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http://cdy.sagepub.comCultural Dynamics

DOI: 10.1177/092137409801000203 1998; 10; 123 Cultural Dynamics

M. Madhava Prasad Back to the Present

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123

BACK TO THE PRESENT

M. MADHAVA PRASAD

Centre for Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore

ABSTRACT

Thinking about culture in the humanities is dominated by a historicistapproach derived from a nationalist, postcolonial consciousness marked bya disavowal of modernity. The study of contemporary culture, in particularthe cultural context overdetermined by capitalist processes, shows up thelimitations of this paradigm and foregrounds the need for a concept of thecontemporary. As a first step towards this goal, the article takes up foranalysis certain key ideologemes of modern Indian life which hinge on thesense of a recovery of identity, and tries to demonstrate their inadequacy fora rigorous sense of the present.Key Words contemporaneity culture democracy modernity nation

A sense of the present is, above all, a matter of arrival. It is a problematicthat emerges as much out of the long interregnum of debates about moder-nity in the postcolonial context as it does from the consolidation of theeffects of the revolution signalled by the declaration of the Republic. It isan attempt to exit from the inter-civilizational or inter-racial agonistics ofthe colonial aftermath to announce, not the nations arrival at some prede-termined telos but arrival as such, arrival in the present as the place fromwhich to find our way forward. It proposes an answer to the questions thathave been the traumatic driving force behind all the debates about moder-nity. To the question, When will we arrive at/return to our true destiny? itanswers: We have arrived at our true destiny. Moreover, we have alwaysbeen there. Likewise to the question, When will we recover our trueidentity? it enables us to reply: We have recovered our true identity.Moreover, our identity has always been true.

In his call to make the present an object of reflection, Vivek Dhareshwar(1995) suggested that a receptivity to the present can only be realizedwhen we break out of the paralysing historicism that debates aboutmodernity are caught up in:


124 Cultural Dynamics 10(2)

When ... we begin to reflect on the conditions for a critique of our modernity, it wouldbe futile, and intellectually incoherent, to deny our history as alien in order then toreach back to a different historicity as our impossible history (nonmodern or pre-modern time, culture).... In order to determine a reflective relation to our present wemust think the historicity of history itself. Here then is the paradoxical task: we need todeploy historicity against the very notion of history such that historicity is not reab-sorbed by historicism. (p. 318)

I approach the question of arriving at a reflective relation to our presentas someone interested in developing a framework for the study of contem-porary Indian culture. It is the problems encountered in the course of myattempts in this direction that led me to the sense that one needs a conceptof our contemporaneity in order to respond in full measure to the com-plexity and diversity of cultural practices in a modern democratic nation-state where thinking continues to be troubled, if not haunted, by thelegacies of colonialism. I approach it as one who cannot distance modernityfrom his own sense of identity in order to speak of it as an alien imposition,with the aim of discovering a way to bring to consciousness (to my own con-sciousness) this truth for which there is as yet no recognition. While this isa difficult process that cannot be accomplished in one stroke, in whatfollows a beginning is made through a reading of some central ideologemesof the historicist fantasy that sustained and perhaps continues to sustain usas (post)colonial subjects.

The Drama of Humiliation

In the course of a discussion of Tagores fiction, Ashis Nandy (1994: 50)remarks of Nikhil (The Home and the World) and the reborn Gora that[t]hey have been through and emerged relatively intact from the humili-ation of the colonial experience; and the even greater humiliation offighting colonialism with the help of methods and ideologies importedthrough the colonial connection. What interests us in this passage is thestrong evocation of colonialism as above all a humiliating experience. Whatis succinctly formulated here is clearly a widespread feeling, one that we all(at least those who are interpellated by the nationalist ideology) share. Onecould even say that it is by learning to experience this humiliation as onesown that every generation accedes to the national, that a subject becomesa national subject. The simultaneity of these two events must be noted: toexperience colonial humiliation is to become national subject but, at thesame time, only a national subject can feel so humiliated.And yet, in the 50th year of independence, there are already signs that

this historical memory of humiliation is no longer the powerful unifyingexperience that it once was. The finance ministers reported invitation tothe West to come back once again and conquer India is only a spectacularand mildly scandalous sign of a general loss of potency of the memory of


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125Prasad: Back to the Present

colonialism. (One of the ironies of this golden jubilee is that the Britishseem, by all accounts, to be celebrating it with more enthusiasm thanIndians.) Does this not indicate a loss of historical consciousness, does itnot forebode the erosion of national identity? If we forget past humilia-tions, do we not open ourselves to the possibility of their repetition?

