Abstract
This essay is a critical homage to Ranajit Guha, who passed away recently in his hundredth year. Through a rereading of Guha's bilingual oeuvre—including his later writings in Bengali—the essay explores Guha's rethinking of time as he started with Marxism, moved to a critique of historicism, then to a disavowal of history, on to postcolonial criticism, and ultimately to a cosmopolitical stance. It suggests that Guha's most important contribution to global critical theory is not his historiographical achievements but his unique phenomenology of time. Mobilizing both modern and nonmodern semiotic, grammatological, and aesthetic traditions, Guha reconceived time as a function of the limits and possibilities of human language and argued that common lives and subaltern subjects could not be accessed without admitting to the heterogenous temporal constitution—“time-knots” as he would call them—of the contemporary. Thinking with Guha helps us make the general argument that emancipatory politics demands a radical reopening of the question of time and a stepping aside of the framework of modernity—an argument that other erstwhile Subaltern Studies authors such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee have recently made. The essay understands Guha's century-long political and intellectual journey as a metonym for our times, marked by an agonistic and unpredictable interplay of multiple pasts, losses, emergences, and futures.
Ranajit Guha is perhaps the most influential thinker that twentieth-century India has given to the world. This essay is a critical homage to Guha, who recently passed away in his one hundredth year. Here I explore Guha's rethinking of time in the wake of his historiographical innovations. I reread the complex evolution of his bilingual oeuvre, as he started from Marxism, moving to a critique of historicism, then to a disavowal of history, on to postcolonial criticism, and to an eventual cosmopolitical stance. I suggest that Guha's most important contribution to global critical theory is not his historiographical achievements but his unique phenomenology of time.
Mobilizing both modern and nonmodern semiotic, grammatological, and aesthetic traditions, Guha reconceived time as a function of the limits and possibilities of human language and argued that common lives and subaltern subjects cannot be accessed without admitting to the heterogenous temporal constitution—“time-knots”—of the contemporary. I claim that thinking with Guha helps us make the following argument: namely, that emancipatory politics demands a radical reopening of the question of time and an alternative to the framework of modernity. Modernity imagines time in two ways: either as chronological succession, onto which is mapped a narrative of continuous progress, improvement, modernization, and development (history), or as a series of chronological ruptures, onto which is mapped a narrative of disruptive events, new beginnings, and apocalyptic reckonings (revolution). Both these imaginaries have been powerfully critiqued for their foundation in universal transition narratives. Both liberal and Marxist transition narratives, especially influential in the postcolonial decades, render the colonized and the subaltern noncoeval to their own times. Just as importantly, they deny the reality of heterogeneous times and multiple worlds, foreclosing the possibility of hitherto unthought genealogies and alternative futures. This essay suggests that while Guha may or may not have seen himself as a critic of modernity, his work offers us a way of rethinking our contemporary moment as one marked by the agonistic interplay of incommensurable pasts, memories, losses, emergences, virtualities, and futures, both human and planetary. What we call the “modern” is only one of these temporalities. The task of emancipatory politics today is to face up to this intractable temporal constitution of our present. After all, this is something that other erstwhile Subaltern Studies thinkers have also come to argue: most notably Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his thematization of the contradiction between global and planetary temporalities, and Partha Chatterjee, in his description of the democratic present as a complex articulation of heterogeneous times.
Ranajit Guha was most well known as the founder-leader of Subaltern Studies, a Southern intellectual collective that emerged as a movement of radical history writing in 1980s India. By the 1970s, the Indian nation-state's developmental promise had come to nothing. In response to widespread peasant, working-class, and student insurgency, the government entered the Emergency period in 1975–76, suspending the population's civic and constitutional rights. Guha first came into public view at this time via his writings in the popular press about India's crisis of democracy. More interested in full-time political activism in early life, Guha had left college to join the Communist Party of India. After resigning from the party in protest of the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Guha returned to academics and in 1963 published his first book, A Rule of Property for Bengal. After a gap of two decades, he went on to found, along with younger historians from India, the Subaltern Studies project.1
Criticizing the then-dominant nationalist, Marxist, and British “social history” schools of historiography for rendering peasants and first peoples of the colony prepolitical and premodern subjects of history, Ranajit Guha, as this essay argues, sought to fashion a new archival method and a new representational technique that could render the subaltern present to modernity. Soon, however, his historical search for the subaltern came up against the limits of academic history, leading Guha to interrogate history's disciplinary protocols—its juridical conception of evidence, linear chronological sensibility, causal narrative structure, authoritative orientation toward the past, and constitutive state-centrism. This was also the moment, around the 1990s, when Guha and Subaltern Studies came to be a global intellectual force, feeding into the general movement of postcolonial criticism that spread across diverse academies of the Americas, Africa, Australia, and the UK. Guha trenchantly criticized modern historiography's complicity with colonial epistemologies that underlay the violent, developmental logic of the postcolonial nation-state and argued that the subaltern could never really find a home within the disciplinary confines of academic history. To do justice to the subaltern, one had to imagine new expressive forms and new narrative temporalities. Guha thus moved from a critique of history to a phenomenological rethinking of time. Abjuring the historian's preoccupation with the re-presentation of pasts, Guha reconceived temporality as a function of language, grammar, narrative, and expression. And he turned more decisively from history to literature and poetry as forms best suited to such expressions of time. This was also when Guha seemed to disavow his global persona and return to writing exclusively in Bengali. While much has been written about Guha's historiographical innovations and their relationship (or otherwise) to radical emancipatory politics of the South, the politics of time implicit in his scholarship could do with some more attention. I suggest that by proposing to engage “the knottiness of time,” Guha disavowed the modern-day hegemonic binaries between linear and cyclical, human and natural, historical and mythological, empty and symbolic temporalities; he set out in search of a language that could cosignify the freedom and finitude of the human condition, or more precisely, the form of orientation to the world and the planet that humans have come to call “time.” Only such a language of thought, he would imply, could unchain human futures from the false promises of capitalism and modernity.
Guha's thought seems to evolve in three clearly identifiable phases. Early on, he appears to work within the framework of modern academic disciplines, bringing insights from anthropology, structural semiotics, and poststructuralist literary theory to bear upon history to correct the latter's historicist and statist biases. Subsequently, he seems to move to postcolonial criticism of modern epistemological structures, especially that of the discipline of history. Finally, he appears to shift from a critique of history to a phenomenological rethinking of time by reflecting on human language's capacities to enunciate temporality and reimagine modes of dwelling in the world. These three phases, roughly coinciding with the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, can also be mapped otherwise—as a methodological move from reading colonial archives against the grain to deconstructing modern European philosophy to critically parsing Greek, English, Sanskrit, and Bengali literature, drama, and poetry. The journey can also be mapped, I suggest, as a shift of attention from the event of popular insurgency to the everyday time of common lives and eventually to a cosmological and/or more-than-human temporality. Despite its shifting focus, as I will try to demonstrate, Guha's work has been animated by a concern with time and language right from the beginning. It is an error, I suggest, to read Guha's intellectual trajectory as a regrettable shift from a direct political-cum-ideological concern with the subaltern subject to an aesthetic-cum-philosophical concern with the human condition as such. Therefore, while remaining attentive to the subtle shifts in Guha's thinking, I try to tease out some of the continuities in his oeuvre: most notably his abiding interest in precolonial philosophical, narrative, and poetic traditions; his attempt to fashion an expressive mode that is irreducible to the European conception of the “literary”; and above all, his quest for temporal imaginaries faithful to ordinary lives and finite worlds.
