Review of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe

Jonathan Wright (101810420)

HIST 664 Dr Smith

04 November 2019

The postcolonial discourse of this text, in this case on Europe, is in a field that is also

dominated with views on other continents such as Africa that tussled with an ‘end’ of

colonialism from within Europe rather than outside of it as Chakrabarty arrestingly

demonstrates. Provincializing Europe does more than give a voice to underrepresented

historians, he paves the way for an external intervention into problematic histories of previously

colonized peoples Historians had only targeted the information that they perceived to be

available rather than a true history from those it affected.

One of his primary concerns in his thesis is not in forgetting the Eurocentric history that

preceded him, but in reshaping internal European viewpoints towards the communities

originating geographically from outside it. He explains that the act of “provincialising Europe is

not a project of rejecting or discarding European thought”, it is the discussion of modernity

outside of Europe (16). This act of collaboration is a common theme throughout his work and

he seeks to show how thinkers within Europe had continually remained staunchly located within

their continental boundary when assessing influence abroad. Indeed, Europe displays “everyday

habits of thought that invariably subtend attempts in the social sciences to address questions of

political modernity in South Asia” and he evolves internalist European thinking towards better

practices in a more global post-colonialist historical world (4). However, this very social-focused

monograph cannot avoid economics and study of labor within this as a vital cog in colonialism

and the legacy it left behind. Marxist theory is continually referred to but has a negative place in

postcolonial theory as it “builds a memory into this analytical category of that which it can never
completely capture” (92). This temporal thinking into commodities spills into political thought as

Chakrabarty critiques the methodology of modern historiography in avoiding the histories of

minorities. In writing that “democracy requires hitherto neglected groups to tell their histories”,

he calls to the duty of communities and historians to offer different views of the past through a

collaboration with their shared experience (100).

Returning to the personal nature of his work, he draws on his own experience in life, and

from others originally from outside of Europe, to make a larger comment about the historical

field. Chakrabarty identifies as part of middle-class Bengali community, the “first Asian social

group of any size whose mental world was transformed through its interactions with the West”,

and this upbringing helped him to find the liberal histories available from the Enlightenment that

embraced themes of greater equality between Europe and its colonies (4). He communicates this

history directly in later sections and assures the reader that they are a more modern way of

viewing this in comparison with appropriated histories, in this case, of India. The issue of a

modernism based on retained colonial ideas affects the communities perceived as being

‘outsiders’ and this book shows how European development models are “inadequate in helping

us to think through the various life practices”, in this case of India (5). Education has clearly

formed a significant part of the insufficient attempt to counter the separatism with colonized

nations. One of his most explicit case studies outlining the differences in current European and

external thinking is the power of the father over his child. He believes that “political authority in

this modernity was modelled on parental authority, which never ceased to be” and within this,

there is no death of parental authority within his personal community (231). Contrary to all that

has been said, Chakrabarty’s belief that “European thought is a gift to us all” resonates

particularly strongly with his overarching theme of educating historians to lead future studies

into viewing the interconnection of colonized and colonizers (255). This strikes at the heart of

his view that rather than forgetting history, cooperating in a postcolonial world is imperative to

achieve true representation.

 Chakrabarty's monograph powerfully dismantles Eurocentrism by exposing the

previously accepted notion of global European models. Provincializing Europe accepts the role of

Europe in providing great thinkers, but places greater agency on the individual communities and

how their voice is more important. A clearly personal work, this relocation of European thinking

was timely in revealing the haunted legacy that colonial discourse had laid out and providing a

foundation for a more authentic postcolonial voice.

Bibliography

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2000)