chakrabarty civilizacion a globalizacion

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From civilization to globalization: the ‘West’as a shifting signifier in Indian modernityDipesh Chakrabarty aa University of Chicago , USAPublished online: 09 Jan 2012.

To cite this article: Dipesh Chakrabarty (2012) From civilization to globalization: the ‘West’ as a shiftingsignifier in Indian modernity, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 13:1, 138-152, DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2012.636877

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From civilization to globalization: the ‘West’ as a shifting signifier inIndian modernity

Dipesh CHAKRABARTY

ABSTRACT This article tracks the shifting cultural meanings that the East/West distinction hasproduced in the history of nationalism in colonial and post-colonial India. It does so by focusing onthe word “civilization” and the role it played in promoting a rich sense of inter-cultural dialogue inthe writings of nationalist leaders such as Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, RabindranathTagore, and Jawaharlal Nehru. The article documents how the word figures with much reduced sig-nificance in contemporary cultural debates about globalization in India and concludes by asking ifthe rise of China and India to global prominence holds the potential today to initiate a conversationacross cultures similar to the one that accompanied the rise of the West in the age of modern imperialrule.

KEYWORDS: nationalism, civilization, globalization, modernity

1.

I feel honored to have been invited to delivera couple of lectures in this series that allowsscholars who base their thoughts on the his-torical experience of India to exchangenotes with those who think out of the experi-ence of this great nation. I am also grateful tothe authorities that organized this series fortheir hospitality and the invitation thatmade my visit possible.

I will tell you a little bit about my back-ground before getting into my lecture. I wasborn and raised in the colonial city of Cal-cutta. By the time I was born, India hadbecome independent. True, the British weregone but there was still a lot of anti-Britishsentiment around. Growing up, we imbibedthe nationalism of our parents. When I wasin high school, India and China had a warthat produced much discussion and debatein our community. One group, the majority,blamed China. At the same time I hadsome cousins who were Communists whothought that a Communist country wouldnever start wars and that it was India whomust have started it because the Indian

government, they said, was controlled bythe rich. To them, Nehru represented thebourgeois classes. By the time I enteredhigh school, I was convinced India was atfault. So a lot of my friends and I used toargue with other Indians supporting Chinain that war.

I was born in a Brahman family, andyoung Brahman men have to undergo asacred religious ceremony after which theybecome fully Brahman, something like theJewish Bar Mitzvah. The presents I receivedfrom my friends upon my induction intoBrahmanhood included aMoscow-publishededition of volume 1 of Das Kapital, and fourvolumes of Selected Works of Mao. Thus, onmy ‘second birth’—Brahmans are known asdvija, or twice-born, on account of this cer-emony—I was born a Maoist. This is only anexample of what happened generally toyoung people in many parts of India. Youmay remember that it was in 1959 that theUSSR started having difficulties with Chinaand began withdrawing their support fromChina. By 1962, the differences between thetwo countries were out in the open. In 1964,the Indian Communist party likewise split,

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 13, Number 1, 2012

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one branch supporting the USSR, the otheropting for neutrality. We were young peopleangry about poverty and injustice in ourcountry. In a lot of ways, we were similar tothe students at Tiananmen Square in 1989.We thought the real problem we had inIndia was an exploitative class and their poli-ticians running the country and what weneeded was a revolution of the Chinese typeand that a revolution, as theChineseCommu-nist Party said in their polemics with theSoviets, had to be a violent one. We readMao saying that just like you need a broom-stick to clear away thedust, youneedviolenceto clear away the exploiters of the people. Wewere drawn to Mao’s teachings. Most impor-tantly, there was a Maoist peasant uprising in1967 just after the leftists and their Commu-nist allies had been elected to office in mystate of West Bengal where Calcutta is. TheCommunist Party of India (Marxist) thatwas neither pro-Moscow nor pro China, butwas a member of the ruling coalitionopposed the peasants and attempted to putdown their rebellion by force. My friendsand I morally supported the uprising.Because India and China were alreadyenemies, People’s Daily published an essayentitled ‘Spring Thunder Breaks out overIndia’ giving us moral support in 1967. In1969, a third Communist Party was formedin India, the Communist Party of India(Marxist-Leninist) (CPIML), which was theIndian Maoist Party. Young Maoists wouldgo around Calcutta writing slogans such as‘China’s path is our path’ and ‘China’s chair-man is our chairman.’We used to argue withpeople about this. When this Maoist partywas formed, some of its leaders reportedly—so at least the story went—snuck intoChina and offered the chairmanship to Mao,which Mao had the good sense to decline. Idon’t know if this story is true but it is truethat the CPIML left the position of the Chair-man vacant. The highest position ever occu-pied by an Indian in that party was that ofthe vice-chairman, for the chairmanship, itwas said, could only be Mao’s. This was ouranti-nationalism, or our internationalism.The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolutionbroke out in 1966. As it gatheredmomentum,

the Maoists in India came quite seriouslyunder its influence. The vice-chairman of theparty said the urban youth must go to the vil-lages with the red book and organize pea-sants to kill bad landlords and create apeople’s army that would liberate India by1975!Manyofmy friendswent to the country-side braving police oppression. As formyself,I was too scared to go, leaving my city lifebehind. Besides, I knew that the police couldbe brutally cruel. So I told my friends, Icould not go through with this and I wasvery ashamed of myself. At one of our ‘self-criticism’ meetings à la the Red Guards, Idenounced myself and overnight I lost allmy friends. As it happened, India had justset up two business schools with Americanhelp, and since my life suddenly seemed tohave no revolutionary significance, Ithought I must simply earn money, so Iwent to study in one of these businessschools. Many of my friends meanwhile hadgone to villages. The first thing they con-tracted on getting there was diarrhea; theyreturned to the city for treatment and thenwent back again to launch their violent revo-lution by beginning to kill oppressive land-lords and assuming that such acts ofviolence would start a Maoist ‘prairie fire’.Eventually, the policemoved into the villages,flushed them out, so they came back to thecity and made ordinary and poorly-paidtraffic constables the targets of their violence.The movement was slowly crushed by thegovernment. Around 4000 young Indiansdied, by Amnesty international calculations.