Autonomy” and the Temporal Alterity of the Subaltern
The first volume of Subaltern Studies began with Ranajit Guha's manifesto on Lenin's line: “What is to be done?” In this, he accused mainstream historiography of elitism. While elite historiography was useful in highlighting the ideological nature of modern power regimes, it reduced the political to the narrow domain of laws, policies, and formal institutions of colonial governance.2 It failed to grasp the “autonomous” domain of subaltern politics, which made the anticolonial movement what it was—namely, a militant mass insurgency. That the question of time was implicit in this understanding of subaltern autonomy becomes clear immediately after, when in the very same essay Guha argues that subaltern political practices can be traced back to precolonial traditions. Colonial modernity had failed to render these traditions ineffective, unlike precolonial elite politics, which quickly became anachronistic with the hierarchical co-optation of elites into modern colonial institutions of power. Guha insisted that even though these popular traditions were nonmodern, they should not be understood as archaic, that is, as so many stubborn residues of a temporally superseded past. They were meaningful and active in the present and, in combination with modern ideas and practices, gave “new forms and content” to nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular politics.3 The source of subaltern political autonomy lay precisely in the temporal autonomy of subaltern lives: their “greater depth in time and in structure,” to use Guha's phrase.4 In other words, subaltern politics was indubitably present and yet strangely untimely with respect to the so-called modern.
According to Guha, this untimeliness at the heart of colonial modernity was to be understood in terms of a theory of colonialism. The colonial state, he explained, was of the nature of “an absolute externality,” “structured like a despotism,” a form of “dominance without hegemony.”5 In the colony, unlike in the metropolis, the modern state was ruled purely by physical coercion and racial exclusion, hence failing to produce hegemony (i.e., any form of social or ideological participation by the colonized). By actual governmental mechanisms, therefore, the modern state was compelled to mobilize a combination of precolonial political idioms and colonial modern governmental strategies, reanimating in the process nonmodern political cultures and disproving Marx's claim that colonialism was an unwitting force of history that would modernize “backward” peoples and bring about a universal transition to secular capitalism. Guha showed that the dominance/subordination dialectic in colonial India operated through the supplementation of modern British ideologies of improvement, order, and “rule of law” by nonmodern concepts of dharma (the Brahmanical ecumene of social hierarchy), danda (the kingly right to maintain social order through the exercise of just punishment), and bhakti (the normative ideal of obeisance to gods, Brahmans, kings, elders, teachers, husbands, and masters). Consequently, protest against colonial rule was also animated by a combination of modern notions of rights and representation with earlier notions of duty, sacrifice, and religiously enjoined resistance to unethical kingly power.
The understanding that the modern subaltern subject embodied a kind of temporal alterity to the present challenged both liberal and Marxist imaginations of progressive history. Unsurprisingly, Guha's early writings display signs of struggle with the then-dominant Marxist transition paradigm, which held that history universally and inexorably moved from feudalism to (state-)capitalism to socialism. Even as he argued for subaltern autonomy, Guha felt compelled to qualify his proposition by saying that “subaltern politics did not have the necessary objective condition to mature,” giving away his still-dominant historicist predilections. Subaltern politics apparently got caught up in “economism” and “sectarianism” (both popular communist terms at the time) and failed to usher in a new people's democracy.6 The transition debate dominated Indian academia from the 1960s to the 1980s—when historians and economists ceaselessly debated whether there was feudalism in medieval India or capitalist “potentials” in India's past, whether colonial subordination meant that India was already “subsumed” under the capitalist mode of production without having been fully industrialized, whether colonialism could itself be conceived as a distinctive mode of production unforeseen by Marx, or if one had to rehabilitate Marx's undertheorized conception of the Asiatic mode of production for India, and so on.7 The transition imaginary also informed debates about the nature of the postcolonial nation-state. Political theorists deployed the Gramscian notion of “passive revolution” to describe the Indian state as a class settlement between modern capitalists and traditional feudal landlords, an unseemly temporal contract that held up proper democratic transition in the country.8
The transition framework, however, was always already troubled by the specifics of Indian history—leading Sudipta Kaviraj, who also contributed to a later volume of Subaltern Studies, to argue for a “revisionist” theory of modernity. Unlike in western Europe, he argued, in India universal democratization preceded industrialization and secularization, lending a very different temporal configuration to India's modernity.9 This early democratization explained the ubiquity of popular insurrections in postcolonial India: food movements; citizenship movements by refugees; student movements against political corruption; and most importantly, Naxalism, the armed peasant and “tribal” movement of the late 1960s and 1970s that took the student and scholarly community by storm. Inspired by the Maoist strategy of encircling the city by the country, the Naxal uprising seemed to suggest that traditional peasantry and forest peoples—and not the advanced industrial proletariat—were the true revolutionary force of the times, disrupting the linear order of the Marxist transition narrative. It was the experience of the Naxal movement that was directly responsible for Guha's abiding interest in the Indian peasant. Incidentally, “Naxal” is an epithet employed by the Indian state even today when it seeks to arrest without due process those it considers dangerous dissenters, using to their advantage the enduring symbolism of peasant/tribal insurgency in India.
