Social Theory from the Global South: In Conversation with Durba Mitra, Andrew Liu, Anupama Rao
MEGHNA CHAUDHURI AND MATTHEW SHUTZER
Illustration of Chinese and Indian tea sales in an Indian Tea Association pamphlet, 1910. Permission: from p. 11 of Tea War and provided by Andrew B. Liu.
Introducing “Social Theory from the Global South”
Why should we ask history to do theory? What does it mean to insist that a social theory aspiring to a form of global knowledge must emerge from the spaces of the global south? These questions framed a wide-ranging conversation we held in November 2020 with Durba Mitra and Andrew Liu to mark the publication of their new books–Mitra’s Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought and Liu’s Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India. Our aim in bringing Durba and Andrew together was to understand their respective orientations to social theory and historical method—and to see, in practice, the work of emergent theory-making within archivally-grounded historical research. The problem space of “social theory from the global south” may not have been their articulation of the issue, but we felt it captured an overarching set of theoretical concerns relating to questions of comparability, translation, and historical structure taken up in different ways in their monographs.
These monographs inherit a canonical social theory characterized by its emphases on language as thought and the categories of identity and difference. But they also emerge at a moment, as Anupama Rao writes in her introductory remarks below when a multiplicity of new approaches to history and theory are challenging traditions of concept-making formed primarily through engagements with European thinkers. The move against such Eurocentric social theory remains motivated by the insistence of postcolonial scholars of the underlying historicity of European thought, and the false universalization of European social contexts as the basis for grounding the ongoing theorization of global life. Framed in this way, there is now a longstanding recognition that histories from places which we rather crudely refer to here as “the global south” have either been excluded from attempts to theorize modern forms of society and politics, or they have been posited as the exception to an idealized European norm. This impasse originally provoked the project of provincializing European social theory, and it now animates constructive efforts to establish, on equal footing, the intellectual and philosophical traditions of the “non-west” as textual sources for theorizing in the present.
Does the substitution of the “global south” for the “global north” necessarily challenge our understanding of the relationship between history and theory? Or do versions of this project leave intact older presumptions regarding the epistemological enclosure of cultural difference, acting potentially, as the literary theorist Shu-Mei Shih has provocatively suggested, as a kind of mirror image of Eurocentrism? It would seem that the ability to unpack the content of theory-making from the global south continues to depend on what historians decide to make of the form and experience of colonialism, a subject that bears the weight of so many questions concerning modern hierarchies of power, bourgeois nationalism, the origins and trajectories of capitalism, and, indeed, the very divisibility of knowledge worlds into the hemispheric categories of north and south.[1] Few new historical monographs are better positioned to return our academic conversations to these foundational issues than Durba’s and Andrew’s books.
In Durba’s book, we encounter a reworked critique of the Eurocentricity of the normative categories of sexuality, in which figurations of female deviancy, coded as the “prostitute,” appear as global categories converging across disconnected discursive and cultural spaces. For Durba, colonial knowledge production is essential, but the origins and reproduction of such knowledge categories present an explanatory problem. The histories of misogyny, heteronormativity and sexual violence her book delineates are not limited to European thought but indeed enter into the most intimate self-understandings of the gender and caste hierarchies of colonial Indian society.
If Durba’s work forces us to query the coherence of framing knowledge in reified geographic terms (e.g. Europe v. Asia, North v. South, Empire v. Global), Andrew’s book offers us a new account of Marxist political economy routed through global economic history. Andrew’s Marx is not the same figure so often caricatured as a crude theorist of class and the undisguised wage relation, but the Marx of the Grundrisse, and one more adequate to our own age of Special Economic Zones and multinational subcontracting. Tea War cuts against the grain of recent efforts to think global economic thought in terms of the diffusion and translation of western political economy – a story, in other words, of foreign ideologies thinly connected to vernacular realities. Instead, Andrew asks us to consider receptivity or the transformations in social and economic life that made it possible for people in China and India in the nineteenth century to describe their reality in categories resembling the social logic of capital.
Our conversation with Durba and Andrew touched on these and other subjects. We have also included a transcript of introductory comments presented by Anupama Rao, whose thinking helped to synthesize these two books and to locate them within historiographical and generational shifts.
Note
[1] An alternative project is a heterotopic vision outlined by Nile Green that seeks to bracket the dominance of colonialism/nationalism/capitalism through a model of linguistic mediation. For Green, the fact of vernacular difference suggests multiple potentialities of historical and identitarian experience that are not reducible to the colonial encounter. Nile Green, “The Waves of Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean,” American Historical Review 123 (3), 2018: 846 - 874. For an account that understands heterogeneity as internal to the production of capitalist space-time, see Manu Goswami, “Autonomy and Comparability: Notes on the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial,” boundary 2 32 (2), 2005: 201 - 225.
Author permission
Situating the two texts: Anupama Rao
Many of us are thinking about the past many months of the pandemic as an opening for a new engagement, even as it also marks a closure. It is an inaugural moment: what does it augur?
