In The Waiting-Room Of History

I went to a Protestant school in Bombay, but the creation myth we were taught in theclassroom didn't have to do with Adam and Eve. I remember a poster on the wall when I was in the FifthStandard, a pictorial narrative of evolution. On the extreme left, crouching low, its arms hanging near itsfeet, was an ape; it looked intent, like an athlete waiting for the gun to go off. The next figure roseslightly, and the one after it was more upright: it was like a slow-motion sequence of a runner in the firstfew seconds of a race. The pistol had been fired; the race had begun. Millisecond after millisecond, thatrunner - now ape, now Neanderthal - rose a little higher, and its back straightened. By the time it hadreached the apogee of its height and straight-backedness, and taken a stride forward, its appearance hadimproved noticeably; it had become a Homo sapiens, and also, coincidentally, European. The race had been wonbefore it had properly started.

This poster captured and compressed the gradations of Darwin's parable of evolution, both arresting timeand focusing on the key moments of a concatenation, in a similar way to what Walter Benjamin thoughtphotographs did in changing our perception of human movement:

Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (ifonly in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a personactually takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It isthrough photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious; just as we discover theinstinctual subconscious through psychoanalysis.

The poster in my classroom, too, revealed a movement impossible for the naked eye to perceive: from lowerprimate to higher, from Neanderthal to human, and - this last transition was so compressed as to be absentaltogether - from the human to the European. These still figures gave us an 'optical unconscious' of apolitical context, the context of progress and European science and humanism. Here, too, Benjamin hassomething to say. In a late essay, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', he stated: 'The concept of thehistorical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous,empty time.'

'Homogeneous' and 'empty' are curious adjectives for 'time': they are more readily associated with spaceand spatial configuration. Certain landscapes glimpsed from a motorway, or the look of a motorway itself,might be described as dull and 'homogeneous'; streets and rooms might be 'empty'. My mentioning motorwaysisn't fortuitous. When Benjamin was formulating his thoughts on progress and history, and writing this essayin 1940, the year he killed himself, Hitler, besides carrying out his elaborate plans for the Jews in Germany,was implementing another huge and devastating project: the Autobahn. The project, intended both to connect onepart of Germany to another and to colonise the landscape, was begun in the early 1930s; it's clear thatHitler's vision of the Autobahn is based on an idea of progress - 'progress' not only in the sense of movementbetween one place and another, but in the sense of science and civilisation. In India, in other parts of theso-called 'developing' world, even in present-day New York, London or Paris, it's impossible properly toexperience 'homogeneous, empty time' because of the random, often maddeningly diverse allocation of space,human habitation and community. It is, however, possible to experience it on Western motorways and highways.Hitler was a literalist of this philosophy of space and movement: he wanted space to be 'homogeneous', orblond and European. Benjamin knew this first-hand; he was writing his 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' asa Jewish witness to Nazism and one of its potential victims. Hitler's anxiety and consternation at JesseOwens's victory in the 100 metres at the Munich Olympics in 1936 came from his literalism of space, hisinvestment in progress and linearity. That idea of space was at once reified and shattered when Owens reachedthe finishing line before the others.

Benjamin had been thinking of history in terms of space for a while; and, not too long before he wroteabout 'homogeneous, empty time', he'd posited an alternative version of modernity and space in hisdescriptions of the flâneur, the Parisian arcades and 19th-century street life. The Parisian streetconstitutes Benjamin's critique of the Autobahn: just as the crowd, according to Benjamin, is 'presenteverywhere' in Baudelaire's work, and present so intrinsically that it's never directly described, theAutobahn is implicitly present, and refuted, in Benjamin's meditations on Paris. The flâneur, indeed, retardsand parodies the idea of 'progress'. 'Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in thearcades,' Benjamin writes in a footnote to his 1939 essay on Baudelaire. 'The flâneurs liked to have theturtles set the pace for them. If they had had their way, progress would have been obliged to accommodateitself to this space. But this attitude did not prevail; Taylor, who popularised the watchword "Down withdawdling!", carried the day.' The flâneur views history subversively; he - and it is usually he -deliberately relocates its meanings, its hierarchies. As far back as 1929, Benjamin had explained why theflâneur had to be situated in Paris:

The flâneur is the creation of Paris. The wonder is that it was not Rome. But perhaps in Rome evendreaming is forced to move along streets that are too well-paved. And isn't the city too full of temples,enclosed squares and national shrines to be able to enter undivided into the dreams of the passer-by, alongwith every shop sign, every flight of steps and every gateway? The great reminiscences, the historicalfrissons - these are all so much junk to the flâneur, who is happy to leave them to the tourist. And he wouldbe happy to trade " all his knowledge of artists' quarters, birthplaces and princely palaces for thescent of a single weathered threshold or the touch of a single tile - that which any old dog carries away.