Writing much later in 2008, Partha Chatterjee identified the transition mentality as the bugbear of India's twentieth-century academic thinking and government-speak. Citing the work of the heterodox economist Kalyan Sanyal, who argued that the originary event of primitive accumulation was not historically anterior to capitalism but always already accompanied it as its shadow, Chatterjee said that “political society”—by which he meant the everyday lives and politics of the “governed” (those who would never be absorbed into the modern capitalist sector as a proletariat or have access to legally justiciable civil rights)—cannot be captured in terms of a premodern-to-modern transition narrative.10 And Dipesh Chakrabarty would famously say in his Provincializing Europe that transition narratives relegated Southern populations to the “waiting room of history” from which there seemed no exit and no hope of achieving temporal parity with the North.11 Capturing the world of subaltern politics therefore requires us to grasp the contemporaneity and hybridity of heterogeneous times, a stance that Chatterjee would later develop in his critique of Benedict Anderson's thesis of the “empty, homogenous time” of capitalist modernity.12
Unsurprisingly, several essays in the early Subaltern Studies volumes discussed time directly. Partha Chatterjee argued that if one replaced the concept of “modes of production” with “modes of power,” one could sense the continuing presence in early twentieth-century India of late medieval and early modern forms of peasant community. These longer traditions continued to adjudicate popular sensibilities of conquest and consent, justice and injustice, redress and punishment, obligation and entitlement, insider and outsider—indexing a distinctive subaltern political ethic that cut through the domain of formal liberal politics based on individual representation and universal franchise.13 In his follow-up essay in Subaltern Studies II, Chatterjee further argued that the “community” was the logically anterior category upon which rested the whole edifice of the Marxist transition theory. But this was not a chronological anteriority because historically diverse forms of community remained operative—as was the case in colonial India's agrarian society—at the very heart of the global capitalist order. This called for, he concluded, a revision of Michel Foucault's enterprise, taking into account that in the colony so-called modern modes of the exercise of power were limited not only by the “persistence of older modes” but also by a complex “combination” of the nonmodern and the modern.14 Shahid Amin, for his part, invoked the “geo-ecology” of heterodox economist Radhakamal Mukherjee and argued that instead of thinking the economic as a universal abstraction, we attend to the temporality of processes inherent in nature/ecology. Gesturing to the limits of Marxist social history, which understood the transition to capitalism as a universal transition from natural time to church time to clock time, Amin argued that proper attention to the dynamics of small peasant agriculture shows peasant time to be far more complex: a combination of crop rotation, fallow periods, and harvest cycles with a calendar of rituals, festivities, and dealings with the state. The traditional Marxist binary between labor time and waiting time, work and leisure, did not quite capture this complexity. Amin then read the nineteenth- and twentieth-century transformation of India's agrarian society as a process driven by the imposition of the state's fiscal calendar, indifferent to ecological events and natural processes, over the immanent temporality of peasant agriculture.15 Sumit Sarkar also famously discussed the persistence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century subaltern politics of the idiom of kaliyuga, the last epoch of the yuga cycle of classical Indic thinking, which imagined the movement of time as a process of declining moral and social virtue, with the last epoch being one in which women and low castes rose to the top. Sarkar demonstrated how subalterns often interpreted the unprecedented nature of the colonial present as kaliyuga and chose to rise up against dominant classes on the grounds that insurgency was foreordained by time.16 (In his reflections on the Santal hul, Guha too discussed the implication of the popular imagination of time as the prime agent of politics.) Later, Sarkar further analyzed the workings of the kaliyuga imaginary in the agonistic interface between peasants and the new urban middle classes employed in colonial offices,17 as did Partha Chatterjee.18
The year that Subaltern Studies II was published, Ranajit Guha published his Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency. In this classic account, Guha strenuously objected to the image of the “pre-political” peasant rebel popularized by the likes of Eric Hobsbawm and other Marxist proponents of “history from below.” By calling the peasant “prepolitical,” Guha argued, these historians denied a transformative capacity and intellectual acumen—he called it “consciousness”—to subaltern insurgents, who seemed to await the arrival of nationalist and communist vanguards to help them graduate to politics. Guha then offered an alternative, in this case, somewhat structuralist, reading of autonomous subaltern political consciousness, which, according to him, worked via a set of systematic interpretative, analytical, and organizational competencies—making the Indian peasant deeply political in orientation and belying the idea that so-called premodern rebellions were mere momentary eruptions with no lasting effect on the unfolding of historical temporality. In this book, like in his manifesto in Subaltern Studies I, Guha argued that, just as the exercise of power in colonial India required the repurposing of “ancient” idioms of dharma, danda, and bhakti, insurgent peasants too deployed techniques, signs, and symbols drawn from the longer insurrectionary traditions of hing, bidroha, ulgulan, hool, fituri etc.—once again vouching for the heterogeneous temporal constitution of the moment of insurgency.
Guha's Elementary Aspects too is beset by a palpable tension between his residual transitionist sensibility and his effort to liberate subaltern politics from historicist condescension. But what is truly remarkable in this book is Guha's minute attention to precolonial texts and traditions even though the book is about colonial modern politics. So, for example, the concept of atidesa (literally, extension, extrapolation, excess, and/or transference of meaning)—a technical term found in classical grammatological and exegetical texts, most famously in Panini's grammar (500–300 BCE) and Jaimini's Purva Mimamsa (ca. 400–200 BCE)—is brought to bear upon the analysis of the peasants' interpretative techniques of “transference” and “transmission,” by which insurgent consciousness spread beyond its immediate context, made sense of distant and/or abstract power relations, and acquired a supra-local territoriality and efficacy.19 Similarly, the Manusmriti (ca. 200 BCE–200 CE), an ancient juridical text that prescribed norms of social conduct according to the hierarchies of caste and gender, is analyzed in order to understand modern-day renewals of preexisting structures of subordination.20 The epigraph with which Elementary Aspects begins, tellingly, is an extract from the third- and second-century BCE Buddhist text Majjhim Nikaya, which cites the Buddha as speaking of a time when masters would become slaves and slaves would become masters. Guha implies that these older conceptions were operative in modern politics not as faint residues of a distant past but as viable contemporary forces. This becomes even more evident when one notes that Guha not only approached these older traditions as so many objects of analysis but also deployed them as part of his own temporally eclectic repertoire of analytical tools, positing them as commensurate to his eminently modern object of study. As we shall see below, this interest in the contemporary salience of pre- and noncolonial concepts and forms of expression would continue to animate Guha's later work and would in fact become more central to his unique version of critical thinking.
Guha critiqued colonial histories, and by extension nationalist and Marxist histories, for flattening out this heterogeneous temporality of modern-day politics into a narrative of historical necessity, forcibly incorporating the autonomous subaltern domain into the unilinear time of relentless modernization, development, progress, and transition. In the first essay of Subaltern Studies II, his well-known “Prose of Counter-insurgency,” Guha wrote about the temporal politics of “primary, secondary and tertiary” narratives of rebellion. He showed how state archives, contemporary memoires, and latter-day histories reconfigured narrative temporality to stage subaltern insurrection as an event that was anachronistic, untimely, distant, and disruptive of the movement of history. Here is a rather dense paragraph from this text:
The effect is the work of “organization shifters” which help the author to superimpose a temporality of his own on the that of his theme, that is “to ‘dechronologize’ the historical thread and restore, if only by way of reminiscence or nostalgia, a Time at once complex, parametric, and non-linear, braiding the chronology of the subject matter with that of the language-act which reports it.” . . . The shifters disrupt the syntagm twice to insert in the breach . . . a moment of authorial time suspended between the two poles of “waiting,” a figure ideally constituted to allow the play of digressions, asides and parentheses forming loops and zigzags in a story-line and adding thereby to its depth.21
Guha here is drawing on Roman Jakobson's use of the concept of “shifters” as redeployed by Roland Barthes in his 1967 text “Le discours de l'histoire.” In Barthes's analysis of modern historiography, “testimonial shifters” appear as linguistic mechanisms that betray the presence of the otherwise disguised author-historian, and “organizing shifters” are ways the narration subtly diverges from the chronological sequence of the actual event and reorganizes it according to the needs of the authorial discourse, in this case, as counterinsurgent prose, superimposing its own complex temporal structure over the temporal structure of the event originally authored by peasant rebels. Mobilizing Barthes, Guha demands that we carefully attend to the linguistic and narrative structuring of historiography in order to grasp the fact that what is really happening here is a battle of contending temporalities between dominant and subaltern, colonizer and colonized. Note that Guha has already moved away from the question of representation per se and is arguing that history does not simply misrepresent so-called premodern political subjects but produces an insidious reality effect more powerful and more determining than ideology work and/or value judgment. Guha is insisting that we attend to the disjuncture between the immanent temporality of insurgency and the narrative temporality of the prose that seeks to historicize it.
