Dipesh Chakrabarty - Rethinking Working-Class History in EPW

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Rethinking Working-Class HistoryAuthor(s): Dipesh ChakrabartySource: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 26, No. 17 (Apr. 27, 1991), pp. 1117-1119Published by: Economic and Political WeeklyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4397996

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DISCUSSIONRethinking Working-Class History

Dipesh ChakrabartyAmiya sagare sinan karite sakali garal bhela-Jnanadas (16thc)I AM honoured by the extended discussionin your journal' of my book RethinkingWorking-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940(Princetonand Delhi, 1989).I shall mainlyconfine myself here to responding to thereview-essay y Amiya KumarBagchisincehis is the essay that discusses the book asa whole. I do not intend to inflict on yourreaders hetediumof a point by pointrebut-tal of the criticisms by Bagchi. The morecurious reader,I hope, will read the bookand come to her or his own conclusions. Iwrite because some important partsof myargument-much of it containedin the lastchapterof thebook which remains uriouslyabsent fromBagchi'sdiscussion-appear tohaveescaped Bagchi. I am also interested ndrawingout some of the more generalim-plicationsof our "disagreements"n an ef-fort to situatethis debatewithina larger n-tellectual ontext. I shall thereforeonly notehere, but not respond to, some of thegratuitouslynsultingor patronising esturesthat Bagchi adopts in his'review-essay-hissuggestion, for instance,that I write betteronly when I write,as a "mere historian"orthe revelry f his proseovermy alleged "ig-norance"and "confusion".To these I canonly respondas a studentandethnographerof Bengali 'Bhadralok' culture-after all,even criticisms and book reviews can beanalysedas culturalpractices-but I realisethat this is not the time or place for suchethnography.Letmebeginthen witha briefexpositionof the argument that I think goes totallyunrepresentedn Bagchi's critique. Bagchispends a fair few words "exposing" the"ahistorical" nd "residual" haracter f mycategories"pre-bourgeois"nd"pre-capital"(pp PE-57, PE-59, etc). I don't grudgehimhis sense of triumph. But I had explainedin the book how my use of these categoriesrestedon a particularreadingof Marx andhow that reading was connected to one ofthecentralobjectivesof the book. As I saidin the Preface:In looking at this [jute workers'] history interms of Marx's categories. . . my objectiveis to developa critical understandingof thesecategories themselves and of their use in theconstruction of historical narratives.2The book is an attemptto critiquethe verycategories hat enable it to be, to surveyandexplore critically the very (theoretical)groundon which t stands.Thequestion hatI saw as fundamentalto my exercise was:what aretheconditionsof possibility or myparticular narrative? Students of post-structuralist hought will realise that I amnot the first person to ask this question,

especiallyafter Lyotard,HaydenWhiteandothers have alerted us to the problem ofmeta-,grand-or master-narrativesn history.What I think I do document andanalyse nthe book, by way of my particular andhistorically-groundedxample, s a dilemmathat is special to 'Marxist' labour history(particularly istoriesof consciousness)andperhaps o the projectof 'Marxist'historiesgenerally. I cannot summarise the bookhere-though I recommend o the interestedreaderchapters 1, 3 and 7 of the book inaddition to the Preface-but let me addressthe issue very briefly.The problem is something like this. Aninteresting epistemological propositionunderlies Marx's use of categories like'bourgeois'and 'pre-bourgeois' r 'capital'and 'pre-capital'. The prefix 'pre' heresignifies a relationship that is bothchronological and theoretical. (The twoaspects cannot be separated.)The comingof the bourgeoisor capitalistsociety, Marxargues nthe Grundrisse ndelsewhere, ivesrise for the first time to a history that canbeapprehendedhrougha philosophical nduniversal category, 'capital'. Historybecomes, for the first time, theoreticallyknowable. All past histories are now to beknown(theoretically, hat is) from the van-tage point of this category, hat is, in termsof their relationshipto or differencesfromit.3 Things reveal their categorical essenceonly when they reach their fullest develop-ment, or as Marx put it in that famousaphorism of the Grundrisse: "Humananatomy contains a keyto the anatomyofthe ape"4The category capital'however, sI havediscussed n the book, containswithinitself the legal subject of Enlightenmentthought. In other words, it is the name ofa set of relationships which embody the(bourgeois) uridical notion of equality. Oras Marx said in that very Hegelian firstchapterof Capital I, the secretof 'capital',thecategory,"cannotbedeciphered ntil thenotion of humanequality has acquired hefixity of a popular prejudice".5My use of the category'pre-bourgeois' sthen not a historicist one for I don't use itas a historical category. In other words, itis not a categorylike 'the bhadralok'whichtriesto extractanalyticalvaluefroma socialgroup's description of itself. (I am notthereby declaring historical categoriesuseless, for I do use some in my book, but'pre-bourgeois'was not one of them.) 'Pre-bourgeois'or 'pre-capital(ist)',n my book,alwayshas the epistemological stance that,as Ihaveexplainedabove,I read nto Marx'suseof them. It is a short-handwayof saying"when seen from the point of view of theuniversal-theoretical ategorycapital'" do

not ask it of my critics that they agree withmy reading of Marx but a fair review hasto acknowledge his readingbefore disagree-ing with it.Bagchi'sdemand,then,that I should have'specified' "the generative processes of

