1Having been for many years a professor at Delhi University, Sumit Sarkar is one of the leading Indian historians of his generation. In the 1980s he participated in the Indian-British Subaltern Studies Collective that established new standards in the historiography of colonialism. In the 1990s he was one of the leftist intellectuals engaged in the struggle against Hindu nationalism. His books include Modern India: 1885-1947 (Basingstoke, 1989) and Writing Social History (Delhi, 1998). We talked to him about the achievements and shortcomings of the Subaltern Studies project, the prospects of global history, Marx’s Eurocentrism and the problem of religion.

2Sumit Sarkar, in the 1980s you were one of the members of the Subaltern Studies Collective that set against all forms of elitist Indian historiography (whether colonialist, nationalist or Marxist) a strong emphasis on the experiences and the agency of the popular classes. Could you briefly describe the context in which this project emerged and its relationship to the different Marxisms?

3The abiding contribution of early Subaltern Studies to South Asian history-writing lay in a move away from looking at popular movements in terms of elite mobilization and ideologies, towards emphasizing autonomous initiatives by subordinate groups. This led on to efforts to explore the consciousness and culture of “subaltern” strata. We were interested, above all, in the relationships between popular movements in late-colonial India and middle-class and elite nationalism. Within Marxist traditions, clearly, Gramsci was a crucial influence on us. Also relevant were elements of Thompsonian history-from-below.

4Perhaps the most fruitful kind of work within this trend took the form of a focus on specific incidents, studied in as all-round a manner as possible. I would suggest that this was the kind of “global history” (in the specific sense of a search for totality) that was most relevant to early Subaltern Studies. Of course, “global history” in a more conventional sense can be seen as relevant to the development of critiques of colonial structures and ideologies. This had, in any case, a central place in the mainstream of South Asian research. In fact, the basic critiques here had already been developed within the corpus of Indian nationalist writings, and early Subaltern Studies did not add anything very substantial to such analysis. Instances of micro-studies of specific incidents or moments in early Subaltern Studies include David Hardiman’s analysis of the Devi cult, Shahid Amin’s work on the role of rumour in constructing, from below, images of Gandhi, Ranajit Guha’s “Chandra’s Death”, and my essay “The Kalki-Avatar of Bikrampur”. [1] These were precisely efforts to explore the interdependence between social and cultural generalities and singular historical events and processes.

5The 1970s were a stormy period in Indian history, marked by a major upsurge in a variety of popular movements, notably the railway strike of 1974 and the Naxalbari movement [2] which began in 1967, embers of which continued well into the 1970s and beyond. After the brutal imposition and eventual defeat of the Emergency [3] (1975-77), such popular militancy continued, though in a different vein. The upshot was a simultaneous discrediting of the early Nehruvian optimism and the increasingly evident failure of established forms of Left and Communist politics. Within left-wing scholarship, Subaltern Studies may be seen as a rendering of these political shifts, with its simultaneous rejection and radicalization of the existing traditions of Indian Marxism.

6Why did the Subaltern Studies Group in the 1980s, despite huge methodological commonalities with feminist theory, consist only of men and did not include historians like Romila Thapar, your wife Tanika Sarkar, or Lata Mani?

7In retrospect, the affinity between some aspects of early Subaltern Studies work and the already rich tradition of socialist-feminist history writing, especially in Britain, seems clear enough. But unfortunately, we were late in becoming aware of much of this rich corpus. Prior to the Sangari and Vaid edited volume Recasting Women [4], feminist-history writing and theory had hardly developed at all in India – which perhaps also partly explains its absence from early Subaltern Studies, both in writing and membership. When feminism did enter Subaltern Studies, primarily through the intervention of Gayatri Spivak [5], it came very largely mediated by cultural studies and post-colonial theory. But the insights of earlier generations of feminist historians, particularly the British socialist-feminists, were, unfortunately, never engaged with by Subaltern Studies.

8Peasants were the primary focus of early Subaltern Studies. At times, this seems to have been at the cost of other forms of subaltern oppression and militancy. Here, it was a question not primarily of silences, of absence, but problematic aspects in the ways in which these areas were probed in early Subaltern Studies. The silence about urban labour was broken by Dipesh Chakrabarty [6], but in a rather ambiguous way: what he emphasized were the deferential elements in workers’ relations with their social superiors, and even with middle-class labour organizers. Chakrabarty saw this deferentiality as a continuation of peasant attitudes: for him, the worker remained essentially a peasant. Strangely, in explicit studies of the Indian peasantry within Subaltern Studies, the undoubted elements of deference found much less emphasis. If questions of labour tended to be elided in our early work, gender was almost entirely an absent concern until the post-colonial turn within the project. Caste was another such theme that tended to be surprisingly absent in the bulk of the work.

