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In the light of Chakrabarty's study, Naipaul's work begins to fall into place. Here is a writer who seems to have subscribed quite deeply to the sort of historicism that Chakrabarty describes. From the middle period onwards, in books such as The Mimic Men, A Bend in the River and In a Free State, Naipaul gives us a vision - unforgettable, eloquent - of the Caribbean and especially Africa as history's waiting-room. Modernity here is ramshackle, self-dismantling: it exists somewhere between the corrugated iron roof and the distant military coup, the newly deposed general. The 'not yet' with which Forster's narrator indefinitely deferred, in A Passage to India, the possibility of a lasting friendship between Fielding and Aziz are also the words that describe Naipaul's modern Africa. The opening sentence of A Bend in the River (which so exasperated Chinua Achebe) - 'The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it' - owes its tone less to religious pronouncements than to a belief in what Benjamin called 'the march of progress' in the 'homogeneous, empty time of history'. Naipaul's theology stems not so much from Hinduism, or the brahminical background he's renowned for, as from Mill. It was Mill, as Chakrabarty points out, who consigned certain nations to a purgatory, in which, in different concentric circles, they've been waiting or 'developing' ever since. In fiction, the greatest explorers of this Millian terrain have been Naipaul and Naipaul's master, Conrad.

Chakrabarty's study also helps to clarify the ways in which we discuss and think of the 'high' cultures of the so-called developing countries: not only the ancient traditions, but the modern and Modernist ones as well. This is an area of self-consciousness, and a field of inquiry, that is potentially vast, important and problematic; it also happens to be one that 'cultural studies' has largely missed out on, being more concerned with popular culture and narratives of resistance to empire. Yet for almost two hundred years, in countries like India, there has been a self-consciousness (and it still exists today) which asks to be judged and understood by 'universal' standards. It isn't possible to begin to discuss that self-consciousness, or sense of identity, without discussing in what way that universalism both formed and circumscribed it.

In some regards, then, cultural studies is hostage to the kind of historicism that Chakrabarty talks about: it can't deal with the emergence of high Modernism in postcolonial countries except with a degree of suspicion and embarrassment, partly because of the elite contexts of that Modernism, but partly, surely, for covertly historicist reasons, such as a belief that no Modernism outside Europe can be absolutely genuine. Take the Bengal, or Indian, Renaissance: the emergence of humanism and modernity in 19th-century Calcutta. The term 'renaissance' was probably first applied to this development by the eminent Brahmo Shibnath Shastri; it was later employed by historians such as Susobhan Sarkar. Marxist and, later, subalternist historians have with some justification raised their eyebrows at the term. They have tried to dismiss it as intellectually meaningless, mainly because they see it as an elite construct, an upper-middle-class invention that raises too many questions, and which, while identifying too closely with British ideas of 'progress', was also an instrument of vague but voluble nationalist blarney. All this is true. But it ignores the fact that a construct can be a crucial constituent of an intellectual tradition. The European Renaissance is a case in point: we now know that it is largely a 19th-century invention, but that doesn't reduce the role it has played in the drama of European intellectual and cultural history - it only problematises it.

The opening of Susobhan Sarkar's Notes on the Bengal Renaissance, which first came out as a booklet in 1946, makes clear the unease that historians felt on first using the term:


The impact of British rule, bourgeois economy and modern Western culture was felt first in Bengal and produced an awakening known usually as the Bengal Renaissance. For about a century, Bengal's conscious awareness of the changing modern world was more developed than and ahead of that of the rest of India. The role played by Bengal in the modern awakening of India is thus comparable to the position occupied by Italy in the story of the European Renaissance.

 

Whether these claims are true or not is open to debate; but they're disabled by their uncritical investment in the idea of Europe as the source, paradigm and catalyst of progress and history, both in an earlier and in the colonial age. The habit, in the context of Indian culture, of not only invoking Europe but making it the starting point of all discussion, was inculcated by 19th-century Orientalists: the translator and scholar William Jones called Kalidasa, the greatest Indian poet and dramatist of antiquity, the 'Shakespeare of the East'. To do this, Jones had to reverse history - Kalidasa preceded Shakespeare by more than a thousand years. Jones is not so much making a useful (and supremely approbatory) comparison as telling us inadvertently that it's impossible to escape 'homogeneous, empty time': that as far as Kalidasa is concerned Shakespeare has already happened. This language persisted in the subsequent naming of periods in culture, and of cultural figures; and educated Bengalis followed the example of the Orientalist scholars. Thus Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, India's first major novelist, became the 'Walter Scott of Bengal'. Both Scott and Chatterjee wrote historical novels, but when the comparison was first made, on the publication of Chatterjee's first novel, Chatterjee claimed he'd never read Scott. Even if he had, to call him the 'Walter Scott of Bengal' is subtly different from, say, Barthes remarking, 'Gide was another Montaigne,' where a continuity is being established, a lineage being traced. In the phrase that describes Chatterjee, however, an inescapable historicism refuses a literary continuity, and turns Chatterjee into an echo. Walter Scott in Bengal is Walter Scott in the waiting-room.