. .'pre-capitalist' elationships" PE 55)or-documented the "slow social processes"(PE-56) and/or the "logical transforma-tions" (PE-59) through which the 'pre-capitalist' could become 'capitalist' s quitewide of the mark. Firstly, t leaves a master-narrative, meta-historyof transitionfrom'pre-capitalist' o 'capitalist' unquestionedand thereby eproduces standard, istoricistreading f thesephilosophical/epistemologicalcategories. My book, whatever ts failures,is a conscious argumentagainst this tenden-cy. Secondly, if the world is theoreticallyknowableonly from the vantage point of'capital' i e, an ensembleof bourgeoisrela-tionships), does not the very enterpriseofMarxist historythen become a specialcaseof narratives hatprivilegea particular iewof modernitythe roots of which alwaysgoback to certain traditions in Europeanthought and whichwillalwaysperipheralisenon-Westernpasts (precisely through thegestureof universalising hem)?One aim-ofmy book was to both recognise and*pro-blematise his as the condition thatenabled'me' to speak.6Perhapsbecausehe misses hese objectivesof thebook-or perhapsbecause o hisearsthese are all "a mishmashof philosophical-sounding phrases" (PE-58)-Bagchi mis-reads my reservationsagainst the prevalentand dominant political-economic ap-proaches n studiesof consciousness/culturein Indian abourhistory.Myreservations rein the first place part of the overalltheoreticalaimsof the book andshould notbe treated n separation rom them. Further-more,if Bagchi has foundme exhibitinganattitude of "utterdisdain"(PE-58) towardspolitical-economicanalysis,I canonly con-clude that I have failed miserably n com-municatingto him the spirit of my prose.I actually undertakea lot of the kind ofanalysis hatBagchiaccusesme of notdoing(see in particularpp 198-210). say it in myPreface hat my analysisdoes not deny"thevalidityof Marxianpolitical economyas away of explaining working-classhistory"(p xii), a statement hat Bagchidropsout ofthe quote with which he sets the tone of hiscritique n its opening paragraph.Thebulkof the analysisin chapter3 is of a political-economic kind where I conclude a majorpart of the discussion with the comment:"Thepolitical economy of the jute industrythus goes a long way toward explainingwhy. . ." (p 95). Of narrowly politicalarguments, I say: "We should listen care-fully... for it is not without some force toit" (p 198). I am disappointed that thissounded like "utter disdain" to Bagchi.

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This is not to weaken my reservations,however.They runthroughthe whole bookand I stand by them. Nor does Bagchi'sretrospective attempt to rescue his ownwriting (which I quote on p 211 and hedefends on PE-57)convince me, "SenandWilliams"andmy "ignorance" otwithstan-ding, that Bagchiand I havecommunicated.The point at issue was not whetheror not"theexperienceof livingperilouslynear themarginof subsistence... etc"did "somehow... enter into the consciousness of these peo-ple"(PE-58).Posedin suchcommonsensicalterms, the question can only be rhetoricalin function, for both Bagchi and I (or anyother observer or that matter)give enoughevidence to suggest that these so-calledeconomic factorswere mportant.My ques-tions were posed at another level. Withregard to this particular statement, theywould have entailed asking, for instance:Who is thesubjectof this 'experience'?Doesthe adverb perilously' ndicatean authorialpresence?Fromwhat kind of meta-narrativedoes the expression 'the margin of sub-sistence" ome? Is theconsciousness hatin-forms this observationthe same as the juteworker's consciousness (obviously a con-struct)? What are the conditions for thesetwoconsciousness o be thesame(so thatananalytical statement could look innocentlydescriptive)? To what extent did the juteworkers' history fulfil these conditions?Perhapsthis is to offer o'nly more "philo-sophical mishmash" to Bagchi (who ob-viously has no taste for it), but my discus-sion of "rationality"that has so offendedBagchi both derives fromand reachesbackto these questions, for it is set, as indeed isthe whole book, within an attemrt tounderstand the problems of subject-production encountered in n-,rrafivising,from a Marxistpoint of view,"hepasts ofsubaltern classes. As I said in the firstchapterof the book: "Ananalytic strategythat seeks to establish a 'working class' asthe 'subject'of its historymust also engagein the discursiveformation that makestheemergenceof such a subject-categorypos-sible' (p 6). GayatriSpivakhaspiit thepointmore eloquently in a recent interview:the problem of political subjectivity is notgoing to be solved by romanticising thesubaltern. All the complications of 'subjectproduction' apply to us. It does not applyto them. When we talk about them, they