9How can we explain this problematic treatment of various categories of “subaltern”? In retrospect, I now feel that here the implicit pull of anti-colonial nationalism had been an unrecognized but crucial determinant. There was a major paradox here. The power of nationalism undoubtedly enabled much of the sharpest historical analysis produced by the Subaltern Studies project, notably in Ranajit Guha’s pathbreaking Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency. [7] On the other hand, movements and politics not directly associated with the national movement, and sometimes even part-loyalist in their attitude to foreign rule (for instance, in the case of Dalit politics, and social-reformist interventions into the women’s question) were implicitly felt to be embarrassments, and not studied “in their own terms”, a phrase that was ironically much in use within the collective.

10In the late 1980s the Subaltern Studies Collective began to take a direction that is often described as a shift away from social history from below towards a cultural history of representations. [8] You left the Collective in the early 1990s and wrote an article titled “The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies” [9] where you criticize amongst other things an un-critical use of Edward Said’s concepts. How do you view the development of Subaltern Studies today?

11I wouldn’t say that later Subaltern Studies marked a shift from social history from below to the study of cultural representations: my chief problem was never with cultural analysis as such, which of course must have a crucial role to play in any all-round historical analysis. My problem was the increasing obsession within the project with the idea that colonialism was basically a form of cultural domination and subordination to the modern West. A reified figure of Western “power-knowledge”, and implicitly the West itself, has passed into intellectual commonsense in South Asian studies as a direct result of the post-colonial turn. Here, Edward Said was clearly a crucial but in some ways ambiguous influence (not so much Said himself as the form of his intellectual reception here in India). The theme of Western origins of many elements of political and cultural modernity in India came to acquire an almost fetishistic centrality within the Subaltern Studies project, despite the undeniably ground-breaking insights of its later phase. The cultural dimensions of colonialism were given absolute priority over a whole series of relations of power, as well as practices, within Indian society. The initial provocation of Gayatri Spivak’s methodological queries about the unstated assumptions of early Subaltern Studies was valuable, and helped us in our stock-taking. However, in our minds, Spivak’s critique came to be entangled with the rejection of Western and Enlightenment cultural domination as the central feature of colonial modernity. This was attractive to many members of the collective, but personally such a reduction of colonial domination to cultural imposition seemed historically somewhat narrow to me.

12Your own conception of social history includes, in the vein of E.P. Thompson, a strong reference to lived experience and its complex contextual conditionings. How do you mediate between social and cultural generalities and singular historical events and processes? What about the interpretation-dependence of experience and the role of politics in the formation of (subaltern) world-views? Finally, what is, within your version of social history, the relationship between objectivity and partisanship?

13I find Thompson’s concept of experience valuable, because he interpreted it as a constant mediation between “external” pressures and human creative practice. For him, experience is not one or the other of these two terms: it is mediation itself. Thompson’s concept of experience helps us avoid two pitfalls. On the one hand, it refuses any attempt to extol the idea that experiences are the property of particular communities or identities, and therefore untranslatable, and that this is all there is to them. So experience is not just the history of “fragments”, separable from one another. On the other hand, experiences are also irreducible to the working-out of some grand metaphysical design, whereby a world-historical process simply duplicates itself within particulars.

14The meanings of concrete experiences, however, are never transparent. They are necessarily modulated by cultural forms and political conflicts. In a Thompsonian understanding, there can be no culture without struggle. If we interpret culture as historically sedimented social practices, then this means that experience and culture are always at a fundamental level political, i.e. constituted by change and conflict. In this sense, of course experience is both “interpretation-dependent” and political, whether for elites or subalterns.

15Partisanship and “objectivity” do not contradict each other in any but the most banal sense. Marxism – a partisan philosophy if there ever was one – has enriched and deeply influenced my work and thinking. To cite an instance, I do not think that I could have developed an interest in the nineteenth-century mystic Hindu thinker Ramakrishna Paramhansa, and the petty-bourgeois, clerical ambience within which he operated, and which gave his philosophy its force and material influence, without a deep interest in the questions of class and subjectivity, and the particular ways in which they condition and imbricate each other. For example, I tried to show the implications of the belated entry of clock-time into India, and the disciplinary mechanisms it generated in the world of clerical labour, for the reception of Ramakrishna. [10] There were mystics before and after him, and he has often been considered to be a timeless figure independent of historical processes. The burden of my research was to show that this was not the case, and explore the historical conjuncture that produced him, with its particular articulation of mid and late-nineteenth century economic processes and social relations in Bengal, expressed within a lower middle-class milieu of office work or chakri. This, however, did not mean a collapsing of the traditional devotionalism from which Ramakrishna drew his inspiration into a mere reflection of material conditions: the dialectic between the two was fundamental, and reductionism of any kind would be misleading. In this case, the object of research, the way I chose to raise the question, the themes I explored in relation to this historical milieu, and the answers I provisionally found, were all unthinkable without my anchorage in Marxian approaches to history (which is not to say that the latter automatically generated the former). As for “objectivity”, I believe it is constituted by a careful observance of the protocols of historical research, the verifiability of evidence, and the constant knowledge that my conclusions remain open to revision and change. For me, that is what objectivity means, and this is why I see no necessary contradiction with “partisanship”.

