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http://cdy.sagepub.comCultural Dynamics
DOI: 10.1177/092137409801000203 1998; 10; 123 Cultural
Dynamics
M. Madhava Prasad Back to the Present
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123
BACK TO THE PRESENT
M. MADHAVA PRASAD
Centre for Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore
ABSTRACT
Thinking about culture in the humanities is dominated by a
historicistapproach derived from a nationalist, postcolonial
consciousness marked bya disavowal of modernity. The study of
contemporary culture, in particularthe cultural context
overdetermined by capitalist processes, shows up thelimitations of
this paradigm and foregrounds the need for a concept of
thecontemporary. As a first step towards this goal, the article
takes up foranalysis certain key ideologemes of modern Indian life
which hinge on thesense of a recovery of identity, and tries to
demonstrate their inadequacy fora rigorous sense of the present.Key
Words contemporaneity culture democracy modernity nation
A sense of the present is, above all, a matter of arrival. It is
a problematicthat emerges as much out of the long interregnum of
debates about moder-nity in the postcolonial context as it does
from the consolidation of theeffects of the revolution signalled by
the declaration of the Republic. It isan attempt to exit from the
inter-civilizational or inter-racial agonistics ofthe colonial
aftermath to announce, not the nations arrival at some
prede-termined telos but arrival as such, arrival in the present as
the place fromwhich to find our way forward. It proposes an answer
to the questions thathave been the traumatic driving force behind
all the debates about moder-nity. To the question, When will we
arrive at/return to our true destiny? itanswers: We have arrived at
our true destiny. Moreover, we have alwaysbeen there. Likewise to
the question, When will we recover our trueidentity? it enables us
to reply: We have recovered our true identity.Moreover, our
identity has always been true.
In his call to make the present an object of reflection, Vivek
Dhareshwar(1995) suggested that a receptivity to the present can
only be realizedwhen we break out of the paralysing historicism
that debates aboutmodernity are caught up in:
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124 Cultural Dynamics 10(2)
When ... we begin to reflect on the conditions for a critique of
our modernity, it wouldbe futile, and intellectually incoherent, to
deny our history as alien in order then toreach back to a different
historicity as our impossible history (nonmodern or pre-modern
time, culture).... In order to determine a reflective relation to
our present wemust think the historicity of history itself. Here
then is the paradoxical task: we need todeploy historicity against
the very notion of history such that historicity is not reab-sorbed
by historicism. (p. 318)
I approach the question of arriving at a reflective relation to
our presentas someone interested in developing a framework for the
study of contem-porary Indian culture. It is the problems
encountered in the course of myattempts in this direction that led
me to the sense that one needs a conceptof our contemporaneity in
order to respond in full measure to the com-plexity and diversity
of cultural practices in a modern democratic nation-state where
thinking continues to be troubled, if not haunted, by thelegacies
of colonialism. I approach it as one who cannot distance
modernityfrom his own sense of identity in order to speak of it as
an alien imposition,with the aim of discovering a way to bring to
consciousness (to my own con-sciousness) this truth for which there
is as yet no recognition. While this isa difficult process that
cannot be accomplished in one stroke, in whatfollows a beginning is
made through a reading of some central ideologemesof the
historicist fantasy that sustained and perhaps continues to sustain
usas (post)colonial subjects.
The Drama of Humiliation
In the course of a discussion of Tagores fiction, Ashis Nandy
(1994: 50)remarks of Nikhil (The Home and the World) and the reborn
Gora that[t]hey have been through and emerged relatively intact
from the humili-ation of the colonial experience; and the even
greater humiliation offighting colonialism with the help of methods
and ideologies importedthrough the colonial connection. What
interests us in this passage is thestrong evocation of colonialism
as above all a humiliating experience. Whatis succinctly formulated
here is clearly a widespread feeling, one that we all(at least
those who are interpellated by the nationalist ideology) share.
