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this sense , " Indian " history itself is in a position of subalternity ; one can only articulate subaltern subject positions in the name of this history . 24
The place of Europe as a silent referent works in many ways . First , there is the matter of " asymmetric ignorance ": non-Westerners must read " great " Western historians ( E . P . Thompson or Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie or Carlo Ginzburg ) to produce the good histories , while the Western scholars are not expected to know non-Western works . Indeed , non-Western scholars are recognized for their innovation and imagination when they put into practice genres of inquiry developed for European history ; a " total history " of China , the history of mentalite in Mexico , the making of the working class in India are likely to be applauded as fine studies .
Even more important , Chakrabarty suggests , is the installation of Europe as the theoretical subject of all histories . This universalization of Europe works through the representation of histories as History ; even " Marx ' s methodological / epistemological statements have not always successfully resisted historicist readings ." 25 Chakrabarty ' s study of jute workers in Bengal runs up against precisely the same Eurocentrism that undergirds Marx ' s analysis of capital and class struggle . 26 In his study , Chakrabarty finds that deeply hierarchical notions of caste and religion , drawn from India ' s traditions , animated working-class organization and politics in Bengal . This posed a problem for Marxist historiography . If India ' s traditions lacked the " Liberty Tree " that had nourished , according to E . P . Thompson , the consciousness of the English working class , were Indian workers condemned to " low classness "? The alternative was to envision that , sooner or later , the Indian working class would reach the desired state of emancipatory consciousness . This vision , of course , assumes the universality of such notions as the rights of "' free-born Englishmen " and " equality before the law ," and it posits that " workers all over the world , irrespective of their specific cultural pasts , experience ' capitalist production ' in the same way ." 27 This possibility can only arise if it is assumed that there is a universal subject endowed with an emancipatory narrative . Such an assumption , Chakrabarty suggests , is present in Marx ' s analysis , which , while carefully contrasting the proletariat from the citizen , falls back nonetheless on Enlightenment notions of freedom and democracy to define the emancipatory narrative . As a result , the jute workers , who resisted the bourgeois ideals of equality before the law with their hierarchical vision of a pre-capitalist community , are condemned to " backwardness " in Marxist accounts . Furthermore , it allows the nation-state to step onto the stage as the instrument of liberal transformation of the hierarchy-ridden masses .
It is not surprising , therefore , that themes of historical transition occupy a prominent place in the writing of non-Western histories . Historians ask if these societies achieved a successful transition to development , modernization , and capitalism and frequently answer in the negative . A sense of failure overwhelms
24 Dipesh Chakrabarty , " Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History : Who Speaks for ' Indian '
Pasts ?" Representations 37 , ( Winter 1992 ): 1 .
25 Chakrabarty ," Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History ," 4 .
26 See Chakrabarty , Rethinking Working-Class History .
27 Chakrabarty , Rethinking Working-Class History , 223 .
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1994