16In her book Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination [11] Gurminder K. Bhambra tries to transfer the impulse of postcolonial and subaltern studies into a project of “connected histories”. What do you think about this recently emerging strand of global or world history? Do you see, within this field, any prospects of bridging the all-too-common gap between economic and cultural history? Do you have any suggestions about what a global history of capitalism might look like?

17Subaltern Studies, and other research associated with it, is the first Indian historiographical trend which attained a global reach. It deepened an understanding of the phenomenon of the cultural domination of the world by the modern West. Paradoxically, however, this has led to a possibly excessive and narrow concentration on the cultural dimensions of colonial power. Far from helping to breach the gap between the economic and the cultural, it has, I feel, sometimes deepened the gulf. To some extent, perhaps, my work on such themes, developed primarily at a polemical level, has shared this limitation. What we still need is a properly global (conceptually rather than just geographically) analysis of the neo-liberal orthodoxy which has conquered most of the world, and seemed, till the recent economic crisis, unassailable. There remains an urgent need for an analysis in depth of the historical roots of our present conjuncture, and that, I feel, has to come from a global history of capitalism, which, however, does not lose its essential moorings in the specificities of local conditions. “Global” should not be a purely geographical category, but a more wide-ranging conceptual one.

18The worldwide surrender of much in left traditions, manifested very clearly in some developments in India too, demands a comparative investigation. I am thinking, particularly, of the ways in which multinational corporations have been allowed to appropriate land from peasants in many parts of India and other countries. At the same time, there is ample evidence of growing popular resistance to such tendencies, manifested for instance in Left-ruled West Bengal, in the partly successful movements in places like Singur and Nandigram. Yet the surrender of much of the traditional Left to global capital urgently demands critical and historical analysis, on a global scale. Critiques of such phenomena have tended to concentrate on local specificities. While that remains essential, one needs also an awareness and study of the wider dimensions of such surrender.

19The new trend of “global history” tries to analyze cross-cultural and cross-national currents by bringing together new data and research. Unlike the old imperial histories, the aim of this new work is not to elaborate apologies for colonial domination, but, rather, to give the critique of colonialism a cross-national reach, without sacrificing local understandings. One field of global history about which I do have greater knowledge is the development of labour history in recent years, in many parts of the world. Rich archival depositories are being built up, in centres like the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, and important dialogues have been developing, notably between labour historians in India and South Africa. Labour history seems to me to be an area where economy and culture can come together, on a necessarily global level.

20In Edward Said’s Orientalism one can find a trenchant critique of Marx’s work as Eurocentric. Recent Marxist scholarship on this question oscillates between emphasizing a learning process in the work of Marx (from the articles on India in the 1850s to the later studies on Russia and Ethnology) and defending him as being already anti-colonial from the beginning. What do you think about the question of Marx’s Eurocentrism? Are there any prospects for what has been polemically called the “mode of production-narrative” [12] with its characterization of pre-colonial India as belonging either to an “Asiatic” or a “feudalist” mode of production?