Onecould even say that it is by learning to experience this
humiliation as onesown that every generation accedes to the
national, that a subject becomesa national subject. The
simultaneity of these two events must be noted: toexperience
colonial humiliation is to become national subject but, at thesame
time, only a national subject can feel so humiliated.And yet, in
the 50th year of independence, there are already signs that
this historical memory of humiliation is no longer the powerful
unifyingexperience that it once was. The finance ministers reported
invitation tothe West to come back once again and conquer India is
only a spectacularand mildly scandalous sign of a general loss of
potency of the memory of
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125Prasad: Back to the Present
colonialism. (One of the ironies of this golden jubilee is that
the Britishseem, by all accounts, to be celebrating it with more
enthusiasm thanIndians.) Does this not indicate a loss of
historical consciousness, does itnot forebode the erosion of
national identity? If we forget past humilia-tions, do we not open
ourselves to the possibility of their repetition?
Situating ourselves in this present moment of erosion of
historicalmemory, perhaps we should take another look at the scene
of humiliation.As a point of departure for such an examination we
may take the prop-osition that the scene of humiliation always
involves a third. What turns astruggle between two opposed forces
into an experience of humiliation isthe presence of the Other as
witness to the enslavement and degradation ofthe vanquished. In a
more archaic version, it was perhaps the people whoplayed this role
when the vanquished king was dragged through the streets.But in a
modern nation under colonial rule, it is the people themselves
whoare humiliated, by another people, the East humiliated by the
West. Whothen witnesses this scene and instils in us this feeling
of having beendegraded before another?
The peculiarity of capitalist colonial domination is that it is
the domi-nation of one nation over another, a fact which Tagore in
his lectures onnationalism emphasized more than any other feature,
evoking the figure ofthe nation-machine. Where home payments are
the driving force behindconquest, the maintenance of national
identity becomes crucial and byextension, apartheid practices serve
to maintain the distinction of the colo-nized. The extraction of
surplus value to be deployed elsewhere becomes acrucial factor in
bringing into being the scene of humiliation. Thus into thetwo-term
relation between colonizer and colonized a third term isimported,
whereby colonial relations between two nations are justified
byreference to a neutral ground. This neutral ground justifies
colonialism as amission but it is also under its aegis that
anti-colonial struggles take place.My sense is that this neutral
ground is History. But then is not history
itself a western thing? The scene of humiliation is the
enactment of afantasy wherein we submit to history by feeling
humiliated when we aremerely defeated. By this very enactment,
however, history has been ren-dered hors de combat, no longer
merely the much touted western propen-sity for keeping a historical
record-in itself nothing more than aparticular mode of production
of discourse about the past. It is only at themoment when we
acknowledge History as the common transcendentalwitness that the
scene of humiliation becomes imaginable. This history isnot the
accumulation of discourse about the past, the evolving
methodolo-gies for keeping record and for extracting meaning from a
sedimented past.It is not history as a form of knowledge but
History as the gaze that affirmsour being in the modern world.
If this is the case there is then no point in claiming that the
imposition ofhistory on a people accustomed to mythical thinking,
or whatever, is itself
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126 Cultural Dynamics 10(2)
a humiliating act. The feeling of humiliation is already an
admission ofcomplicity, of a secret pact between enslaver and
enslaved to let history bethe ultimate witness. This is the history
that Fanon (1990: 170) speaks ofwhen he says:
The Negro, never so much a Negro as since he has been dominated
by the whites, whenhe decides to prove that he has a culture and to
behave like a cultured person, comesto realize that history pomts
out a well-defined path to him: he must demonstrate that aNegro
culture exists. (Emphasis mine)
History here is the aegis of negotiation, a reconciler, not a
weapon ofstruggle. This is what explains the sense, articulated by
Dipesh Chakrabarty(1997: 223) that &dquo;Europe&dquo;
remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of allhistories,
including the ones we call &dquo;Indian&dquo;,
&dquo;Chinese&dquo;, &dquo;Kenyan&dquo;, and soon.
Although Chakrabarty is here referring to historical discourse
pro-duced in the academy, it is arguable that the subject of
history he invokes isthe transcendental exception which makes
possible the assembly of nationalhistories. The subject as gaze
that unifies the field is what I evoke here asoccupying the
position of the transcendental signifier, like the phallus
inpsychoanalytic discourse. Here the tension arises because of the
continuingsense that history is still the same as the practice of
historical knowledgeproduction (or that the phallus is still the
penis), which renders invisible theelevation of history as gaze to
a neutral, transcendental position. This gazeis an ever-present
gaze but its Judgement Day is always deferred to a futurethat will
never arrive, whence the practice of burying time capsules, to
bediscovered by the Future.
