Book Review
The burden of memory
Ranjit Hoskote
Argues that modernity is best achieved if conditions propitious to forgetting the past are encouraged
LEARNING TO FORGET The Anti-Memoirs of Modernity: Dipankar Gupta; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 545.
To some robustly optimistic observers, modernity is synonymous with a system of protocols that, when enacted by law or policy, can transform the workings of a social formation, ensure the creation of institutions that enshrine the rule of law, and generate a rationally organised and governed public sphere. From this viewpoint, modernity is a technique of progress that
can be activated as a universally executable programme, irrespective of the local contours of culture or economy.
In this sense, and in its unstated belief in the basic rationality of social actors and the primacy of modernity's public institutions, this viewpoint partakes of the spirit of 19th-Century positivism. Such a view ignores the instinctual drives that lead individuals and communities to subvert the rule of law, to corrupt modern institutions in the service of backward-looking agendas.
It also ignores the fact that many figures shaped by modern conditions have nonetheless championed a notion of tradition that is not a retrieval of the actual past so much as it is the pseudo-nostalgia of a modern imagination lacking anchorage in the traditional continuities of place, community and cosmography.
Ambivalence
To less sanguine thinkers, modernity denotes, not only the illuminations of the Enlightenment, but also those shadowy extremisms of newness that can be as dangerous as the past's dogmata. Indeed, one of the more subtly dangerous aspects of modernity is its ability to reify the symptomatic world-readings or tactical positions of earlier generations into absolutes: these absolutes (typically of Self-valorisation and Other-perception) are then promoted with zeal, articulated through the technological means that are also modernity's gift, as the only sources of transcendence in a relative world. They thus degenerate rapidly into fanatical straitjackets that threaten the range of consciousness, the latitude of imagination, and the freedom of thought.
On this account, modernity is an ambivalent phenomenon that operates unevenly, sometimes counteracting the prevailing forces in a society to project a more progressive vision, at other times becoming complicit with such forces to accentuate asymmetries of entitlement and opportunity. This view recognises that the protocols of modernity
must always be negotiated through terrains already determined by the mandates of religious difference, ethnic tension, social hierarchy and economic asymmetry.
Such beloved abstractions of liberal modernity as autonomy, entitlement, citizenship and justice, which offer the individual a space of belonging irrespective of origin or status, do not achieve an instant and obvious definition; rather, they are continuously being contested by the forces of occlusion and aggression, which counter them with equally abstract but more passionate and persuasive doctrines of ethnic identity and historical wrong. And yet these latter do not retreat from the ground of the modern; nor do they shy away from fighting for control over the contemporary.
Deliberative
On the contrary, they claim the future in a messianic tenor; their demands are phrased in the rhetoric of what can only be called illiberal modernity. If I have sketched these two extreme views of modernity in such detail, it is only as a prelude to the reading of a provocative and richly textured, if idiosyncratic, meditation on the subject by the sociologist Dipankar Gupta. Gupta leans, in his understanding of modernity, towards the first position; as such, he often actively decries the latter position, arguing somewhat summarily that modernity is by definition opposed to illiberalism. He is thus led to dismiss such conceptualisations as `multiple modernities' (under which rubric he would doubtless include counter-modernities and alternative modernities) on the grounds that they depend on a conflation of the modern with the contemporary.
While he uses the term `contemporary' to mean only the morphology of the Now as articulated through `technology, bureaucracy, or urbanisation' and other such structural features, he reserves the term `modern' for a grand teleology of progress, a `deliberative project' that appears wide enough to embrace the visions of Hegel,
Rawls, and even the Buddha.
Re-examination
However, much of the evidence that Gupta marshals in the course of his investigation into a complex Now which is not so much a single density of time as a weave of mosaic and fracture, rupture and tear, predicament and instability dismantles this brisk distinction between morphology and principle. This book bears the Malrauxesque subtitle of `The Anti-Memoirs of Modernity'; its combination of polemic, playfulness and intense attentiveness recalls the French flaneur-savant's approach, but the book is also supported by research and a sober appraisal of the results of fieldwork.
Following in the wake of the author's Mistaken Modernity: India Between Worlds, the present work revisits and re-examines many of his long-term objects of scrutiny: the nature of caste and ethnicity as mobilisations elaborated in a contemporary polity rather than as primordial entities; the relationship
between individual subjectivities and the platforms that permit them to engage in productive encounter; the symbolic role of such cultural practices as fashion and sport in an epoch dominated by aspirationalism, the cult of individual self-gratification, and the desire for visibility and representation; the aura of the contemporary martyr, who stands at the flashpoint of a conflicted selfhood, caught between the neutral concept of the citizen as subscriber to liberal civic ideals and the impassioned image of the individual as adherent of compelling religious beliefs.
While so brief a review as this can scarcely do justice to the sophistication of Gupta's arguments, it is important to take away from this book its key insistence that we must practise a redemptive amnesia, a sort of willed Ricoeurian forgetting that alone can emancipate the modern subject from the desire to conduct the present as an arena of vengeance for the past's horrors. Such a forgetting and the
shared will among social actors to begin afresh as equal partners in the project of the future, untainted by the bitterness of long feuding alone can save the contemporary individual from the repetition of the past's syndromes.
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