21First, Edward Said’s work is surely not a wholesale rejection of Marx’s worldview. It is not possible to extrapolate from some scattered passages in Orientalism into a general critique of Marx. As for the question of eurocentrism, I think it is necessary to disentangle several meanings of this basically pejorative term. There is, in the first place, the fact that historians and thinkers often necessarily draw from the material and ideas of their own specific temporal and spatial locations. In that narrow sense, it would not be at all impossible to find “Eurocentric” elements in Marx’s writings, but this is hardly a damaging accusation. He is, after all, able to derive the most powerful of all critiques of global capitalist domination from empirical evidence that was mainly European, and heavily British. A second meaning of Eurocentrism is the justification of and overt or covert support for projects of Western colonial domination. Some passages in Marx’s writings about India, notably the phrase about British rule in India being the “unconscious tool of history” are certainly questionable, though not necessarily entirely without insight. After all, Marx considered capitalism itself, in its “Western” form, an unconscious tool of history, insofar as proletarian revolution would be impossible without capitalism “producing its own grave-digger” in the proletariat. As far as anti-colonial movements are concerned, Marx often expressed deep sympathy and some understanding of them. This was manifested in the Indian context, in his writings about the 1857 Rebellion, about which he was often enthusiastic. Finally, as a nineteenth-century European writer, Marx shared many of the assumptions of his time and place. This can be seen in his fairly uncritical acceptance of an evolutionary framework for human history, even though his later writings – especially in his correspondence with Vera Zasulich over the possibility of socialism in Russia, he did move away from the assumption of a unilinear historical trajectory. This contrasted sharply with earlier passages in his writing, where he assumed that “advanced countries” would show the “backward” the shape of their future. Again, as a nineteenth-century European thinker, Marx’s writings include references to “national character”, at times used in a pejorative, even racist manner, with reference, particularly, the Slavic people. This seems to have been, at least in part, an emotive reaction to the role of Russian armies in the suppression of the 1848 Revolution, with Tsarism serving as the gendarme of reaction. It needs to be emphasized that attempts to defend everything Marx had written would obviously be ridiculous. One needs to apply to Marx what he once declared his favourite motto: “Doubt everything”.

22As for the question of the relevance of a “mode-of-production narrative”, I do feel that its use in Indian history has been both valuable and at the same time problematic. I am thinking here of the way in which some Marxist historical discussion has been obsessed with questions of definition, for instance the question of whether there was feudalism in Indian history. Definitions can become a substitute for historical understanding. But a jettisoning of questions of production relations would block any effective study of processes of historical change, and in this sense the mode of production remains a valuable analytic tool.

23In my own work, for instance, I have found it impossible to understand the much-used Bengali nineteenth-century phrase “the slavery of office work” without considering the concrete realities and tensions of the employer-employee relationship in government and mercantile offices. A Marxist framework, which potentially can integrate material conditions and cultural forms within a structured totality, has remained for me an indispensable tool of research.

24Ranajit Guha, in his article “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” [13], has characterized the religious consciousness of rebellious peasants as a “massive demonstration of self-estrangement”. Nearly twenty years later, Dipesh Chakrabarty rejected in his Provincializing Europe [14] the enlightenment tradition of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” as completely Eurocentric and declared the gods to be the real agents of Indian society. How, in your view, should a critical perspective deal with religious motivations and forms of protest? What might be the role of the critique of religion within a renewed project of enlightenment?

25I find Dipesh Chakrabarty’s formulation that gods are the “real agents” of Indian society extremely curious. In any Marxian framework, such a phrase could only mean an analysis of processes of self-estrangement, and in that sense it has value. Or this formulation would mean literally an acceptance of the reality of God or gods. But that is not what Chakrabarty seems to be suggesting. He makes a valuable point, through this formulation, by drawing our attention to the ways in which, in their daily lives, large sections of the Indian people experience gods as real presences. Any serious historical perspective must come to grips with this. The point of my work is by no means a blank and contemptuous dismissal of such beliefs, but an effort to understand, in a comprehensive manner, why such beliefs have so much strength among Indian subaltern groups. I feel, in this context, that Marx’s famous call, while rejecting important aspects of the Enlightenment, that criticism of heaven must become criticism of the earth, is still a valuable guide. A hermeneutics of suspicion does become sometimes dismissive and contemptuous, pitfalls that need to be avoided. However, is there not the danger of a reverse condescension, since I am sure that Chakrabarty is far removed from any literal acceptance of the reality of gods as an anchor for history-writing? Such an acceptance would entail a religiously oriented history, perfectly cogent on its own terms, but one equally alien to Chakrabarty and myself. If one does not accept religion in the manner that a believer does, is there really any other way of approaching religious beliefs and practices, except through what will inevitably be a hermeneutics radically alien to the true believer? After all, the role Chakrabarty assigns to gods and religion is presumably not identical to that of the committed believer. And as an atheist, would I not be acting in bad faith if I were to disavow my atheism when examining historical manifestations of religion? That would, in my view, be far more condescending than a perspective that is committed to and unashamed about its atheism. There is a general current in some aspects of postcolonial thinking that is perpetually suspicious of the radical historian’s externality to the subaltern worlds he or she claims to be speaking for. While there certainly exist elements of a condescending “hermeneutics of suspicion” in some approaches, the opposite gesture – to simply acknowledge the reality of the peasant or worker’s belief in gods, and to refrain from “elitist” criticism – is also deeply problematic, and is of little service either to the “subaltern” or to one’s own historical practice.