The Bhasa of History—an essay for Dipesh Chakrabarty

ABSTRACT What value does a leading historian of modern South Asia ascribe to bhasa literature? Meant as an introduction to a volume of papers dedicated to Dipesh Chakrabarty, this essay proposes to read through some of his work and draw out a couple of general responses to this central question. The first one concerns Chakrabarty’s larger philosophical engagement with the condition of colonial modernity in India. In his treatment, bhasa literary corpus is a site of difference as well as belonging. He searches for the difference that marks Indian experience of colonial modernity in the literary. The value of bhasa, in this instance, lies in its ability to provide a ground for resistance to the uniform march of enlightenment and capitalist modernity. And, bhasa enables an awareness of historical difference precisely because it provides a sense of belonging. This sense of belongingness is closely tied to a place, a particular location as well as to a sense of everyday intimacy. As the hybrid site of difference as well as belonging, bhasa is then the constitutive cradle of what Chakrabarty calls ‘History 2s’. The second one concerns Chakrabarty’s more specific analysis of the evolution of history as an academic discipline in modern India. He delineates a sharp devaluation in the political worth of the literary that the rise of rational-scientific history writing brought about in the middle decades of the twentieth-century. As he studies the intellectual careers of particular historians, part of his intent is to elaborate on this process of devaluation. The essay situates this reading of Chakrabarty in a larger discursive context. It briefly looks at the work of some other scholars of modern South Asia who share these intellectual concerns, and seeks to create, as it were, a dialogue between Chakrabarty and others. The essay concludes by briefly introducing the papers in the volume. In different ways, they extend Chakrabarty’s preoccupation with the relationship between history and literature, and with the subject of modernity in India at large.