In 1985, Guha went on to write a remarkable essay called “The Career of an Anti-God in Heaven and Earth,” which further foregrounds his interest in the entanglements of the modern with the “ancient.” The beginning of the essay is worth citing:
Religion is the oldest of archives in our subcontinent. All the principal moments of the ancient relationship of dominance and subordination are recorded in it as codes of authority, collaboration and resistance. . . . Congealed and generalised through recursive use over long periods, they tend to outlive their original functions and operate in subsequent cultures not only as a relic but also as an actively overdetermining factor . . . expressed in myth, cult, ritual and custom and their permutations. . . . This documentation is not easy to read . . . it lacks the transparency of written discourse; shrouded often in mystic sentiments and obscure symbols, its reason defies the rationalistic assumptions of its interpreters; modified by accretion and decay, it does not allow itself to be grasped as lucidly as a consistent body of law; elliptical and syncopated, it suffers in comprehensibility because of the duplex character of its messages which are worldly and other-worldly at the same time.22
In this telling, religion is not mere historical object—a clearly defined entity that transforms with and in time and therefore amenable to historicization—but an archive unto itself that holds together traces of multiple pasts and heterogenous temporalities. This archive is not available to us as a systematic repository of well-preserved documents and artifacts from which “facts” can be directly accessed. Rather it is a live and dispersed matrix of practices, habits, ideas, and symbols—simultaneously old and new, human and metahuman, subject to decay and accretion. What is it then to approach religion as an archive? Guha says that it is to sense “syncopation”—a musical technique by which the rhythmic accent of a piece is displaced by shifting attention from a stronger to a weaker beat, producing a displacement in temporal register. It is also to engage with “ellipsis”—a form of signification that leaves much unsaid through extreme economy and/or ossification of meaning. In other words, reading religion as an archive calls for sensitivity to the work of time.
Guha begins this essay by extensively citing Marxist historian D. D. Kosambi, who used ethnographic techniques to recover older histories from their scattered material traces in the contemporary. Guha then goes on to read and reread the old myth of the anti-God Rahu—the malevolent force that swallows the sun and the moon, causing their eclipse, and engenders universal pollution—in its diverse retellings from the distant past to the present, in order to stage the shifting contours of what he tellingly calls an “ancient and unresolved antagonism” between Brahmans and outcasts, creditors and debtors. This detour via Kosambi tells us that, in his early writings, Guha's critique of historicism and his signature style of “thinking across times” drew on anthropological insights—further confirmed by the pride of place given to the “tribe” or the adivasi in his Elementary Aspects, even though he sometimes problematically glossed forest peoples as peasants. However, unlike Kosambi's version of historical anthropology, Guha's anthropological interest lay in that strand of the discipline that dealt with language, grammar, semiotics, narratology, myth, folklore, custom, and religion. His writings are dotted with references to Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson, Durkheim, and Barthes, as well as to classical Indian grammarians and semioticians like Panini and Bhartrhari. Interestingly, the anthropologist Bernard Cohn, an important contributor to Subaltern Studies, also focused on language as his prime object of analysis.23
In the 1980s, Guha appeared to be still searching for a representational technique that would help give the subaltern a tangible presence in modernity. And yet his account of modern politics as an interweaving of heterogenous times seems to take his critique of historicism toward what Eelco Runia calls a “critique of representationalism.” Modern historiography, according to Runia, imagines the past as nonpresent, absent, and hence accessible only as a re-presentation. This produces a metaphorical relationship to the past, by which modern historiography makes sense of the past by referring it to the present and of the present by referring it to the past—producing a circularity in which the ontological status of the past becomes irrelevant. Runia, however, proposes, like Guha, that the past is not absent or untimely and that it has a presence in concrete forms: not only in monuments, artifacts, and diverse topoi of being but also in language, culture, and common sense, in ways that are often too self-evident to register. This present past can surprise, overwhelm, and move us, and even cause us to take unthinkable revolutionary leaps toward the future and produce the truly new. This extra-historical past appears in a metonymic relationship to us, as an infra- or supra-register of the present itself or in a part-to-whole relationship to our times. This past is not to be merely read for meaning but acknowledged in terms of its efficacy to “move.” Having established the presence of the past, Runia then goes on to explore the ontological possibility of the “new.” He implicitly critiques, as does Guha in the 1980s, modernity's conceit that imagining the novel and the new is an exclusively modern orientation. He then shows, through a study of classical rhetoric and Aristotelian dialectics (in a way paralleling Guha's interest in classical Indic language philosophy) how a new reality is produced not as invention ex nihilo but as an hitherto unthought “third” worked out of the chemistry between already-existing points and counterpoints, present pasts and present emergences, so to speak.24
The Literary and the Everyday
By 1985, the problem of representation had come to be openly debated in the pages of Subaltern Studies. In her “Deconstructing Historiography,” Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak highlighted the political, ethical, and epistemological limits of re-presentation as an act, and accused Guha of an untenable “metaphysics of presence” behind his claim to faithfully recover and represent subaltern “consciousness” in the language of academic history writing. Instead, she offered her own reading of the Subaltern Studies project as an alternative “theory of change” and glossed Guha's counterintuitive readings of the historical archive as a prime instance of the literary practice of deconstruction.25 Interestingly, however, while Spivak urged Guha to give up on his concept of the subaltern as an immediate historical subject, Guha's own work took a very different direction. As we shall see, his critique of first historicism and then history, instead of taking him from the subject to the text, returned him to a refigured aesthetic subjectivity—of a dispersed self-in-world—as prime conduit for the unfolding of “being and time” (hence his abiding interest in Rabindranath Tagore and Martin Heidegger). We already see glimpses of his interest in this finite and worldly singular self in his efforts to recast the subaltern from community to individuality in his essay “Chandra's Death,”26 or more programmatically, in “The Small Voice of History.”27 In fact, one could say that even as he traveled for a while in the company of poststructuralist literary theory, Guha's path went in a different direction—when he not only redefined the literary and the textual from the perspective of classical Indic aesthetic traditions and modern-day Bengali poetics but also embarked upon a search for a language, a form, and an orientation adequate to the time of the commonplace and the everyday.
