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Benoy Kumar Sarkar: Restoring the nation to the world
This book explores the life and times of the pioneering Indian sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar. It locates him simultaneously in the intellectual history of India and the political history of the world in the twentieth century. It focuses on the development and implications of Sarkar’s thinking on race, gender, governance and nationhood in a changing context.
A penetrating portrait of Sarkar and his age, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern Indian history, sociology, and politics.
A penetrating portrait of Sarkar and his age, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern Indian history, sociology, and politics.
222 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 7, 2015
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January 28, 2022
This was brilliant! Short, but very dense, Satadru Sen's extensive analysis of Benoy Kumar Sarkar's work makes for an intriguing, confusing, complex, and troubling read. There isn't much biography here- the book revolves entirely around some of the themes in Sarkar's work. I'll admit, the density meant I sometimes got lost and had to re-read certain passages, or didn't entirely grasp some as much as I could have, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading this nonetheless. Sen is a brilliant writer, and Sarkar is a fascinating subject.
Sarkar (1887-1949) was an Indian sociologist, scholar, and nationalist. He travelled widely, learned English, German, French, Italian, and spent many years teaching in Germany. One of the results of his wanderings was a worldly outlook. He feverishly sought to appropriate ideas from abroad, as a form of "counter-conquest (going anywhere, assessing everything, assimilating anything)".
However, Sarkar was also deeply impacted by the realities of colonial humiliation, and racial prejudice. He sought to reject Orientalist stereotypes, and hated racial hierarchies that doomed the coloured peoples of the world to perpetual subordination. He wanted to "declare his
membership in the science-world and simultaneously protest his exclusion", and hated what he termed the 'albinocracy' that seemed to dominate the world. On some level, this led him to reject essentialism. However, in his attempts to turn colonial prejudices back on to the coloniser, he adopted a "scorched-earth approach to discourse, [where] what mattered more than the content of knowledge was the political value of knowledge in a race war marked by ‘pain and ill-treatment’. The inconsistency reflected the nihilism of a colonial-cosmopolitan intellectual enterprise that could not find its way out of the colony and exploded. But it was also an attempt to utilise the rubble as ammunition."
Sarkar's conception of the world as race war served to limit his 'liberalism', stifle his radicalism, and led him to some deeply unsettling conclusions. He began to espouse a deeply militant nationalism, driven as he was by ressentiment. As Sen puts it, "Sarkar wanted to be counted in the civilised world, not to question civilisation and savagery very rigorously." His vanguardist conception of nationalism- infused with German romanticism, realpolitik, the 'urge to conquer', and skirting dangerously close to fascism on many occasions- led him to an obsession with the state as an end in itself.
The state, in Sarkar's view, was a pedagogical tool and was tasked with creating a nation from the vast human material that existed in India. The Volk would have to be crafted by this state, and there were few limitations to what it could resort to in its mission: "To reconcile the universalism of his racial posture with the observable ‘facts’ of Indian backwardness, Sarkar relied on a ‘lag’, i.e., the different locations of nations on a common timeline of progress and liberty. The role he envisioned for the state, particularly in ‘latecomer’ nations like India, had to do with such lags: while they lasted, the vanguardist state would compensate for the backwardness of society, even if it had to put the individual in a re-education camp or a hospital...Sarkar posits notions of identity, citizenship and governance in which there is a normative confusion between the state, the nation and the community, and the individual can never be certain where he is located. Where Mill imagined a discrete regime that dragged a laggard population into progress, Sarkar’s state weaved in and out of its identification with the people: it was both ‘of’ the people and actively engaged in producing the people."
I'm having to actively stop myself from writing more here, so I'll end with the question of whether or not Sarkar was a fascist, as some historians have recently claimed. Here Sen comes to a disturbing conclusion: "The charge of fascism functions as a blunt instrument, obliterating nuance. But I do not find the accusation frivolous. Moreover, because I am arguing that Sarkar was not so much an outlier as an alternative within Indian nationalism, I am also suggesting that his quasi-fascist tendencies have been aspects of the ideology of the independent Indian state—and more generally, of the modern state—whenever the state has confronted the dissident individual or the recalcitrant community."
Sarkar (1887-1949) was an Indian sociologist, scholar, and nationalist. He travelled widely, learned English, German, French, Italian, and spent many years teaching in Germany. One of the results of his wanderings was a worldly outlook. He feverishly sought to appropriate ideas from abroad, as a form of "counter-conquest (going anywhere, assessing everything, assimilating anything)".
However, Sarkar was also deeply impacted by the realities of colonial humiliation, and racial prejudice. He sought to reject Orientalist stereotypes, and hated racial hierarchies that doomed the coloured peoples of the world to perpetual subordination. He wanted to "declare his
membership in the science-world and simultaneously protest his exclusion", and hated what he termed the 'albinocracy' that seemed to dominate the world. On some level, this led him to reject essentialism. However, in his attempts to turn colonial prejudices back on to the coloniser, he adopted a "scorched-earth approach to discourse, [where] what mattered more than the content of knowledge was the political value of knowledge in a race war marked by ‘pain and ill-treatment’. The inconsistency reflected the nihilism of a colonial-cosmopolitan intellectual enterprise that could not find its way out of the colony and exploded. But it was also an attempt to utilise the rubble as ammunition."
Sarkar's conception of the world as race war served to limit his 'liberalism', stifle his radicalism, and led him to some deeply unsettling conclusions. He began to espouse a deeply militant nationalism, driven as he was by ressentiment. As Sen puts it, "Sarkar wanted to be counted in the civilised world, not to question civilisation and savagery very rigorously." His vanguardist conception of nationalism- infused with German romanticism, realpolitik, the 'urge to conquer', and skirting dangerously close to fascism on many occasions- led him to an obsession with the state as an end in itself.
The state, in Sarkar's view, was a pedagogical tool and was tasked with creating a nation from the vast human material that existed in India. The Volk would have to be crafted by this state, and there were few limitations to what it could resort to in its mission: "To reconcile the universalism of his racial posture with the observable ‘facts’ of Indian backwardness, Sarkar relied on a ‘lag’, i.e., the different locations of nations on a common timeline of progress and liberty. The role he envisioned for the state, particularly in ‘latecomer’ nations like India, had to do with such lags: while they lasted, the vanguardist state would compensate for the backwardness of society, even if it had to put the individual in a re-education camp or a hospital...Sarkar posits notions of identity, citizenship and governance in which there is a normative confusion between the state, the nation and the community, and the individual can never be certain where he is located. Where Mill imagined a discrete regime that dragged a laggard population into progress, Sarkar’s state weaved in and out of its identification with the people: it was both ‘of’ the people and actively engaged in producing the people."
I'm having to actively stop myself from writing more here, so I'll end with the question of whether or not Sarkar was a fascist, as some historians have recently claimed. Here Sen comes to a disturbing conclusion: "The charge of fascism functions as a blunt instrument, obliterating nuance. But I do not find the accusation frivolous. Moreover, because I am arguing that Sarkar was not so much an outlier as an alternative within Indian nationalism, I am also suggesting that his quasi-fascist tendencies have been aspects of the ideology of the independent Indian state—and more generally, of the modern state—whenever the state has confronted the dissident individual or the recalcitrant community."
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