Subaltern Studies: Vol. 9.

• Author: Kopf, David
• Position: Review

Edited by AMIN SHAHID and DIPESH CHAKRABARTY. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. 284. $29.95.

This volume, far more than any previous one, explores the varieties of dominance by means of which one group exploits another in the British and more recent Indian historical context. So overwhelming is the evidence in each of the studies that dominance existed in so many different situations among all categories and groupings, that it could be argued that power is the primary human need, even though it is often disguised in the rhetoric of political idealism or humanitarianism. This position is underscored by the godfather of the subalternists, Ranajit Guha, who in the first article writes:

The colonial rulers are said to have won the minds of the natives everywhere by helping them to improve their bodies. This is a commonplace of imperialist discourse meant to elevate European expansion to the level of a global altruism. The control of disease by medicine and the sustenance of health by hygiene were, according to it, the two great achievements of a moral campaign initiated by the colonizers entirely for the benefit of the colonized. But morality was also a measure of the benefactor's superiority, and these achievements were flaunted as the triumph of science and culture. It was a triumph of Western civilization symbolized for the simple-minded peoples of Asia, Africa and Australia touchingly by soap. (p. 40)

In the first study, "Writing, Orality and Power in the Dands, Western India, 1800s-1920s," Ajay Skaria examines the manner in which writing was perceived by non-literate peasants and tribals and how it was utilized by the colonist overlord. One common view is that the British asserted their power through the written word because "natives" perceived it as being magical. Utilizing his data on the tribals who have inhabited the heavily forested tract known as the Dangs in western India, Skaria has this to say about the impact of writing under the British:

There was an ideology surrounding the written word that valorized it far above the oral in administrative practices. This could be called the rhetoric of fixity, or the notion that meanings, once inscribed in writing, were more stable and less arbitrary than those embodied in oral traditions or pre-colonial forms of writing. From this perspective, the inscription of colonial laws, for example, substituted a regular and ordered world for a personal, tyrannical, and arbitrary one. (p...