Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles - Hardcover

Dube, Saurabh

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822333252 ISBN 13: 9780822333258

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Destined to become a key work of subaltern studies and a crucial intervention in postcolonial scholarship, Stitches on Time probes the relationships between empire and modernity, nation and history, the colonial and the postcolonial, and power and difference. Saurabh Dube combines history and anthropology to provide critical understandings of the theory and practice of historical ethnography and contemporary historiography. Drawing on extensive archival research and innovative fieldwork as well as political economy and social theory-including considerations of gender-he unpacks the implications of specific Indian pasts from the middle of the nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century.

Dube provides incisive accounts of the interactions between North American evangelical missionaries and Christian converts of central India, and between colonial legal systems and Indian popular laws. He reflects on the difficulties of history writing by considering the production and reception of recent Hindu nationalist histories. Assessing the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective, he offers substantial critical readings of major writings by Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, and others. Dube develops the concept and practice of a “history without warranty” as a means of rigorously rethinking categories such as modernity, colonialism, the West, the postcolonial, and the nation.

About this title

About the Author

Saurabh Dube is Professor of History in the Center for Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de MÉxico in Mexico City. His books include Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community.

From the Back Cover

"Saurabh Dube's book will make a signal contribution to the political and theoretical legacy of South Asian subaltern studies. Based at the Colegio de Mexico and in conversation with scholars and intellectuals based in Latin America, Dube has written a book that will enhance the dialogue between Latin American critical social thought and subaltern studies already underway. Historically grounded and theoretically sophisticated, "Stitches on Time "conveys the feeling of a new gaze in the tradition of subaltern studies, an awareness of a daily life out of place in relation to the subject of scholarly pursuit."--Walter D. Mignolo, Duke University

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Stitches on Time

Colonial Textures and Postcolonial TanglesBy Saurabh Dube

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2004 Saurabh Dube
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822333258

Chapter One

Traveling Light

An immaculate conception of the epiphany of travel spells the end of memory. Yet memory strikes back-as empires have done, again and again-to be reunited with travel through a surplus of longing. Consider the following interchange: "Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better in his travels. 'I should think not,' he said. 'He took himself along with him.'"

Overture

The light and baggage discussed in this chapter belong to the civilizing mission of God and the enlightened modernity of the Savior. Several years ago, Bernard Cohn invoked the image of "missionaries in the rowboat" to remind us of some of the ways in which memory, forgetting, and travel are bound to each other through excesses of longing. In the passage that follows, the anthropologist-historian is primarily questioning a model of anthropology as an a historical practice, but the metaphorical charge, critical force, and current implications of his writing extend rather wider. He writes that

the missionary, the trader, the labor recruiter or the government official arrives with the bible, the mumu, tobacco, steel axes or other items of Western domination on an island whose society and culture are rocking along in the never never land of structural-functionalism [tradition], and with the onslaught of the new, the social structure, values and lifeways of the "happy" natives crumble. The anthropologist follows in the wake of the impacts caused by Western agents of change, and then tries to recover what might have been. The anthropologist searches for the elders with the richest memories of days gone by, assiduously records their ethnographic texts.... The people of anthropologyland, like all God's Children got shoes, got structure.

In tune with this testimony, my discussion of the worlds shaped by missionary travels questions the privilege accorded to Western origins of change-and queries the primacy given to Euro-American agents of transformation-in non-Western arenas. Indeed, by emphasizing the contradictory location of the mission project in the creation of colonial cultures of rule, I also seek to think through the imaginings of a singular West that simultaneously underwrite Eurocentric celebrations of a triumphant modernity and undergird nativist laments for ravaged traditions. The dialectic of enlightenment and empire negotiated enduring bonds between colonial power and evangelical knowledge, but the reworking of Western truths through vernacular apprehensions accompanied and interrogated such key complicities.

Second, in keeping with the tenor of Stitches on Time, this chapter traces quotidian cartographies defining spaces in time and places in history on the margins of the West. My reference is to mappings that probe the bloated typologies and immense reifications underlying authoritative imaginings of the metropole and the colony. The master languages of reason and race contracted lasting links between civilization and the Savior, but the recasting of European idioms through vernacular translations attended and subverted such close connections.

Finally, elaborating and extending the critical spirit of Bernard Cohn and carrying forward the combative concerns of other scholars, this chapter seeks to consider particular connections between the past and the present. I have in mind here possible complicities between the travels of many missionaries (and similar mandarins) and the journeys of certain anthropologists (and other academics). This last move rests on a retreat to Heidelberg, a journey to Germany that has to await the end of the chapter.

In the Shadow of the Cross

J. W. Shank was a pioneer Mennonite missionary who traveled from North America to northern Argentina in the early twentieth century. He was a participant-as witting apprentice and hapless journeyman-in the ceaseless trek of a traveling West. Here is what he wrote on the missionary as a civilizing agent in the Christian Monitor: "He opposes slavery, polygamy, cannibalism, and infanticide. He teaches the boys to be honest, sober, and thrifty; the girls to be pure, intelligent, and industrious. He induces the natives to cover their nakedness, to build houses.... It is hard to overthrow the long established heathenism, but slowly it yields to the new power and the beginning of civilized society gradually appears. In every country where mission work has been done we find that the first lasting changes for a higher social order began through missionary effort."