I on theother handwaspursuingmyMBAto join the other side. But there were someironies of history here as well. Nehru’s govern-ment had decided that Indian business man-agers must have capitalistic economics, for thefuture of Indiawas to be focused on capitalism,but he also wanted to ensure that India’s senseof the past was anti-colonial. So ours were theonly two business schools in the world thathad compulsory history lessons and myhistory professor turned out to be a Marxist.When I finished my degree, my professorasked me whether I wanted to be a manageror a historian. Finding Marxist history rathercomforting—because the idea that the

The ‘West’ as a shifting signifier in Indian modernity 139

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individual was less unimportant than imper-sonal historical forces helped me to rationalizemy failure to be a revolutionary—I gave upmy job and decided to become a historian.A few years later, I went to Australia for myPhD. I still remember how I felt when I firstmet Chinese students in Australia. I rememberhoping theywould all sharemyenthusiasm forthe Cultural Revolution, but they were allagainst it! I remember arguing angrily with aChinese woman. As I said to her ‘but Maohad such beautiful ideas,’ she countered meby saying ‘but what’s the use of ideas thatdon’t work?’ I wrote home to my friendssaying that these students must have beencounter-revolutionaries, the ‘wrong’ type ofChinese from my point of view! I waitedlong for the right type of Chinese students,but they never came. I finally had to reconcilemyself to the possibility that I wouldnever meet someone who might have a wordor two to say in favor of the CulturalRevolution. I did hear some good thingsmuch later but they were very qualifiedand measured statements. It was clear thatthe GPCR was not what we had made it outto be.

The firstbatchofChinese students comingoutofChina, it seemedtome,wereas romanticabout the West as we were about China. Ourromanticism of China came from a long tra-dition of Western romanticism. I rememberall theWestern intellectuals—historians, econ-omists, journalists—who went to Chinaduring the Cultural Revolution and wrotebooks about how beautiful it was. If you readtheir descriptions, you’d think the Revolutionwas heaven on earth. It took me a long timeto accept the change in China and it took meeven longer to realize the wrong things donein the name of the Cultural Revolution andabout the sufferings they imposed on many.There were many things we did not knowabout Chinese socialism. We didn’t knowabout the famine that followed the GreatLeap Forward, for instance. I still rememberdefending backyard furnaces. So coming toChina for me was a matter of experiencingvery mixed and profound feelings.

This is where I come from, from a time inthe history of the youth of India when they

were deeply influenced by Maoist politicalthought. Subaltern Studies, the historicalseries I am associated with, was started bya bunch of Indian historians for whom Maowas a figure of inspiration. In addition,there was a global romance about peasantrevolutions not just because of China butalso because of the Vietnam War.

What I want to speak about here is abouta question that I have raised a few timesbefore in conversations with Indian andChinese friends. ‘I understand and evensupport your desires to becoming super-powers,’ I say to them.

Butwhenyou come truly to dominate theworld effectively, what terms of criticismwill you provide to your victims so theycan criticize your domination? In otherwords what resources will you producefrom within your tradition that otherswill use to criticize you?

In posing this question, I begin from thepremise that no powerful country can everbe completely benign. If a country or a nationbecomes powerful in a worldly sense, theywill end up oppressing some group of othereither internally or externally. So if a powerfulnation is to be good for itself, it has to takeresponsibility for its power and create termsthat its victims can use to criticize it.

This is the proposition I want to illus-trate by looking at how the meaning ofEurope or more generally the West haschanged in India from the colonial period—I will be mainly concerned with the periodc.1890s to now, the last few decades that is,when India has seen the rise of a newmiddle class, a surge towards urbanization,a globalized media, a competitive consumer-ist culture, a public life rocked constantly byallegations of large-scale corruption, and acapitalism innovative and dynamic incertain areas such as IT while absolutely‘red in tooth and claw’ when it comes toresources and real estate. I do not ask aboutthe meaning of the West out of idle curiosity,however. Behind it lies my larger question.

There is no doubt that Europe and Eur-opeans once dominated this planet. By the

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end of the nineteenth century, 80% of thesurface of the earth was under the rule ofone European power or another. Since 1945,however, we have seen a retreat of the colo-nial great powers of Europe and the rise ofsuper-powers like the United States andonce the Soviet Union as well. China andIndia today aspire to similar super-powerstatus. China has already achieved a lotmore of it than India. A super-power thatdominates us surely dominates us economi-cally, militarily, and technologically. It alsoundoubtedly influences our imagination—the twentieth century, which became theAmerican century, cannot be imagined, forexample, without the global dominance ofHollywood or certain American institutionalimaginaries (such as institutes of technologyin various countries modeled on the MIT).Yet a distinction remains to be madebetween European colonial domination ofothers and the sheer economic, military,and cultural weight of a super-power. Thedistinction is this: when European powersbecame imperial-colonial ‘lords of thehumankind’ from the period of the Renais-sance to that of the Enlightenment and intothe nineteenth century, they also gave theirvictims the terms and categories of thoughtwith which to critique and challenge Euro-pean domination. Two such great ‘weaponsof criticism’ forged in the European work-shop of the nineteenth century—but withtheir intellectual genealogies stretchingfurther back into history—were Marxismand Liberalism, both wielded with greateffect by many decolonizing nations andthinkers who criticized European domina-tion. That is why I raised the question thatif tomorrow China or India were to becomea superpower, would we simply dominatein the ways the Americans have dominated?Or would we dominate in such a way thatour very domination will create visions ofhumanity that the rest of humanity wouldbe able to use against us? So I think if a realsuperpower or a dominating power wantsto be good in spite of knowing no power isbenign, it has to create a certain kind of con-tradiction or criticism within itself. It needsto develop a culture of self-criticism at the

same time that it develops into a powerfulplayer in the affairs of the world.

Will we move beyond the horizons ofEuropean thought as China and Indiabecome dominant, powerful countries orthis century? Will India and China producenew grounds for thinking on which human-ity will meet as one? This is an importantquestion for our times. Certain importantproblems we look at today are global inscope: climate change is a global problem,food security is a global problem, terrorismis a global problem, water shortage, energycrisis, and so on, are global problems. Irecently read an Indian report that said, forthe first time in Indian history, India hashad to order an entire tanker of water fromAlaska. The Chinese building of dams inthe Himalayas worries Indians because thetwo countries do not have a water treaty.Yet, given the global or planetary nature ofso many of our contemporary crises, themodel of thinking that said that ‘my develop-ment will have to come at your cost’—thatmodel will clearly will not work in the longrun. As we develop separately as differentnations, we also have to develop somesense of commonality.

