Stitching Times, Making Histories

Sailen Routray

 

The book Stitches on Time is a timely intervention, albeit an ambitious one. The book simultaneously tries to intervene in the debates surrounding post-colonialism and subaltern studies, and attempts to do a meta-theoretical analysis of the grid that apparently underlies much of social science theorizing. The modes of argumentation offered are also varied.

These range from detailed reconstructions of historical material regarding conversion, missionary activity, and the entanglements of colonial law and popular legalities; theoretical analysis of the various modes of writing history; and meta-theoretical reflections regarding tradition and modernity. According to Dube, central to such an enterprise are processes and procedures that interrogate two ‘forceful scandals,’ that of the West and the nation, and two powerful projects, that of a reified modern state, and a singular western modernity.

There are some key questions that this book addresses. These include the following. Is there a way of doing, what Dube terms as, ‘historical anthropology of colonial cultures’? Can we do so without reifying the colonial state and accepting the ‘uniform efficacy of its power’? Is it possible to undertake such an enterprise without, at the same time, not simplistically foregrounding the continuities that span between the pre-colonial, colonial and ‘post-colonial’ periods?  

These questions straddle the divide between the postcolonial turn in literary and cultural theory that foreground the efficacy and power of colonial structures and imperial systems, and other disciplinary projects, primarily either historical or anthropological, that argue for a much more contingent and inherently contradictory picture of the colonial experience.

Crucial to the latter projects are notions of subjecthood and subjectivity that simultaneously condition and are conditioned by colonial structures of reading and deploying power and difference. Of all the theoretical moves in recent times that have tried to foreground such concerns, subaltern studies is arguably the most important, and the volume under discussion takes this project as its point of departure.

Dube tries to push social science theorizing in the direction of what he terms as ‘history without warranty.’ This theoretical orientation apparently tries not to buy into the ‘scandals’ of the west and the nation on which traditionally the discipline of history is premised upon. Yet at the same time such a project self-consciously tries not to take the recourse of merely ‘provincializing Europe’. 

Central to the project of history without warranty is the philosophical orientation that Dube quotes as weak ontology. This position does not mistake our descriptions of the world for the world itself. It sets itself the task of writing of history as a continuous process of interrogation and reformulation of academic categories. Chapter six of the book tries to do precisely this by simultaneously exposing the constructed nature of Hindu nationalist claims about the birth place of Ram in Ayodhya, and the entanglements between the ‘scandal’ of the nation and universal history.

Stitches on Time can be read simultaneously as a contribution to the discourse surrounding religion, conversion and religiosity in India, a history and apologia of the subaltern studies project, a plea for reopening the social sciences, and a study in the practice of history without warranty. 

The most important contribution of the book perhaps lies in Dube’s discussions about the way notions about modern and enchanted places and peoples are constitutive of social science disciplinarity. But this particular entanglement is not very deftly untangled and is only hinted at. Perhaps one can look forward to Dube achieving this very task in his later works. Considering the quality and depth of the book under discussion, such an expectation can only be a pleasant one.

Details About the Book: Saurabh  Dube. 2004. Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles. Durham and London: Duke University Press.