ABSTRACT
As C. A. Bayly has observed, British imperial rule in India made the problem of “modernity” an Indian problem in the colonial era. Modern Indian intellectual history, he writes, “attests to the virtuosity of Indian thinking” on the topic of “modernity” and reminds us of the problems concepts of “modernity” continue to pose in postcolonial times (“Afterword” 168). Postcolonial scholars in India have taken a leading role in theorising (and deconstructing) concepts of “modernity” – through a critique of “reason”, through the displacement of the history of the “West” as the master historical narrative, and through the questioning of the possibility of history being subsumed within a single system of representation (Chatterjee The Nation; Chakrabarty; see also Ludden). The aim of the present chapter is to demonstrate that the problems of “modernity”, “reason” and “historical progress” were problems with which figures in nineteenth-century Bengal also engaged and struggled, albeit in a different way and in a different context. This chapter focuses on just one figure, the Bengali Brahmo religious and social reformer Keshab Chandra Sen, and explores the ways in which he conceptualised “world history” and the epistemological framework upon which it was based. The objective here is to contextualise the innovative and influential recent work of postcolonial scholars and historians of empire within critiques of “Western modernity” advanced by Indians living in the colonial era. It is my view that, by paying more attention to the nineteenth-century project of what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called “provincializing Europe”, we might gain new insights into the project as pursued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