It struck me that one conversation we might want to have is about the ongoing shift in the study of South Asia. Andy and Durba’s books are part of a clutch of work in this past decade that doesn’t feel the need to restage earlier debates with that same cast of characters and the same governing agonisms of the field: the capital versus colonialism debate or to orient their questions around Indian nationalism as a psychic crutch—an idée fixe that governs the scholarly unconscious. The fact that these books transform how we see the overdetermined (and somewhat overstudied) space of colonial Bengal is an even greater testament!
I’d like to situate these two texts within a generational shift, a shift in what questions are posed and how, and with what entailments. In that sense they are inaugural, they are on the cusp of something. I think this has to do with the changed structure of the academy, and structures of training: the ways in which diasporic Asians locate their questions, both as students and scholars. If we think of Durba’s book, which is about how certain questions also become animating arguments about the present—through structures of regularity, recurrence, and repetition—then I’d want to take up the charge of immanent critique and turn it back on this question: where is the study of South Asia today?
For example, the commitment to feminist inquiry, the recognition of gender in the world, which both of these texts exhibit is not incidental. (Inspired by feminist theorists and intellectual historians, queer takes on high theory, we might even say).
Neither is the focus on “the social,” incidental, that is, that domain of lateral connectedness, interaction, association (and inequality) that these texts explore. Or, the ways in which each of these books positions itself as an inquiry across scale—deeply local, but always with a sense of the globality of the questions asked. Their worldliness, this dialectic of social facticity, category formation, deployment, objectification of the social, is important.
Always historicize, certainly. But there might be something here about putting incommensurate or unexpected bodies of literature in conversation: Andy speaks about how theory from South Asia allowed him to rethink Chinese exceptionalism, for instance, and to rethink the uneven, if interconnected, worlds of an Asian capitalism. (The Atlantic World and the plantation, or what Saidiya Hartman calls the belly of the world, predicated on the necessity of gendered labor that yet remains occluded, is clearly also at the background).
Durba’s work is inflected by scholarship in the history of science around empiricism, granularity, texture, detail. This attention to the logistics of how knowledge is made—technique, protocols, graphs—transforms the colonial Bengal we all thought we knew so well. The book unpacks the staging of the social as a problem for analyses that explain society back to itself. It allows us to dwell on the self-referentiality of the human sciences. (Foucault is not much mentioned explicitly, and I do want to ask Durba about this very Foucauldian work).
It is not apparent that these two books have any necessary connection to each other.
Tea War is about two social formations that go under the sign of an internally conflictual Asian capitalism—the first is the world produced by unfree, indentured labor in Assam; the other is organized around the intimacy of family labor in Chinese borderlands, Anhui and Fujian. Each is discrete but united by broader shifts—the commodification of labor, the taste for tea, and the social abstractions that organize economic and political life under colonial capitalism. Mediated by British political economy as a distinct form of social thought, the Assamese plantation and the peasant families appear as so many pre-capitalist formations, precisely while they are being integrated into logics of extraction and accumulation. In doing so, Liu is drawing on a rich tradition of theoretical engagement, for example, Luxemburg and Banaji on real and formal subsumption, that help to account for this relationship between capital and non-capital, between so-called peasant modes of production and global capitalism (around debt).
In Indian Sex Life, Durba thinks about the constitutive relationship of sex and the social, and asks how kinship—that threshold between nature and culture—produces the social, and gives it fixity. Here, while the prostitute is a limit case, a figuration of disorder, who exposes the desire for ‘the social’ as itself an unstable and impossible desire. It is the anxiety around “deviance” and “promiscuity” that brings in its wake prolix acts of naming, defining, categorizing: that is, efforts to produce and govern “the social” through empirical description, quantification, the forensics of verification.
As the many words to describe slightly different communities of women who engage in a variety of behaviors (those who meet their lovers secretly, who are sold into slavery, or those lustful women who desert their husbands who cannot satisfy them) coalesces around the term prostitute, a naming that attains conceptual density as it is mobilized in different disciplinary settings (from law to medicine, to colonial sociology, and indeed, life writing). The prostitute’s promiscuity is matched by the promiscuous movement between disciplines, their internal modes of verification, and so forth. (We might ask, is this a Philology as world history?) There are deep reverberations here around how the human sciences come to think of the feminized body, its worth, and value. There is the question of freedom, e.g., freedom of contract, the idea of the female, or sexual freedom.
Interestingly, Durba does not engage questions of labor, value, commodification (and the discourses of political economy) that arise simultaneously, at the moment she discusses. Ideas of traffic, transaction, exchange, accumulation—through the family form, through marriage, which is the systemic “inside” to which the prostitute is the other side, are not really discussed.
Meanwhile, Andy collapses “difference,” embodied “difference,” into the category of labor, and the laboring body as it enables capitalist accumulation. We might argue that this question of social difference, social heterogeneity, and its relationship to universalizing and extractive logic of capital in the book is also an argument about how the proletariat becomes the modern political subject.
The question that I want to pose, and which these books begin to open for us, is the relationship of social history to social theory.
