a blog by Peter Leonard
Notes transcribed in real time, please excuse any errors or misunderstandings.
The plenary speaker on the last day of the Malmö Book Life conference was Dipesh Chakrabarty, a professor of history at my alma mater. He was interested in taking one of the themes of the conference - the Public Sphere - to India, and seeing what happens to the concept in the process.
He began by noting that Habermas conceived of the Public Sphere as a category of bourgeois society, not necessarily found in real life but rather approximated by several institutions. Not every modern nation mints replicas of Habermas' European bourgeoise, but, according to Chakrabarty, none have escaped the ghosts of this category. The ghost of the public sphere haunts us, and one form in which it does so is the study of History. This discipline has the principles Public Sphere inscribed upon it: documents must be verified, open, public, and accessible. This point is derived from the principle of reasoned debate: one needs open access to information, and must expose sources to a hypothetical other's reasonable examination and criticism. Thus the study of History carries the Telos of the Public Sphere within it.
The study of history is dependent on several kinds of processes, and one of these is the system by which private or official documents become public records. There are two abstracting principles which function here:
1) Reification: The State as abstracting force. The State procures documents, and transforms them into national texts, historical texts which are preserved as the memory of the government. It creates a special repository, the Archive, which is not a living memory, but rather a Place. This exterior embodiment symbolizes the reified condition o the documents themselves.
2) Commodification: The Market as abstracting force. Individual or institutional collectors purchase documents -- for example when churches sold large amounts of ecclesiastical records to universities, forming the basis of several important academic libraries.
Old documents acquire their value through these two processes of abstraction, Reification and Commodification. And through these processes, the Archive hides the history of its own production.
As Chakrabarty interprets Habermas, the Public Sphere (or Civil Society) is both an idea and an ideology: that one must be open to another's reasoned skepticism of one's own position, based on shared and mutually-available information.
The English term "research" was translated into Indian languages around 1910 -- but the idea of history was already in India, despite extremely difficult conditions for researchers. In examining the early practice of History in India, Chakrabarty discovers a malfunctioning public sphere, where historians came up against a society and government totally without the sources upon which historical inquiry can be based.
He examines the story of two Indian historians, Sarkar (1870-1958) and Sardesai, who worked together and against each other in a kind of "Coöp-tition" to piece together the history of areas of India prior to British rule. The conditions that Sarkar and Sardesai found were inamicable to the practice of history because neither the State nor the Market was functioning correctly in abstracting documents into the public sphere. Bureaucrats in princely states kept their official offices as part of their own homes, which led to a private ownership of the state documents and papers when the functionary died or retired. Petty kingdoms jealously guarded their own records, refusing to send them to national archives for preservation and indexing. Without public access to information, historical practice modeled on western tradition could not proceed. Sarkar and Sardesai went on private record-hunting expeditions, relying on their own mutually-complimentary command of Indian and Persian languages, but taking extreme care to hide the real purpose of their antiquarian scavenging, lest the families of bureaucrats or other collectors catch on and raise their asking prices for historical sources.
Even after the documents of the Raj were opened up in Great Britain in 1914, as part of the Crown takeover of the Royal East India Company, the domestic government in India refused to do the same thing. The country that both sets of records treated might be the same, but the Public was different -- the Public Sphere was not presumed to exist in India. Contemporary researchers are accustomed to the practice of states sealing archives for set amounts of time -- 30 years, 50 years -- in order to preserve official secrets and prevent the study of history from influencing contemporary events. We might call this delay period "chronophage," an eating-up of time by the State. But in India, social relations ate up even the possibility of creating such an eventual archive.