1484 Gyan Prakash
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