The order of immanence and the design of transcendence that shore up this statement are both matters of temporality. This should not be surprising. At least since the Enlightenment, renderings of a universal history cast in the image of an exclusive Western civilization have rested on a critical opposition between sacral (enchanted) societies rooted in myth and ritual on one hand and dynamic (modern) orders grounded in history and reason on the other. Here the many modes of colonial domination-a plethora of ideologies and hegemonies and varieties of epistemic and physical violence-are premised on a temporal privilege, a franchise for the future accorded to Western arts of civilization by the blueprint(s) of a universal history.

The idea that modern journeys shaped by such schemes simply forget the past and the present-or the place and the point-of their departure is disabling fiction. Actually, these trails lead us toward the immense monumentalization of a spectacular memory. A singular mapping of modern Western civilization plots the past and future of other peoples. Such cartographies reveal that beyond the self is more than the other, with the imaginary lines instead unraveling hierarchies of otherness. There is just one road to true modernity, but different peoples have reached its distinct milestones. Furthermore, these varieties of otherness share a similar logic with the severalty of Western selves. The fantasy of the absorption of the other through the rigors of travel is a ruse (and more) for discovering an ever enchanted past of the self-erased from contemporary memory through the disenchantment of the Western world-in the timeless presence of the primitive/native. Therefore, there can be striking symmetry between the evangelical persuasion of those who would convert Hindu heathens to Christianity in the last century and the sa(l)vage mind of those who today fetishize and freeze tradition to prevent the loss of a timeless primitive/native.

In discussing the light and the baggage of the civilizing mission of God and the enlightened modernity of the Savior, I focus here on evangelical enmeshments in central India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The point is simple. If we wish to rethink dominant metageographies-"the set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world"-as a necessary condition of reconceptualizing colonial cultures and postcolonial pasts, we could do worse than think through the perspectives drawn from the margins. The patterns of evangelical entanglements in the dim and dusty land of Chhattisgarh are no less important than the designs of dominance in the smart and spruce sites of London or Delhi for exploring the widest questions of meaning and power. It follows, too, that margins can invoke other mappings of the world. A story of the hegemonic worlds created by imperious journeys that excludes subordinate knowledges of subject peoples from within its folds runs the risk of reifying the place and power of Western institutions and imaginings-ever incomplete, always questioned, and already displaced in other realms-that it sets out to interrogate. These leitmotifs of margins run through the different movements of this piece.

Musical metaphors apart, this chapter and the one that follows combine critical theoretical concerns of recent explorations of evangelization and empire and crucial aspects of the ethnographic and historical record of Christianity in colonial Chhattisgarh in order to foreground important issues in the study of evangelical encounters. In central India, these entanglements were located at a critical intersection of meaning and power involving two simultaneous and overlapping processes: on one hand, the contradictory engagements of the mission project with colonial cultures of rule; and on the other the complex interleaving of Protestant theology, evangelical beliefs, and practices of missionaries with principles of caste-sect and dynamics of village life in the creation of a vernacular Christianity. The missionaries, indigenous catechists, native congregations, and local populations were protagonists and players in dramas of divergent perceptions, actors and agents in theaters of contending practices.

This chapter and the next tell parts of this story. These tales concern the worlds fashioned by missionary travels and the reworking of these realms in quotidian arenas. Yet what I recall here are not merely disparate accounts chosen at random from the diverse stories on over in a larger historical and ethnographic record. The fabric of the shared past of evangelical entanglements was woven from the interlacing of various threads, different designs, and many motifs-stitches on time made by evangelical missionaries and Indian converts. My task is to unravel the weave of these threads in order to present something of the tattered texture of empire.

There is another critical agenda here. Just as the separation between enchanted spaces and modern places exercises its seductions in the here and now, long ago it set the agendas for the modern history and contemporary anthropology of South Asia. Indeed, according to a salient suggestion a classic division of academic labor has separated the historical study of colonial rule in South Asia from the anthropological analyses of indigenous society on the subcontinent. Stitches on Time joins other critical exercises in the field to subvert the profoundly ideological division between the discrete desires of anthropology and the distinct longings of history while regarding the colonizers and the colonized and the metropole and the margins as part of a mutual terrain, interspersing modernity and empire.

A Journey

Theirs was but a short stay in Nagpur, the capital of the newly created Central Provinces of the British Indian empire, and now a few acquaintances had gathered to bid them farewell. In the summer of 1868, on the morning of an oppressively hot day, with a small membership of the Free Church of Scotland in attendance, Rev. Oscar Lohr and his wife, deep in thought and prayer, arranged their three young children and carefully packed their belongings in specially rigged bullock carts. For the first missionary of the German Evangelical Mission Society, pursuing a path laid by Providence, this was the last leg of a long journey that had begun in Elizabeth, New Jersey (and even earlier in Laehn, Silesia). Oscar Lohr stood before the trail that stretched onward to Raipur, the administrative center of the Chhattisgarh region, and then beyond into the remote wilds of middle India. Would a guiding hand lead the missionary and his family to the heart of Chhattisgarh among the people he had come to serve?

