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.