Author permission
Conversation with Durba Mitra and Andrew Liu
Methods of Comparison
Meghna Chaudhuri/Matthew Shutzer: We were wondering if both of you could discuss the methods of comparison employed in your books. In Durba’s book, there is less attention to the historical conditions enabling forms of comparison than an emphasis on textual circulation and the consolidation of hegemonic knowledge. Durba’s book suggests that the “omnipresent” figure of the prostitute pervades all the sciences of society, but the exact mode of translation and appropriation across textual genres is not specified. What structures this “omnipresence,” and how should we understand it as a durable form of comparative knowledge-making?
Andy’s book, on the other hand, is directly focused on the role of impersonal forms of mediation, understood through the market logic of global “competition,” that enable and structure comparison as a type of knowledge about the world. This focus is at odds with other trends in the field that tend to see “connection,” rather than “comparison,” as the basis for mediating global history. How do you see your method in relation to these other histories?
Durba: In Indian Sex Life, I argue that the comparative method in modern social thought emerged from the late 18th century through ideas of normative and aberrant sexuality, particularly in the comparative assessment of the control of women’s sexuality in the racialized study of “primitive” marriage and kinship. This history of comparison has a long legacy in a lexicon of social scientific concepts that we use to comprehend, describe, and quantify social life. Concepts like endogamy, kinship, marriage, descent, alliance, sex ratios find their origins in the marking, control, and comparative assessment of racialized women’s sexuality. In comparative theories of civilization, India functioned as a key exemplar in the study of comparative structures of social development, with Indological, ethnological, and ethnographic studies of India populating the footnotes and bibliographies in widely influential social theories from the fields of ethnology, comparative jurisprudence, sociology, history, and anthropology. In the context of the Indian social sciences, I analyze the emergence and dominance of the comparative method in the twinned fields of philology and ethnology, and how the comparative staging of sexual behavior produced a wide range of social relationships, behaviors, and identities as commensurate and comparable. The “prostitute” cohered a broad range of ideas of female sexual deviancy and functioned as a critical temporal diagnostic of the developmental stages of Indian society.
In social theories that emerge in the first decades of the twentieth century in India, theories about the control and erasure of “excessive” or “surplus” women’s sexuality are indeed omnipresent. The ubiquitous presence of this idea is because the mutable concept of the prostitute could do all of the explanatory work necessary to explain the lack and lag of colonized Indian society. But the concept of “prostitute” reaches far beyond colonial India, and she can be seen as a key site of knowledge in the nineteenth century and twentieth century in many early sociologies of the modern city. In the rise of state-sponsored social science across the world, we see the rapid consolidation of social practices around heterosexual reproductive monogamy in the domains of law, science, and policing. These institutions deploy social scientific practices to map colonized peoples, freeze them in time, and structure governance and social institutions around the control of women’s sexuality.
Andrew: “Comparison” is a question I wrestled with throughout this project. Years ago, I thought a lot about Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s famous opposition between comparative and connected histories, which many readers including myself interpreted as almost moral in character: comparisons are “bad,” and connections are “good.” I remember explaining my dissertation premise to a faculty member early on as a comparative approach to Chinese and Indian tea in the global marketplace. They basically frowned and said, “well, keep looking for other angles.” Within a Subrahmanyamian approach, “good” history meant tracking the physical movement of a person or thing, or else it would not count as connected. Ultimately, I wound up splitting the difference between Subrahmanyam’s two categories by foregrounding the category of competition, which does count as a form of material connection, albeit abstract, but which also helps us historicize comparison in provocative ways. For instance, there’s an interesting literature on the concept of “real abstraction” in a modern, commodity-driven society, which argues that our abstract modes of thought are not simply human nature or purely mental; rather, mental abstraction corresponds to the practical abstraction of constantly exchanging goods for money. I venture that my book is also arguing for a history of “real comparison,” namely, that the creation of a global division of labor in the nineteenth century encouraged more abstraction, quantification, and comparative thinking by its participants. Comparative thinking is very much a real, inescapable part of modern life, but it is a product of history, an issue the sociologist Philip McMichael underscored years ago.
I now think all history is comparative, so we might as well confront it, lest we remain stuck in a subconscious Eurocentrism. Comparative thinking is not necessarily “bad” in the naïve materialist sense, but it can certainly become stale and even dangerous when we approach it in a static and uncritical manner.
Figuring the “Archaic” in the Present
Meghna/Matt: One of the core tensions in both of your books is the point that colonial modernity rests on institutions, ideas, and discourses that are represented as archaic or vestigial. In different ways, your books document how modern configurations of, say, sexual deviancy, or capitalist enterprise, are an amalgamation of pre-colonial practices and norms, with specifically modern orientations to society, morality, and economy. Can you explain how these contradictions unfold in your work?
Andrew: My book is invested in the question of how do you deal with “traditional” elements that co-exist with more modern and novel social forms in the nineteenth and twentieth-century Asia? For many scholars, the mere existence of, say, “unfree” (slavery, indenture, penal contracts) or “independent” labor (family agriculture), paired with commercial capital, signified tradition and hence precapitalism.
The historical and intellectual problem I had to figure out was how to reinterpret those phenomena within a more flexible conceptualization of capitalism itself? For these Asian tea industries were certainly profitable and displayed the dynamics of competitive accumulation we typically recognize as modern.
