ABSTRACT
Arising essentially out of the colonial/imperial project – itself a product of liberal capitalism, either as a reaction to it or out of guilt conscience – the notion of ‘identity’ has been characterized by an anxiety regarding its imminent loss or disappearance. The development of post-mediaeval or modern ‘high cultures’ within colonized societies – such as the emergence of the Bengali urban culture in nineteenth-century Kolkata – continually subjected to the ebb and flow of colonial intellectual and cultural currents, was largely responsible for engendering this sense of loss and degeneration. As Marx had suggested, this had taken place due to a gradual distancing of the ‘realm of culture (art, metaphysics, morality, ethics, law, etc.) […] from the “real” conditions under which human beings produce their means of subsistence’ (Abbinnett 2004: 74). The rift was significantly more than the critical distancing all cultures duly need for self re-evaluation and replenishment, providing the ‘general determination of “culture as ideology”’ (Abbinnett 2004: 74). The increasing distancing and abstraction produced an ‘independent domain of human self-recognition’ (Abbinnett 2004: 74), setting up a distanced and abstracted socio-cultural and political praxis as a window to look back at and exploit the original social context of cultural production. Enlightenment rationality, often propagated as instrumental thinking under the aegis of the colonial culture, empowered the emerging cultural centres to unilaterally ‘de-culture’ and ostracize its siblings and disown all ‘natural ties’ with its traditional roots. With the departure of the colonial patrons and the chasm that was by now unbridgeable through the technological empowerment of the urban elite, the identity crisis was complete.