For our immediate concerns, the relevant factor here is that the
strivingfor singularity, for the status of an exception to the rule
of a homogenizingmodernity, can only occur against this horizon of
the gaze of history.Moreover, every striving after singularity only
reinforces, or at any rate,fails to evade the status of
particularity, that is to say, the status of a par-ticular within
the reigning universal. In light of this we could perhaps
prof-itably read the theme of provincialization of Europe that
Chakrabartyamong others proposes, against the grain, not as an
attempt to liberate thenon-western world from western modernity,
but as a way of setting moder-nity itself free from its historical
association with Europe in order therebyto be able to relate to it
differently.
The Subject Supposed to BelieveIf the above narrative works at
the level of the historical destinies of theworlds civilizations,
in the post-colonial moment we encounter theproblem of national
identity as an immediate necessity, as something thatmust be
realized or posited as effective. How is this to be achieved?
Inorder to approach the problem at hand, let us turn to a succinct
formulation
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127Prasad: Back to the Present
of one of the principal ideologemes of post-independence India.
This for-mulation is attributed to the late poet, linguist and
critic A.K. Ramanujan,justly famous for his translations of
Kannada, Tamil and Telugu poetry, hisown poetry, fiction and
criticism in English and Kannada, and his compi-lation of folk
tales based on oral retellings. In an interview, the
playwrightGirish Karnad, while remarking that Ramanujan was a
strong influence onhis own work, cites a remark by the latter which
he holds up as a sort ofmotto for the artist in contemporary India:
I do not believe in God; Ibelieve in people who believe in God.
Rather than define the ideologeme,this remark performs it, giving
it a protonarrative form, and as such invitesinterpretation.
It is a statement that articulates and tries to resolve a
fundamentaldilemma of the secular intellectual in contemporary
India. It enacts onepossible solution to what we have become
habituated to defining as theproblem of the coexistence of
modernity and tradition. The speakingsubject here is located in
modernity, where the lack of belief attests tothe indifference that
characterizes modern capitalist societies. Thesubject recuperates
from this state to establish an indirect relation ofbelief through,
as it at first appears, the mediation of true believers.However,
this new belief is not so much an indirect approach to God asa
direct substitution of the people for God. Henceforth, it is the
exist-ence of the people in their original state of primary belief
that sustainsthe secular subjects capacity for belief. It is not
their belief as such thatis the object of the secular subjects
attention. It is only in so far as thisbelief constitutes a
guarantee of difference that secondary belief finds itsfulfilment.
As Jacques Lacan has argued, to believe in God is already notthe
direct faith in a transcendent being that it appears to be. To
believeis to believe in the community of believers, to pledge
allegiance to thiscommunity. This secular faith is no exception.
Belief in the folk sustainsthe community of secular intellectuals,
giving us the sense of differenceof which modernity has robbed us.
From another perspective, this faithcould be one way in which the
secular subject as global citizen, productof the internationalism
of colonial rule, recovers a sense of nationalidentity.
Whereas in the developmentalist ideology of modern
nation-states, theundeveloped are invited to relate to the
developed as the subject supposedto know, in the above formulation
we see the evocation of the subject sup-posed to believe, whose
figure enables an integration of modern and non-modern sectors into
a nation. This subject supposed to believe has been thepoint at
which, in modern India, the two poles that are usually rendered
asmodernity and tradition converge. These poles, which are also
renderedsometimes as Nehru versus Gandhi, together constitute a
sometimes antag-onistic, sometimes complementary ideological dance
where, in the words ofFrank Sinatra, you cant have one without the
other.
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128 Cultural Dynamics 10(2)
What is to be noted here is also that, by constituting this
couple, byrelating them through the figure of the subject supposed
to believe,Ramanujans formulation locates the nation so formed in
the chain ofnational identities, a particular within the reigning
universal, turning itssingularity into a moment within the
particular. The possibilities of othertimes, other paths and
destinies are husbanded to serve as the sedimentedresources of a
nation-state. The people in their belief, in their incommen-surable
singularity, no longer encounter directly the hegemony of
moder-nity. The secular intellectual or the members of civil
society turn towardsthem in order to maintain their distinction as
a nation within the modernworld.
