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Abstract
This essay is a thematic and methodological introduction to the Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project. This interpretive oral history collection reckons with and complicates the over-representation of Bengalis in the study of South Asian intellectual history. As editors, we propose a new framework to study intellectual life in the period of decolonisation—the study of Third World humanities from South Asian perspectives. We situate West Bengal and Bangladesh as important, but obviously not exclusive, vantage points from which to explore formations of Third World thought from the 1940s to the 1980s. Methods in oral history collecting and curation help us to comprehend the intelligibility of Third World humanities expressed from regionally grounded, and diasporically mobile, South Asian perspectives.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. See Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1883); and Rey Chow, ‘An Addiction from Which We Never Get Free’, in New Literary History, Vol. 36, no. 1 (2005), pp. 46–55.
2. They are labelled ‘organic intellectuals’ in the Gramscian sense. One of the early sociological histories of a class of intellectuals appeared in L.B. Namier, 1848: The Revolution of Intellectuals (London: Cumberlege, 1944); see also the important and very salient approach to the sociological study of academic cultures in Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).
3. Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 12.
4. The contributions in Partha Chatterjee (ed.), Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), sketch out the colonial disciplinary antecedents to some of the post-colonial trajectories discussed here. See the Appendix for a full list of interviewees by location. Interviews in progress at the time of publication include those of Samik Bandyopadhyaya, Sumanta Banerjee, Bharati Ray, Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik, Fazle Abed and Mohammed Yunus.
5. See the essays by Bose and Iqbal in this special section: Neilesh Bose, ‘Inheritance and the Idea of “the East” in Banglaphone Thought in the Era of Decolonisation’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 41, no. 4 (Dec. 2018), doi:10.1080/00856401.2018.1516129; and Iftekhar Iqbal, ‘State of (the) Mind: The Bengali Intellectual Milieu and Envisioning the State in the Post-Colonial Era’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 41, no. 4 (Dec. 2018), doi:10.1080/00856401.2018.1514556. For two critiques focusing on the crippling nature of this nationalism, see Karuna Mantena, ‘The Ideas of Indians’, in Caravan (1 Mar. 2013) [http://www.caravanmagazine.in/books/ideas-indians, accessed 20 Oct. 2015]; and Neilesh Bose, ‘Hiding the Nation in the Global: Modern Intellectual History and South Asia’, in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 15, no. 2 (2014), doi:10.1353/cch.2014.0028 [http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v015/15.2.bose.html, accessed 6 Aug. 2018].
6. See Sudipta Kaviraj, The Imaginary Institution of India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); and Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 139.
7. The Bandung Conference or the Afro-Asian Conference of 1955 marked the origins of the Non-Aligned Movement by which Third World nations formed an economic and political bloc outside the American and Soviet spheres of influence.
8. This is not to overlook or discount Chinese imperial machinations during the same period.
9. Joan Edelman Spero, The Politics of International Economic Relations (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), p. 21. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) comprise three major institutions that marked this post-war North American and Western European reconstruction of the global economy. See Adeoye Akinsanya and Arthur Davies, ‘Third World Quest for a New International Economic Order’, in The International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Vol. 33, no. 1 (1984), pp. 208–17.
10. W.E.B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1945).
11. For the argument about the transition from ‘global colonialism to global coloniality’, see Anibal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Ethnocentrism, and Latin America’, in NEPLANTA, Vol. 1, no. 3 (2000), pp. 533–80; and Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘Colonial Difference, Geopolitics of Knowledge and Global Coloniality in the Modern/Colonial Capitalist World-System’, in Review, Vol. 25, no. 3 (2002), pp. 203–24.
12. Achille Mbembe, ‘Africa in Theory’, Papers of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (2013) [http://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/seminar/Mbembe2013v3.pdf, accessed 5 Mar. 2016].
13. In European and European–American contexts, many scholars have approached the study of the twentieth century through a prosopographic study of Western intellectuals. Two important examples are Martin Jay’s classic, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1973); and Tony Judt’s Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
14. See Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument’, in The New Centennial Review, Vol. 3, no. 3 (2003), pp. 257–337; and Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Between the Public Intellectual and the Scholar: Decolonization and Some Post-Independence Initiatives in African Higher Education’, in Inter-Asian Cultural Studies, Vol. 17, no. 1 (2016), pp. 68–83.
15. Christopher T. Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); and Odette Lienau, Rethinking Sovereign Debt: Politics, Reputation, and Legitimacy in Modern Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)
16. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, ‘African Studies and Universities since Independence: The Challenges of Epistemic and Institutional Decolonization’, in Transition, no. 101 (2009), pp. 110–35.