The last time I was in China—in Septem-ber 2010—I was quite struck by discussionsin English-language Chinese newspapers onthe need to move from the ‘Made in China’phase to the ‘Created in China’ one. Iassume that these newspaper writers hadmaterial things in mind when they spoke ofthings being ‘created in China’—somethinglike cars and gadgets of Chinese design. ButEuropean domination of the world wentmuch further than designing materialobjects by creating concepts that framedsome of the normative ideas for all of us.Can India and China aspire to the same role?

It is to ask this question that I want toshare with you an Indian chapter in thehistory of the much-discussed—and todaymuch-tainted—word ‘civilization’. Aroundthat word of European origin were createda series of meanings that, by attachingmany possibilities to the word, allowed forthe common meeting ground between Euro-pean colonial masters and those whom they


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dominated. The question is this: how does apowerful country, which cannot avoid dom-inating others because it is powerful, create aculture of understanding itself as internallyplural and thus help the dominated also tocreate a plurality of their own selves? It isthe politics of creating pluralities within our-selves that, I submit, creates a commonground, a ground for dialogue in a worldthat is marked by inequalities of all kinds.

I’m going to use the concept of civiliza-tion as a historical example of what I have inmind. ‘Civilization’ is a word that belongedoriginally to European vocabularies butaround which a plurality of ‘Europe’s’ andof ‘India’s’ were created; creating thereby acommon ground that I will call ‘civility’.What I do here is to defend the idea of civility.Gandhi was a master at civility, even withpeople he fought against. Once, for example,in his South African years, when a proposedstrike of Indian laborers in 1914 appeared tocoincide with a strike of railway enginedrivers, he wrote a letter to South AfricanMinister (later General) Jan ChristiaanSmuts voluntarily postponing the strike byIndians saying he did not want to attack thegovernment when it was already weakenedby another major strike, but would wait forthat other strike to be over and then com-mence his. When Gandhi was later put inprison by Smuts, he actually made a pair ofsandals as part of his prison labor and pre-sented them to Smuts. Smuts in turn returnedthem as gifts to Gandhi on Gandhi’s 70thbirthday, remarking that it was his bad luckto be in a situation once where he wasobliged to imprison this man. Or takeanother example of civility. Gandhi madesome comments in 1934 in a newspaper inwhich he explained a terrible earthquake inBihar as divine chastisement for the sin ofuntouchability. Rabindranath Tagore dis-agreed very strongly but before publishinghis disagreements, he actually wrote toGandhi asking if had really made those com-ments, and mentioning that he proposed tooppose Gandhi publicly if Gandhi wouldverify that the comments were indeed his.Gandhi wrote back saying yes, those com-ments were his own, and that Tagore should

feel welcome to oppose them, which Tagoredid. This was civility in opposition.

Let me begin with the word civilization.This word was critical to the story of Euro-pean imperialism. European domination ofthe world was often justified by what theEuropeans saw as their civilizing mission.Others were barbaric and savage so theyneeded their help in civilizing, except theyalways thought of the Indians and Chineseas bearers of ancient civilizations that hadfallen on bad times—they were civilizationsin decline. It was very clear, however, thatthe more uncivilized the Europeans thoughtsome people were, the more freedoms Eur-opeans allowed themselves to marginalizethem.

Many prominent scholars, including,famously, the historian Luciene Febvre andthe linguist Emile Benveniste, have writtenhistories of this word that first came intouse in French in the 1760s and then intoEnglish in the following decade. John StuartMill wrote a famous essay on the topic in1836. Brett Bowden’s recent book, TheEmpire of Civilization: the Evolution of an Imper-ial Idea (2009), updates this history bringing itup to our contemporary times. I do not wishto cover all that familiar ground. Nor will Ido anti-Orientalist or anti-Samuel Hunting-ton critique of this term—simply because Itake such critiques for granted. I want tobegin by demonstrating to you how, fromabout the 1880s to the 1950s, there arose ahistorical situation that enabled leadingIndian nationalists to develop a close connec-tion between the idea of civilization and therelated idea of civility and turn them intoinstruments of a critical dialogue withEurope as part of their struggle for freedomfrom European domination. The ideas ofcivility and civilization, as is well known,arose at different times in European history,the word ‘civility’ being older than theword ‘civilization’. In bringing the twowords together, Indian nationalists wereunwittingly restoring a connection that hadbecome breached through usage. For whilethe word ‘civilization’ in its late-nineteenthcentury incarnation could refer to achieve-ments in the sphere of material culture


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alone, at its inception the word also connoteda certain ‘civil’ state of being, for its sourcelay, at least in its usage in eighteenth-century France, in religion’s call ‘to confrater-nity, to soften our hearts’ (Bowden 2009: 27).The intimacy between civility and religionwas, again, a fraught one—several commen-tators have pointed to the tradition of theword ‘civil’ often referring to that whichwas not religious (as in the expression ‘civilmarriage’).1 The connection at originbetween ‘civility’ and ‘civilization’ was alsobroken by later imperialist practices of dom-ination, for members of imperial nationscould be both ‘civilized’ on their own termsand be ‘rude’ and ‘barbaric’ towards othersat the same time. To turn the question ofbeing civilized by the European into a ques-tion of human civility itself was a major stra-tegic achievement of Indian nationalistthinkers.

‘Civilization’ was a key word in Euro-pean vocabulary from the beginning of thenineteenth century. The hierarchical scale ofhuman civilization that the thinkers of theScottish Enlightenment developed formed avery important element in British thinkingabout India. But Indian nationalists made ittheir own in producing critiques of theWest. As Rabindranath Tagore remarked in1941, the last year of his life, the word ‘civili-zation’ that had been translated into Bengali(and Hindi) as sabhyata actually had noequivalent in ‘our languages’ (Tagore 1961:407).2 Yet it came to be of much use toIndian nationalist critics of the West.

The Indian voices I want to consider herebelong to four iconic Indians: Swami Viveka-nanda, originally known as NarendranathDatta, the first Indian religious activist tobring a ‘modern’ version of Hinduism tothe West; Rabindranath Tagore, India’s pre-eminent poet who was awarded the Nobelprize in literature in 1913; MahatmaGandhi, who I suppose needs no introduc-tion; and Jawaharlal Nehru, the first PrimeMinister of independent India.

Between them, these intellectuals alsocover the period of the anti-colonial move-ment in India and the years of transition toa postcolonial state. They are all personalities

who had some impact on the West and in theworld generally. There was, however, arhythm to the timing and the nature oftheir impact: their impact was heightenedwhenever Western intellectuals entertaineddoubts about validity and the mission oftheir own civilization. Absent this doubt,and the impact of Indian critiques of theWest is immediately reduced. This see-sawfeature of the historical career of the word‘civilization’ as it moved back and forthbetween the West and the East is an indexof the historical role it played in creatingroom for dialogue—a middle ground—between the colonizer and the colonized.