Edward Said, in his preface to the 1988 volume of selected Subaltern Studies essays, saw Guha as belonging to a long line of postcolonial novelists and poets—Rushdie, Marquez, Alatas, Faiz, and so on—in a way presaging Guha's emerging literary persona.28 Guha began his 1998 essay “A Conquest Foretold” by citing Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold.29 Here he contrasted conquest, the instant of absolute aggression sans futurity, with rule, which by deploying the apparent perpetuity of law, refigured conquest as always already foretold (i.e., subject to historical necessity). Colonial historiography did precisely this, he argued: namely, glossed conquest as an event in history rather than as a visitation upon history that disrupted a people's shared sense of chronology. It is interesting that the passage from Márquez that Guha chose as his epigraph describes what an unprecedented event could do to the experience of everyday time: “For years we could not talk about anything else. Our daily conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around . . .” Guha's 2008 essay “A Colonial City and Its Time(s)” similarly described ordinary urban life in the colony as an unceasing present with neither anteriority nor futurity.30 He did this by contrasting the narrative strategies of two contemporary “realist” parodies: Charles Dickens's Sketches by Boz (serialized between 1833 and 1836) and Kaliprasanna Singha's Hutum Penchar Naksha (1862):
The historicist imperative is conspicuous by its absence in Hutom Pyanchar Naksha. That is not to suggest that it is ahistorical . . . the Naksha affirms its historicality by deploying time in a manner strikingly different from the Sketches [of Boz]. The latter . . . traces its way back from the day-to-day to connect itself by a direct linear nexus to the past. The actual, assimilated thus to the bygone, adds to its density, and the shards of broken lives, picked up from the backstreets of London, are fitted ingeniously into the tale of England's expansion overseas. Nothing could be more different from the temporal strategy of the Naksha, based on a total involvement with the present, which, instead of being overtaken by the past as in the Sketches, does the overtaking itself. The past is by no means left out, but no sooner does it make its appearance than it is absorbed into the ongoing surge of the present. The aspect of light, the present or vartamana, contrasted in Indian thought and language with the more obscure aspects of the past and the future, affirms its authority by letting some of the characteristic phenomena of urban life disclose themselves . . . , for [and Guha cites Bhartrhari here] “The present is a path that is like light itself [vartamano adhva prakasavat].”31
Contrasting the narrative temporalities of Dickens and Singha, Guha shows how everyday time is differently staged in metropolitan and colonial literature. In the former, everyday minutiae are incorporated into the march of historical time, so that even broken backstreet lives seem to acquire a past and a future derived from the historical destiny of the globally resurgent imperial nation. In the latter, however, the unprecedented colonial present devours both the past and the future. The everyday becomes immediate and unrelenting—the argument that Guha had already made in his “Conquest Foretold” via Márquez and now makes via Bhartrhari (ca. 450–510 CE), whose statement that the present is the light that discloses the past and the future takes on a different connotation in context of colonialism, a phenomenon that seeks to cancel out other pasts (replacing them with “world history”) and other futures (replacing them with the eternally deferred promise of modernity) in favor of a temporally stalled present.
Guha's shift of attention from the historical archive to literature and poetry coincides with his turn from the event of peasant insurgency to the time of the common everyday. Note that Guha's everyday was different from the everyday proposed by James Scott in his Weapons of the Weak, a book that made waves almost at the same time as Subaltern Studies.32 While Scott's everyday was recovered ethnographically, Guha insisted that the everyday was not directly accessible by either anthropology or history. Anthropology rendered the everyday into banal routine, and history subsumed the everyday under the biography of the state. Guha's 2000 lectures on History at the Limit of World History were precisely an attempt to cotheorize everyday time and the literary imagination. Guha invoked Henri Lefebvre's exasperation at practitioners of microhistory who trivialized everyday life. Lefebvre had argued that the “familiar deceives by redundancy” and that the everyday therefore called not for painstaking detailing but for a special insight.33 To Guha, this special insight was to be found in Rabindranath Tagore's literary approach toward common life.34
The everyday is a peculiar phenomenon in time, Guha said. Its temporality cannot be identified with any particular day in the calendar that is today or tomorrow, although in its apparent obviousness the everyday is “easy to recognize in the current day or the one to come.” Everydayness is thus necessarily informed by a sense of the past. This is, however, not the historian's past. Guha argued that what we call facts are differently experienced in history and in the everyday. Historical facts are necessarily grasped ex post facto. The everyday data of common “weal and woe” (sukha dukkha in Tagore's telling), on the other hand, are subject to the unfolding of singular lives and are anticipatory and uncertain in nature. In that sense, the everyday is the classic subject matter of literature and poetry. It is no accident, then, that history talks of “development” and relates to the past through the logic of causality, while literature and poetry talk of “actualization,” of a potential that may or may not realize itself in time.35 In other words, the everyday admits to the vicissitudes of time while history seeks to domesticate it.
In Guha's telling, European philosophical traditions worked with a fear of the corrosive capacity of time and hence displayed an utter dependence on the state's sovereign capacity to stabilize time's vicissitudes. In Europe's origin myth, Chronos devoured his own children and had to be tamed by the sovereign power of King Zeus, a story that came to be sublimated in Hegel's idea of the state as the ultimate embodiment of self-actualizing Spirit, centering the movement of time as history.36 History in turn became anchored to the figure of the historian, the stable and enduring authorial self placed above time, as it were; the historian acted in analogy to the state, as eternal witness to time's passage. In Indic philosophical and aesthetic traditions, however, for Guha time was understood as a creative force that brought the world into being. This was the poet's function as well, which is why—as David Shulman argues in his 2012 book on the history of imagination in India, tellingly titled More Than Real—the term bhava, denoting poetic efficacy, derives from the root word bhu-, denoting the act of “worlding.”37 Guha contrasted the European genres of history and the novel to the Indic genres of katha and kavya to argue that while the former grounded time and truth in the stable self-identity of the author's own experience in time, the latter privileged the listener's initiative. In kavya, it was the listener who invited a cycle of retellings of a “heard-of” past—based not on the poet's access to absolute facticity but on a shared sense of wonder at a time recognized as not one's own. If the historian sought to establish a relationship of authority vis-à-vis the past (which is why the future appeared inevitably as a fearsome other), the poet related to the past in the same way as he did to the future: through a sense of bismaya, astonishment at unknown times. Here is Guha again:
Experience stands for truth in the European narrative. Since the beginning of historicization and novelization, its value as truth has come to be identified and assessed as a function of its immediacy. The less mediated an experience is in time and space, the truer it is. That is what makes the [authorial] self so important for the representation of experience in history and the novel. . . . [In Indic traditions] the past is anchored to no experience in particular. It is precisely such indefiniteness and openness that enables it to produce . . . an infinite number of stories and the latter to generate wonder without end. The absence of closure helps . . . language to illuminate what is unusual about the usual in everyday life.38
In itihasa, the early Indian genre of kavya devoted to the past, the poet, and the listener were coeval, with the latter's aesthetic skill being as much at stake as the former's. Unsurprisingly, the Amarakosa translated the listener as the arambhaka—the commencer or initiator rather than as a reader/audience subordinate to and after the fact of the author/narrator.39 In this genre, the audience was not merely a functional role, for poetry owed its origin to the audience's inaugural aesthetic action. Hence the particular narrative structure of itihasa—of tales within tales, relays of different voices, “an arterial movement which digresses ever so often into loops that rejoin the trunk sooner or later”—a description that resonates with Arindam Chakrabarti's more recent description of the Mahabharata's polyglossia.40 Taking the Mahabharata as the prime example of the genre of itihasa, Guha goes on to show how important interlocutors were in this narrative, working strategically to gather the listeners' will in the development of the story cycle. Even the putative original author of the epic, the sage Vyasa, was staged in Mahabharata as the original listener charged with relaying the story and its many voices across time. In itihasa, Guha argues, the narrator and the listener both partake in a shared temporal distance to the narrated event. This distancing is done by a verb acting closely together with two indeclinables (avyaya) to form that word—“compounded as itiha- they point out what is said about a past by enclosing it in invisible quotation marks.”41 It is this temporal alterity that produces “wonder” as itihasa's prime affective orientation to the past—wonder being “the ultimate form of novelty,” which deploys repetition as the background that can help apprehend changes in the familiarity of ordinary life.42 In other words, in Guha's telling, in nonhistorical traditions of thinking time, the presence of diverse pasts is animated by the mutually entangled expressive labor of the poet and the active and attuned desire of the listener. Between poet and audience, author and reader, thus the experiencing self appears as distributed across time rather than as a self-identical and witness-entity like the authoritative historian.