My argument centers on a more flexible and globally-oriented reading of Marx (elaborated upon here) that distinguishes between what Marx called the “specifically-capitalist mode of production” and, implicitly, non-specifically capitalist elements. In my mind, these are historicizing categories. The former refers to spectacular innovations “specific” to the last few centuries, imaginable only when the logic of accumulation uproots and reanimates social life, manifest in, say, large-scale automobile assembly lines, computer-based financial instruments, massive infrastructural projects to provide energy and transportation and so on. This is the classic image of modern development. But capitalism as an abstract social logic also accommodates non-specific elements, precisely the types of unfree or independent labor forms that could be found in ancient or self-sufficient rural societies. The starkest example in my book was the usage of incense sticks as timekeepers to regulate and discipline tea workers in China. The technology itself was unmistakably old and inaccurate compared to mechanical clocks, but they could be used in modern, industrial ways. That distinction makes a huge difference in how we analyze these phenomena.
I should also say that I drew inspiration and confidence from a plethora of new studies advancing claims about the “modernity” of premodern social forms, especially the literature on slavery as capitalist in the US and on the domestic labor-based “industrious revolutions” in northwest Europe and East Asia. Many of these works in the last few decades have been indirectly inspired by the reshaping of the global economy, which has reintroduced a lot of “archaic” social forms into our everyday lives, especially with talk about Asian sweatshops, impoverished farmers in the global south, and scandalous headlines over unfree and trafficked workers. This is very much a self-reflexive historical exercise.
Durba: We are in a moment today where we must ask questions about the enduring presence of claims of Brahmanical authority through textual mandates that have perpetuated upper-caste patriarchy and anti-Muslim violence all under the guise of a claim to objective social science and progress. Modern claims to Sanskrit origins are critical in the making of new structures of knowledge that undergird legal, social, and scientific institutions that define the social and political landscape of colonial and postcolonial India. Today claims to patriarchal origins in Sanskrit text are often made through a paradoxical reclamation of the language of anti-colonial nationalism, where the Hindu Right redeploys the language of anti-colonial liberation in violent rhetoric against Muslims that places invented narratives of Hindu subjugation at the heart of a resurgent nativist right-wing Hindu nationalism. In these discourses, Sanskrit texts function as a kind of “indigenous knowledge system” that can be used to contest colonial misrepresentations of Indian society. In my book, I show how this patriarchal Hindu majoritarian logic of “counter-claims” of indigenous knowledge in Sanskrit text has a long and deeply violent history.
Diagram of “prostitutes” from Hindu sexology, from the textbook Indian Sex Life and Prostitution (1934) by Santosh Kumar Mukherji. Permission: from page 54 of Indian Sex Life and provided by Durba Mitra.
I think your question gets at a critical idea: female sexuality is constituted as an object of knowledge through its potential for excess, through interdictions that delineated the control of women’s sexuality. Yet deviant female sexuality does not stand outside of disciplinary categories or the terminological lexicon of social science. Rather, it is the genesis of constitutive categories and concepts that shape the modern study of society. People often say to me: Isn’t the “prostitute” present in all societies since the beginning of time? As I argue in the introduction to Indian Sex Life, her timelessness, casting the “prostitute” as a member of the “world’s oldest profession,” is critical to a project of knowledge that sought to dominate and describe the most intimate domains of social life in India through the language of sexuality. This knowledge economy placed the prostitute outside of the time of modern society, a remnant of the primitivity of women’s excessive sexuality outside of monogamous marriage. Her persistent presence in modern society challenges the closed economy of modern social life organized so fully around the idealization of upper-caste Hindu monogamy. Through this history of modern claims to authority in Sanskrit text, we learn not only of the regulation of female sexual deviancy but also, the constitutive role of ideas of women’s sexuality in the naturalization and consolidation of upper-caste Hindu power through a modern claim to the archaic.
Global History and the History of Empire
Meghna/Matt: Both of you specify that your accounts are not aimed as empirical additives to an existing global story but are meant to reframe how we understand the making of the “global”—for Durba, as the discourses that constitute the modern social sciences, and for Andy, the social logics animating the global division of labor. In key ways, however, your books underscore the conceptual and epistemological problems of how to think of empire within a story of the global, and vice versa. How do your books address the problem of empire, and in what ways does your global scope reach beyond the geohistorical categories of traditional imperial framings?
Durba: The term “global” in history writing provokes critique, but also, new conditions of possibility for me. In my critical mode, I think of the “global” in global history as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the wolf being some scholars who claim the “global” as a new domain when their studies look eerily like old imperial histories. I find that few global histories give me insights into the multilingual ideas, work, laughter, music, sociality, violence, environments, hierarchies, moods, and lifeworlds of most of the people in the colonized and decolonizing world. As a scholar of gender and sexuality, I find that “global” and “connected” histories often disappear questions of women, gender, and sexuality, despite decades of feminist and queer scholarship that has called for scholars to critically interrogate archives and methods of history-writing through questions of gendered power and heterosexual normativity. Thus, in my critical mode, “global” offers me few tools to think anew about the project of envisioning feminist and decolonial possibilities today.