My first case in point is Swami Viveka-nanda, who won recognition in the West ata time when very few male intellectuals inBritain or the United States entertained anydoubts about the global mission of the West.For, by the time Africa was being opened upfor colonial rule and exploitation towardsthe end of the nineteenth century, decades ofstable European economic growth andmaterial prosperity hadmade the idea of pro-gress seem palpably true. In fact, so deeplyingrained was this idea and so confidentwere the Europeans of ways of measuring it,that the British in India regularly publishedannual and decennial statistical reports inthe second half of the nineteenth centurycalled, Reports on Moral and Material Progressof India. Here, again, Brett Bowden has anexcellent discussion of how the idea of civili-zation morphed into the idea of progress(Bowden 2009: Chapter 3).

Vivekananda made his name by speak-ing successfully at the first World Parliamentof Religions held in Chicago in 1893. (Therecent clamor over 9/11 has made manyIndians forget that 11th September alsomarks the anniversary of this historiclecture.) Vivekananda reportedly abandonedthe stiff formality of the gathering to addresshis audience as ‘Sisters and Brothers ofAmerica’ and was an instant success. Hisrepresentation of Hinduism in America andin Britain in the 1890s won him immediatelya large number of followers in these counties.

Now, the letters that he wrote in thisperiod from America and Europe to his


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disciple back in Madras, Alasinga Perumal,show clearly that Vivekananda understoodhow very ‘political’ the idea of ‘civilization’was and how very closely it was connectedto the colonial enterprise. A letter dated 6May 1895 and addressed to Perumaldescribes his ‘success’ in the United States:‘… India is now in the air, and the orthodox[Christian clergy] … are struggling hard toput out the fire.’ He then goes on to say:

If you could send and maintain for a fewyears a dozen well-educated strong mento preach in Europe and America, youwould do immense service to India,both morally and politically. Many ofthe Western people think of you as anation of half-naked savages, and there-fore only fit to be whipped into civiliza-tion. If you three hundred millionsbecome cowed by the missionaries …,what can one man do in a distant land?(Vivekananda 1995a; emphasis added)

Yet, for all the charm of the ‘success’ thatthe Swami wrote home about, the factremains that an overwhelming majority ofthe people in the West who actually acceptedand felt drawn towards the teachings of Vive-kananda were women, and not men. Muchrecent research supports this conclusion and,in fact, there is quite telling evidence even inwhat he wrote at the time. Here is a letter, forinstance, from 1893, written from Massachu-setts to Perumal on 20 August 1893: ‘Fromthis village I am going to Boston tomorrow. Iam going to speak at a big Ladies’ Club here… I must first go and buy some clothing inBoston. If I am to live longer here, my quaintdress will not do. People gather by hundredsin the streets to see me’ (Vivekananda 1995b).Apparently one reason why a few days afterhis first arrival in Chicago he left the city forBoston was that ‘the man in the street staredand poked at him as at some object ofcurious and dubious nature’—there werealso considerations of costs. But Boston itselfwas not much different.

I landed [in Boston] … a stranger in astrange land. My coat was like this redone and I wore my turban. I was

proceeding up a street in a busy part oftown when I became aware that I wasfollowed by a great number of menand boys. I hastened my pace and theydid too. Then something struck myshoulder and I began to run, dashingaround a corner and up a darkpassage, just before the mob in fullpursuit swept past—and I was safe!(Burke 1998 [1958]: 19, 20)

‘So,’ he continued in the previously-citedletter, ‘what I want is to dress myself in along black coat, and keep a red robe andturban to wear when I lecture. That is whatthe ladies advise me to do, and they are therulers here, and I must have their sympathy’(Vivekananda 1995b: 18–19).

Or take another letter dated 2 November1893 in which Vivekananda reproduces anewspaper report of one of his lectures:‘Ladies, ladies, ladies packing every place –filling every corner, they patiently waitedand waited while the papers that separatedthem from Vivekananda were read’ (Viveka-nanda 1995b: 20). In fact, a contemporaryobserver, Mrs S.K. Blodgett, who waspresent at the Parliament of Religions whenVivekananda opened his maiden speech byaddressing the assembled gathering as‘Sisters and Brothers of America,’ had thisto say of women’s immediate reaction tothe Hindu monk:

When that young man got up and said,‘Sisters and Brothers of America,’ seven[?] thousand people rose to their feet asa tribute to something they knew notwhat. When it was over I saw scores ofwomen walking to over the benches toget near him, and I said to myself,‘Well, my lad, if you can resist thatonslaught you are indeed a GOD!’(Burke 1998 [1958]: 81)

This is an interesting story, I suggest, ofthe West being rendered plural by the wayVivekananda addressed the West. His dis-course appealed more to women than men,and this won him the platform he sought.There is a buried history here of Americanfeminism or at least of women’s activism


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that I can only parenthetically acknowledgeand but cannot bring out in any detail. Butincidental information available in Viveka-nanda’s biographies does tease our imagin-ation. One of Vivekananda’s early hostessesand patrons in Boston, Ms Kate Sanborn,was herself a lecturer and author whowrote about country life and composedsmall poems for friends that clearly spokeof her thoughts about men: ‘Though you’rebright/ And though you’re pretty/ Theywill not love you/ If you’re witty’ (Burke1998 [1958]: 23). Another of the Swami’s hos-tesses, Mrs Kate Tannat Woods, was also alecturer and author who wrote ‘manybooks’ including Hester Hepworth, ‘a storyof the witchcraft delusion’ (Burke 1998[1958]: 42–43). But these were clearly individ-uals and families interested in lookingbeyond the West, sometimes influenced byAmerican Transcendentalism. In the Woodsfamily, for instance, it was said over a fewgenerations that Vivekananda andMahatma Gandhi ‘were more Christlikethan any the world has known’ (Burke 1998[1958]: 43).3

If it were the ‘ladies’ of the West—andmen interested in ‘counter-culture’—whoreceived Vivekananda’s critique of the Westenthusiastically, the situation was not all thatdifferent for Mohandas Karamchand Gandhiwhen he first came to London in the 1880s—a few years before Vivekananda went toChicago—as a student. His inspiration came,as his great grand-daughter Leela Gandhihas shown in her imaginative book AffectiveCommunities, from non- mainstream personal-ities such as the homosexual and anti-imperialwriter Edward Carpenter or the vegetarian,animal-welfarist, and anti-imperial HenrySalt (Gandhi 2006: Chaps. 3-4).