One might wonder in what way Guha's move from history to literature is predicated on his initial quest for the subaltern. Guha seems to imply that the subaltern can come into their own only by disavowing the time of the modern state, which is founded on the political theology of sovereignty as a form of extra-temporal “perpetual power,” an eternally enduring presence untroubled by popular insurgencies, regime changes, and temporal vicissitudes. This becomes more explicit in his 2013 Bengali book, Prem na Pratarona (Love or betrayal). Here Guha thinks through the temporality of the promise—the ultimate guarantee of a future based on faith and fidelity. Through a reading of the archaic stories of King Creon and his sister Antigone and King Rama and his wife Sita, Guha argues that the promise of law, as embodying sovereignty and deployed by the state as putative guarantee of a people's future, rests on a betrayal of another promise—the promise of the “forever” that animates fraternal and/or erotic love. Guha asks why such stories inevitably attach themselves to the story of kingship. He responds by saying that it is the story of this other promise, always already betrayed (as are Antigone and Sita), that takes us from history to poetry and from the story of foundation to that of the beloved's abandonment in the name of the subject.43
Perhaps Guha is implying that we attend to the negative temporality of this betrayed promise in order to sense the subaltern via a poetics of desire and loss rather than a historical recovery of presence. Perhaps Guha is deconstructing the European origin myth of the state as based not on a promise but on a legally justiciable guarantee of a social contract—between equals who are never that. Perhaps we can feel Guha's thoughts resonating here with Saidiya Hartman's reading of the untimely appearance of the classical figure of Venus in archives of slavery—as the figure of a woman who is staged, like Antigone and Sita, as “little more than a register of her encounter with power.”44 Though Guha is no feminist, there still appears something shared between Hartman's “critical fabulations” and Guha's poetics of time—which is about the intimate temporality of common lives erased by history.
The Self and the Cosmos
I have argued so far that Guha's critique of first historicism and then history led him to attend to the time of the everyday, from the perspective of a self-in-the-world more proximate to the poet's than the historian's. His Bengali writings demonstrate this but also take us further. In this final section, I argue that in his later years, Guha seems engaged in a phenomenological rethinking of time by way of unpacking the relationship (or otherwise) between life, language, and the cosmos. Here too Rabindranath Tagore appears as an important interlocutor, though not the only one. Let me begin by first describing the texture of Guha's self-in-the-world, a self that is deliberately staged as not quite self-same or self-possessed. Instead, it is a distributed self, irreducible to subjecthood, identity, and/or authority. I suggest that it is this dispersal of the self in the world that creates an opening in Guha's later work to the more-than-human and the cosmopolitical.
In his 2009 book Kobir Nam o Sorbonam (The poet's name and common names), Guha went beyond his History at the Limits of World History project to further elaborate the distinction between the temporal orientations of the poet and the historian. In this book, he once more rereads Tagore alongside ancient Indian thinkers Panini, Bhartrhari, and the eighth-century dramaturgist Bhavabhuti, whose postscript to Ramayana focused on Rama's unwarranted exiling of Sita to the forest and his murder of the low-caste ascetic Shambuka under pressure of “public opinion” and by virtue of a kingly failure to navigate the contrary demands of justice.45 Through these readings, Guha goes on to argue that the complex interplay of the first- and the second-person pronouns in poetry—the “I” and the “you”—undermine the contextually overdetermined subject position of the proper noun: the authorial name. In poetry, Guha argues, the temporality of the address and the addressee are so entangled that it often leads to an unexpected exchange of positions. This unstable dynamic of the “I” and the “you”—creating uncertainty around who is speaking when and wherefrom—socializes the self-in-the-world via the aesthetic imperative of sadharanikaran (literally, “generalization” or “making common”), a technical term that Guha borrows from classical rasa theory. Sadharanikaran makes possible an overreach of the present (he uses the term utkranti, not to be translated too hastily as “transcendence”). This temporal overreach enables a move beyond historical context and a leap into other times and other places, a poetic capacity that Tagore mobilized, Guha believed, in his critique of nationalism and his poetic embrace of not only the world at large but also the cosmic and the divine.46 Nothing explains this desire for a generative confusion of the “I” and the “you” better than the writings of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008). Here is Darwish's well-known poem “If I Were Another” as a commentary on Guha's take on the distinct temporal orientations of common names and proper names.
In his 2011 book Tin Amir Katha (The story of three me-s), Guha moved beyond Tagore. Through a study of the early modern poetry of Lalon Fakir (1772–1890)—particularly his Arshinagar (The city of mirrors), in juxtaposition to modernist poets Sudhindranath Datta (1901–1960) and Sankhya Ghosh (1932–2021), the latter also a prominent Tagore critic—Guha asks whether we can mobilize language in a way that allows us to institute a relationship of direct address—I to you—between neighboring or side-by-side entities. To Guha, however, at stake is not the ethic of neighborliness—friendship and hospitality as Derrida argued.48 At stake is the possibility of a face-to-face linguistic orientation that, according to Guha, is unavailable in realist prose—or perhaps unavailable in human language itself.49 It is worthwhile here to cite Lalon's song, if only to indicate the unbridgeable distance between oneself and another that Guha works with in this book.
Note how in Lalon's telling, my neighbor is at the same place as me and yet miles apart. More importantly, note that here the neighbor is not of the human form—s/he has no limbs, no head, and is only partly terrestrial, being both aquatic and avian. I would tentatively suggest that here is a glimpse of what would soon become in Guha an opening to the more-than-human via a detour through nonmodern poetics. Incidentally, the mirror metaphor has a long genealogy in precolonial philosophical and aesthetic traditions. As Udaya Kumar shows elsewhere, the mirror was consecrated as a deity in temples by the nineteenth-century Malayali caste radical Sree Narayanaguru, who mobilized nondualist Vedanta and Yoga in order to propose that the realization of castelessness was a function of a close scrutiny and deconstruction of the self.51 In Lalon, the mirror metaphor works ironically—as the human reflection offers up a delusional eye-to-eye contact with one who is the same and yet for that very reason unreachable.