Yet, I find new conditions of possibility in studying the “global” in what I feel is resonant with Andrew Liu in his wonderful Tea War, as a site of thinking about the rise of the division of gendered power and the global reorganization of modern life through linked histories of imperial expansion, colonial capitalism, and enslavement. In this thinking, I learn from extraordinary work in Black feminist historiography and theory that center racialized ideas of gendered difference and sexuality in the archives and afterlives of enslavement. My book intervenes in global histories of sexuality by complicating historical projects that treat the heterosexual/homosexual definition as the singular motor that drives the making of modern sexuality from the nineteenth century. Instead, I propose that the concept of the prostitute, and more broadly racialized ideas of female sexuality, are critical to the reorganization of modern social life around heterosexual monogamy under colonial conditions of capitalism. My study of the concept of the prostitute in South Asia is not solely a study of “empire,” nor is it an additive account that globalizes already-established frameworks from Europe and America with empirical evidence from South Asia. Instead, I reveal how the colonial study of India functioned as a critical exemplar in widely influential texts of modern social theory. The institutions of colonialism and enslavement came to traffic in parallel concepts and epistemic procedures that saw the control, subjugation, and erasure of racialized women’s sexuality as critical to the progress of modern society. In other words, in my view, interlinked histories of colonial racial violence and enslavement are the very origins of modern sexuality as we know it today, and that is indeed a global history.
Andrew: Again, comparison to me is not just about viewing two places side by side but also situating them within a larger whole—a “grounds for comparison”—which I identified as the nascent international division of labor. This perspective forced me to specify how exactly empire mattered in the story of tea, something that gets taken for granted when one stays exclusively within a national framework.
(By the way, here I could easily detour into asking how did the Qing Empire—a multiethnic, continent-sized empire to the letter—matter, but for this question, I will stick to the more common conception of “empire” as European domination over the rest of the world. But the fact that I could even bring up the Qing already tells us that the British empire is far from an exhaustive way of thinking about the world at this time, which involved overlapping imperial and national and metropolitan jurisdictions.)
Empire obviously mattered, but as we bring in more locations, then its explanatory force grows less evident. The question becomes less whether but how empire mattered? A common refrain in Indian tea history is that the white planters exploited, physically abused, and outright murdered their workers out of racial animus. This is by no means wrong. But if you look at Chinese tea, then you have similar stories of managers harshly abusing and pushing their workers to deadly levels of exhaustion as well, and those people all had the same skin, eye, and hair color. This complicates the idea that racial or white supremacy serves as the overarching explanation for the labor history of tea.
What really pushed forward the story of the global tea war, I believe, was competitive accumulation; and then, folded within this dynamic, empire made a great deal of difference. Specifically, the penal contracts helped create the conditions to recruit labor for the Assam plantations, though unfree labor and “native” recruitment were by no means novel. From an economic perspective, the penal contract also meant an artificially depressed wage for the “tea coolies,” who were paid about one-half the market rate but had no recourse due to the unfair justice system. It was this type of old-fashioned wage exploitation, more than cutting-edge innovations, that helped Indian tea compete with Chinese tea in the crucial decade of the 1880s. And of course, empire mattered to the extent that it shaped the tariff policies and marketing campaigns, something that Erika Rappaport describes in her work. But overall, “empire” as a straightforward story of European expansion and domination does not capture the full scope of these transnational dynamics.
Subjectivity
Meghna/Matt: We wanted to ask you both a little bit about subjectivity.
Andy, your project works against the naturalization of the economic and the political as distinct and separate, and indeed, could be seen to contribute towards historicizing how that naturalization came to be. Your book shows how British thinkers of political economy, Chinese and Indian commentators, merchants, and Chinese and Indian nationalists grasped the political-economic category of productive labor as a commodity despite very different local material and intellectual contexts. These arguments lie at the heart of what you are presenting as a distinctly modern form of subjectivity. Durba, your book provides an excellent map of the many routes through which the subjectivity of the ideal modern individual within society was sought to be produced – whether in colonial contexts of empirical taxonomy or criminology or the context of the modern sciences of society more broadly.
Can you each tell us more about the stakes of your argument and how it speaks to other ways in which social theory has grappled with the question of historical consciousness?
Andrew: My book opens with a discussion of how the Chinese and Indian tea industries diverged at the turn of the twentieth century and how both contemporaneous propagandists and subsequent economic historians explained this divergence through naturalized differences between “east” and “west.” Such economic Orientalism has been a clear target of recent criticism, especially among scholars in the tradition of Pomeranz’s Great Divergence, and I’m very much in sympathy with that project.
But I’m also interested in historicizing the production of those naturalized categories themselves, through a conceptual history grounded in everyday social and economic life. It will not do to simply denounce the Marxes and Webers for their Eurocentrism, not least of which because Orientalist categories have long persisted among many people outside Europe. Some explanatory account of the appeal of naturalized categories would be far more useful.