At the end of the nineteenth century,when most of the major leaders and thinkersof the West were brimming with confidenceabout the righteousness of Europeanempires and their civilizing missions,Indian interlocutors of the West could onlyspeak to those parts of the West that werethemselves marginalized: spiritualists,women, homosexuals, vegetarians, and soon. Imperial success, as Ashis Nandy put it

in his provocative book, The Intimate Enemy,had made the dominant ‘European personal-ity’ hyper- masculine (Nandy’s term), side-lining all that could be considered—fromthe psychological point of view that Nandyassumes—feminine or child-like in thehistory of the West. Readers of Nandy willremember how brilliantly he uses the biogra-phy andwritings of Rudyard Kipling to illus-trate this point (Nandy 1983: Chap. 1).

It was only after the end of the FirstWorld War that claims of civilizationalsuperiority of the West came to be ques-tioned by Western intellectuals themselves.Some of the mood of the period is capturedin the following lines that the English politi-cal scientist Harold Laski wrote in June1923 to his friend Felix Frankfurter, aHarvard professor and later a judge at theSupreme Court of the United States:

The truth is, dear Felix, that we oughtnot to stay in India. Literally andsimply, we are not morally fit to do thejob. On all of which please read E.M.Forster, A Passage to India … . I add mygrave doubts whether the Indians cangovern themselves. But it is better forthem to make efforts than to have thisrunning sore at the heart of things. Ifthey fail, let it be their failure. Oursuccess (if it were not too late) wouldonly deepen their sense of inferiority.(Martin 1953: 58)

What thus came under a dark cloud ofdoubt in this period was the very idea thathad become triumphant by the end of thenineteenth century: that the West was civili-zationally superior to the rest of the worldor that its civilizational superiority gave itthe right to rule others.

It was in this period that intellectuals inthe West were more prepared to listen to cri-ticisms of their civilization coming fromother places, and it was no accident that itwas in this era that both Mahatma Gandhiand Rabindranath Tagore, perhaps the twofinest products of the Indo-British culturalencounter, emerged as major critical voicesfrom outside the West. Both Tagore andGandhi were universalist in their orientation.


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Profoundly committed to the welfare ofIndians, they were not nationalist in anynarrow sense. They also had their own sig-nificant differences, a pointer to the factthat even amongst themselves, the best ofthe Indian leaders, while agreeing on theimportance of being civilized, could only dis-agree on what might be the most propermeaning of the word. ‘Civilization’ was acritical word in the Mahatma’s vocabularytoo, except that it meant usually the indus-trial way of life to which he was opposed.The one famous tract that Gandhi wrote in1909 on the subject of self-rule in India,Hind Swaraj, contained a whole chapter onthe subject where, following Edward Car-penter, he called civilization ‘a disease’(Gandhi 2007 [1997]a: 34). Gandhi’s viewsare relatively well known, so I will notexpand on them. Both Gandhi and Tagorerejected the idea that material culture or arti-facts alone could stand for civilization. Theyalso rejected as insulting the idea that it wasEurope’s task to civilize others. Yet theycarried on through their lives a complex con-versation with the West precisely on thequestion of what it meant to be civilized.They thus converted the question of civiliza-tion into a question of civility. But theiranswers were sometimes very different.

In a collection of essays that he wrotemostly in the last decade of his life (he diedin 1941), Tagore summed up his views onthe role of Europe in Indian history. Hewas not unaware of the blemishes thatEurope carried in her history by havingoppressed other peoples and having takenover their lives and lands. In the title-essayof the book Kalantar (Change of Times),Tagore wrote thus about the negative sideof the idea of ‘civilization’ that Europepreached to the colonized.

Gradually, we saw that outside of thenations Europeans considered their own,the torch of European civilization was[used] not for the purpose of illuminationbut for starting fires. That is why one dayChina’s heart was bombarded withcannon balls and balls of opium.Schuster’s Strangling of Persia … [shows]

how ‘civilized’ Europe once strangledwith both hands young Persians deter-mined to give their lives to liberatingPersia from long-term inertia … . Onanother side, everybody knows how inthe Congo region of Africa European ruletransformed into indescribable horror. …The Great War has suddenly lifted acurtain on Western history. … Wewatched Japan, the leading student inEurope’s classroom, in Korea, in China,laughing off criticisms with examplesfrom European history. … The Europethat once called … Turkey inhuman …now hosts the indiscriminate terror offascism in her open courtyard. (Tagore1968)

Indeed, in his last essay on ‘Crisis inCivilization’ penned in 1941, Tagore—facedwith the barbarism of the Second World War—struck a despondent note on the question ofEuropean civilization: ‘I had at one timebelieved that the springs of civilization wouldissue out of the heart of Europe. But todaywhen I am about to the quit the world thatfaith has gone bankrupt altogether’ (Tagore1999a). Yet he refused to give up his ‘faith inMan’ (Tagore1999a).Or, considerhis judgmentabout the place of Europe in Indian history:

The advent of the English in Indianhistory was a strange affair. As humanbeings, they remained much moredistant from us than even the [foreign]Muslims. But no foreign nation canmatch the depth and pervasiveness ofthe intimacy that the English, as ambas-sadors of the spirit of Europe, haveforged with us. (Tagore 1968: 210–211)

Whatmade this possible?Tagore’s answerwasfourfold. First was modern science or reasonthat Europe brought to India: ‘Everyday sheconquers the world of knowledge, becauseher pursuit of reason is pure, free as it is fromfeelings of personal attachments’ (Tagore1968: 210–211). The second important Euro-pean idea to impact on India was the idea ofequality before the law:

One message contained in the new[British] rule was that crime was


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judged independently of the personsinvolved. … Whether a Brahman killeda Shudra or Shudra a Brahman, theoffence of murder belonged to the sameclass and the punishment was thesame…. (Tagore 1968: 210–211)

Third was the idea that no human beingcould be a property of another: the effort,as Tagore put it, against ‘convertinghumans into commodities’ (Tagore 1968:210–211, 212). And, finally, there was themessage of self-determination or self-govern-ment that Tagore saw as another fundamen-tal message of Europe:

That, today, in spite of all our weak-nesses we can attempt to change the situ-ation of our nation and the state is due toour taking a stand on the ground of [aEuropean] theory … . It is on thestrength of this theory that we fight cla-morously with such a powerful govern-ment over demands we would neverbeen able to dream of raising with theMughal emperor. (Tagore 1968: 212)

And what was this theory? It was thetheory of sovereignty, both of the individualand the nation. ‘This is the theory expressedin the poet’s line,’ wrote Tagore; the poet inquestion was no other than the Scottishnational poet Robert Burns and the line wasone from a famous song he wrote in 1795: ‘Aman is a man for all that’ (Tagore 1968: 212).