There's an implicit critique of the imperial city, and the imperialist aesthetic, in this description ofRome, with its 'great reminiscences' and 'historical frissons', and in the contrast of 'national shrines' and'temples' with the 'touch of a single tile'. Benjamin is not alone in using these metaphors; both Ruskin andLawrence (who probably took it from Ruskin) use Rome as a metaphor for the imperial, the finished, theperfected, as against the multifariousness of, say, the Gothic, the 'barbaric', the non-Western. Benjamindoesn't quite romanticise the primitive as Lawrence at least appears to: instead, he comes up with aparticularly modern form of aleatoriness and decay in the 'weathered threshold' of a Parisian street.

Of course, the flâneur was not to be found in Paris alone. There was much wayward loitering in at leasttwo colonial cities, Dublin and Calcutta. This - especially the emergence of the flâneur, or flâneur-likeactivities, in modern, turn of the century Calcutta - would have probably been difficult for Benjamin toimagine. Benjamin's figure for the flâneur was Baudelaire, and for Baudelaire - and, by extension, for theflâneur - the East was, as it was for Henri Rousseau, part dreamscape, part botanical garden, part menagerie,part paradise. Could the flâneur exist in that dreamscape?

Dipesh Chakrabarty, the author of Provincialising Europe, whose meditations onthe limits of Western notions of modernity and history are impelled by Benjamin but who also has the word'postcolonial' in his subtitle, was born in Calcutta. His inquiry is partly directed by the contingencies ofbeing a South Asian historian in America, and also by being a founder member of the subaltern studies project,which attempted to write a South Asian or, specifically, Indian history 'from below', by bringing the'subaltern' (Gramsci's word for the peasant or the economically dispossessed) into the territory largelyoccupied by nationalist history. But the inquiry is also shaped by the Calcutta Chakrabarty was born in, muchas Benjamin's work is shaped by the Paris he reimagined and, to a certain extent, invented.

From the early 19th century, the growing Bengali intelligentsia in Calcutta was increasingly exercised bywhat 'modernity' might mean and what the experience of modernity might represent, specifically, to a subjectnation, and, universally, to a human being. Chakrabarty's book is not only an unusually sustained and nuancedargument against European ideas of modernity, but also an elegy for, and subtle critique of, his ownintellectual formation and inheritance as a Bengali. The kind of Bengali who was synonymous with modernity andwho believed that modernity might be a universal condition - irrespective of whether you're English, Indian,Arab or African - has now passed into extinction. Chakrabarty's book is in part a discreet inquiry into whythat potent Bengali dream didn't quite work - why 'modernity' remains so resolutely European.

Chakrabarty's writing is not without irony or humour; the cheeky oxymoron of the title is one example. Atleast a quarter of Chakrabarty's work was done, and his challenge given an idiom, when he reinvented thisterrific phrase, which was probably first used with slightly more literal intent by Gadamer. According toRanajit Guha, who is or used to be to subalternist historians roughly what Jesus was to the apostles, the'idea of provincialising Europe' had 'been around for some time, but mostly as an insight waiting forelaboration' before Chakrabarty articulated and substantiated it so thoroughly. The 'idea' itself is set outand argued for in the introductory chapter. Chakrabarty begins with a disclaimer:

'Provincialising Europe is not a book about the region of the world we call "Europe". ThatEurope, one could say, has already been provincialised by history itself.'

The essay has two epigraphs: the first, from Gadamer, seems to speak of Europe as a 'region of the world';the second, more tellingly, from Naoki Sakai, describes the 'West' as 'a name for a subject which gathersitself in discourse but is also an object constituted discursively'. What Chakrabarty wants to do with'Europe', then, is in some ways similar to what Edward Said did with the 'Orient': to fashion a subversivegenealogy. But instead of Said's relentless polemic, Chakrabarty's book features critique and self-criticismin equal measure. For me, Chakrabarty has the edge here, because for Said the Orient is a Western construct,an instrument of domination: he doesn't - and never went on to - explore the profound ways in which modernOrientals (Tagore, say) both were and were not Orientalists. Chakrabarty's work suggests, I think, that theword 'Eurocentric' is more problematic than we thought; that, if Europe is a universal paradigm for modernity,we are all, European and non-European, to a degree inescapably Eurocentric. Europe is at once a means ofintellectual dominance, an obfuscatory trope and a constituent of self-knowledge, in different ways fordifferent peoples and histories.

Said's great study takes its cue from the many-sided and endlessly absorbing Foucault, in its inexhaustibleconviction and its curiosity about how a body of knowledge - in this case, Orientalism - can involve theexercise of power. Much postcolonial theory, in turn, has taken its cue from Said and this strain of Foucault.Chakrabarty's book comes along at a time when this line of inquiry, which has had its own considerable rewardsand pitfalls, seems one-dimensional and exhausted. In spite of the 'postcolonial' in the subtitle, it oweslittle to the fecund but somewhat simplified Foucauldian paradigm. Instead, its inspiration seems post-structuralistand Derridean, and it rehearses a key moment in Derrida: the idea that it is necessary to dismantle or take onthe language of 'Western metaphysics' (which for Derrida is almost everything that precedes post-structuralismand, in effect, himself), but that there is no alternative language available with which to dismantle it - sothat the language must be turned on itself. For Derrida's 'Western metaphysics' Chakrabarty substitutes'European thought' and 'social science thought':

European thought . . . is both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the various lifepractices that constitute the political and the historical in India. Exploring - on both theoretical andfactual registers - this simultaneous indispensability and inadequacy of social science thought is the taskthis book has set itself.

