Identity

Abstract

An irony of Third World, or non-Western, historiography, and scholarship for that matter, is that it cannot be processed in total ignorance of the architects and major figures of European history and their conceptual paradigms. Here ‘anctioned ignorance’ of the elites is unpardonably and absolutely out of the question. European historians from Edward Thompson, through Le Roy Ladurie, George Duby, Carlo Ginsberg, Lawrence Stone, Robert Darnton, to Nathalie Davies can go about their work without bothering about non-Western systems of knowledge. Finding himself in a dilemma, Dipesh Chakrabarty ruefully argues in Habitations of Modernity that while non-Western historians, including himself, cannot afford to turn a blind eye to authorities in the field and are hard put to display their credentials time and again, a Western scholar can set about his/her work within hard and fast Eurocentric standards and without this besmirching the credibility of his/her work. The situation becomes all the more exacerbated when Chakrabarty himself acts out that logic while discussing the nineteenth-century reformers Rammohun Roy and Iswarchandra Vidysagar as they approached the subject of Sati (widow-burning.) Referring the phenomenon to lack of compassion, which habit had rendered imperceptible, Chakrabarty adduces the authority of Adam Smith. A few lines later, he refers to Hume’s definition of pity in a gesture that articulates the impossibility of going beyond that heritage.¹