In other words, for Tagore as for Gandhi,criticisms of European civilization was not away of ignoring that fact that any civilizationwas plural and multiple when looked at fromthe inside. It was a civilization’s capacity tofurnish itself with tools for self- criticism and,therefore, for self-improvement that impressedTagore in the end. Of the Spanish–Englishrelations, for example, he would say: ‘Wehave … witnessed from this distance howactively the British statesmen acquiesced inthe destruction of the Spanish Republic. Onthe other hand, we also noted with admirationhow a band of valiant Englishmen laid downtheir lives for Spain’ (Tagore 1999a: 724–725).The general principle involved here was speltout as a part of a lecture he gave in 1923 and

then reproduced verbatim in a letter writtento an Oxford-based academic in 1934: ‘Wehave seen Europe cruelly unscrupulous in itspolitics and commerce, widely spreadingslavery over the face of the earth in variousnames and forms. And yet, in this very sameEurope, protest is always alive against its owninequities.’4

To be civilized, then, was to have acapacity for self-reflexivity, to be able tocreate one’s own critique. That was thekernel of civility. Conversation with Europeabout civilization was valuable because Eur-opeans could be self-reflexive.

2.

With the coming of independence in 1947,however, the line of criticism that Tagoreand Gandhi had developed lost steam.There are many reasons for it. Let memention two critical ones, one external andthe other internal to India. The 1950s and1960s were in some ways a re-run of theyears 1870 to 1900. With the defeat ofNazism, Fascism, and Japanese militarism(all products, predominantly, of the inter-war period), and the unprecedented materialprosperity the post-war West, the idea ofprogress returned in a new guise, nowknown under the various names of modern-ization, economic growth, and politicaldevelopment. Developing countries such asIndia participated in that optimism. Therewas, of course, the Cold War and a sense ofcompetition, symbolized by the space race,between the ideas of socialism and capital-ism. There was the non-aligned movementheaded by India for a while but that was apolitical choice. What seemed invinciblewas the industrial way of life whose praisewas sung by many an American theorist,ranging from Walt Whitman Rostow (thetheorist of economic take-off), JamesBurnham (the theorist of managerial revolu-tion) and through to Daniell Bell (the manwho spoke of post-industrial society). Theindustrial way of life as such now seemedtruly beyond question.

The global, Indian voice of this periodwas that of the first Prime Minister,


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Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru’s vision and spirithave recently received an astute interpret-ation at the hands of Sunil Khilnani whowrote: ‘Nehru wished to modernize India,to insert it into what he understood as themovement of universal history’ (Khilnani1998: 8). With this transition to the era andthe mantra of modernization, the civiliza-tional critique lost its appeal to Indianleaders. It was as though Nehru’s India, asKhilnani puts it, ‘had to move forward byone decisive act that broke both with itsancient and its more recent history. Therationalist, modernist strain in Nehru’sthinking … obliterated the attachment tothe heritage of an Indianness rooted in thepast’ (Khilnani 1998: 132).

The other factor that destroyed civiliza-tional thinking was developments from the1930s that profoundly rejected, for good orbad, the assumption of national unity thatunderlay the very idea of there being anIndian civilization. Muslims criticized theapparent Hinduness of the idea; the lowercastes and the ex-untouchables, as theycame into political power and consciousness,increasingly saw the claim to civilization asbased on texts produced by the Brahminsand the upper castes. This latter critique,going to back to Phule, Ambedkar andothers, has become an integral part oftoday’s culture of democracy in India.

Perhaps the death of the Gandhi’s civili-zational critique of modernity and the sub-sequent transition to the values and visionof modernization is best captured in anexchange of letters that took place betweenGandhi and Nehru in 1945, a little morethan a year before independence. Gandhiwrote to Nehru:

I still stand by the system of governmentenvisaged in Hind Swaraj. … I am con-vinced that if India is to attain truefreedom and through India the worldalso, then sooner or later … people willhave to live in villages, not in towns …. Crores 1 crore = 10 million of peoplewill never be able to live in peace witheach other in towns and palaces. …You must not imagine that I am

envisaging our village life as it is today.… My ideal village will contain intelli-gent human beings. There will beneither plague, nor cholera, nor smallpox; no one will be idle, no one willwallow in luxury. (Gandhi 2007 [1997]b)

To which Nehru replied: ‘A village, nor-mally speaking, is backward intellectuallyand culturally and no progress can be madefrom a backward environment. … we haveto … encourage the village to approximatemore to the culture of the town’ (Nehru2007 [1997]).

Yet there was one legacy of the civiliza-tional critique of imperialism that nobody,not even Nehru, could reject or evenwanted to discard, and that is India’s adop-tion, on independence, of the principle ofuniversal adult franchise—in short, a foun-dational aspect of Indian democracy. Indianinstitutions and social practices are undemo-cratic in many respects, but India is surelyunique among developing countries andamong her neighbors for having sustaineda tradition of, on-the-whole, free and fairelections for 60 years. Khilnani, it seems tome, is only half right in saying:

Contrary to India’s nationalist myths,enamoured of immemorial ‘villagerepublics’, pre-colonial history little pre-pared it for modern democracy. Nor wasdemocracy a gift of the departing British.Democracy was established after a pro-found historical rupture … [that]incited them to imagine new possibili-ties…. (Khilnani 1998: 17)

Khilnani is right in emphasizing that‘democracy’—giving non-literate peasantsthe rights of citizenship—represented arupture in Indian history but he underesti-mates the role that the ‘nationalist myths’,myths celebrating Indian civilization and anallegedly deep republican tradition, playedin giving Indian leaders the courage thatenabled them to take the historically- unpre-cedented step of making peasants, overnight,into citizens. Thus, he overlooks the fact thatwhat gave Indian leaders the courage to defythe dictum of a John Stuart Mill that ‘there


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could not be any universal franchise withoutany universal adult education’ was theassumption that our ancient civilization haddone the job of literacy and prepared thepeasant for shouldering the burden of citi-zenship. If I may quote frommy book Provin-cializing Europe where I have touched uponthis issue:

