Page 162 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

156 CULTURAL STUDIES

for example, in bargaining between groups of governments over ecological and
environmental issues—many ‘Third Worldist’ positions are admittedly internally
inconsistent and Ahmad’s criticisms of them, in particular that of the category
‘Third World literature’, are well-taken. Sections of his interesting—though weak
because he sets out to prove an inevitable connection between ‘poststructuralism’
and ‘pessimist’ politics—discussion of Rushdie’s novel Shame show a capacity
for getting beyond the formulaic (as when he writes with visible affection and
sensitivity of everyday life in Pakistan: see p.139). Even his criticism of the
ahistoricism that sometimes afflicts Said’s category of ‘orientalism’ has some force
to it, though the chapter is marred by its meanness of spirit and its total incapacity
to understand why Said’s epoch-making book by the same name has spoken to so
many people in so many different contexts. Ahmad can only see the book’s
influence as a sign of a ‘world supervised by Reagan and Thatcher’, and being due
to Said’s methodological invocation of Foucault and of ‘the way it
[Orientalism] panders to the most sentimental, the most extreme forms of Third
Worldist nationalism’ (pp. 177–8, 195).
There are three rather weak chapters in the book—those on ‘Marx on India’,
‘Indian Literature’ and ‘Ideologies of Immigration’. The first of these reads like a
crash-course that Ahmad appears to have taken on Marxist historical scholarship
on/in India. His knowledge is shaky. He thinks, for example, that it is only as a
result of Said’s influence and that of CDA that ‘Colonialism is now held
responsible not only for its own cruelties but, conveniently enough, for ours
too’ (pp. 196–7). Clearly, he is not even aware that this position that he ascribes
to CDA was one of the most prominent characteristics of OIM in the 1970s, and
famously so in the case of Bipan Chandra whom he adoringly mentions in his list
of Indian Marxist scholars whom he thinks Said should have read. As to the chapter
on ‘Indian Literature’, I can only agree with Ahmad’s own judgement: that ‘there
are many in India far more competent than I who can and do write on these
matters’ (p. 14). The chapter on ‘Ideologies of Immigration’ and some sections in
the preceding chapter on ‘Literary Theory’ belong to what Ahmad has written from
the spleen and carry chunks of pure viciousness. It is here that Ahmad’s polemics
acquire a certain shrillness of tone and he makes points that are neither true nor
fair. For example, in criticizing a statement of Homi Bhabha’s in the latter’s Nation
and Narration, Ahmad concludes, hitting somewhat below the belt: ‘it takes a very
modern, very affluent, very uprooted kind of intellectual to debunk both the idea
of progress and the sense of a “long past”, not to speak of modernity itself’ (p. 68).
Again, one can think of scores of Indian intellectuals—Ashis Nandy, Ramachandra
Gandhi, Partha Chatterjee, Gautam Bhadra, Vivek Dhareshwar immediately come
to my mind—who are perhaps much less modern, affluent and transnational than
Ahmad himself and yet whose intellectual positions would be close to that which
Ahmad criticizes. But Ahmad conducts his polemics in such black-and-white terms
and with such a fantastic sense of political activism and urgency—he mentions in
several places a ‘determinate socialist project’ in which he is located—that he does