become unified subjects... The problemsofsubject production do not disappear whenyou'reactually with other human beings whohappen not to possess your class privilege.7The argument in chapter 6 (that Bagchicould not "lay [his] hands on") questions,within this overall theoretical context, thepervasive endency n 'secularist'andMarx-ist writings on the 'communal' probleminIndia to privilege a certain version of thehomo economicuswhenever hequestionofconsciousness is at issue.Bagchi readsthe book with expectationsthat it was not designed to fulfil. Ourdisagreements-and feelings of disappoint-ment which I can assurehim are mutual-stem from differences that are quite fun-

damental. Bagchi wants a history that"search[es] ut the workers' ealvoice"and"filluminates] the area of workers' con-sciousness"(PE-59). I write at a timewhena hostof scholarsandintellectuals-amongthemeRanajitGuha, JamesClifford,HaydenWhite, GayatriSpivak, RichardRorty, notto mentionFoucaultandDerrida-have pro-blematised ideas about representation,language,realityand voice/consciousness nsuch a waythat it is no longer possible forme to betheoretically nnocent n these mat-ters.This is not to put my book forwardasthe best exampleof what it sets out to do;others,I hope,willwritebetterbooks on thesubject. Nor is this to deny the value of thehumanist traditiQnwithin which historybooks areusuallywritten and the pleasuresthey can give. It is just that this was not theprincipal pleasure my book was meant toproduce.Minewas a self-consciousexercisein method, using history to rethink certainideas in Marxistpoliticalphilosophy.I maynot have succeeded in achieving my ownaims but that is a different question.I may add that froman existentialpointof view, I found a method-orientedstanceeasier to handle than any pretension that Iwas speaking for the class I was writingabout. A book is born in its own historicalcontext. My book belongs to the traditionthat it sets out to critique. It is, in thatsense, itself a part of the long history of'bhadralok' fascination with Marxistthought and its categories, though it aimsto provide a critique of that history, as itwere,fromwithin. If Bagchi'sandmy ideaswrestle, hey wrestle on this sharedground.It will be clear then that it could nothave been my idea to "sneer at" Bengali'bhadralok' rade union leadersor to "pourscorn"and "contemptuousanger"(PE-56,59)on theworkerswhosehistoryI examined.I am surprisedonce againthat Bagchireadsthese attitudes into my prose, even thoughI haddescribed hese 'bhadralok' eadersas"men who tried to become one with theworkers instead of wanting to dominatethem ... whose faith in socialist ideologiesremainedunflinching o theveryend of theirlives"(p 146);while of the workers'willing-ness to submit to dominant forms ofauthority, I had said:One is reminded of Hegel's discussion of themaster-slave relationship, in which themaster'sdominance is dependent on the slaverecognising him as the master. In referringto the 'bhadralok' trade union leaders as'masters' then, we do not intend to portraythe working class as a passive instrument ofthe leaders' will. At issue is the question ofthe worker'sown will, his own consciousness,his shrewd realisation that under the cir-cumstances he could sometimes best exercisehis power by choosing to serve (p 141).Is this the voice of 'contempt'or 'scorn'?Ido thinkthat Bagchi misspendshis vitriol.Fundamentally,Bagchi looks for a com-forting narrativewhere all Indiansarecastinto the role of passivevictimsof the hugejuggernaut of colonialism. No Indians,

whethereliteor subaltern, akeanyrespon-sibility for their own histories in this

narrative-a farcry fromThompson'spointthat "the [English]working class was pre-sentat its own making".WeIndians, ncon-trast,are neverpresentat ourown 'unmak-ing'. This 'unmaking' s something that hasbeen done to us by the Britishanda fetishis-ed demoncalled 'colonialism' a historian'sversion, I suppose, of what the Indiangovernment,whenever aced with domestictrouble, calls the 'foreign hand'). That iswhy, for Bagchi, our current"problemsof... class, ethnicandlinguistic[andgender?]differences", and those created by"numerous. . prejudices nd superstitions"are all simply nheritances romthe colonialperiod,"the egacyof colonialism" PE-59).In his sarcastic spiel over my passingcomment-that "the ... indigo planter ...modelled himself on the Bengali ...landlord" he forgets that some of theBengali landlords were themselves indigoplanters, hat the plantersoften consideredthemselves 'zamindars' and used manyinstruments f the latter's uthority, ndthatevenwhentheplanterwassomeoneschooledin the slave-driving echniquesof the sugarislands, their Bengali-Indian 'amlahs' (of-ficials)madeconsiderableand creative on-tributions to the regimes of torture theyinflicted on the peasantry.(Some of these'amlahs' werepetty landlordsthemselves.)8Letusbeclearabouttheissueshere.Thereis no question of condoning the oppressivepractices of the European bosses in themines, factories and plantations of India.But the Indian bosses werenot necessarilyany sweeter n their attitudes. Therewas ablending, I claim, in the colonial situation,of the Britishauthoritarianpractices withour own 'undemocratic' traditions. The