Situating ourselves in this present moment of erosion of historicalmemory, perhaps we should take another look at the scene of humiliation.As a point of departure for such an examination we may take the prop-osition that the scene of humiliation always involves a third. What turns astruggle between two opposed forces into an experience of humiliation isthe presence of the Other as witness to the enslavement and degradation ofthe vanquished. In a more archaic version, it was perhaps the people whoplayed this role when the vanquished king was dragged through the streets.But in a modern nation under colonial rule, it is the people themselves whoare humiliated, by another people, the East humiliated by the West. Whothen witnesses this scene and instils in us this feeling of having beendegraded before another?

The peculiarity of capitalist colonial domination is that it is the domi-nation of one nation over another, a fact which Tagore in his lectures onnationalism emphasized more than any other feature, evoking the figure ofthe nation-machine. Where home payments are the driving force behindconquest, the maintenance of national identity becomes crucial and byextension, apartheid practices serve to maintain the distinction of the colo-nized. The extraction of surplus value to be deployed elsewhere becomes acrucial factor in bringing into being the scene of humiliation. Thus into thetwo-term relation between colonizer and colonized a third term isimported, whereby colonial relations between two nations are justified byreference to a neutral ground. This neutral ground justifies colonialism as amission but it is also under its aegis that anti-colonial struggles take place.My sense is that this neutral ground is History. But then is not history

itself a western thing? The scene of humiliation is the enactment of afantasy wherein we submit to history by feeling humiliated when we aremerely defeated. By this very enactment, however, history has been ren-dered hors de combat, no longer merely the much touted western propen-sity for keeping a historical record-in itself nothing more than aparticular mode of production of discourse about the past. It is only at themoment when we acknowledge History as the common transcendentalwitness that the scene of humiliation becomes imaginable. This history isnot the accumulation of discourse about the past, the evolving methodolo-gies for keeping record and for extracting meaning from a sedimented past.It is not history as a form of knowledge but History as the gaze that affirmsour being in the modern world.

If this is the case there is then no point in claiming that the imposition ofhistory on a people accustomed to mythical thinking, or whatever, is itself


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a humiliating act. The feeling of humiliation is already an admission ofcomplicity, of a secret pact between enslaver and enslaved to let history bethe ultimate witness. This is the history that Fanon (1990: 170) speaks ofwhen he says:

The Negro, never so much a Negro as since he has been dominated by the whites, whenhe decides to prove that he has a culture and to behave like a cultured person, comesto realize that history pomts out a well-defined path to him: he must demonstrate that aNegro culture exists. (Emphasis mine)

History here is the aegis of negotiation, a reconciler, not a weapon ofstruggle. This is what explains the sense, articulated by Dipesh Chakrabarty(1997: 223) that &dquo;Europe&dquo; remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of allhistories, including the ones we call &dquo;Indian&dquo;, &dquo;Chinese&dquo;, &dquo;Kenyan&dquo;, and soon. Although Chakrabarty is here referring to historical discourse pro-duced in the academy, it is arguable that the subject of history he invokes isthe transcendental exception which makes possible the assembly of nationalhistories. The subject as gaze that unifies the field is what I evoke here asoccupying the position of the transcendental signifier, like the phallus inpsychoanalytic discourse. Here the tension arises because of the continuingsense that history is still the same as the practice of historical knowledgeproduction (or that the phallus is still the penis), which renders invisible theelevation of history as gaze to a neutral, transcendental position. This gazeis an ever-present gaze but its Judgement Day is always deferred to a futurethat will never arrive, whence the practice of burying time capsules, to bediscovered by the Future.