In Guha's reading, the expansive embrace of the world made possible by this poetic dispersal of the self is more than just a humanist orientation. Thinking along the same lines as poets like Jibanananda Das and novelists like Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Guha then goes on to make what we today recognize as a more-than-human gesture, invoking gods, animals, and the earth itself as being at stake in his phenomenology of time. Guha had already registered the presence of other-than-human forces in his Elementary Aspects—male and female snakes, buffalos, gods, dead ancestors, and in fact time itself—as incitements to insurgency.52 In his 2009 book Choi Ritur Gaan (Songs of the six seasons), Guha explores Tagore's laborious efforts at attuning human language to the earth's seasonal mood changes—reminding us of Jane Bennett's recent quest, via Henry Thoreau and Walt Whitman, for a “middle voice,” a verb form in between the active and the passive voices, the subject and predicate, that could register animal, vegetal, mineral, and atmospheric vitalities in human language.53 In the book of seasons, Guha argues that seasonality must not be reduced to cyclical time as is often done by philosophers (most famously Mircea Eliade) who assume that Western time is linear and Eastern time cyclical. For every new season is a singular event in common experience, a moment of anticipation, renewal and rebirth, with every summer, every spring, every monsoon returning with a difference, bringing an element of surprise. This is why Tagore attributes a sovereignty to the king of seasons, rituraj. Guha then goes on to argue that cosmic forces appear in human language as simultaneously alien and domesticated, as much in poetry as in popular sense, wherein the moon, the rain and the summer storm become events simultaneously inside and outside of the human heart. He further argues that the conceptual incommensurability between cosmic time and historical time has always been accepted in lokachar (popular custom) and suggests that human existence is experientially much closer to cosmic processes than to the unfolding of historical time as modernity would have us believe.54
Let me put into play some of Dipesh Chakrabarty's thoughts on Tagore here. Chakrabarty, a younger colleague of Guha's from the Subaltern Studies days, has also had Tagore as a constant interlocutor. In his Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty discussed Tagore's debates with his contemporary modernist poets regarding the nature of the real and the factual. Against the accusation that he was a bourgeois poet incapable of representing the misery and suffering of the common people—incapable, that is, of true realism—Tagore insisted that transformative poetics cannot simply stop at showing the real. It must pierce the veil of reality to illuminate the aesthetic of common lives, miserable as they may be. Chakrabarty shows how Tagore, in his well-known prose poem “Bansi” (The flute), clinically depicts people living in poverty in a filthy back lane of Kolkata, only to execute, in Chakrabarty's words, a cinematic “dissolving shot” at the end of the poem: when he describes how unexpectedly the sound of someone playing the cornet, just by the way, pierces the smelly air of the lane.
“A full scale attack on the historical and the objective,” Chakrabarty says, this change of register in Tagore's poem shows up the so-called fact as both real and not real, resonating deeply with Guha's argument in History at the Limit of World History that the common everyday can be accessed not through history but only through poetics.56
Chakrabarty then takes his Tagore from Provincializing Europe to the Climate of History in a way that bolsters my reading of Guha as making a more-than-human gesture in his late works via Tagore and others. Here is what Chakrabarty cites from one of Tagore's letters to show Tagore's planetary orientation:
Within my life there is a secret memory of the life of trees. . . . Why only trees? Within me are deposited memories of the entire material world. All the vibrations of the universe bring thrills of kinship to my entire body—the silent and ancient exuberance of trees and creepers have found today a language in my life . . . Whenever, at auspicious moments, the realization that I am here together with the sun, the moon, the stars, and the land, rocks, and water rings out in my mind with the clarity of a musical note, my body and mind experience the intimate thrills of a vast existence. This is not me poeticizing, this is my nature [speaking].57
Recall here that when Gandhi had said that the devastation brought on by the Bihar earthquake in 1932 was just retribution on a people guilty of the sin of untouchability, Tagore had protested sharply. Often read as a rationalist retort, this was perhaps no less Tagore's refusal to humanize cosmic forces and gloss over their absolute alterity as Gandhi seemed to do. Here is Tagore again emphasizing the alterity of the cosmic: “The waves in my bloodstream dance to the rhythm of the waves in the sea—but the waves cannot recognize me.”58
In 2010, Guha wrote Adi Kobi ar Prothom Pathak: Ekti Pouranik Sakkhatkarer Kahini (The primordial poet and the first reader: Tale of an old encounter), where he traced the origin of poetry to the ancient encounter between humans and birds. The story is well known. Valmiki, a reformed low-caste bandit, remorseful of the violence of his vocation, is wandering the forest when he encounters an amorous pair of krauncha birds frolicking in the trees. Suddenly, a hunter arrives and shoots an arrow, killing the male bird. As the bird drops to the ground, the female bird sings out in distress, and words roll out of Valmiki's mouth as if by their own volition. It is a curse upon the hunter set to meter and rhyme, which goes on to become the world's first example of poetry. This primordial poetry is, strictly speaking, unauthored, for Valmiki does not know how and why he spoke. Hearing his exclamation, the gods descend on earth and invite Valmiki to compose a mahakavya, a great epic on King Rama, turning him into history's first poet. Guha says: “Somoy tai manusher bhashae bnadhna porhe kobita holo”—set to human language, time thus became poetry.59
In Smriti, Priti o Prakriti (Memory, love and nature), Guha reads Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's (1894–1950) novels—and not just the iconic Pather Panchali (The tale of the road), adapted for film by Satyajit Ray (as the classic narrative of an individual caught up in the nation's postcolonial modernization) or Aranyabanhi (Forest fire), which famously bore witness to the Santal rebellion of 1855, a much-discussed insurgency in Subaltern Studies historiography. According to Guha, Bibhutibhushan was searching for a language to adequately express the workings of mahakal (planetary time), as it inscribes itself upon the earth and its rivers, hills, and forests. Following Bibhutibhushan, Guha asks: What happens to our sense of human history when we register the fact of cosmic forcings? What happens to our sense of chronology when the river flowing by my house registers in my mind as the same river that had once flowed through King Ashoka's capital city two millennia ago? Guha then goes on to ask why litterateurs like Bibhutibhushan and Tagore but also ancient poets turned to God and religion when faced with the inexorability of cosmic forcings and planetary scales. Is religion the only way for humans to grasp the nonhuman and the more-than-human, that is, by way of metahuman imaginaries? Or are there other possible philosophies of finitude accessible through a poetics of time?60 It is notable that Guha uses the term nisarga repeatedly in this text. Nisarga, though often translated as “nature” in modern Bengali, has a wider semantic range. In Sanskrit and Pali, the term denotes the cosmos, the earth, creation, the inherent propensity of entities to transform by themselves without human intervention, and alternatively, the void, the abandoned, the evacuated. One should also remember that prakriti, the other term that stands for nature as we know it today, is a term that classical Sankhya philosophy thematized as active matter, somewhat similar to what we now call “vitality,” responsible for all processes of creation, differentiation, individuation. This as opposed to purusha, which was thematized in this philosophical school as the principle of inactive, unchanging, universal consciousness (not quite God but a kind of universal witness and analytical entity). I would suggest that writings in modern vernacular languages such as Guha's are often haunted by the specter of these older, untimely connotations that stealthily inflect our modern-day usages—transforming, in this case, the modern-day binary of nature versus culture.
