Huntington In Reverse

Postcolonial Studies (PCS) is widely seen as intellectually avant garde and politically radical and progressive. There is a small but growing literature, to which this book is a valuable contribution that critiques PCS on both counts; in these respects seeing its claims to going beyond the supposed limitations of Marxism, as mistaken and dangerous. PCS is more a retreat and a bad detour, not a rich and promising new path of exploration. Or, as the author Kaiwar puts it, ‘Postcolonial studies with its poststructuralist and post-modernist imbrications does not have the same value or valences as Marxism … [which] is also the “anticipatory expression of a future society”.’ The object of critique here is not the vast body of historical and sociological writings done in the name of Subaltern Studies (SS) or PCS which have their merits and insights as specific case studies but of their theoretical pretensions and claims. Early theorizers of SS as a distinct school of Indian historiography fed into the subsequent development of the conceptual framework that undergirds PCS.