For our immediate concerns, the relevant factor here is that the strivingfor singularity, for the status of an exception to the rule of a homogenizingmodernity, can only occur against this horizon of the gaze of history.Moreover, every striving after singularity only reinforces, or at any rate,fails to evade the status of particularity, that is to say, the status of a par-ticular within the reigning universal. In light of this we could perhaps prof-itably read the theme of provincialization of Europe that Chakrabartyamong others proposes, against the grain, not as an attempt to liberate thenon-western world from western modernity, but as a way of setting moder-nity itself free from its historical association with Europe in order therebyto be able to relate to it differently.

The Subject Supposed to BelieveIf the above narrative works at the level of the historical destinies of theworlds civilizations, in the post-colonial moment we encounter theproblem of national identity as an immediate necessity, as something thatmust be realized or posited as effective. How is this to be achieved? Inorder to approach the problem at hand, let us turn to a succinct formulation



of one of the principal ideologemes of post-independence India. This for-mulation is attributed to the late poet, linguist and critic A.K. Ramanujan,justly famous for his translations of Kannada, Tamil and Telugu poetry, hisown poetry, fiction and criticism in English and Kannada, and his compi-lation of folk tales based on oral retellings. In an interview, the playwrightGirish Karnad, while remarking that Ramanujan was a strong influence onhis own work, cites a remark by the latter which he holds up as a sort ofmotto for the artist in contemporary India: I do not believe in God; Ibelieve in people who believe in God. Rather than define the ideologeme,this remark performs it, giving it a protonarrative form, and as such invitesinterpretation.

It is a statement that articulates and tries to resolve a fundamentaldilemma of the secular intellectual in contemporary India. It enacts onepossible solution to what we have become habituated to defining as theproblem of the coexistence of modernity and tradition. The speakingsubject here is located in modernity, where the lack of belief attests tothe indifference that characterizes modern capitalist societies. Thesubject recuperates from this state to establish an indirect relation ofbelief through, as it at first appears, the mediation of true believers.However, this new belief is not so much an indirect approach to God asa direct substitution of the people for God. Henceforth, it is the exist-ence of the people in their original state of primary belief that sustainsthe secular subjects capacity for belief. It is not their belief as such thatis the object of the secular subjects attention. It is only in so far as thisbelief constitutes a guarantee of difference that secondary belief finds itsfulfilment. As Jacques Lacan has argued, to believe in God is already notthe direct faith in a transcendent being that it appears to be. To believeis to believe in the community of believers, to pledge allegiance to thiscommunity. This secular faith is no exception. Belief in the folk sustainsthe community of secular intellectuals, giving us the sense of differenceof which modernity has robbed us. From another perspective, this faithcould be one way in which the secular subject as global citizen, productof the internationalism of colonial rule, recovers a sense of nationalidentity.

Whereas in the developmentalist ideology of modern nation-states, theundeveloped are invited to relate to the developed as the subject supposedto know, in the above formulation we see the evocation of the subject sup-posed to believe, whose figure enables an integration of modern and non-modern sectors into a nation. This subject supposed to believe has been thepoint at which, in modern India, the two poles that are usually rendered asmodernity and tradition converge. These poles, which are also renderedsometimes as Nehru versus Gandhi, together constitute a sometimes antag-onistic, sometimes complementary ideological dance where, in the words ofFrank Sinatra, you cant have one without the other.


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What is to be noted here is also that, by constituting this couple, byrelating them through the figure of the subject supposed to believe,Ramanujans formulation locates the nation so formed in the chain ofnational identities, a particular within the reigning universal, turning itssingularity into a moment within the particular. The possibilities of othertimes, other paths and destinies are husbanded to serve as the sedimentedresources of a nation-state. The people in their belief, in their incommen-surable singularity, no longer encounter directly the hegemony of moder-nity. The secular intellectual or the members of civil society turn towardsthem in order to maintain their distinction as a nation within the modernworld.