Earlier in 1998, Guha had published an essay on Jibanananda Das's poem Surjo o Somoygronthi (The sun and the twine of time). Here he analyzed the poet's experiments with image and form for purposes of sensing cosmic temporality. In Guha's understanding, Jibanananda juxtaposed cosmic and human forms in his poetry in order to highlight their “rupagata, shaktigata o gunogata parthakka” (“their different qualities, forces and forms”), endangering in the process the metrical, syntactical, and semiotic stability of human language itself. Guha argued that the only way to capture time in human language was by intensifying the incommensurabilities between human memory and cosmic processes. Any attempt to align the two would be a naïve and failed act of representation.61 Guha's choice of Jibanananda (1899–1954) is critical here. A maverick and solitary poet, with a very different style than his modernist contemporaries, Jibanananda died young, crushed under the wheels of a Calcutta tramcar. He wrote of wildernesses—as much of the urban wilderness (the gutter, the hydrant, the rail track, and the dark, potholed gullies) as the rural (streams, grass, weeds, roots, insects, amphibians, and birds). Here are a few extracts from his poems to give a sense of why Guha is aligned with Jibanananda in his quest for a more-than-human linguistic orientation to time. The poem “One Day Eight Years Ago” speaks of the owl, the dead frog, the buzzing mosquitoes, held at bay by the thin, porous net around the wakeful human's bed!
In what sense is the mosquito net an unforgiving enemy here? In what sense is the bed analogous to a dark monastery that keeps the world at bay? In his poem “I Shall Return,” Jibanananda speaks of his desire to return to his home country—riverine Bengal. But this is not patriotic or nationalist desire, for the poet seeks reincarnation not as a human but as a bird.
Jibanananda's poem “Banalata Sen,” perhaps his most well-known, stages historical time thusly:
Here the poet personally experiences history as a long, tiresome walk through many millennia, pushing through the dark and the gray of lost worlds. The references are clearly to Indian history and to the Mauryan empire's cities and monuments. And yet it feels as if he has passed through the entire expanse of the earth and navigated many oceans. At the end of his walk, the poet-traveler comes to rest momentarily, face to face with Banalata of Natore.65 Banalata of Natore is herself etched with history. Her black hair is the night of Vidisha, the ancient town that saw Greeks, Buddhists, Jains, and clans of warriors pass through. Her face is made of the engravings of Sravasti, the historic town of Buddha's enlightened sojourn at the crossroads of many a Chinese pilgrim. “Where have you been for these thousand years?” Banalata asks the poet, as the kite shakes daylight off her wings and the night settles on earth. The poet dusts off his gray and frayed manuscript and sits down for a few minutes to spin a yarn or two. In Jibanananda's poems, Guha discovered “knots” of time, the tangles of the contemporary with the archaic, the days and nights of frogs, mosquitos, lepers, and beggars with the days and nights of those who claimed to be singularly human and exclusively modern.
Conclusion
Guha never self-consciously claimed to be a postcolonial or decolonial thinker, though he has often been read as such. He did question the hegemony of colonial modern epistemologies as they undergirded modern history, European political philosophy, empirical sociology, and realist aesthetics. But this was not merely a critique—a negative agenda. Through a unique rereading of the literature of life, he offered us a phenomenology of time that allows us to both critically inhabit and outlive the prison of our present. To my mind Guha's journey is best seen as a prime example of a cosmopolitical quest, something that comes through more clearly if we pay attention to his late Bengali writings. I see Guha as cosmopolitical in the dual sense of the term—one, as exceeding the nation and two, as circumscribing the human in the world—even though the concept of cosmopolitics was perhaps unavailable to him. For those of us who were students of history in late 1990s India, Guha's influence was formative—not only because he helped us dream of futures beyond the promises of liberal modernization and Marxist revolutionary politics but also because he was a maverick scholar whose unique experimental style of thinking, writing, and playing with time was not bound by context and discipline. This essay has sought to return to him, in his one hundredth year, a version of himself as seen through the distant eyes of a student of his students.
Notes
Sharma, “How Feudal Was Indian Feudalism?”; Thorner, “Semi-Feudalism or Capitalism?”; Habib, “Potentialities of Capitalistic Development in the Economy of Mughal India”; Banaji, “For a Theory of Colonial Modes of Production”; Alavi, “India: Transition of Feudalism to Colonial Capitalism.” For a collection of the important interventions in the Indian transition debate, see Patnaik, Agrarian Relations and Accumulation, and Mukhia, Feudalism Debate.
Chakrabarty, “Conditions for Knowledge of Working-Class Conditions”; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 8.
Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, 23n18, 51–58, 237; Moghe, “Evolution of the Mimamsa Technical Term Atidesa.”
Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” 18; emphasis mine.
Guha, “The Career of an Anti-God,” 1; emphasis mine.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez quoted in Guha, “Colonial City and Its Times,” 329.
Guha, “A Colonial City and its Time(s),” 341; emphasis mine.
Guha's turn to the literary via Tagore is not to be confused with a blurring of the boundary between history and fiction, as was famously done by Hayden White. Hayden White argued that the historian's claim to be speaking a language of absolute facts was belied by their use of literary tropes and emplotment strategies, in ways no different from that of novelists. In other words, there was no real generic difference between a historical and a literary text. Guha's argument was the opposite. Instead of collapsing fact and fiction, he in fact sought to heighten their division on the grounds that history and imagination approached and enunciated time differently. If White's approach was generic, Guha's can be called temporal.
Guha, History at the Limit of World History, 63, 68; emphasis mine.
Darwish, “If I Were Another”; emphasis mine.
Translation by Carol Salomon; emphasis mine. I am not sure about her use of the feminine pronoun for the neighbor. In Sufi and baul metaphysics, the addressee is often ambiguous—it could be the lover and/or God. But the charge could either be hetero- or homoerotic. See Lalon Sain, “Barir Kachhe Aarshinagar.”
Translation drawn from Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 166–167; emphasis mine.
Chakrabarty, Climate of History in a Planetary Age, 130–31; emphasis mine.
Jibanananda Das, “One Day Eight Years Ago.”
Jibanananda Das, “I Shall Return”; translation mine.
Jibanananda Das, “Banalata Sen”; translation mine.
Natore incidentally was the capital of a zamindari in eastern Bengal, a “little kingdom” dotted with palaces and moats known for the legend of pagla raja, the mad king, and also associated with the name of the austere eighteenth-century queen Rani Bhabani, who was known to have dedicated her life to the cause of learning and public welfare and intelligently negotiated the coming of the English East India Company.
