Voicing the subaltern became a major theoretical proposition ever since Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak invoked it in a big way. The vernacular writings, or what Michael Foucault termed ‘local knowledges’, more or less represent the voice and culture of the subalterns. And of course, most such registers are the outcome of unique social contexts.
One such social process that helped to define and conserve the cultures of many a rural population of colonial India is conversion, an area that continues to be controversial. Saurabh Dube’s After Conversion: Cultural Histories of Modern India probes the issues of conversion by analysing the colonial writings of a vernacular Christianity and the trajectory of the transformations of caste and sect in South Asia.
At the outset, Dube warns against pre-conceptualisation of knowledge and the dangers of foregrounding and foreclosing wider theoretical issues with distinct emphases and definite boundaries. He also attempts to redefine the centrality of the West or Europe within the discourse.
The precise process of translation, embodied in the writings of a vernacular Christianity, was central to the complete elaboration of colonial cultures.
It also registered the everyday life of colonial power and evangelical authority — and of course the ambivalent distinctions between evangelisation and the empire,
according to Dube.
Conversion is better understood as a historical process, rather than as a one-time, singular change of faith, Dube holds, while examining the various conversion-related issues that haunt India even today.
In a bid to mark the making and unmaking of religious forms and ritual practices, the author brings to the narrative the customs and conventions of two popular sects — Satnampanth of Chhattisgarh and Mahima Dharma of Orissa — both of which denounced the traditional Hindu idols and deities, and also rejected most of the caste hierarchies and inequalities to a great extent. These specimens, in fact, challenge the very notion of continuity implied within the systems of sect and caste.
There are two pen portraits — one of the author’s father Shyama Charan Dube, a pioneering anthropologist, and another of artist Savindra (Savi) Sawarkar whose work marked an iconography of a radical art and a Dalit imagination — that serve to address the key concerns regarding the ethnographic evolution of anthropology and Dalit aesthetics.
S C Dube, who was primarily lured by the folklore of Chhattisgarh, went on to undertake studies on tribal sects and villages in different parts of the country. His work was marked by the interplay between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular. He held that primitive cultures were not static but dynamic and always focused on the historical and sociological factors that influenced and transformed the tribal and ethnic communities.
Savi’s works represented a profound challenge to the established norms of art, while probing the correlation between meaning and power and domination and subordination, within the regimes of caste and also within cultures of untouchability.
Later on, Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his dialogue with the author, stresses the inadequacy but also the indispensability of European thought in the discourse on modernity.
Chakrabarty also analyses Martin Heidegger’s preferred human prototype which he referred to as ‘Being-there’ or ‘Being-in-the-world’ and Edmund Husserl’s concept of ‘life-world’ both of which highlight an individual’s encapsulation within a sphere of reality and experience.
Dube’s text is a prestigious addition to the great body of literature on post-colonial modernity. His hermeneutic analysis of a set of expressions of an ethnically and culturally diverse empire writing back to the centre effectively captures the conflicts of a state and society in transition. And such critical narratives essentially lead to elaborations of wider theoretical issues.
— The author is a journalist and critic based in Mangalore.
zeitgeistuk@gmail.com