explain them by establishing the central role of capitalism in forging that complex, uneven modernity and, through the commodification of the planet, to oversee the proliferation of difference.
In fact, Kaiwar argues masterfully, embracing a Marxist understanding of colonialism would prevent postcolonial theorists from implicitly falling into liberal conceptions of modernisation theory, which they currently do. It is modernisation theory – not Marxism – that puts forward linear, Eurocentric notions of transitions and development of capitalism in the world, the idea being that once obstacles and impediments are removed, modernisation, development and progress will proceed in a ‘smooth, self-perpetuating process with desirable results’ (pp. 121–22). In contesting this, postcolonial theory describes what those obstacles and impediments are, pointing to the imposition of foreign, European ideas and practices, or the intransigence of subaltern life and consciousness, or something else. The implicit framework, however, that modernisation would proceed without those obstacles, remains the same.
Marxism, however, has nothing to do with modernisation theory or smooth processes of development. The widely held fiction in postcolonial and culture studies that Marxism posits a ‘modes of productive narrative’ – in which one mode of production automatically transitions into another – actually goes against the very spirit of Marxism, which is about disruption and unevenness, crisis and contradiction, booms and busts, and the potential, never automatic, that transformation might emerge out of crisis through radical actions of the oppressed and exploited. Marxism’s understanding of capitalist (and colonial) modernity is open to the unevenness of the system globally because historically specificity and difference is already assumed: the history of capital has never been its singular and steady march, whether within nations or across the world.
In the second part of the book, Kaiwar delves more deeply into the theoretical debate, with special attention to Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. In principle, he applauds the ideas of ‘provincializing Europe’ and challenging claims to universalism reflecting the arrogance of imperialism and white supremacy. The critique of ‘Europe’ that appears in much radical academic theory is a rejection of liberalism, racism and imperialism. However, he questions the disappearance in postcolonial theory of other aspects of the real history of Europe – the struggles of subaltern Europe and the development of a whole radical tradition that has also rejected liberalism, racism, imperialism. Without an understanding of class divisions globally, the postcolonial theorists turn the realities of historical difference and unevenness brought about by European colonial conquest into a mark of absolute difference between ‘East’ and ‘West’. Like the Third World bourgeois nationalists they criticise, they flip around the Orientalist division of the world into civilised/backward, scientific/spiritual, democratic/authoritarian, white/non-white, etc., championing the latter over the former but keeping the binary thinking intact. The ‘East’ created in postcolonial theory is what Kaiwar calls ‘the postcolonial Orient’.
His argument takes up different aspects of this East/West divide. One strand is what he calls ‘postcolonial populism’, a critique of modernity that constructs a romantic, pre-colonial and pre-capitalist past in which ‘the people’ were simply happy and fulfilled in themselves (p. 69). This populism directly reflects elite and upper-caste nationalist projects, for even a simple rendition of pre-colonial and pre-capitalist history from the point of view of women, oppressed castes and oppressed classes would reveal a world of sharp inequality and horrors, not any sort of ahistorical South Asian identity that ought to be preserved.
Another strand is the theory of the ‘subaltern’ – signifying the marginalised and oppressed subject –that posits a completely autonomous subaltern world unaffected by ‘elite’ actions, whether British or Indian. Kaiwar shows how such a concept of the subaltern is firmly connected to postcolonial Orientalism, as the subaltern carries the true essence of ‘Third World difference’, as it were.
Finally, once Subaltern Studies had travelled to New York, Chicago, London and Canberra, it appears that diasporic academics, too, could be subalterns. In the context of multiculturalism and identity politics in US universities, theorists transform into ‘postcolonial subjects’ carrying ‘Third World difference’. Subalternity goes from being a marker of class and caste in earlier Subaltern Studies to racial and ethnic difference after the postmodern turn in Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory.
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Kaiwar often writes with biting sarcasm, as when he says: ‘Historicism is what allowed European domination of the world, Chakrabarty suggests [in Provincializing Europe], thereby correcting one’s naive assumption that it must have been the heavy artillery of imperialism’ (p. 162). But beyond the one-liners, Kaiwar is interested in interrogating Chakrabarty’s celebrated category, ‘History 2’ (the world of affect, fragments, subaltern, spirituality) that he says gets left out of ‘History 1’ (historicism, the big picture). Rather than dismissing these ‘small’ elements of life, Kaiwar seeks to explain them as part of the modern world that all of us experience, however differently. For instance, against Chakrabarty’s notion that western and non-western experiences of time are fundamentally different, Kaiwar cites Jameson to explain that the disjuncture between our individual experience of time and the larger patterns and forces of history is part and parcel of modern life everywhere – which we can only understand when we embrace, not reject, historicism and the idea of totality. ‘Human time, individual time is out of sync with socio-economic time, with the rhythms or cycles … of the mode of production’, Jameson argues, and ‘we are poorly placed to witness the more fundamental dynamics of history, glimpsing only this or that incomplete moment.’ Nevertheless, the task of theory is to ‘deduce the absent totality that makes a mockery of us, without relinquishing the fragile value of our own personal experience’ (pp. 166–67). Kaiwar, thus, does not dismiss Chakrabarty’s interest in those small, individual aspects of life that do not appear in standard histories, but he explains that they are part of living in capitalist modernity, and therefore not uniquely ‘western’ or ‘non-western.’