The 'first in Europe, then elsewhere' paradigm that Chakrabarty speaks of - what is now the developmental paradigm - is what made the process of modernisation in non-Western countries seem to many, European and non-European, like mimicry. 'We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World,' Naipaul's narrator, Ralph Singh, says in The Mimic Men; Chakrabarty's friend, the exuberantly impenetrable Homi Bhabha, has an essay on mimicry and colonialism, 'Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse', that has long been part of every postcolonial primer. In it he tries, using Lacan and referring in passing to Naipaul's great, intractable novel, to complicate and even rescue the idea of mimicry, to make it subversive: mimicry undermines the coloniser's gaze by presenting him with a distorted reflection, rather than a confirmation, of himself. Some of the essay's formulations about mimicry - 'almost the same but not quite'; 'almost the same but not white' - are close enough to the kinds of problem Chakrabarty addresses. Once again, though, as with Said, I think Chakrabarty's work gives us a richer, more penetrating language to deal with modernity and the colonial encounter. There's a barely concealed utopian rage in Bhabha against the compulsion towards mimicry, and also an unspoken nostalgia for a world in which mimicry isn't necessary. For Chakrabarty, 'Europe' is a notion that has many guises, and these guises have both liberated us and limited us, whichever race we belong to. There is, therefore, a valuable element of self-criticism in his study: to provincialise Europe is not to vanquish or conquer it - that is, provincialising Europe isn't a utopian gesture - but a means of locating and subjecting to interrogation some of the fundamental notions by which we define ourselves.

Despite its title, it might be more productive to read The Mimic Men with Chakrabarty's book rather than Bhabha's essay in mind. Ralph Singh, a failed politician from the Caribbean island of Isabella, now retired at the age of 40 to a boarding-house in London, and writing something like a memoir, is not so much disfigured by 'mimicry' as haunted, even entrapped, by the language called 'Europe'. It's not a life story he wishes to compose. 'My first instinct was towards the writing of history,' Singh says, and he returns again and again to an analysis of a way of thinking and seeing. 'I have read that it was a saying of an ancient Greek that the first requisite for happiness was to be born in a famous city,' he writes. 'To be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder.' 'Second-hand', like 'half-made', is a word weighted with the historicism that gives Singh his sense of being a failure from the start, and Singh's creator much of his pessimism. Even memory, the site of renewal for the Romantics and Modernists, is deceptive: 'My first memory of school is of taking an apple to the teacher. This puzzles me. We had no apples on Isabella. It must have been an orange; yet my memory insists on the apple. The editing is clearly at fault, but the edited version is all I have.' The orange exists in the waiting-room. Its historical and physical reality counts for little; Ralph Singh's memory is 'discursively constituted', and has its own truth; and, at the time of the narrative's composition, it is all he has of Isabella.
Connecting the two halves of Chakrabarty's study - the first largely a self-reflexive appraisal of social science writing, the second a critical engagement with modern Bengali culture - are not only the themes of historicism and modernity, but the figure of Benjamin. Chakrabarty picks up the key insight about the 'homogeneous, empty time of history'.
   

The phrase was made current in the social sciences by Benedict Anderson in his classic discussion of the rise of the nation-state, Imagined Communities; but Chakrabarty's usage of it, concerned primarily with the European notion of modernity, is Benjaminesque in spirit. Yet the references to Benjamin after the introduction are relatively few. This is an interesting and intriguing elision: perhaps Chakrabarty needs him to be an invisible presence. In the second half of the book I sensed him most powerfully in the chapter 'Adda: A History of Sociality'; and it might have been enriching to have the connection made explicit, or to know whether Chakrabarty himself was fully conscious of it. 'The word adda (pronounced "uddah") is translated by the Bengali linguist Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay as "a place" for "careless talk with boon companions" or "the chats of intimate friends" . . . Roughly speaking, it is the practice of friends getting together for long, informal and unrigorous conversations.' Never was adda so theorised and romanticised as it was in Calcutta, as both a significant component and symptom of Bengali bourgeois culture in the first three-quarters of the 20th century. Even the usage of the word is different in Bengali from Hindi, say, where it means a meeting-place not a practice. Chakrabarty goes on:

By many standards of judgment in modernity, adda is a flawed social practice: it is predominantly male in its modern form in public life; it is oblivious of the materiality of labour in capitalism; and middle-class addas are usually forgetful of the working classes. Some Bengalis even see it as a practice that promotes sheer laziness in the population. Yet its perceived gradual disappearance from the urban life of Calcutta over the last three or four decades - related no doubt to changes in the political economy of the city - has now produced an impressive amount of mourning and nostalgia. It is as if with the slow death of adda will die the identity of being a Bengali.


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