In defending the new [Indian] consti-tution and the idea of ‘popular sover-eignty’ before the nation’s ConstituentAssembly on the eve of formal indepen-dence, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, laterto be the first Vice-President of India,argued against the [Western] idea thatIndians as a people were not yet readyto rule themselves. As far as he was con-cerned, Indians, literate or illiterate, werealways suited for self-rule. He said: ‘Wecannot say that the republican traditionis foreign to the genius of this country.We had it from the beginning of ourhistory.’ (Chakrabarty 2007 [2000]: 10)

Radhakrishnan’s statement is an indi-cation of how much the introduction ofdemocracy in a country such as India owedto the labor of those—such as Gandhi orTagore—who adopted the European idea of‘civilization’ and worked it to anti-colonialand democratic ends. It is no wonder thatGandhi kept calling for universal adult fran-chise from as early as 1921. What Khilnanidoes not appreciate enough, it seems to me,is how nationalist myths about the pasts ofIndia helped our nationalist leaders todevelop a faith in the masses. Without thatfaith, right or wrong, there would not havebeen any experiment in mass-democracy inIndia. Indian democracy originated thus ina gesture of civility on the part of the elitetowards the masses.

3.

Today, with a consumerist revolution occur-ring in India, the West having lost all civiliza-tional status with the demise of formalempires, and the rise to political power oflow-caste parties and populations in India,the civilizational/spiritual understanding ofnational life lies much diminished, if not

reduced to a nullity, in significance. My mainpurpose in discussing it was to show how inthe age of imperial—as distinct from super-power—domination, the very word “civiliza-tion”, much debated on all sides as to its truecontent, provided a middle ground on whichboth the colonizer and the colonized couldmeet in a spirit of conversation across thedifferential of power and hierarchy.

The West does not any longer connoteany civilizational superiority. Nor does itact as any kind of middle ground any morein the politics of culture. But the West stillstands for a materially powerful culture,though now shorn of all the messages ofhumanism or liberalism that a Tagore oreven Nehru read into it. And politics ofculture in India today cannot be separatedfrom the presence of media and consumer-ism in Indian public life. So let me illustrate,in drawing to a close, what happens to a con-flict over the West as a sign when the signitself cannot any longer mediate the conflict.

In February every year now, youngIndians celebrate Valentine’s Day. This hasbecome quite a cultural craze in urban India.On 24 January 2009, a bunch ofmen belongingto a self-styled Hindu outfit called the RamSene (Warriors of Rama) physically assaultedyoung women visiting a pub in the town ofMangalore in Karnataka. The state govern-ment, run by the Hindu party BJP, wereinitially soft on the perpetrators of this vio-lence, especially their leader Pramod Mutha-lik, a person with a long past in Hindu-stylepolitics. Muthalik apologized for hittingwomen but not for the attack on pubs andother things he considers inimical to Indianculture. His next program, he announced,was to resist the celebration of Valentine’sDay for it was ‘un-Indian’. He said his groupwould forcibly abduct and marry off anyyoung couple found being romantic inpublic. In a television interview with CNN-IBN, he explained: ‘Why should one declareone’s love only on one particular day of theyear? In India,we loveour partners everyday!’There has been violence by other groupsbefore against the observance of Valentine’sDay. Feminists this time formed an alliancecalled the ‘Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose


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andForwardWomen’whoon5February2009started a campaign of collecting and sendingMuthalik and his men pink chaddis (chaddi isthe Punjabi-Hindi word for underwear) fromall over the country. More than 12,000 chaddiswere collected. The campaign has been verypowerful in the English-language media. TheTimes of India ran an animation. Unfortunately,I cannot reproduce theanimationhere for tech-nical and copyright reasons, but I will discussits contents briefly to help underscore mypoint. The animation showed a talking headof Muthalik being forced into silence by onepink chaddi after another flung on his faceuntil he is completely gagged and cannotmove his lips.

It’s an interesting debate for me towatch, as someone living outside of India,to notice how different the West hasbecome in its connotation. Around theValentine’s Day, there were reports of theamount of money people had spent on con-spicuous consumption. All the big hotelswere booked up, people booked dinnersinvolving payments that were sometimesten times a full professor’s monthly salary.So there were three things coming together:consumerism, the importance of the media,and the question of ‘Westernized’ women,but what was the West? What did it signify?

The West is no longer a question of civi-lization but of certain kind of aggressivepursuit of freedom in consumption and life-style, focused on the freedom of the individ-ual to express him or herself and not beoriented to a community except in seekingprotection in public life from violence andoppression that could be directed towardssuch an expression-seeking individuals. Onthe other side stands a very violent, oppres-sive, and patriarchal construction of ‘tra-dition’, mortally opposed to this figure ofthe individual that it construes the‘Western’ as ‘foreign’ and a threat to ‘tra-dition’ and which therefore subjects theallegedly Westernized women to patriarchaland undemocratic violence.

Indian feminists obviously deployed alot of bantering, in-your-face kind of humorin this animation campaign. Some of thehumor could even be considered queer.

Nor do I question the powerful mobilizationthey achieved in this campaign against abunch of goons. But at the same time, Icannot but notice the complete absence of amiddle ground in this conflict. On the oneside are Muthalik and his men, threateninga Western-style expression of love and sexu-ality with violence, embodying intoleranceand thuggery. On the other side is this ani-mation that also ends with a symbolicgagging of Muthalik as though those fightingfor their right to choice of lifestyle andfreedom also would rather silence oppositionthan engage in any conversation with it. TheWest here is a figure split completelybetween the idea of immoral sexual promis-cuity on the one hand and the right tosexual expression, consumption, choice, andlifestyle on the other. Straddling these div-isions is the emerging rich–poor divide.

4.

Onemay ask: why should we care about civi-lity? Isn’t intolerance the only fitting answerto the intolerance of a Muthalik? Besides,many Indian friends, who have seen Dalitleaders of recent times deliberately use, togreat effect, uncivil language towards theupper caste, ask: isn’t civility an elitistproject? Does it not hide claims to privilege?Well, you only have to visit India to knowthat the classes that suffer the basest formsof incivility are the subaltern classes, notthe wealthy or powerful elites. Besides, Iagree with the old argument of EdwardShils’: institutions of civil society decay ifthere is no civility in public life, no cultureof respect for the lives of others (Shils 1992).