At the same time the subject supposed to believe is hardly left alone bythe forces of development. The implicit assumption behind belief in thebeliever is that there is a barrier between the two sectors, that there is aself-sufficiency to the life of the community which makes it indestructible.This enclosure however is breached by development. We want the com-munity to speak its own truth, to address itself in its communications, itsrituals and practices. We want its messages to be absorbed into its own cir-cuits, to be available to us only indirectly as evidence of its self-identity. Butdevelopment breaks into such enclosures to force the subject to speak to us.In the ideological scenario of cultural self-identity, there is speech, seman-tically rich and instantly communicated. Under developmental conditions,the subject becomes voice, bearing demands: voice deprived, at themoment of enunciation, of the assurance of communication. When thismessage is received by the developmental sector, it is understood asdemanding rights-cultural rights for instance.

Thus it is that for developmentalists, the world is full of voicesexpressing demands. For those anxious about national identity there is acommunity turned upon itself, with which one must link up in order tosecure our identity. This checkmated conceptual field is what we con-front when we look for ways in which to reconceive the humanities inIndia, in particular when faced with the challenge of conceiving a frame-work for the study of contemporary culture. As cultural production andthe field of reception are increasingly mediated by capitalist processes,we face, within cultural studies, our own variations on the two themesdiscussed above.

1. Capitalist (mass/popular/commercial) culture is already altogether toowell defined, its essential features are well known. It has, moreover, itsstages and forms: for example, realism, modernism, postmodernism withtheir self-sufficient Eurocentric histories. From this perspective, as a cap-italist culture, India seems to offer only an ersatz recapitulation, an inau-thentic variant that aspires to but never quite catches up with theinternational model.


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2. On the other hand, and by way of compensation, we have the option ofconsidering ourselves, like others on the planet, as one of many singu-larities which are fortunate or condemned to be other than capitalistculture. In this scenario, Europes encroaching culture produces its ownclones, as noted above, but always fails to transform the core. Our iden-tities are inalienable. Come what may, phir bhi dil hai hindustani. Forstudies of popular culture in modern India, this presupposition some-times appears to be a political imperative.As the expansion of modernity makes the latter claim more and more

difficult to sustain, a new tendency has emerged of examining the ways inwhich people on the periphery of the capitalist core consume modernity(Breckenridge, 1996) in their own ways. It is not just a case of shifting atten-tion from production to consumption, a shift that capitalist culture effec-tively enforces, but also of asserting that communities on the peripheryrelate to modernity primarily as an object of consumption, therebyimplying that they are situated outside it. Here the historicist fantasy of areturn to true identity is replaced by a sort of achieved historicist paradisewhere we can consume modernity all we want but it will never get thebetter of us. On the other hand, we cannot escape the feeling that wevebeen had anyway since this consumption of modernity takes place on theglobal stage, where nation-states are seen as declining formations delayingthe inevitable union of the local directly with the global. To return to ourmain concern, the present cannot be ours except through an abdication ofpower by the nation-state.

Political SocietyHow can a receptivity to the present help us to think our way out of thisconceptual stalemate? A recent essay by Partha Chatterjee can serve as aninstance of the possibilities for thinking that such a receptivity could openup. In a deceptively simple operation, Chatterjee places an incision in theconceptual field that reorganizes the field, redefines its constituents andprovokes a redefinition of the problems posed within it. The line drawn isat an angle to all the familiar lines that divide modernity from tradition, andso on. First, like Ramanujan, Chatterjee does not wish away the modernor civil society but tries to find a way of connecting it with the rest of thesocial structure. Insisting on a retention of the classical sense of the termcivil society, the essay then characterizes the rest as political society (hereparting ways with Ramanujan), having already separated the politicaldimension of modernity (as democracy) from modernity as a mass-cul-tural, consumerist, developmentalist, globalized phenomenon. This newpolitical society is the site of mediation between the population and thestate (Chatterjee, 1997: 32). Referring back to a point made above, I would