At times, it seems that what’s at fault in postcolonial theory for Kaiwar is not necessarily its specific discussions of unevenness and complexity, but the fact that a firm line is drawn between ‘West’ and ‘East’; that such fixed and essentialist characteristics are attributed to each, artificially forcing researchers and analysts to ignore any linkages or similarities that can be found across those lines. By way of illustration, he offers the example of nationalist ideology, and the way in which a strict West/East divide along the lines of historicism/anti-historicism doesn’t help us to understand how nationalism works – anywhere in the world. As Benedict Anderson has shown in Imagined Communities, Kaiwar argues, nationalism has both historicist and anti-historicist dimensions. It rewrites history by celebrating origin stories, by presenting some moments of conflict as necessary struggles that made the nation stronger, and by more or less wiping away events that go against the grain of the story of the Great Nation. But nationalism also has an anti-historicist element: like all nations, the US projects the nation as existing beyond time and history, as an object of reverence and devotion which all should respect, despite real divisions of class, race, gender and social inequality of all kinds. In other words, both historicist and anti-historicist ways of seeing the world exist in every place. But, as Kaiwar argues, Chakrabarty and others are so insistent on East/West difference around the axis of historicism/non-historicism that they minimise the complexity of the world – and fall into the Orientalist trap. Chakrabarty needs to insist that only Indian (i.e. Sanskrit-based) notions of time operate outside of history, and that western notions of time are linked to historicism.
Kaiwar is especially ruthless when spirituality and religion are put centre-stage in defining non-western identity and its indissoluble essence. Undoubtedly, the rejection of secularism as ‘western’ is politically dangerous in an Indian climate dominated over the past several decades by a Hindu fundamentalism that has marked leftist and secular efforts as pro-Muslim ‘pseudo-secularism’. On the theoretical level, Kaiwar argues, postcolonial theory turned Antonio Gramsci’s complex understanding of culture into one that contests materialist analysis. Gramsci has been assigned some light duties, transformed into a heterodox Marxist with an anticipatory foot in the politics of the new social movements with their ethics of dispersion, instability and displacement, rather than the Leninist project of a punctual overcoming of bourgeois civilization, involving, among other more political matters, a break with the stranglehold of organized religion. (p. 102)
Kaiwar is referring here to the way that religion gets turned into an essential and organic element of popular consciousness in an academic field much more invested in criticising ‘European reason’ than capitalism. The fetishisation of religion in Provincializing Europe and elsewhere reifies Orientalist thinking, as ‘secularism’ is seen as part of the European enlightenment and therefore inapplicable to discussing India.
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While the critique of ‘Europe’ that appears in much radical academic theory is, as already noted, a critique of liberalism, racism and imperialism, other aspects of the real history of Europe have disappeared in postcolonial theory – the subaltern Europe, if you will: the struggles of poor and working people, of migrants and minorities, and of women. Kaiwar shows sympathy with Guha’s argument in Dominance Without Hegemony that colonialism was an immensely complex social formation that cannot be described either as a dynamic modernity overwhelming an inert tradition, or the ‘stapling’ of western liberalism onto an unchanging Eastern feudalism. But he asks why Guha is so insistent on explaining the unevenness of colonial modernity as the ‘failure’ of the colonial and/or national bourgeoisie to bring about hegemony from above when like Gramsci in ‘The Southern Question’, we should be talking about a radical hegemony from below that seeks to transform society completely.
The two places where I strongly take issue with Kaiwar are, first, his too-frequent jabs at the identity and location of the scholars he criticises as if these are, in and of themselves, explanations for their theoretical arguments, and, second, his alarmist political characterisation of the field of postcolonial studies, ethnic studies and the like as ‘a necessary moment of the global consolidations of right-wing ideologies for the 21st century’ (p. 375). Even if we agree that the West/East divide in postcolonial theory is not just ‘Third-Worldism’ (which is my reading) but a new Orientalism, a left rehashing of Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, positions like those above cut against the careful materialist approach presented in the book.
Indeed, like Chibber, Kaiwar does not sufficiently grasp or appreciate the space for progressive and leftwing thought that postcolonial studies – along with ethnic studies, women’s studies, and other related fields – have created in a political climate in which the actual Left is weak and fragmented and academia is increasingly corporatised. The welcome critique of postmodernist thought in these fields needs to acknowledge that, ironically, they attract people who are committed to social justice, historical truth and other values that postmodernism dismisses. While Huntington advised US politicians and directly shaped imperialist thought, professors in postcolonial studies and related fields are supporting Palestinian liberation and #BlackLivesMatter, organising teach-ins in the era of Trump, and being placed on rightwing watch-lists.
These observations aside, The Postcolonial Orient makes a welcome contribution to Marxist scholarship in postcolonial studies. By historicising postcolonial theory and also offering an alternative, understanding of colonialism, capitalism, modernity and culture, Kaiwar’s book gives us the breadth and depth of field we need to understand the complex workings of capitalism with colonialism, ideology, and culture.