tyranny of the petty (or big) official weexperience n our everyday ives eventodaycannot beexplainedawaysimplyas a 'legacyof colonialism'.The landlord's authority,evenafterone fully grants the peculiaritiesof the colonial context, always hadelements-as Ranajit Guha has amplydemonstrated in his Elementary Aspects ofPeasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi,1983)-derived fromcultural odesthat hada history much longer than that of theBritish in India.9To blame everythingoncolonialism s to presenta pointof viewandnot a proven fact; nor is it to give a veryprecisedefinition to colonialism itself. But,most of all, it is to write a historythat canonly be comforting for the modern Indianruling classes. (To the extent historicaldebates reflect the concernsof the genera-tions that write these histories, producingintellectualdiscomfortforthe Indianrulingclasses (to which the historian often per-sonally belongs) seemsa more worthyaimnow, more than four decades afterindependence, han the old (though under-standable)nationalist objective of visitingevery sin on our (past) foreign masters.)Inconclusion, etme sharewiththereadera small historical ironythat relates to thisdebateand one that Bagchiand Ghoshhave,

between hem,reproducedn theircriticisms.A long time ago, in 1975, I presented n a1118 Economic and Political Weekly April 27, 1991

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seminar n Calcuttasome of the firstresultsof my research nto the history of the jutemill workers of colonial Bengal. The au-dience, mostlyMarxistacademicsof thecity,largely responded n a tone verysimilartoBagchi's. My superiorstold me about mytheoretical 'confusions' and 'ignorance'.While most of thecensure ame to meorallyand through the 'bazaar gup' of the leftacademic circles of Calcutta and Delhi, adebate ensued in writing between RanajitDas Guptaandmyselfwhereclearlypolaris-ed positions were presented.'0More thanfifteen yearshave gone by, and I now readParimalGhosh (a younger scholar who isby no means a sympathetic reader of mybook) generouslydescribe hatold paperofmine as a "seminal" ne that, in hisopinion,"no doubt .. effected a kind of break-through" (PE-61). I want to end by sayingthat it is ironies of this kind that help thehistorian survive the acrimony of hostilecriticisms. For opinions change, even inCalcutta.

Notes1 Amiya KumarBagchi, 'WorkingClass Con-sciousness', EPW, Review of PoliticalEconomy, July 28, 1990; Parimal Ghosh,'Communalism and Colonial Labour:Experience of Calcutta Jute Mill Workers,1880-1930', EPW, Review of PoliticalEconomy, July 28, 1990;and Arup KumarSen, 'Towards n Understandingof 'Worldsof Labour' ', EPW, October 6, 1990.2 Rethinking Working-ClassHistory, p xi.3 see KarlMarx, Grundrisse:Fqundations ofthe Critiqueof PoliticalEconomy translatedby MartinNicholas, Harmondsworth,1973,pp 469-512and KarlMarx, Capital:A Criti-que of Political Economy, Vol 3, Moscow,

1971, pp 593-613.4 Grundrisse, p 105.5 Capital, Vol 1, Moscow, nd, p 60.6 1 have developed this point further in tworecent pieces: a short article in Seminar,October 1990, entitled 'Of 'Communal'Workersand 'Secular' Historians' and in aforthcoming article called 'Postcolonialityand the Artifice of History: Who Speaksfor 'Indian' Pasts?'.7 Gayatri Spivak, Interview in SocialistReview, Vol20, No 3, July-September1990,p 90.8 See Girishchandra Bosu, Sekaler darogarkahini (1888), Calcutta, 1983, sectionentitled 'neelkuthi' Bosu'sdiscussion makesit clear that the amlah's conception and ex-ercise of authority (i e, torture) wassomething that was in part derivedfrom hisown culture.9 Gautam, Bhadra, 'The Mentality ofSubalternity:Kantanama or Rajdharma'inRanajit Guha (ed), Subaltern Studies VI(Delhi, 1989), pp 54-91 contains anilluminating discussion of some of theseissues.10 Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ranajit DasGupta, 'Some Aspects of Labour Historyof Bengal in the Nineteenth Century: TwoViews',Occasional PaperNo 40, CentreforStudies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, 1981.Much of this debate will now be of onlyhistoriographical interest.

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