17. Wilder, Freedom Time; Lawrence Jackson, The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–50 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); and Julian Go, Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 5–10.
18. From East Africa we might name the group of scholars who developed in the 1970s at the University of Dar-es-Salaam and Makerere University, including Ali Mazrui, Mahmood Mamdani and Issa Shivji. Latin American contributors to Third Worldist thought from the same period include Raúl Prebisch from Argentina, Celso Furtado from Brazil, Anibal Quijano from Uruguay, and Enrique Dussel from Argentina. From the Arab world came Samir Amin, Anouar Abdel Malek, Hisham Sharabi, Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm, Abdallah Laouri, and many others. Representatives from the Caribbean included the New World group, George Beckford, Lloyd Best, Norman Girvan, Kari Polanyi Levitt, and others.
19. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
20. David Ludden (ed.), Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globalization of South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2002), p. 11.
21. https://corpora.tufts.edu/catalog/tufts:MS165.001.009.00001?timestamp/59:28. All interviews were last accessed 25 September 2018.
32. On the uses of the university space for ‘study’ and for the formation of ‘undercommons’, see Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013).
38. https://corpora.tufts.edu/catalog/tufts:36?timestamp/66:01. See Iqbal’s essay, ‘State of (the) Mind’, in this special section.
39. Susan Buck-Morse, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); and Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Makings of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
40. See Bose’s essay, ‘Inheritance and the Idea of “the East” in Banglaphone Thought in the Era of Decolonisation’, in this special section.
44. For two key works exploring the links between masculinity and colonialism in this particular Bengali context, see Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly’ Englishman and the ‘Effeminate’ Bengali in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); and Tithi Bhattacharya, Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal, 1848–1885 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).
45. See Kabir’s essay in this special section: Ananya Jahanara Kabir, ‘Utopias Eroded and Recalled: Intellectual Legacies of East Pakistan’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 41, no. 4 (Dec. 2018), doi:10.1080/00856401.2018.1516129. The theory of ‘low-frequency’ violence, especially in the realm of the intimate, is explored in Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). See also Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), for a discussion of politics in the realm of the intimate.
46. See Yoav Di-Capua, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Omnia El-Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Wilder, Freedom Time; and Jackson, The Indignant Generation. For a recent review of the role of archives in the study of decolonisation, see ‘AHR Roundtable: Archives of Decolonization’, in American Historical Review, Vol. 120, no. 3 (June 2015), pp. 844–950, with contributions by Farina Mir, Caroline Elkins, Todd Shepard, Jordanna Bailkin, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Omnia El-Shakry and H. Reuben Neptune.
47. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), provides an important and foundational contribution to counter-archiving in South Asia.
48. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); Gayatri Gopinath, ‘Archive, Affect, and the Everyday: Queer Diasporic Re-Visions’, in Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich and Ann Reynolds (eds), Political Emotions (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 165–92; and Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
49. David Scott asks the question: ‘how does my generation look back through the veil of memories of an older generation, listening to the ways in which its accounts of the past shapes its hopes and longing for a future horizon of possibility that I now experience as ruin?’ See David Scott, ‘Introduction: On the Archaeologies of Black Memory’, in Small Axe, Vol. 12, no. 2 (2008), p. vi.
50. On ‘re-membering’, see Hartman, Scenes of Subjection. See also Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); and Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
51. See Gerald Zahavi, ‘Oral History in the Digital Era: Notes from the Field’, in Mary Larson and Douglas Boyd (eds), Voices from the Revolution: Oral History and the Digital Humanities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 119–32; Donald A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 30; David Henige, Oral Historiography (New York: Longman, 1982); Ramon Harris et al., Practice of Oral History (Glenrock, NJ: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1975); James Hoopes, Oral History: An Introduction for Students (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974); and Valerie Raleigh Yow, Recording Oral History (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994).
52. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 2004); and Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). An example of friction is provided at this moment in the interview with Purushottama Lal (20:39), https://corpora.tufts.edu/catalog/tufts:MS165.001.026.00001?timestamp/20:39.
53. A good example of the stuttering nature of the archive is offered at the beginning of the interview with Uma Dasgupta (0:00), https://corpora.tufts.edu/catalog/tufts:MS165.001.028.00001?timestamp/0:00, while street noise provides a background chorus in such oral histories as Amiya Bagchi’s (0:00), https://corpora.tufts.edu/catalog/tufts:MS165.001.020.00001?timestamp/0:00.
54. Patricia Leavy, Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 7. See also Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Patricia Leavy, The Practice of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2nd ed., 2011).