What inspired me is the literature on reification stemming from Marx’s critique of the fetishism of commodities. In simplified form: capitalism develops as a global and expansive system that assigns different values to goods but is also intensely specialized, hence privatized and invisible. The true basis for differences in prices, wages, income, etc. can be found in the “hidden abode” of production but is often concealed from view, giving rise to superficial explanations based on appearances in the “sphere of circulation.” Quantitative differences, therefore, appear as qualitative ones, and social processes get reified into the natural properties of things themselves. Applying this to the story of tea, the divergences between Chinese and Indian tea emerged from a dynamic social process of competition involving farmers, manufacturers, transport, finance, colonial officials, etc. but ultimately they were reduced to, and reified into, the natural properties of Chinese and Indian air and soil, as a stand-in for timeless civilizational differences.
Durba: This question is challenging because I think the question of consciousness is intimately linked to notions of freedom and agency that are complicated when we begin to question the foundations of modern social theory and reframe its origins in colonial racialization and patriarchy. Indian Sex Life complicates any ideal vision of historical subjects through which we might imagine a kind of retrievable consciousness for the woman named prostitute. As we know well from feminist and subaltern interventions about agency and speech, there no easy rescue for the “consciousness” of the historically marginalized. The “prostitute” appears in archives of those social-scientific projects of colonial law, public health, and medicine, policing, mandates of evidence, labor, indenture, housing, and social work that initiated new practices of knowledge from the nineteenth century. Most often, when women appear in these archives, they are marked solely as prostitutes, and that classification delimits what we can know and how we can know it.
How then are we to think the consciousness of women named, described, enumerated, criminalized, dissected, photographed, all in the service of theories of Man’s achievement of true consciousness through sexual restraint? In theories of caste, marriage, and Indian social evolution, the unrestrained desire was the remnant of a primitive past, and the control of female sexual desire was key to Indian social development for a modern society. Bengali social scientific studies produce clear theories of sexual difference based in the idea of consciousness. Man might fall prey to instinct but had the capacity for consciousness through sexual self-restraint. In contrast, the woman was cast, again and again, as being wholly incapable of sexual restraint, with no will except the sexual drive, which required ongoing surveillance through monogamous marriage. The ideal of patriarchal monogamy was not natural, but something transcendent, the triumph of man over instinct in his pursuit of consciousness.
There is thus a paradox at the heart of modern ideas of women’s freedom in much social and political thought as imagined in modern social thought in India: women were to be freed from “custom,” but their liberation was to be achieved through their adherence to the control of the patriarchal household. Hindu women were to be freed from the backwardness and degradation of “social customs,” and critically, from the dangers of “Muslim conquest” that coerced them and led them to social perversion, yet women were not free to express or exhibit any excess of will, desire, choice, in any way.
The Archival Premises of Social Theory
Meghna/Matt: Durba, one of the more seemingly prosaic but deeply illuminating strategies of exposition you deploy rests on presenting the chain of transmission, revision, and circulation of what we might call genres of ethnography and data collation within the colonial archive. You actually lay out the details of district magistrates’ observations on “local” women and sexual deviancy, and the stages through which these deeply eclectic observations become collated into empirical bases for universalizing discourses of society.
Andrew, your book makes use of the Jiang family's personal archives and particularly the handbook by Jian Yaohua to track the minutiae of the labor process in the manufacture of tea. You also use these documents to argue against the way social theory has apprehended the longue duree development of a so-called “Chinese” path towards capitalism.
In both cases, your attention to seemingly prosaic details is foregrounded to de-stabilize the constitutive premises of key propositions of twentieth-century social theory. Can you speak more to your choices in this regard and how—if at all—it engages social theory not just as a historical object in formation, but in its contemporary forms as well?
Durba: A method that defines Indian Sex Life is idling, sitting with the details of archival documents. As I reflect on it now, I see this approach as a desire to be in close proximity to an archive, a bearing witness to the power of granular description. Over the course of the book, I dwell in the redundant, circular, exhaustive details of archives. I meditate on materials and descriptions, from elaborate social taxonomies, detailed handwritten letters stashed in B files, and the violent descriptions of women’s bodies in invasive autopsies and case studies. As I say in the introduction to the book, these archives are often banal, at many points predictable and repetitive, and at other times profoundly violent. In detailing the texture, sensibility, and narrative effect of these different archives, I work to lay bare the exhaustive experience of traversing these diverse archives that all placed female sexual deviancy at the heart of social thought. I wanted to document the revelation and exhaustion one feels when confronting an archive that claims to exhaustively enumerate the intimate lives of women and to make that exhaustion part of the argument of the book itself. I worked to account for the experience of history writing, the way one has a visceral reaction to the graphic nature of scientifically objectified narratives of women quite literally disembodied through description.
But I also think Indian Sex Life brings attention to what you thought-provokingly frame as “seemingly prosaic details” because often we think we already know what there is to know. We feel we already know the terrain of the colonial knowledge project, the contents of Risley’s ethnographic study, the enumeration of the census, and the power of the statistical survey. We imagine we have already fully comprehended the organization and logic of the indexes of Indian language books dislocated and “preserved” in the British Library. We presume we already know early Indian sociological studies of caste and marriage. But so often, we have not reflected on the epistemological organization of these texts, the format and structure of the questionnaires that constituted the data for the ethnographic study, or the origins of the key concepts that anchor Indian social science. My book asks: What happens if we begin with the premise that at the heart of the study of Indian society is the control of female sexuality? What happens when we look again at those seemingly familiar, known archives?
