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FORUM: RESPONSE
A History of the Present
Mithi Mukherjee
| In his comments Kunal Parker has framed my article within what he calls the "ontology of colonialism as difference." He argues that my article "fits squarely" within a "self-consciously postcolonial scholarship" that in recent decades has been centrally concerned with "the rendering of colonialism as difference." My research in this article, however, was neither inspired nor guided by the historiography of difference. Indeed Parker's framing of my article in these terms prevents him from seeing the most important claims in it.1 If I were to characterize the nature of my essay in terms of a genre of historiography, I would place it in the genre of the history of the present. My aim in this article, which is part of a larger project, was to make the postcolonial political formation in India intelligible in the light of its pre-independence historical origins. While most historians of modern India terminate their research at 1947, the year of India's independence, assuming postcolonial political development to be inaccessible to historical research, most studies by political scientists have taken 1947 as their point of departure, as if the postcolonial political formation had emerged fully formed without any history. My larger project seeks to break through this historiographical barrier and make postcolonial India accessible to historical research. |
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Given the exclusive deployment of western categories to frame Indian history in the past, the historiography of difference has brought to light many neglected and marginalized aspects of Indian history.2 However, to make difference the sole criterion for historical research (which is what Parker's use of the word "ontology" seems to suggest) is to leave important facets of the present impossible to problematize and unintelligible. There are several reasons for this. First, the discourse of difference focuses primarily on culture. Second, this discourse tends to take cultural differences to be a given—as always already there, thus reifying what are otherwise historically evolving differences. It is therefore not surprising that these studies often focus on (cultural) "perceptions," a term that carries a sense of the present without history. In much of this historiography difference is seen in spatial terms as distance separating two already given cultures, for example India and Britain. What is absent is the temporal dimension which would register difference as change. It is, therefore, only logical that this notion of difference rarely rises to the level of contradiction, conflict, and war, the major driving forces of history. As a result, one reduces historical research to an exercise in the enumeration of difference without change and, therefore, runs the risk of ultimately ending up with unchanging and essentialized identities, exactly the opposite of what one had set out to do. |
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Apart from the deployment of difference as a methodological tool, there is also a moral aspect to this historiography of difference in which difference takes on the meaning and weight of a moral value. Parker's comments, in my view, carry both these methodological and moral connotations. It is because of this moral inflection that this historiography pursues the subject as the origin of discourse and action, who then becomes the target of a moral judgment. This explains the need to focus on individuals and their motivations, rather than larger historical formations. Hence Parker's use of phrases like "respect for difference," and "cultural bias" (implying a disregard of difference), and his misreading of my essay as a defense of Burke. What, however, this line of enquiry assumes is that the pre-given subject stands above history while determining its movement, thus forgetting that the subject itself is a historical construction. Moreover, such a reading puts morality above history, as if history follows the laws of universal morality. Indeed, as a historian, I would argue that any specific system of morality is in itself a historical construction and cannot be deployed to explain the workings of history. |
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The tendency to reify the cultural difference between England and India prevents one from seeing the internally differentiated nature of the British engagement with India. The purpose of my essay was to bring out the difference between what I call the "imperial" and the "colonial" as it came to be articulated in this trial and went on to characterize British rule in India. My essay was not concerned with exploring the origins of the personal motivations behind individual involvements in the trial, nor with passing a moral judgment on their appreciation, or lack thereof, of cultural difference. Instead, it focused on the historical construction of discursive-institutional frameworks on which the emerging empire in India was sought to be grounded and which subsequently determined the political history of British India. While the "imperial" was grounded in a discourse of supranational juridical sovereignty centered in the person of the monarch under the category of justice as equity, and a recognition of the a priori rights of the colonized, the "colonial" was based on ideas of power, conquest, and subjugation of the colonized in pursuit of the exclusive interests of the colonizer. The Burkean intervention under the category of justice as equity created a juridical representational space for India as a whole (not just for particular sections of the Indian population like the "native princes" as Parker argues) and launched a juridical representational politics in India. What Parker has missed in my article is that my focus is not on the person of Burke but on the persona of the lawyer in the equity court that Burke took on in the House of Lords to enunciate the Indian cause. |
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Parker wonders whether Burke's appreciation of difference may have made any difference to facts on the ground, in so far as colonial administration continued to operate in arbitrary, racial, and expropriative ways. What is crucial about Burkean discourse was that it articulated or launched a new teleology of justice as equity that did not seek to reflect reality but to alter that reality, thereby assuming the difference between what it envisioned as the ideal and the political conditions and the facts on the ground. I use the term "teleology" as a combination of the terms "telos" or goal and "logos" or discourse. Hence, the term teleology, in my use of it, is a discourse organized around a specific goal to be realized. In this use of the term teleology, the common understanding of discourse acquires a temporal dimension insofar as the goal remains to be realized in the future. Even as the colonial administration continued to function more or less in the same arbitrary mode as it had before Burke's intervention, the difference was that, now, for the first time, it was exposed to the critical discourse of the teleology of imperial justice and thus ran the risk of losing its legitimacy. |
