Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for klasserommet

At the end of the eighteenth century, Hindu law, insofar as it can be described as a unitary system, operated in terms of four texts that ‘staged’ a four-part episteme defines by the subject’s use of memory: sruti (the heard), smriti (the remembered), sastra (the learned-from-another) and vyavahara (the performed-in-exchange). The origins of what had been heard and what was remembered were not necessarily continuous or identical. Every invocation of sruti technically recited (or reopened) the event of originary ‘hearing’ or revelation. The second two texts – the learned and the performed – were seen as dialectically continuous. Legal theorists and practitioners were not in any given case certain if this structure described the body of law or four ways of settling a dispute. The legitimation of the polymorphous structure of legal performance, ‘internally’ noncoherent and open at both ends, through a binary vision, is the narrative of codification I offer as an example of epistemic violence.

The narrative of the stabilization and codification of Hindu law is less well known than the story of Indian education, so it might be well to start there. Consider the often-quoted programmatic lines from Macaulay’s infamous ‘Minute on Indian education’ (1835): ‘We must at present do our best to form a class who maybe interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class who may be in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population. The education of colonial subjects complements their production in law. One effect of establishing a version of the British system was the development of an uneasy separation between disciplinary formation in Sanskrit studies and the native, now alternative, tradition of Sanskrit ‘high culture’. Within the former, the cultural explanations generated by authoritative scholars matched the epistemic violence of the legal project.

I locate here the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, the Indian Institute at Oxford in 1883, and the analytic and taxonomic work of scholars like Arthur Macdonnell and Arthur Berriedale Keith, who were both colonial administrators and organizers of the matter of Sanskrit. From their confident utilitarian-hegemonic plans for students and scholars of Sanskrit, it is impossible to guess at either the aggressive repression of Sanskrit in the general educational framework or the increasing ‘feudalization’ of the performative use of Sanskrit in the everyday life of Brahmanic-hegemonic India. A version of history was gradually established in which the Brahmans were shown to have the same intentions as (thus providing the legitimation for) the codifying British: ‘In order ti preserve Hindu society intact [the] successors [of the original Brahmans] had to reduce everything to writing and make them more and more rigid. And that is what has preserved Hindu society in spite of a succession of political upheavals and foreign invasions. This is the 1925 verdict of Mahamahopadhyaya Haraprasad Shastri, learned Indian Sanskritist, a brilliant representative of the indigenous elite within colonial production, who was asked to write several chapters of a ‘History of Bengal’ projected by the private secretary to the governor general of Bengal in 1916. To signal the asymmetry in the relationship between authority and explanation (depending on the race-class of the authority), compare this 1928 remark by Edward Thompson, English intellectual: ‘Hinduism was what it seemed to be… It was a higher civilization than won [against it], both with Akbar and the English.’ And ass this, from a letter by an English soldier-scholar in the 1890s: ‘The study of Sanskrit, “the language of the gods”, has afforded med intense enjoyment during the last 25 years of my life in India, but it has not, I am thankful to say, led me as it has some, to give up a hearty belief in our own grand religion.

The contemporary international division of labor is a displacement of the divided field of nineteenth-century territorial imperialism. Put simply, a group of countries, generally first-world, are in the position of investing capital; another group, generally third-world, provide the field for investment, both through the comprador indigenous capitalists and through their ill-protected and shifting labor force. In the interest of maintaining the circulation and growth of industrial capital (and of the concomitant task of administration within nineteenth-century territorial imperialism), transportation, law and standardized education systems were developed – even as local industries were destroyed, land distribution was rearranged, and raw material was transferred to the colonizing country. With so-called decolonization, the growth of multinational capital, and the relief of the administrative charge, ‘development’ does not now involve wholesale legislation and establishing educational systems in a comparable way. This impedes the growth of consumerism in the comprador countries. With modern telecommunications and the emergence of advanced capitalist economies at the two edges of Asia, maintaining the international division of labor seves to keep the supply of cheap labor in the comprador countries.

Human labor is not, of course, intrinsically ‘cheap’ of ‘expensive’. An absence of labor laws (or a discriminatory enforcement of them), a totalitarian state (often entailed by development and modernization in the periphery), and minimal subsistence requirements on the part of the worker will ensure it. To keep this crucial item intact, the urban proletariat in comprador countries must not be systematically trained in the ideology of consumerism (parading as the philosophy of a classless society) that, against all odds, prepares the ground for resistance through the coalition politics Foucault mentions. This separation from the ideology of consumerism is increasingly exacerbated by the proliferating phenomena of international subcontracting. ‘Under this strategy, manufacturers based in developed countries subcontract the most labor intensive stages of production, for example, sewing or assembly, to the Third World nations where labor is cheap. Once assembled, the multinational re-imports the goods – under generous tariff exemptions – to the developed country instead of selling them to the local market.‘ here the link to training in consumerism is almost snapped. ‘While global recession has markedly slowed trade and investment worldwide since 1979, international subcontracting has boomed. … In these cases, multinationals are freer to resist militant workers, revolutionary upheavals, and even economic downturns.’

8.juli 1991.