Andrew: In writing this book, I developed a criticism of the Anglocentric model that dominated much of Chinese and Indian economic history for much of the last century, including the theory of “involution” you reference. I’m not exaggerating about the “Anglocentrism,” by the way: David Cannadine showed decades ago that the English industrial revolution became canonized as a mythological standard of development in the 1960s, at the same time that modernization theory became formalized by Landes and Rostow as a culturally-neutral model against which all other societies were to be measured.
Such scholars thus viewed capitalism through a “technicist” lens, centered on the progress of techniques and technologies in a local context. My criticism is not to dismiss the role of improvements but rather to say that these explanations conflate content with form: they explain how capitalist production thrived but do not ask about the underlying historical processes through which accumulation came to assume a determinative role in social life, something that cries out for a global perspective.
I was interested in historicizing accumulation itself as a novel social form that emerges generally and comes to look very different in particular locales. Even though technical capabilities in China and India were uneven, we still see social dynamics shared in common with the industrialized cores, especially the drive to raise the productivity of human labor through whatever means possible. This is what the Jiang family story and the Wuyi Mountain surveys pointed toward: breaking out of the straitjacket of the Anglocentric model by foregrounding how global pressures could produce in the remote countryside the dull repetition of waged labor, time-sensitive market demands, and the creative repurposing of older technologies into industrial-like cooperative arrangements. I am not simply saying, “well if you squint your eyes, these two things kind of look the same.” The goal is to pin our conception of capitalism upon something other than a technicist focus and instead pay attention to social form.
Nationalism and Recuperative Histories
Meghna/Matt: In different ways, both of these texts take a rather pessimistic view of anti-colonial nationalism, while at the same time maintaining critiques of empire, capitalism, and Eurocentrism. In Andy’s book, we are presented with a nationalism that is fundamentally economistic in its ideological constitution, centered on notions of “freedom” that only make sense in the competitive world of capitalist accumulation. In Durba’s book, we see not only how biopolitical projects advanced by the colonial state become internalized by colonial subjects, but also the re-coding of an Orientalist construction of women’s sexual deviancy as the basis for conservative nationalist patriarchy.
In the conclusions of both of your books, even potentially liberatory visions are brought in for reproach. In Durba’s book, “Sultana’s Dream,” often interpreted as an early feminist text, is read as reproducing, by gendered inversion, the repressive logic of homosociality. In Andy’s book we glimpse the prospect of communism, but see instead a society that mobilizes nationalism in order to legitimate the world’s perhaps most successful productivist regime.
These are stark visions. If the goal of global history is not fundamentally recuperative, or in Durba’s words a “search and rescue” operation, how should we understand your respective standpoints of critique?
Andrew: All of us here are part of the post-Benedict Anderson generation, and we take for granted the artifice of the nation. But one of Anderson’s incisive claims was that even though the nation and nationalism are transparently problematic—riddled by “philosophical poverty and even incoherence”—the institution itself persists and is not going away. In fact, it has only grown stronger during the past decade. I did not set out to talk about nationalism, but as I conducted research, I was struck by how a relatively fluid and transnational world of trade and capital flows in the early 1800s had hardened into nationalist projects of state-building by the new century. When I ran into the problem of nationalism, I was not interested in simply criticizing nationalism as artificial but also providing some positive account of it as a historical object, tied to the processes in the rest of the book.
I found myself building upon the tradition of scholars who argue that nationalism in the postcolonial world shares a special set of concerns. In the case of tea, I saw Chinese and Indian nationalism as rooted in a political-economic opposition between “national” versus “imperialist” or “comprador capital.” In writing about the scandal of the unfree Indian “coolie” and the parasitic Chinese “comprador,” I realized that both served as complaints about the exploitation of native labor by foreign capital and, consequently, the need to strengthen native, national capital.
Now, many within the postcolonial nationalism literature would see the embrace of nationalism in China and India as a sort of tragic ending, in which Asian people basically adopt European political forms. But in my view, this process does not suggest the westernization of Asia but that capitalism and nationalism themselves grew less Eurocentric, in this case, more Asian over the last century. Chinese and Bengali thinkers embraced the ideas of national capital not because they were brainwashed but because political-economic categories plausibly explained the world to them—ultimately because Chinese and Indian societies themselves were already immersed in global patterns of capital.
Durba: As you say, I end Indian Sex Life, a history of sexuality and modern social thought, with a strange reflection on the curious life of dreams. I turn to Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s 1905 “Sultana’s Dream,” a story about a woman’s dream of Ladyland, a world where Indian women dominate the public sphere and men stay at home. I ask: What, if anything, do dreams have to do with modern social scientific study? Sultana’s dream is not the first dreamscape concerned with the condition of Indian womanhood that I explore in the book. Indeed, in my detailed readings of theories on the liberation of a colonized Indian society in the chapters before, I explore a very different dream, one written by a self-proclaimed rationalist, S.C. Mookerjee, who claimed the “decline and fall” of Hindu society could only be reversed through the control of women’s sexuality. In juxtaposing dreams, one of a Hindu Bengali Brahman reasserting majoritarian patriarchal control, and the other of a peaceful woman-dominated Ladyland, I ask: Why does one kind of knowledge get to claim the domain of social science while the Hossain’s Ladyland is relegated to the domain of fantasy and speculative fiction? What if, instead, we were to see the social scientific study of Hindu society, with its copious footnotes and claims to scientific objectivity, as a kind of speculative fiction?
