Presenting A New Synthesis

The arguments are set out chronologically and thematically. Sarkar begins with a succinct summary of the epistemological changes that have characterized Indian history since the late 1970s, the shifts away from empirical,‘top down’ accounts of imperialism; simplified accounts of nationalist awakening and liberation using historical ‘stages’, and structural Marxist and class based accounts of the colonial state. In the post-Saidian, Foucauldian world not only has the focus of history shifted downwards towards the production and reproduction of cultural artifacts, but also to the specific contexts in which these operated and gave form to particular and contingent economic and political participation. This localism, inspired in part by subaltern studies but pressed on by most poststructural and post-modern scholars (of various hues), stresses both the complecity of the colonial encounter, but also the often unpredictable and ambiguous dynamics generated by the deepening of British colonial administration which Sarkar takes as the hallmark of the late 19th century.
Sarkar maps and analyses these dynamics across an impressive array of data and sub-fields of Indian history; political and institutional reform, colonial law and missionary activity, and land reform with particular attention to recent work on the environmental impact of the Raj. In the final section, headed Society and Culture, there is an impressive discussion of the construction of urban spaces and a summary of recent work on the rise of popular culture, entertainment and sport. All of these activities created new forms of interaction within the growing metropoles of late 19th century India, or reconfigured existing recreation for different participants. In each section of this densely worked book, Sarkar examines the impact of the colonial encounter by stressing not so much a Saidian imposition of the western imagination, but the constant imbrication of confrontation and co-optation of colonial governmentality by a bewildering variety of Indian and imperial actors. Gone are the old homogenous and uniformed actors of both the imperial and nationalist narratives, gone too is the irritating chronological focus that takes 1947 as some form of ‘Year Zero’ or the need to seek permanent boundaries between different religious and cultural actors.
I was especially impressed by Sarkar’s ability to position his views of particular authors and their works without seemingly listing them. Bibliographical details are made part of Sakar’s great project, allowing his analysis to work through points of agreement and disagreement within the existing literature. Much use is made of Washbrook and Bayley’s work for example, especially the latter’s path-breaking Empire and Information, as well as the work of the subaltern school and recent contributions by Partha Chatterjee. Throughout Sarkar is at pains to confront the difficulties posed by recent postmodern accounts which both fragment the impact of the colonial encounter and render the political and constitutional context of British India into a derivative and purely discursive account of power. Modern Times continues to stress both the uncertainty of colonial centralization, its frequent contradictions and limitations, and the divergent impacts it had on the complexities of Indian societies. These were at times both liberating and oppressive, creating new spaces for civic action and new forms of religious and cultural agency while at the same time closing down others and intensifying (or indeed creating) social conflict by restructuring communities and their access to resources. Nowhere is this more central than in chapter three which examines, with remarkable economy (given the sheer size of the literature) at agrarian history and the on-going debates over colonial land reform and peasant production.
There are some problems with the degree of eclecticism that Sarkar’s work lends itself to. The discursive turn, so central to many of the new historiographies has long exaggerated the subjectivity of the impact of imperialism, while oddly at the same time stressing the ubiquity of the colonial ‘gaze’—and Sarkar is right to challenge some of the absurdities this has produced. Simplistic references to the geographical surveys of India undertaken by the British from the late 19th century onwards for example, as well as on the onset of the census from 1871, often misrepresent the ways in which such technologies constituted reality, as well as their apparant necessity for the colonial government. Moreover many of these techniques were not so much derivative as novel, and returned to the metropol to deal with issues of geographical and social representation there. Rendering these are purely derivative of Foucault panoptican and is both trivial and out of context. Another example can be found in the on-going debates about the so called ‘renaissance’ of Indian cultures in the late 19th century, with particular reference to Bengal. While the impact of western education was limited, it was probably more decisive in reforming and standardizing local venaculars than it was in spreading literacy in English, allowing hybrities in language and expression that were novel and often revolutionary.
If there is a central theme to this major work it is that all of these subtleties—of the ways in which colonial governance and societies restructured each other—need to be understood as realities that contained and yet were enabled by different discursive projects of modernity. There is a risk here that if the discursive turn is neatly folded back into more structural accounts of Indian history, we could well reproduce all the old problems associated with poststructuralism, let alone the dead hand of a Percival Spear or a Sir Penderel Moon. There is an intriguing sense that, for all its originality, Sarkar’s work produces a history of modern India that is not that much different from some of the old historiographers on the rise of an Indian middle class, the rise of conflict in the countryside, and the tensions created by the need to create (as well as constrain) specific sets of Indian collaborators.
Such a view would however be unfair to Sarkar and to the real effort he has made to explain and to consolidate some of the insights that the new methodologies have produced, while suggesting that some need now to be revised or indeed abandoned—or further researched. The synthesis undertaken here is very much that of seeking to calibrate all the localism and contextual work of a bewildering number of scholars (almost all of which are cited and discussed here) into a broader account of India from the late 19th century, paying heed to the role of wider national institutions and policies, themselves neglected sine the 1970s. The colonial impact on India from the late 19th century onwards produced a unique society in which confrontation and co-optation reached the lowest and furthest social constituencies, was both oppressive and potentially liberating, modern but at the same time articulated by a series of indigenous cultures and sensibilities. Within this process emerged the spaces, the actors and the languages that would make India both a democratic and a repressive state long after the British has departed. I very much look forward to the second volume.

Vernon Hewitt is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Bristol, UK.