At the same time the subject supposed to believe is hardly left
alone bythe forces of development. The implicit assumption behind
belief in thebeliever is that there is a barrier between the two
sectors, that there is aself-sufficiency to the life of the
community which makes it indestructible.This enclosure however is
breached by development. We want the com-munity to speak its own
truth, to address itself in its communications, itsrituals and
practices. We want its messages to be absorbed into its own
cir-cuits, to be available to us only indirectly as evidence of its
self-identity. Butdevelopment breaks into such enclosures to force
the subject to speak to us.In the ideological scenario of cultural
self-identity, there is speech, seman-tically rich and instantly
communicated. Under developmental conditions,the subject becomes
voice, bearing demands: voice deprived, at themoment of
enunciation, of the assurance of communication. When thismessage is
received by the developmental sector, it is understood asdemanding
rights-cultural rights for instance.
Thus it is that for developmentalists, the world is full of
voicesexpressing demands. For those anxious about national identity
there is acommunity turned upon itself, with which one must link up
in order tosecure our identity. This checkmated conceptual field is
what we con-front when we look for ways in which to reconceive the
humanities inIndia, in particular when faced with the challenge of
conceiving a frame-work for the study of contemporary culture. As
cultural production andthe field of reception are increasingly
mediated by capitalist processes,we face, within cultural studies,
our own variations on the two themesdiscussed above.
1. Capitalist (mass/popular/commercial) culture is already
altogether toowell defined, its essential features are well known.
It has, moreover, itsstages and forms: for example, realism,
modernism, postmodernism withtheir self-sufficient Eurocentric
histories. From this perspective, as a cap-italist culture, India
seems to offer only an ersatz recapitulation, an inau-thentic
variant that aspires to but never quite catches up with
theinternational model.
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129Prasad: Back to the Present
2. On the other hand, and by way of compensation, we have the
option ofconsidering ourselves, like others on the planet, as one
of many singu-larities which are fortunate or condemned to be other
than capitalistculture. In this scenario, Europes encroaching
culture produces its ownclones, as noted above, but always fails to
transform the core. Our iden-tities are inalienable. Come what may,
phir bhi dil hai hindustani. Forstudies of popular culture in
modern India, this presupposition some-times appears to be a
political imperative.As the expansion of modernity makes the latter
claim more and more
difficult to sustain, a new tendency has emerged of examining
the ways inwhich people on the periphery of the capitalist core
consume modernity(Breckenridge, 1996) in their own ways. It is not
just a case of shifting atten-tion from production to consumption,
a shift that capitalist culture effec-tively enforces, but also of
asserting that communities on the peripheryrelate to modernity
primarily as an object of consumption, therebyimplying that they
are situated outside it. Here the historicist fantasy of areturn to
true identity is replaced by a sort of achieved historicist
paradisewhere we can consume modernity all we want but it will
never get thebetter of us. On the other hand, we cannot escape the
feeling that wevebeen had anyway since this consumption of
modernity takes place on theglobal stage, where nation-states are
seen as declining formations delayingthe inevitable union of the
local directly with the global. To return to ourmain concern, the
present cannot be ours except through an abdication ofpower by the
nation-state.
Political SocietyHow can a receptivity to the present help us to
think our way out of thisconceptual stalemate? A recent essay by
Partha Chatterjee can serve as aninstance of the possibilities for
thinking that such a receptivity could openup. In a deceptively
simple operation, Chatterjee places an incision in theconceptual
field that reorganizes the field, redefines its constituents
andprovokes a redefinition of the problems posed within it. The
line drawn isat an angle to all the familiar lines that divide
modernity from tradition, andso on. First, like Ramanujan,
Chatterjee does not wish away the modernor civil society but tries
to find a way of connecting it with the rest of thesocial
structure. Insisting on a retention of the classical sense of the
termcivil society, the essay then characterizes the rest as
political society (hereparting ways with Ramanujan), having already
separated the politicaldimension of modernity (as democracy) from
modernity as a mass-cul-tural, consumerist, developmentalist,
globalized phenomenon. This newpolitical society is the site of
mediation between the population and thestate (Chatterjee, 1997:
32). Referring back to a point made above, I would
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130 Cultural Dynamics 10(2)
suggest that here political society is conceived as consisting
of subjectsturned into voices bearing demands; at the same time,
not remaining dociletargets of development but speaking a new
political idiom. Subjects, that is,that are neither absorbed in
their self-identity nor lost in a sea of voicesdemanding
development. The three theses in which the argument is
encap-sulated are worth citing in full:
(1) The most significant site of transformations in the colonial
period is that of civilsociety; the most significant
transformations occurring in the postcolonial period are
inpolitical society.(2) The question that frames the debate over
social transformation in the colonialperiod is that of modernity.