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suggest that here political society is conceived as consisting of subjectsturned into voices bearing demands; at the same time, not remaining dociletargets of development but speaking a new political idiom. Subjects, that is,that are neither absorbed in their self-identity nor lost in a sea of voicesdemanding development. The three theses in which the argument is encap-sulated are worth citing in full:

(1) The most significant site of transformations in the colonial period is that of civilsociety; the most significant transformations occurring in the postcolonial period are inpolitical society.(2) The question that frames the debate over social transformation in the colonialperiod is that of modernity. In political society of the postcolonial period, the framingquestion is that of democracy.(3) In the context of the latest phase of the globalisation of capital, we may well be wit-nessing an emerging opposition between modernity and democracy, i.e., between civilsociety and political society. (Chatterjee, 1997: 33)

As far as this desire for democracy that is a feature of political society isconcerned, Chatterjee suggests (p. 30) that we should look within thenation rather than beyond. Beyond the nation lies the agency of modernityminus politics and a necessary tension between these two conflictingdynamics. At a time when there is a general feeling of the disappearance ofpolitics in the moment of postmodernity, this conceptual cut relocates thepolitical in a site that was previously condemned to one of two destinies:either recipients of developmental largesse; or stubborn, self-absorbed pre-servers of tradition, alternative ways of life, etc. It is only in the context ofa national political culture, moreover, that such possibilities for what Iwould term self-alienation can arise. The existence of such a politicalsociety can also be seen as evidence of the provisionality of the state, as thestruggles of political society are also struggles over the state form (seePrasad, 1998: ch. 1 ).

Within every nation-state formation, studies of contemporary culturewill of course inevitably encounter a field in which it is difficult to separateeasily the themes of political society from those of a globalized modernity.But it is nevertheless the case that the political framework opens the wayto a sense of the present and defines a site within which every phenomenon,however global its character, is overdetermined by the nation-state frame-work. The framework of global modernity will ... inevitably structure theworld according to a pattern that is profoundly colonial; the framework ofdemocracy, on the other hand, will pronounce modernity itself as inappro-priate and deeply flawed (Chatterjee, 1997: 34). While it cannot be takenfor granted that the framework of democracy will necessarily reject moder-nity as flawed, it is my contention that our time is located, if anywhere, inthis political framework.

Turning again to the perspective of the humanities, we find that democ-racy as the synchronic structure within which we dwell has failed to capture



the imagination of the disciplines. These latter have continued to be fasci-nated with the moment of freedom, which is also a moment that remindsus, sometimes with an obscene warmth, of the cosiness of colonial domi-nation. To turn to democracy, in other words, to locate ourselves in thepresent not as midnights children forever in thrall to that historicalmoment, but as the children of the revolution, is also to give up the sensethat we can still reside in another time, still draw upon another secretsource of difference. It is also, above all, to face the challenge of culturalinterpretation unaided by the reassuring sense that the meaning of our cul-tural practices is given for all time in our heritage or our establishedpredilections. For increasing numbers of Indians today, this is effectivelythe case.

REFERENCES

Breckenridge, Carol A., ed. (1996) Consuming Modernity: Public Culture inContemporary India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (1997) Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: WhoSpeaks for "Indian" Pasts?, in Padmini Mongia (ed.) Contemporary PostcolonialTheory: A Reader, pp. 223-42. Delhi: Oxford University Press. (Previously pub-lished in Representations 37 [Winter 1992]: 1-26.)

Chatterjee, Partha (1997) Beyond the Nation? Or Within?, Economic andPolitical Weekly (4-11 Jan): 30-4.

Dhareshwar, Vivek (1995) "Our Time": History, Sovereignty and Politics,Economic and Political Weekly (11 Feb.): 317-24.

Fanon, Frantz (1990) The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin.Nandy, Ashis (1994) The Illegitimacy of Nationalism. Delhi: Oxford University

Press.

Prasad, M. Madhava (1998) Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction.Delhi: Oxford University Press.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

M. MADHAVA PRASAD is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultureand Society, Bangalore. Address: Centre for the Study of Culture and Society,1192, 35th B Cross, Fourth T Block, Jayanagar, Bangalore 560 041, India.


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