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The difference between the colonial and the imperial and the emergence of the lawyer as an enunciative persona introduced a new dynamic within the political formation in British India, the significance of which could be gauged from the fact that this enunciative position or persona of the lawyer came to characterize the nature of the leadership of the Indian National Congress party and its mode of representational politics, a century after the Burkean intervention. Indeed, the dominant form of early anticolonial politics led by the Indian National Congress in the nineteenth century had its origin in this difference. This explains why the Indian National Congress was constrained to identify with the empire even as it opposed colonialism. Indeed it was in the Congress's faith in the inherent justice of the empire that their opposition to colonialism was grounded, as was the case with the Burkean articulation of the empire. This further explains why the discourse of justice as equity that had helped launch the Congress politics of anti-colonialism also emerged as its ultimate limit, in that it was unable to envision complete national independence outside the empire; the Congress failed to articulate a discourse of freedom. |
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It ought not to come as a surprise, then, that the movement for independence from British rule was led by Gandhi under a new teleology of freedom. What was unique about this was that it was grounded in Indian discourses of spiritual or renunciative freedom known in Indian languages as moksha and nirvana, with the renouncer (or the "Mahatma" as Gandhi was popularly known) as its enunciative persona. In contrast to the historically familiar discourse of political freedom based on national identity and individualism, it was in the renunciation of self and identity that the Gandhian discourse sought what it saw as the highest form of freedom. This is the reason that the Gandhian movement developed a critique of nationalism, even as it strove for India's independence. In the light of our discussion above of the historiography of difference, here we can see an Indian religious and cultural difference rising to the challenge of history by fashioning its own unique teleology of freedom and deploying it to achieve the immediate political goal of national independence. |
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The break that the Gandhian movement marked from the imperial discourse of justice became dramatically evident in Gandhi's call in 1920, while launching the non-cooperation movement, for a boycott of British law courts and a ban on practicing lawyers from participating and leading the movement for national independence. Having suspended its own teleology of imperial justice along with the enunciative persona of the lawyer, the Congress as an organization now came to be hitched on to the Gandhian teleology of freedom with the renouncer as the new enunciative persona. It is important to note that in so far as it was grounded in the discourse of spiritual freedom, the Gandhian teleology of freedom exceeded the political goal of national independence in that it was only meant to be a temporary historical intervention. It is precisely for this reason that the Gandhian discourse did not emerge as a legislative discourse and did not envision running a government. Therefore, as soon as national independence was achieved, Gandhian discourse receded into the background, even as the reins of the government fell back into the hands of the Congress, which resurrected the hitherto suspended discourse of imperial justice as a discourse of governance. |
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Parker remarks that "we know very little about how a Burkean imperial legal project could have failed." However, before one enquires into the question of failure, one would have to find a historical instance when there was an attempt to implement the "Burkean project" as a discourse of governance. This is where the postcolonial political formation in India offers itself as a case in point. It was this very teleology of imperial justice as equity (rather than freedom, liberty, or individualism), which, until independence, had been deployed as a critical category of anti-colonialism, that now came to be instituted as the "sovereign" category in the constitution of independent India, and thereby overdetermined its political formation in the decades to follow.3 For much of the history of postcolonial India, the category of justice remained the ground of India's national politics of social justice, as reflected in the reservation of jobs in government institutions on the basis of caste (justice as compensatory discrimination), a foreign policy of non-alignment (justice as neutrality/impartiality) in opposition to the cold war discourse of power, and economic policy of centralized state planning designed to control and regulate accumulation and distribution of wealth (justice as fair distribution). In the hierarchy of categories in the Constitution of India, all categories of representational politics such as liberty, equality, and individual rights were not only required to be subordinated to the sovereign category of justice, but also interpreted in its light. |
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Seen from this perspective, Indian political formation in the first forty years of independence, rather than marking a total break from the British past, remained firmly lodged within the juridico-epistemological framework of empire and was an exercise in continuing the teleology of imperial justice first articulated by Burke. India's reluctance in the post-independence period to articulate and engage in a discourse of national power, and the grounding of its foreign policy exclusively in the idea and institution of the United Nations as a supranational body that would render justice in cases of conflict between nations, reflected its continuing affiliation to the deterritorialized discourse of empire constructed by Burke in the late eighteenth century. The extent to which the postcolonial Indian political formation is grounded in its imperial legacy is most visible in the way that the imperial figure of the monarch has been reproduced in the continuing dynastic leadership of the Indian National Congress. To get back to Parker's query, the question of whether this Burkean teleology of justice has since failed or merely run into a crisis remains a subject to be addressed on another occasion. |
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Notes
1. See Mithi Mukherjee, "Justice, War, and the Imperium: India and Britain in Edmund Burke's Prosecutorial Speeches in the Impeachment Trial of Warren Hastings," and Kunal M. Parker, "The Historiography of Difference," Law and History Review 23 (2005): 589–630 and 685–95. Parker's critique seems to be addressed more to Uday Mehta's reading of Burke in his Liberalism and Empire than to the specificities of my arguments. See Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Although Parker seems to be aware of the difference between my arguments and Mehta's when he says, "Mukherjee's major contribution is in showing that Burke did not restrict himself to exhorting his fellow Britons to approach Indians' difference with respect, but went further insofar as he sought to concretize his impulses in a vision of the politico-legal structure of empire." However, when he comes to his critique, Parker lapses back into responding to Mehta's concern about liberalism and the question of difference. Our concerns are very different. My first encounter with Burke's speeches in the trial occurred in the process of pursuing the lineages of the Indian National Congress and its mode of politics while working on my M.Phil dissertation at Jawaharlal Nehru University. See Mithi Mukherjee, "From Pleader to Leader: Legal Practice and the Birth of Politics in India (1772–1920)," M. Phil. dissertation, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 1992.
2. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000).
3. D. D. Basu, Shorter Constitution of India (New Delhi: Prentice Hall of India, 1988), 272.
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