Lohr could barely have known about the lasting effects of this arduous journey, carried out in three bullock carts across the "wilderness" of the central Indian plains (according to the missionary, a wilderness that was made up of relentless heat and overwhelming dust, an abundance of dangerous animals in the forests, and the lack of elementary civilization among the inhabitants). Of course, Lohr knew that he was a "pioneer." The structure of feelings and the forms of evocation that underlay this recognition were shaped by wider understandings of the ongoing colonization of the American West. More specifically, and rather closer to hand, much of Lohr's perception of being a pioneer derived from the express desire of the German Evangelical Mission Society that its first missionary carry out evangelical work among an Indian people who were yet to hear the Word.

Yet the representations of the rigors of a remarkable journey emerged equally plotted onto-indeed, ceaselessly gathered unto and compulsively overlaid by-a grander, more masterly narrative. With the metaphorical figure of the pioneer exercising its many enchantments, Lohr's first-time travel to Chhattisgarh came to articulate tales of missionary vicissitudes in central India, cast much in the manner of similar stories from the Americas and Africa and orchestrated by the New Testament's account(s) of the struggles of the apostles. Were not the carts in which the family Lohr traveled mere "two wheeled conveyances, without springs or seats," with a thick layer of straw providing the sole cushioning and a top fashioned from bamboo matting the only cover? Did not dreadfully slow beasts of burden-"bullocks capable of travelling at the most about four miles an hour"-pull these carts? Did not the Lohrs have to do their traveling by night, protected from panthers (and bandits, too) by a posse of policemen provided by a friendly British official, spending the day in government rest houses, which sheltered them from the sun and hot winds? Even so, could the Lohr family escape a horrid skin irritation that broke out in boils, "a condition caused both by the heat and the all-pervading dust which in the dry season is often a foot deep on country roads"? Indeed, in a contemporary oral testimony rendered by an Indian luminary of the Mennonite church, the rigors of Lohr's pioneering journey encapsulate the founding of Christianity in central India. Unsurprisingly, at its end the account proclaimed that Lohr was an "Apostle to the down-trodden of Chhattisgarh."

Early Encounters

In the summer of 1868, Rev. Oscar Lohr of the German Evangelical Mission Society initiated mission work in Chhattisgarh, drawn to the region by the Satnamis. Lohr's preliminary inquiries had revealed that the Satnamis were heathens with a difference. They were a monotheistic group whose "creed" was opposed to idolatry and caste. To the missionary, this was a providential connection willed by the Lord. Would it be long before the deliverance of the flock once it witnessed the Savior? Yet the Satnamis did not accept the arrival of the millennium. Declining its destiny, the community proved to be elusive for projects of conversion to Christianity.

The missionaries continued to till the field and to sow the seeds of faith. The halting enterprise of conversion gradually grew through ties of kinship and the prospects of a better life under the paternalist economy of mission stations. Over the next few decades, the missionary enterprise in the region expanded. Missionaries of other denominations-the American and General Conference Mennonites, the Disciples of Christ, the Methodists, and the Pentecostal Bands of the World-joined members of the German Evangelical Mission Society, and there were attempts to work with other communities. The converts continued to perceive missionary injunctions and interpret Christian truths through the filters of vernacular cultures. The "harvest" was never bountiful. The harvest was rather curious. The missionaries tended. The missionaries reaped. If they made headway, they also had to retrace their steps.

In recent years, we have had forceful reminders that Western man did not always command the initiative in processes of cultural encounter. In 1868, Oscar Lohr visited the Satnami guru at his home in Bhandar during the community's "annual festival." The missionary described in detail how he was seated next to the guru and served "refreshments." He made the triumphant revelation to a "great mass" of Satnamis that the real satyanam (true name) was Jesus Christ. Elated by the warm welcome, Lohr ventured inadvertently into the realm of ethnographic representations and the pursuit of indigenous meanings, stating that the Satnamis had stroked his beard to show him great honor and affection in their "traditional way."

Missionary hyperbole went on to order the event as one of monumental "historical significance." But was the stroking of Lohr's flowing beard the enactment of a timeless, mysterious, and customary ritual or was it merely a display of Satnami curiosity? Was the serving of refreshments to the missionary by the guru an expression of deference to a saheb (white master)? Alternatively, did this extension of hospitality follow a different logic, signifying "the moral and conceptual subordination of the guest to the host?" To the hundreds of Satnamis gathered in Bhandar, had Lohr's visit on the day of guru puja (worship of guru) unwittingly signified his acceptance of a subordinate role within the domain of the guru's authority? Three months later, the missionary unknowingly challenged a key principle of faith-the wearing of the sacred thread-within Satnampanth. The curiosity of the Satnamis did not lead to their conversion to Christianity, and hostility now replaced hospitality. The millenarian hopes of Lohr lay in ruins. The Satnamis became wary of the missionary enterprise.

Continues...

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822333252
• ISBN 13: 9780822333258
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 277