In political society of the postcolonial period, the
framingquestion is that of democracy.(3) In the context of the
latest phase of the globalisation of capital, we may well be
wit-nessing an emerging opposition between modernity and democracy,
i.e., between civilsociety and political society. (Chatterjee,
1997: 33)
As far as this desire for democracy that is a feature of
political society isconcerned, Chatterjee suggests (p. 30) that we
should look within thenation rather than beyond. Beyond the nation
lies the agency of modernityminus politics and a necessary tension
between these two conflictingdynamics. At a time when there is a
general feeling of the disappearance ofpolitics in the moment of
postmodernity, this conceptual cut relocates thepolitical in a site
that was previously condemned to one of two destinies:either
recipients of developmental largesse; or stubborn, self-absorbed
pre-servers of tradition, alternative ways of life, etc. It is only
in the context ofa national political culture, moreover, that such
possibilities for what Iwould term self-alienation can arise. The
existence of such a politicalsociety can also be seen as evidence
of the provisionality of the state, as thestruggles of political
society are also struggles over the state form (seePrasad, 1998:
ch. 1 ).
Within every nation-state formation, studies of contemporary
culturewill of course inevitably encounter a field in which it is
difficult to separateeasily the themes of political society from
those of a globalized modernity.But it is nevertheless the case
that the political framework opens the wayto a sense of the present
and defines a site within which every phenomenon,however global its
character, is overdetermined by the nation-state frame-work. The
framework of global modernity will ... inevitably structure
theworld according to a pattern that is profoundly colonial; the
framework ofdemocracy, on the other hand, will pronounce modernity
itself as inappro-priate and deeply flawed (Chatterjee, 1997: 34).
While it cannot be takenfor granted that the framework of democracy
will necessarily reject moder-nity as flawed, it is my contention
that our time is located, if anywhere, inthis political
framework.
Turning again to the perspective of the humanities, we find that
democ-racy as the synchronic structure within which we dwell has
failed to capture
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131Prasad: Back to the Present
the imagination of the disciplines. These latter have continued
to be fasci-nated with the moment of freedom, which is also a
moment that remindsus, sometimes with an obscene warmth, of the
cosiness of colonial domi-nation. To turn to democracy, in other
words, to locate ourselves in thepresent not as midnights children
forever in thrall to that historicalmoment, but as the children of
the revolution, is also to give up the sensethat we can still
reside in another time, still draw upon another secretsource of
difference. It is also, above all, to face the challenge of
culturalinterpretation unaided by the reassuring sense that the
meaning of our cul-tural practices is given for all time in our
heritage or our establishedpredilections. For increasing numbers of
Indians today, this is effectivelythe case.
REFERENCES
Breckenridge, Carol A., ed. (1996) Consuming Modernity: Public
Culture inContemporary India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (1997) Postcoloniality and the Artifice of
History: WhoSpeaks for "Indian" Pasts?, in Padmini Mongia (ed.)
Contemporary PostcolonialTheory: A Reader, pp. 223-42. Delhi:
Oxford University Press. (Previously pub-lished in Representations
37 [Winter 1992]: 1-26.)
Chatterjee, Partha (1997) Beyond the Nation? Or Within?,
Economic andPolitical Weekly (4-11 Jan): 30-4.
Dhareshwar, Vivek (1995) "Our Time": History, Sovereignty and
Politics,Economic and Political Weekly (11 Feb.): 317-24.
Fanon, Frantz (1990) The Wretched of the Earth. London:
Penguin.Nandy, Ashis (1994) The Illegitimacy of Nationalism. Delhi:
Oxford University
Press.
Prasad, M. Madhava (1998) Ideology of the Hindi Film: A
Historical Construction.Delhi: Oxford University Press.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
M. MADHAVA PRASAD is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study
of Cultureand Society, Bangalore. Address: Centre for the Study of
Culture and Society,1192, 35th B Cross, Fourth T Block, Jayanagar,
Bangalore 560 041, India.
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