Sumit Sarkar,Modern Times: India 1880s–1950s: Environment,Economy and Culture

Sumit Sarkar’s book was initially conceived as an attempt to revise his earlier textbook, Modern India. As acknowledged by Sarkar himself, the task of revision, however, had led to a rewriting. Since the time of its publication, his own historical perspectives and the framework which he had adopted and structured the narrative of Modern India had undergone major changes. Modern India was an attempt to write ‘history from below’ which was novel in its effort for dismantling the elitist-nationalist framework that had animated the earlier writings of Modern Indian History. His acknowledgement of a discussion with Ranajit Guha, the founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective, in his preface to Modern India, for sharing similar historical perspective, was a standing testimony to the historiographical shift which Sarkar had endeavoured in the textbook.1

Since then, Sarkar had distanced himself from the Subaltern Studies Collective and had produced powerful critique of postcolonial historiography.2 He had also attempted to write history which moved beyond nationalist frameworks as historical writings, often, became congruent with the historical process of the nation-state.3 Such shifts and thrusts of Sarkar’s historical perspectives are visible in this book. The very title of the book, Modern Times, with its emphasis on the heterogeneous spatio-temporalities instead of Modern India in which the territorially demarcated nation-state of India becomes the unit of analysis stands as a proof of the shift in historical understanding. Modern India’s historical narrative had 1885, the founding year of the Indian National Congress, as its starting point and concluded with India’s Independence in 1947. The fractured historical process of the emergence of the Indian nation-state was writ large in its narrative despite its contrary intention. Modern Times, in contrast, begins from the last decade of the nineteenth century, the 1880s which witnessed the consolidation of British imperialism in the Indian subcontinent to the post-Independence India of the 1950s, and engages with themes of Modern Indian history-writing such as environment and culture which were altogether absent and not dealt in Modern India. The recent historiographical interventions and debates are woven together with his own historical perspective—in Sarkar’s language, a ‘synthesis’—on the broad rubrics of environment, culture and economy. As first of the two companion volumes, Sarkar provides an overview of the imperial administrative apparatus and the political, cultural and material processes from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.

Sarkar’s historical assessment of imperial structure, policies and ideologies is a simultaneous critical engagement with postcolonial scholarship which views the colonial state as a monolithic structure. His survey of colonial governance, such as educational policy, legality, the reception of Western science in British India or the colonial state’s interaction with missionaries, highlights the internal dissensions and contradictions within the colonial state-structure which provided it a dynamic of its own. The colonial state-structure, therefore, according to Sarkar, cannot be seen as an externality which was only coercive and baneful in its policy. The colonial state, despite its alien and foreign character, was in active negotiation with indigenous groups for legitimacy which often led to unintended and contradictory consequences. Colonial modernity is not perceived by Sarkar as an imposition or emulation of the enlightenment discourse of the West but as a selective appropriation of certain elements of ‘tradition’ which provided modernity its hybrid character. His engagement with Saidian readings of colonial knowledge structure in recent historiography is a critique of the excessive culturalism that is pervasive in such studies and Sarkar, as a rectification, emphasises upon the material processes which underwrote colonial knowledge.

Sarkar also critically assesses the paradigm shifts which had been brought upon by environmental history. The historiography on colonial state’s policy of control and regulation over forests and wastes is extensively discussed. It is emphasised that there was no single, unilinear thrust to adopt such state regulations which re-emphasises the dynamic and dialectical process of the colonial state-structure. Also, the colonial state’s control over forest resources is not viewed as an inexorable process and Sarkar highlights the resistance which such measures encountered. The hermetically sealed dichotomy between pastoralism and agriculture is dismantled so as to emphasise the interconnections and fluidity between the two categories. The romantic notion of a pre-colonial ‘village-community’ is brought under critical scrutiny for overlooking the internal hierarchical divisions through the aid of a survey of several regional and local environmental histories. An important element in Sarkar’s critical assessment of historiography is his refusal to blame the colonial state only for the various ills of the Indian subcontinent and his repudiation of any romantic notion of indigenous society.

This strain of argument is visible when Sarkar revisits the dry terrain of agrarian history and engages with various strands of the debate on agrarian relations of production. Commercialisation of agriculture, the varied revenue policies of the colonial state, the various forms of agrarian labour and the recurrent phenomena of famines which wrecked the rural economy are sub-themes which are dealt through a critical analysis of an extensive historiographical debate. The ‘forced’ nature of commercialisation of agriculture and the free/unfree forms of agrarian labour are lent scrutiny to emphasise that the neat analytical categories in the form of binaries which are deployed to comprehend a phenomenon do not correspond to its complexity. The colonial state is not projected by Sarkar as the only causal factor for the dynamics and stagnation in agricultural production. The Althusserian category of ‘overdetermination’ is deployed by Sarkar to highlight the indigenous structures of power and dependence and the specifics of ecological condition and production processes which affected agrarian structure. The ‘mode of production’ debate of the 1970s and 1980s which argued on and against the ‘semi-feudal and semi-colonial’ nature of the agrarian sector and the political subtexts, which underlined the thrust of the debate, is reintroduced to the reader along with brief sketches of regional and locality-based research on agrarian economy which complicates a naïve understanding of cataclysmic change under colonial rule.

The catastrophic effect of colonial rule which became an important element of nationalist critique as the ‘drain of wealth’ thesis and ‘de-industrialisation’ of the Indian subcontinent is subjected to careful scrutiny. The various domains of commerce, industry and finance through an exploration of the political economy of the British Empire in which the Indian subcontinent was a crucial element are investigated. The railways, plantations, mines and factories are significant economic sectors which are given elaborate treatment in the chapter to unfold the history of capital and labour. An important intervening assessment of Sarkar is his emphasis on regional variations which complicates any simplistic and straitjacketed notion of ‘de-industrialisation’ or ‘drain of wealth’ thesis. The nuances of regional specificities are highlighted which enable a more complex understanding of Indian entrepreneurship, which despite facing stiff competition from British capital endeavoured to find a buoyancy against the different tides of imperial economy. An illustrative example, provided by Sarkar, was the rise of the Tatas, which got an important fillip and patronage from the colonial government due to tensions in the imperial economy on apprehension of a European war (pp. 259–60).

The materialist underpinning of the cultural dynamics of Indian society is highlighted by Sarkar through a nuanced survey of various cultural histories of the colonial period. To understand their social construction, the architecture of urban spaces, fashioning of urban sociability and the cultivated imagery of ‘rural’ ethnography through the medium of photography are themes which are elaborated by Sarkar. The languages and literatures of the Indian subcontinent which were deeply affected by the advent of printing press as well as other sociopolitical variables were emphasised by Sarkar to highlight its diversity, refuting the exaggerated understanding of English education as a ‘mask of conquest’. Walter Benjamin’s theoretical insight is deployed to assess the visual and performing arts, such as the theatre, painting and cinema. An illuminating example of mass art production, provided by Sarkar, is his exposition of the works of the painter Ravi Varma. The connection of Ravi Varma with the doyen of Indian cinema, Dhundiraj Govind (‘Dadasaheb’) Phalke provides a delightful reading. This book gives critical insights and anecdotes through a magisterial survey of historiography on the colonial state-apparatus on the various themes of environment, economy and culture, and is an indispensable reading for any student and researcher of Modern Indian History.