This is not very far from Derrida, who writes at an important juncture in Writing and Difference of

conserving all these old concepts within the domain of empirical discovery while here and there denouncingtheir limits, treating them as tools that can still be used. No longer is any truth value attributed to them:there is a readiness to abandon them, if necessary, should other instruments appear more useful. In themeantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to destroy the old machinery to whichthey belong and of which they themselves are pieces. This is how the language of the social sciencescriticises itself.

Derrida is reflecting here on Lévi-Strauss, who when confronted with South American myths finds the toolsof his trade obsolete but still indispensable. The idea of Chakrabarty registering a similarly self-reflexivemoment about thirty years later, in relation to Europe, modernity and 'life practices . . . in India', ispoignant and ironic: he belongs to the other side of the racial and historical divide; to a part of the worldthat should have been, at least in Lévi-Strauss's time, and by ordinary European estimation, the objectrather than the instigator of the social scientist's discipline. It would have been next to impossible forLévi-Strauss to foretell that something resembling his anxiety about the social sciences would one day berehearsed in the work of a man with a name like Dipesh Chakrabarty.

And this, of course, is the crux of Chakrabarty's book. 'Historicism - and even the modern, European ideaof history - one might say, came to non-European peoples in the 19th century as somebody's way of saying"not yet" to somebody else.' To illustrate what he means, he turns to John Stuart Mill's OnLiberty and On Representative Government - 'both of which,' Chakrabarty says, 'proclaimed self-ruleas the highest form of government and yet argued against giving Indians or Africans self-rule.'

According to Mill, Indians or Africans were not yet civilised enough to rule themselves. Somehistorical time of development and civilisation (colonial rule and education, to be precise) had to elapsebefore they could be considered prepared for such a task. Mill's historicist argument thus consigned Indians,Africans and other 'rude' nations to an imaginary waiting-room of history.

The 'imaginary waiting-room of history' is another of Chakrabarty's compressed, telling images. I don'tknow if he picked it up from the German playwright Heiner Müller, who uses it of the 'Third World' in a 1989interview; but he employs it to great effect. The phrase has purgatorial resonances: you feel that those whoare in the waiting-room are going to be there for some time. For modernity has already had its authenticincarnation in Europe: how then can it happen again, elsewhere? The non-West - the waiting-room - is thereforedoomed either never to be quite modern, to be, in Naipaul's phrase, 'half-made'; or to possess only asemblance of modernity. This is a view of history and modernity that has, according to Chakrabarty, at onceliberated, defined and shackled us in its discriminatory universalism; it is a view powerfully theological inits determinism, except that the angels, the blessed and the excluded are real people, real communities.

Chakrabarty's thesis might seem obvious once stated; but the 'insight waiting for elaboration', to useRanajit Guha's words, must find the best and, in the positive sense of the word, most opportunistic expositor.In Chakrabarty, I think it has. (The urge to provincialise Europe has, of course, a very long unofficialhistory. It's embodied in jokes and throwaway remarks such as the one Gandhi made when asked what he thoughtof Western civilisation: 'I think it would be a good idea.' Shashi Tharoor is having a dig at historicism whenhe says, in The Great Indian Novel, 'India is not an underdeveloped country. It is a highly developedcountry in an advanced state of decay.') Chakrabarty has given us a vocabulary with which to speak of matterssomewhat outside the realm of the social sciences, and to move discussions on literature, cultural politicsand canon formation away from the exclusively Saidian concerns of power-brokering, without entirely ignoringthese concerns.

In the light of Chakrabarty's study, Naipaul's work begins to fall into place. Hereis a writer who seems to have subscribed quite deeply to the sort of historicism that Chakrabarty describes.From the middle period onwards, in books such as The Mimic Men, A Bend in the River and In aFree State, Naipaul gives us a vision - unforgettable, eloquent - of the Caribbean and especially Africaas history's waiting-room. Modernity here is ramshackle, self-dismantling: it exists somewhere between thecorrugated iron roof and the distant military coup, the newly deposed general. The 'not yet' with whichForster's narrator indefinitely deferred, in A Passage to India, the possibility of a lastingfriendship between Fielding and Aziz are also the words that describe Naipaul's modern Africa. The openingsentence of A Bend in the River (which so exasperated Chinua Achebe) - 'The world is what it is; menwho are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it' - owes its tone less toreligious pronouncements than to a belief in what Benjamin called 'the march of progress' in the 'homogeneous,empty time of history'. Naipaul's theology stems not so much from Hinduism, or the brahminical background he'srenowned for, as from Mill. It was Mill, as Chakrabarty points out, who consigned certain nations to apurgatory, in which, in different concentric circles, they've been waiting or 'developing' ever since. Infiction, the greatest explorers of this Millian terrain have been Naipaul and Naipaul's master, Conrad.

Chakrabarty's study also helps to clarify the ways in which we discuss and think of the 'high' cultures ofthe so-called developing countries: not only the ancient traditions, but the modern and Modernist ones aswell.