The STIAS Series. Stellenbosch, South Africa: Sun Press [an imprint of African Sun Media], 2017. x, 180 pp. [6] pp. of plates. (B&W photos.) US$19.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-920689-99-5.
Premised on the notion that there is a dearth of conceptual clarity regarding modernism and modernity in South Asia (where both of these terms are frequently discussed within the framework of modernization), this book by Saurabh Dube seeks to offer a careful yet stimulating analysis of the formation(s) of the modern. For this reason, the text opens by acknowledging that the issues taken up necessitate “not only critical articulation, but also careful affirmation” (17) of the subjects of modernity. If this theoretical impulse has the book persistently engaged in a dialogue with other books and thinkers, this is not to imply that the book is consequently rendered bereft of an empirically grounded discussion. Instead, Dube not only draws freely from his own academic trajectory as well as ethnographic material to illustrate his conceptualization of modernity, he also extends further afield to encompass the genealogies of the modern in Europe, the Americas, and South Asia. Alongside these aspects, one finds the text peppered throughout with helpful reminders to the reader that modernity is not so much a chronological descriptor as it is a qualitative category. Unlike a conventional monograph, therefore, the arrangement of the chapters in this book does not assume a sequential reading, as underscored by a quick perusal of the chapter titles: “Subjects of Modernity,” “Intimations of Modernity,” “Maps of Modernity,” “Disciplines of Modernity,” “Margins of Modernity,” and “Modern Subjects.”
That Dube takes a nuanced position in his critique of modernity, even as he is sensitive to the concerns raised by scholars of the postcolonial, is reflected in his hesitation to make brash, nihilistic dismissals of it. For instance, based on his assessment of their postcolonial experiences, he demonstrates how both India and Latin America bring to the fore an interrogation of the “facile polarities between prolific modernisms and deficient modernization” (74). This checkered and contested nature of the histories of modernity is poignantly addressed in a subsequent discussion on the entwining of two distinct impulses in the nation-state: “cultural pluralisation” on the one hand, and an “aggressive fundamentalization of existing identities” on the other (132). A concern which guided the academic pursuits of the subaltern studies collective was then to explore and analyze the failure of the nation to assume its place among its own people. He calls out the coeval presence of such ambiguities, and yet characterizes it not as a disabling but as a productive phenomenon. This same coeval character of being thoroughly modern, even while expressing a profound ambivalence toward modernity can be observed in the politics of the Hindu nationalist right:
Within Hindu nationalism, the fetish of the modern state stands closely connected to such ambivalence, at once animating and utilizing ideological control and disciplinary strategies. The assertion of the difference and purity of Hindu civilization and the salience of a strong and powerful modern nation go hand in hand. (72)
In so doing, Dube’s work helps disabuse oneself of the dominant models that variously encode modernity as a splitting of the past from the present, as a developmental surpassing of the past, or as the preserve of an exclusive West that narrates the contours of universal history. Indeed, he makes it a point to note the theoretical deficiency involved in reading the modern subject and the subject of modernity in conflation. What he attempts to demonstrate, rather, are the different ways of being modern that are not necessarily bounded by the articulation of the Western modern subject. An additional advantage of this approach is that it opens up the discussion of modernity to a reflection on the imbrications of space and time in the formation(s) of the modern. Between the two of them, he suggests, anthropology and history illustrate the epistemic violence that informs the pervasive but nevertheless hegemonic constructions of time and space that were expressed in totalizing categories: Western and non-Western worlds, spaces of enchantment and spaces of rationality, the metropolis and the colony. However, any endeavours at tracing the subsequent reconfigurations within both disciplines towards the latter half of the twentieth century, he demonstrates, need to be considered with due diligence so that one remains attentive to the unstated, uncritical assumptions that inform the discipline.
In its schematic survey of the contingencies and coeval temporalities of modernity, Dube has produced an intriguing work that attests to the resourcefulness of a reading of the modernist experience that does not fall back upon binary constructions. A key contribution of this book is that it not only argues against the construction of non-Western orientation to time as somehow in regression to the Western orientation to time, it also destabilizes prevalent images of traditional spaces that are merely waiting to be subsumed into modern history. Similarly, when Dube notes that despite the fact that modernity is premised on the idea of a rupture with the enchanted world, the processes of modernity create their own enchantments, he is providing the reader with the tools to reconfigure and debate the nature of modernity.
Subjects of Modernity will be of immense value to scholars and readers interested in the themes of encounters with modernity, subaltern studies, historical anthropology, temporality and spatiality, and theoretical approaches to South Asia. Finally, the impassioned yet nuanced treatment of modernity and its subjects in this book means that it can also serve as an introductory text for those wishing to better acquaint themselves on this theme.
Vanlal Hmangaiha
Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, New Delhi, India