But that is an argument internal to India.Maybe it applies to China too but I don’tknow. The important issue that I wanted toextract from my short history of the workthat the word ‘civilization’ performed forIndian nationalists of a bygone era is this:Indian nationalism as practiced by the likesof Vivekananda, Gandhi, Tagore, or Nehruin the context of British rule was based oncertain debatable but key terms supplied byEurope but shared on both sides. Civilizationwas one such key word. Its meaning was


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unstable; it differed in different hands.Gandhi and Tagore even famously clasheda few times over its meanings. Yet it wasthis sharing of some critical terms thatcreated a room for dialogical maneuverseven within the vice grip of power. Andthat was because in sharing with the colo-nized the two overarching themes of moder-nity—human control over the forces ofnature and human freedom from oppressionby other humans—Europe exhibited enoughcontradictions within herself to provide thecolonized with terms with which to criticizeher doings. In the concrete, these producedthe kinds of friendships, alliances, hybrid-ities, and ambivalences that Ashis Nandy,Leela Gandhi, Homi Bhabha, and othershave written about.

This returns me to the question withwhich I began. As I welcome the prospectof China and India taking their placeamong the dominant nations of the world, Iwonder if they would help create newvisions of humanity and help humansachieve justice and fairness in a worldracked by problems of planetary pro-portions: climate change, food security,global refugees and asylum seekers, failedstates, and terrors of various kinds. Orwould we continue to think of the worldthrough ideas that became global duringthe era of European ascendancy, and thatstill constitute our vision of civility even asIndian and Chinese national elites pursuethe American model of domination througheconomic, military and technological meansand the actual prospect of achieving civilitybetween the powerful and the powerlessrecedes into a horizon that seems increas-ingly distant? For me, it still remains anopen question for I hope that one day theaspiration to move from ‘Made in China’ to‘Created in China’ will relate not only tothings material (such as designs of cars) butto visions of humanity as well. But for thisto happen, critiques of China, India, US andthe West generally will have to issue fromthe some shared ground of thinking. I takethe conversations represented by theseseries of lectures to be working towardscreating this possibility.

Acknowledgement

This is an edited text of a lecture delivered aspart of the West Heavens Project at theShanghai Art Museum in December 2010. Iremain grateful to the organizers of theproject who invited me to present thislecture and to the Shanghai audience whosemany questions and comments I foundmost instructive.

Notes

1. See the discussion in Orwin (1992).2. There is an English version of the essay, see Tagore

(1999a).3. For the Trasncendentalist connection, see Burke

(1998 [1958]: 26).4. The lines occur in a 1923 lecture entitled ‘The Way

to Unity’ and are repeated in a 1934 letter writtento Professor Gilbert Murray, published togetherunder the title ‘East and West’ in The English Writ-ings of Rabindranath Tagore (Tagore 1999b).

References

Burke, Marie Louise (1998 [1958]) Swami Vivekanandain the West: New Discoveries—His PropheticMission, vol. 1, Calcutta: Advaita Ashram.

Bowden, Brett (2009) The Empire of Civilization: theEvolution of an Imperial Idea, Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2007 [2000]) ProvincializingEurope: Postcolonial Thought and HistoricalDifference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress.

Gandhi, Leela (2006) Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and thePolitics of Friendship, Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press.

Gandhi, M. K. (2007 [1997]a) Hind Swaraj and OtherWritings, Anthony J. Parel (ed.), Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Gandhi, M. K. (2007 [1997]b) ‘Letter to Nehru, 5October 1945’. In Anthony ParelJ. (ed.) HindSwaraj and Other Writings, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 150–151.

Khilnani, Sunil (1998) The Idea of India, New York:Farrar, Strauss, Giroux.

Martin, Kingsley (1953) Harold Laski (1893-1950): ABiographical Memoir, New York: Viking.

Nandy, Ashis (1983) The Intimate Enemy: Loss andRecovery of Self under Colonialism, Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press.

Nehru (2007 [1997]) ‘Letter to Gandhi, 9 October1945’. In Anthony ParelJ. (ed.) Hind Swaraj and


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Other Writings, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 152–153.

Orwin,Clifford (1992) ‘Citizenship and civility as com-ponents of liberal democracy’. In Edward C.Banfield (ed.) Civility and Citizenship, St. Paul,MN: Professors of the World Peace Academy,75–94.

Shils, Edward (1992) ‘Civility and civil society’. InEdward C. Banfield (ed.) Civility and Citizenship,St. Paul, MN: Professors of the World PeaceAcademy, 1–15.

Tagore, Rabindranath (1961) ‘The crisis of civilization’‘sabhyatar shankat’. In The Collected Works ofRabindranath (Rabindrarachanabali), vol. 13,Centenary Edition, Calcutta: Government ofWest Bengal, 407.

Tagore, Rabindranath (1968) ‘Change of times’‘Kalantar’. In The Collected Works of Rabindranath:Change of times (Rabindrarachanabali: Kalantar),Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 214–215.

Tagore, Rabindranath (1999a) ‘Crisis in civilization’.In Sisir Kumar Das (ed.) The English Writings ofRabindranath Tagore, vol. 3, Delhi: SahityaAkademi, 724–726.

Tagore, Rabindranath (1999b) ‘East andWest’. In SisirKumar Das (ed.) The English Writings ofRabindranath Tagore, vol. 3, Delhi: SahityaAkademi, 349, 462.

Vivekananda (1995a) ‘Letter to Alasinga Perumal, 6May 1895’. In The Complete Works of SwamiVivekananda, vol. 5, Mayavati Memorial Edition,Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 79–80.

Vivekananda (1995b) ‘Letter to Alasinga Perumal, 20August 1893’. In The Complete Works of SwamiVivekananda, vol. 5, Mayavati Memorial Edition,Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 18–20.

Author’s biography

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Dis-tinguished Service Professor of History and SouthAsian Languages and Civilizations at the Universityof Chicago where he is a Faculty Fellow of theChicago Center for Contemporary Theory and has acourtesy appointment with The University ofChicago Law School. He has held visiting appoint-ments at many different universities and institutesand currently holds a Professorial Fellowship withthe Research School of Humanities of the AustralianNational University. He is a member of the foundingeditorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a foundingeditor of Postcolonial Studies, and a co-editor of CriticalInquiry. Among his publications are ProvincializingEurope: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference(2000, 2007) and Habitations of Modernity: Essays inthe Wake of Subaltern Studies (2002). Chakrabarty is aFellow of the American Academy of Arts andSciences and an Honorary Fellow of the AustralianAcademy of the Humanities.

Contact address: 1130 East 59th St., Chicago, Il 60637,USA.


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chakrabarty civilizacion a globalizacion

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