ABSTRACT
Over the last few decades, some distinguished Indian intellectuals have been engaged in a critical revaluation of the intellectual and institutional legacies of the European Enlightenment in the subcontinent. 1 For a long time, this critique was seen by the Indian left as a quaint form of intellectual Gandhism – sentimental, perhaps even noble-minded in its rejection of materialist values, but in the end unpractical and unthreatening. The left did not take much notice of it. Things changed, however, in the 1980s. There was poststructuralist and deconstructionist philosophy, now available in English translation, which increasingly called into question Enlightenment rationalism and the metanarratives of progress/emancipation that the left had never questioned. There was also the development in the United States, particularly after Said’s critique of Orientalism, of a whole field of study that devoted itself to understanding the formation of colonial subjectivities through examining ‘colonial discourses’. 2 Within the field of Indian history, anthropologist-historians such as Arjun Appadurai, Nicholas Dirks, Gyan Prakash and other scholars working under the intellectual leadership of Bernard Cohn in the 1980s also began to draw our attention to the way that colonially instituted practices and knowledge-systems affected the formation of new subjectivities in India and cast a lasting shadow over the emerging politics of identity in the subcontinent. And then, at the same time, there was the Subaltern Studies. collective, Gramscian in inspiration and led by Ranajit Guha, who developed a critique of nationalism and of the political imagination for which the nation-state represented the ideal form for a political community. These heterogeneous strands are now part of what is sometimes broadly referred to as the ‘critique of modernity’ debate in India.
