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The great value of this book lies in Chakrabarty's exceptional ability to bring to light what constantly gets glossed over and forgotten when we can only speak the standard languages of the academy. To do this requires the kind of bilingual consciousness which can bring into illuminating relation Adam Smith and Tagore. Chakrabarty makes you regret that so few are capable of doing this with a high degree of eloquence and insight. -- Charles Taylor, IWM Newsletter
This masterful re-examination of rationality, universality, and difference in the postcolonial world should prove inspiring for serious historians of all lands. -- Alice Ballard, Theory and Society
A slow, detailed, careful reading of the author's positively provocative style will be rich in rewards, generating, in the reader's mind, new ideas with new questions pointing to interdisciplinary, inter-cultural research, dialogue. As a reference reading text, it is rich in direct and implied questions on intricate inter-cultural interactions, gaps in communication, etc. As a discourse on basic themes of socio-political modernism and cultural diversity, it is more a starting point than a store of conclusions on debate dealing with cardinal themes pointing to research in inter-cultural and intersocietal studies. His dialectic, constructive discourse is keen on generating lasting questions and not dogmatic, ephemeral answers. -- Wahé H. Balekjian, Online Journal on International Constitutional Law
[T]he analysis of the processes and mechanisms of destruction are well worth reading. -- Joyce Apsel, Human Rights Review
Giovanni Federico . . . has compiled an exhaustive and impressive array of historical socioeconomic data heretofore unavailable in one source. . . . One of the book's strengths is the remarkable level of detail and the carefully assembled historical data. It is a rare sort of book and Federico tells the story of agriculture in a very interesting way. His mastery of the subject is plainly visible throughout the book. . . . This is not a text that can be used in undergraduate courses; rather, it is an analysis of economic performance and the history of agriculture that should be core reading for advanced students of agriculture and researchers. It will be a major reference for the foreseeable future and should be on the shelf of every agricultural scientist and anyone else interested in the historical and economic aspects of agriculture. -- Krishna Prasad Vadrevu, Development and Change
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First published in 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential Provincializing Europe addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of modernity in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is built into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty. Measured against such mythical standards, capitalist transition in the third world has often seemed either incomplete or lacking. Provincializing Europe proposes that every case of transition to capitalism is a case of translation as well--a translation of existing worlds and their thought--categories into the categories and self-understandings of capitalist modernity. Now featuring a new preface in which Chakrabarty responds to his critics, this book globalizes European thought by exploring how it may be renewed both for and from the margins.
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The author's project, to 'provincialize Europe', is an important and interesting banner under which historical writing could march, while also providing ample room for critique. His take on Marx remains evident, incisive and well-justified, and his idea of the 'inequality of ignorance' between East and West is attractive. While I had problems with his definitions of 'historicism', and the way he sometimes seems to caricature contemporary historical writing ignoring some of its more recent and interesting manifestations, its broad range and dilligent scholarship serve very well in forming a point about which to consider ideas and contest such issues.
But most of all, I was impressed with Chakrabarty's general awareness of the cliches and dead alleys of present postcolonial academic writing. All in all, it is an important and pathbreaking text which should please fans of high theory and concrete examples equally, as well as bring relief to those frustrated by the writing styles of a Spivak.
While enticing in its intellectual sharpness and breadth (Chakrabarty discusses Einstein and Marx in one fell swoop), there are a number of problems with this approach. The most urgent among these is that it paralyzes organized secular politics, lends credence to the politics of the religious right wing, and hence legitimates communal and sectarian carnage - a fact of life in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Furthermore, the fact that religion is the traditional stronghold of patriarchy as well as exploitation based on caste appears to escape Chakrabarty's notice. Only intellectuals located at a distance of oceans and continents from the destructive forces they valorize can afford to be so blasé about the very real threat of annihilation faced by minority groups in the context of an ascendant right. Polemics and reality (that specious construct) aside, and on a more scholarly note, the problematic of power stands sidelined. Subscribing to the idea that power is universal, and refusing to acknowledge that it coheres in concentrated form at certain sites (between subaltern and elite) is counterproductive to understanding power as it is exercised in systems of domination and subordination. By no means is such anxiety limited to the scholarship being released under the banner of Subaltern Studies. Susan Pedersen recently voiced similar concern over the direction of feminist history. Her eloquence merits citation in extenso: "[I]nsights that have proven so productive for cultural analysis - insights about the multivalent, collaborative and web-like nature of power - tend to be less useful for the study of narrower political processes. For, once we assume power is everywhere, it usually turns out to be nowhere very much; if it is analytically directionless, it scarcely needs to be taken into account. Our acceptance [...] of the truth that power is everywhere and that the weak, like the strong, play the game of power, has led us away from grasping the other truth that the players are not equal, that even multivalent systems can have internal movements preponderantly in one direction or another, that there are degrees of power, that a middle ground exists between an assumption of total agency and an assumption of total fixity - and that it is on this crucial middle ground that the most interesting questions are found and much interesting history happens."
Finally, the fact that Chakrabarty's archive is the Bengali middle-class male and that he, along with his associates, is mired in theorizing to the neglect of substantive research of subaltern history speaks for itself. ....
In doing so Chakrabarty covers a wide territory in terms of ideology, time and geography. The chapters on Marx and Heideggar are heavy reading; but it is worthwhile to spend one's energy to go through them. Because, he has very expertly explained the the!oretical basis of the tenets of these philosophies that attract the Indian mind, particularly, the Bengali mind. These chapters provide a good background to understand the basis of cultural differences between the west and the east. I find this extremely valuable not only for the students of humanities, but also students of International business.
Several of the important facets of Indian, Bengali in particular, society are discussed in great length. The chapter on widows and women in general is a very valuable topic. Plight of women Indian society is not new by any means. Even the Indian epic, Mahabharat through the questions of Draupadi to the Kuru elder Bhisma introduces the issue of women's freedom. But neither Bhisma in Mahabharat nor the leaders of Indian society provided a definitive solution. Chakrabarty and I share the view that economic independence (and therefore proper marketable education) is the necessary condition for betterment of women's lot.
<br!>I was delighted to read the chapter on "Adda", a unique Bengali culture. In Europe, café culture comes close to it. The French had the "salon" culture. Having participated in many "adda" in my youth in Calcutta, I miss it while living in the US or in Europe. Chakrabarty does a favor to my occidental friends by properly explaining what it means and what it did for Bengali social system.
Summing up, I would recommend this book to several groups of people. First, if you want to learn about the intricacies of the Indian, particularly Bengali, culture, this book is for you. Second, of course, this book is a required reading for any serious student of India and Indian culture. Third, students of international business should also be interested in this book as it lays the foundation of the many cultural tenets that are important in economic activities.
This is a fantastic book that unpacks and rejects the historiography that would deprive the 'savage', 'barbarian' and 'precapitalist' communities within colonial states of autonomy and agency in history. Chakravarty brilliantly re-reads the category "capital" in a way that splits its unifying assumptions.
Its about time Marx's categories were themselves historicized - please read this book, and also Ranajit Guha's "Dominance without hegemony".
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