ABSTRACT

This essay consists of a critical conversation between the extraordinary author Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Much of the discussion turns on various registers of the question of how seriously do we take the ambiguity that lies at the heart of liberalism, the ambiguity caused by the tension between the universal applicability that it claims for itself and the unacknowledged racism that runs through it? In this vein, both Ghosh and Chakrabarty address the issue of why the coercive side of colonialism is often under-enunciated in Indian narratives, especially the reasons for Indian historians frequently recoiling from engagements with the terms of race and racism. Ghosh emphasizes the egalitarian movements and cultures that preceded the Enlightenment. Chakrabarty differs, suggesting that “the Enlightenment – in combination with capitalism – was something special. It was special in the way in which it helped to make ‘equality’ into a universal category of secular life and ran it through every aspect of human activity, building it into all general measures of exchange.”