The afterlife of this history of the control and erasure of deviant female sexuality can be found in India today, painfully so. It is present in the rapid rise of crude anti-conversion laws outlawing interreligious marriage that attack Muslim minority communities, in police brutality against poor working-class women, in the moral denunciation of women in public performances, in the distorted, exaggerated role that forensic evidence plays in public narratives about the rape and brutalization of Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi girls and women. In naming the enduring legacies of this history, I do not think my intent is to equate colonial and postcolonial nationalist structures of patriarchal power. Rather, for me, it is using the tools of historical inquiry to return, critically and very carefully, to the history of the massive and dramatic reorganization of society around long-standing structures of Hindu Brahmanical patriarchy that happens through the collusion of the colonial state and upper-caste Indian elites. That return for me means naming every single law, every single scientific theory, every single concept created and institutionalized in the naturalization of Hindu patriarchy in social theory. For me, returning to this formative moment, looking carefully at archives for potential openings and sites of critique, may offer some avenues for protest and dissent.
Contextualism and Genealogy
Meghna/Matt: One of the core methodological distinctions in your books is addressed to the relationship between discourse and society: how are intellectual forms related to social order?
Andy adopts a broadly contextualist approach to this problem, reading the emergence of economic concepts and forms of economistic critique as arising from the concrete transformations of social life in nineteenth-century China and India. This approach follows what Jameson, in reading Lukacs, called “the unity of thinking and action, or the social determination of thought.”
Durba, on the other hand, refuses what she calls a “figuralist” reading of discursive categories, employing instead a genealogical method to track the appearance of the “prostitute” across textual genres and in constituting the structure of “objective knowledge” on female sexual deviancy. For Durba, “sexual deviancy” is an effect of disciplining knowledge, and the book overall resists claims that intellection reflects any extra-textual context. Durba's genealogy could be interpreted as showing the opposite: the texts in question produce the patriarchal social order that is then subject to critique.
How should we understand these differences between your books? In what ways are texts reliable narrators of social experience; in what ways might they be fragmentations or distortions, rather than indexes of either the “concrete” or relations of “power/knowledge?”
Durba: When it comes to men describing women in a time during the colonial period when women, particularly those so-called “fallen women,” had little to no access to describe themselves, I do not frame the book solely around skepticism of what constituted real social experience as left in traces in archives—a paranoia, one might say, about what was real in the description of the social world and what was not. Rather, I think it is about a paradigm shift, to ask what happens when we rethink the premise of certain social scientific modes of description and enumeration that claimed the progress of society was predicated in the control of women’s sexuality. I think of my project as one step in an ongoing collective project of feminist thought where we think together about novel approaches to social description and enumeration, and defy frameworks of policy reports, censuses, and social scientific studies that produced, and continue to produce, knowledge about women primarily through the language of knowability and measures, through a vocabulary that describes women through ratios, populations, and rates. It is my hope that Indian Sex Life might offer an occasion to think together about imagining a different vocabulary for womanhood.
Richard Schmidt, Kamasutra (1904), cover. Permission: from p. 33 of Indian Sex Life and provided by Durba Mitra.
Andrew: Beyond the textualist question is the problem of plausibility, that is, how does the travel of foreign ideas, like those of classical political economy, correspond to the extra-textual dimension of social structure? I spent a lot of time asking how Asian writers reading classical political economy could embrace the category of “value,” which at first sight was molded out of the lived experiences of Manchester or Glasgow. I decided that “value” still made sense to writers in Asia because it described the sorts of waged labor-dependent social patterns found in the dockyards of Calcutta or the bustling rural markets of southern Anhui or northern Fujian. Those types of commercial-capitalist activities were completely familiar for men such as Dadabhai Naoroji and Bipan Chandra Pal in India and Chen Chi and Wu Juenong in China, and they formed the basis of their embrace of political economy.
At the same time, we are dealing with a paucity of materials, so how much can we really delve into the psychology of this or that writer from the mid-1800s? I do not want readers to think I am arguing something as closed and mechanical as “anyone living in a capitalist society will think like an Adam Smith or David Ricardo,” because that is obviously false. Rather, the lived social experience of capitalist exchange and labor constitute the conditions of possibility for grasping political-economic categories such as “value”—but by no means does the latter automatically follow from the former. So while I am of course a proponent of close readings, I am wary of falling into the extremist position that sees nothing beyond the text itself.
Matthew Shutzer is the Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley, and also holds a fellowship position as an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His work has appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, History Compass, and the online magazine Warscapes. He is currently completing a book manuscript on fossil fuels, global capitalism, and the postcolonial Indian state.
Meghna Chaudhuri is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Boston College. She is working on a book about agrarian finance in South Asia, global development, and the intertwining of ethical and economic subjectivity under capitalism as a form of life.
*With editorial assistance from Tara Giangrande