55. The central work in this field is Pierre Nora’s massive Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92), in which ‘collective memory’ serves as the fount of national identity politics. Sites of memorialisation, cults of the dead, archaeological sites, war memorials, diplomatic treaties, national calendars, constitutions, history books, etc., all ‘construct’ a closed national past.
56. Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings.
57. Here we refer to ‘performance’ in the sense used by Victor Turner, as a means of constituting inter-generational community through repertoires of rituals and cultural acts. See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1969). We also refer to it in the sense used by E. Patrick Thomas, as a means for colonised or oppressed communities to ‘struggle’ for cultural endurance. See E. Patrick Thomas, ‘Introduction: Opening and Interpreting Lives’, in E. Patrick Thomas (ed.), Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis by Dwight Conquergood (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), pp. 1–14.
58. See Chaturvedi’s essay in this special section: Vinayak Chaturvedi, ‘From Oral History to Intellectual History (and the Unintended Autobiography)’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 41, no. 4 (Dec. 2018), doi:10.1080/00856401.2018.1514554.
59. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015); and Simon Gikandi, ‘Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement’, in Early American Literature, Vol. 50, no. 1 (2015), p. 92.
60. Scholars who approached these issues within the particular contexts of a post-colonial world system include Walter Mignolo, Gyan Prakash and C.A Bayly, to name three representative examples. While ‘new imperial history’ was being proposed by scholars such as Catherine Hall, Kathleen Wilson, Antoinette Burton and others, one of the interviewees in the project, Dipesh Chakrabarty, developed a thesis about the nature of social science and Western historiography, eventually published as Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
61. In the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978) and the multifaceted critiques of neo-colonialism by Samir Amin (b. 1931) throughout the 1970s, scholars positioned within a critique of Eurocentrism included interviewees such as Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others of the same generation, such as James Scott (b. 1936) and Stuart Hall (1932—2014). See James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976); and Stuart Hall, ‘Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities’, in W. Lubiano (ed.), The House that Race Built (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), pp. 289–99.
62. This is Robert Young’s argument in Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), p. 274. See also Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995); Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (eds), Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Vinayak Chaturvedi (ed.), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (New York: Verso, 2012); and John McLeod (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (London: Routledge: 2007).
63. See Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); and Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
64. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–316; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
65. One of the last systematic studies of the topic by Edward Shils, The Intellectual between Tradition and Modernity: The Indian Situation (The Hague: Mouton, 1961), was written at the moment of decolonisation and reflects primarily on the colonial modernity of the Indian intelligentsia. Our research places the intellectual developments of decolonisation after this moment into a twentieth-century history, reflective of the 1971 creation of Bangladesh.
66. Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013), p. 284.
67. Ibid.
68. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 25.
69. Examples include the South Asian American Digital Archive [www.saada.org]; the LGBTQ Oral History Collaboratory [http://lgbtqdigitalcollaboratory.org/]; the Tibet Oral History Project [http://www.tibetoralhistory.org/]; the Black Oral History Collection [http://content.libraries.wsu.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/5985/]; the Haiti Memory Project [http://haitimemoryproject.org/]; the Arab Immigration Oral History Digital Collection [http://ufdc.ufl.edu/oharab]; the Native Americans Oral History Collections [http://dloc.com/oh4]; and Digital Harlem [http://digitalharlem.org/, all last accessed 25 September 2018].
70. Britt Rusert, ‘The Impact of Digitization on the Study of Slavery’, in American Literary History, Vol. 29, no. 2 (2017), pp. 267–86; and five essays by Alex Lichtenstein, Joshua Sternfeld, Stephen Robertson, Natalie Zacek and Vincent Brown, ‘Exchange: Reviewing Digital History’, in American History Review, Vol. 121, no. 1 (Feb. 2016), pp. 140–86.
71. Todd Pressner, Digital Humanities 2.0: A Report on Knowledge [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.469.1435&rep=rep1&type=pdf, accessed 20 Mar. 2018].
72. See Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); and Vince Brown, ‘Narrative Interface for New Media History: Slave Revolts in Jamaica, 1760–61’, in American Historical Review, Vol. 121, no. 1 (Feb. 2016), pp. 176–86. See also the concept of ‘countervisuality’ in Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
73. On coloniality, see Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking and Global Coloniality’, in Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, Vol. 1, no. 1 (2011), pp. 1–37. See also the introduction to Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan and Peter Perdue (eds), Imperial Formations (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), pp. 3–42.
74. See Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), for an analysis of how authoritarianism in post-colonial South Asia derived from colonial modes of governance.
75. See recent work complicating the nationalism inherent in South Asian historiography regarding Bengal in Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).