Sophia

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00963-2

What is Western About Western thought?

Sudipta Kaviraj1

Accepted: 4 April 2023

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2023

Abstract
The question at the centre of this paper is part of a larger debate. Though the more
limited question is hardly ever asked in academic discussions, the larger question
– how can knowledge - or more broadly and less helpfully- thought in the world
outside the West can be decolonized is at the center of lively debates surrounding
the ‘end’ of postcolonial theory. Even this question can be asked in two significantly
separate forms: about decolonizing knowledge in these societies; or, alternative,
knowledge about these societies, which would presumably include knowledge pro-
duced in the Western academia about these societies. The two propositions make a
lot of difference. This essay, therefore, deals with that larger question of the human-
istic and the historical sciences indirectly, because I believe that without becoming
clear about this smaller question – what is Western about Western thought? - which
might strike people as odd, we cannot make much progress. Indeed, my claim is that
so much of uncertainty still attaches to the first discussion – whether we are making
any progress at all or not – is precisely because the second question is not seen with
clarity as being a precondition to making progress in the first.

Keywords Postcolonial theory · Decolonial theory · Western thought

What is wrong with postcolonial thinking?

The question at the center of this paper is part of a larger debate. Though the more lim-
ited question is hardly ever asked in academic discussions, the larger question—how can
knowledge—or more broadly and less helpfully - thought in the world outside the West
can be decolonized is at the center of lively debates surrounding the ‘end’ of postcolonial
theory. Even this question can be asked in two significantly separate forms: about decol-
onizing knowledge in these societies; or, alternative, knowledge about these societies,
which would presumably include knowledge produced in the Western academia about
these societies. The two propositions make a lot of difference. This essay, therefore, deals

* Sudipta Kaviraj
[email protected]
1
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, (MESAAS), Columbia
University, Knox Hall, 606 West 122 Street, New York, NY 10027, USA

13
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 S. Kaviraj

with that larger question of the humanistic and the historical sciences indirectly, because
that without becoming clear about this smaller question—what is Western about Western
thought?—which might strike people as odd, we cannot make much progress. Indeed, my
claim is that so much of uncertainty still attaches to the first discussion—whether we are
making any progress at all or not—which is precisely because the second question is not
seen with clarity as being a precondition to making progress in the first.
I shall begin with a brief genealogy of that larger question. After the publication
of Edward Said’s Orientalism, the problem1 of the Western origins of the modern
knowledge about non-Western societies attracted a great deal of attention. But the
debates opened by Said’s work have gone in several different directions—which
is to be expected in the aftermath of a serious intervention in theory. Said’s initial
presentation of his case—mainly against Western knowledge about the Orient—
generated at least two types of further questions. At the heart of Said’s critique was
the issue of representation in the rather obvious sense of the term—how an object
is presented/depicted by means of discursive or visual language. In Orientalism,
the primary direction of the argument and the accompanying evidence are about
how the rise of modern knowledge about Oriental societies was primarily con-
structs of colonial Western scholars, and the primary effect of accumulation of that
knowledge was the production of a ‘picture’ of Oriental societies as inferior to the
social form created by Western modernity. Said’s work registered a contradictory
character of the Orientalist knowledge project: on one side, this literature accumu-
lated typical modern empirical information about Oriental societies—at least in
ways fundamentally different from previous accounts,2 so that these works could
be correctly viewed as the commencement of modern empirical knowledge about
Oriental societies. On the other, he grasped an inseparable interpretative quality
of this information-gathering exercise which portrayed these societies as inferior
in an ascending scale of historical types. The informative element could not be
dissociated, in Said’s view, from the interpretive. In his argument, this marred the
cognitive status of Orientalist knowledge. Orientalism helped in the knowledge
of societies outside the West and simultaneously persuaded its consumers of their
inferiority. Said’s work was highly critical of the Orientalist knowledge corpus, but
this critique was centered almost exclusively on the issue of representation—the
fact that Oriental societies were portrayed through a series of explicit or implicit
contrasts with the modern West: contrasts about their rationality, oppressiveness,
inequality, and misogyny—a series of mutually reinforcing cognitive and ethical
features. It is not accidental that Edward Said was a literary scholar, with high spe-
cialized skills in reading literary texts.

1
Because of the standard assumption that, whether in modern or pre-modern societies, knowledge about
society X is ordinarily produced by knowledge agents in society X. It is an unusual, colonial, historical
condition in which knowledge of a particular kind about society X is produced by knowledge practition-
ers of another -Y.
2
That does not mean that pre-modern societies did not have information systems of their own. Ain-
Akbari, for instance, is a compendium of information about statecraft of Mughal India. Taxation required
detailed information systems.

13
What is Western About Western thought?

This is reflected in the composition of the work—in its marshalling of literary-textual

evidence from a wide arc of colonial English and French sources since the eighteenth
century. Notably, the textual material to support the general argument is distributed
unequally between literary and social scientific literature: a dominant share of the tex-
tual evidence selects representations from literary texts, supplemented by some paral-
lel evidence from texts of a philosophical or social scientific character.3 It is remarkable
that Said does not make a more scrupulous distinction between the cognitive status of
literary and historical representations—not preempting entirely the potential counter-
argument that literary texts do not, in principle, make straightforward cognitive or veridi-
cal claims. Portrayal of highly malicious, revengeful Indian characters in a novel does
not necessarily establish the author’s belief that all Indians share such characteristics; or
that these characteristics are reliably present with sufficient frequency in the real social
world. Thus, a potential inadequacy of Said’s demonstration is this lack of discrimina-
tion between literary and scientific portrayals and cognitive claims that can be derived
from them. Even in literary analysis, this procedure/method presupposes a simple realis-
tic aesthetic of the novel which assumes that descriptions internal to the text are always
purported to be realistic depictions of what is to be found in the world. Though this is a
technically admissible counter-argument, Said was also quite right in his own way. After
all, his primary objective was to demonstrate how the modern Western culture was con-
structing, using its relatively historically recent dominance of the world, particular types
of ‘comprehensive pictures’ (world pictures) of other cultures that were to become part
of the everyday furniture of thought and acted in all acts of thinking. Representation of
the Orient is not an act of a single proposition, or a single text, but of a discourse.4

The Question of Representation and Its Limits

But representation was not the only question that a reading of Orientalism raised.
Indeed, it could be argued that the question of representation—which gave most
offense—was the simplest to resolve among the varied problems that Said’s work
signaled about colonial knowledge. Said was entirely right in implying, although
he did not state this thesis explicitly, that the representation question was part of
a comprehensive representational economy subsuming all of world history/univer-
sal history in European colonial systems of knowledge. The specific representa-
tion of the Orient was not unrelated to the self-representation of the modern West:
indeed, it was the precondition of the second in a new stage of historical thought in
which despite sparse knowledge about the descriptive details of history from other
regions of the world, the stageist understanding of history had to be mobilized as a

3
While the first part of Said’s Orientalism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1978 mobilizes literary
textual evidence, there are significant critical observations about the major European philosophies of his-
tory–stage theories, Hegel and Marx; and the second part marshals evidence primarily from more recent
literature of social science and public discourse.
4
Said’s work relies methodologically on Foucault’s theory of discourse in this sense.

13
 S. Kaviraj

representational economy in which the specific position of each society was ‘scien-
tifically’ assigned. We shall see later that the universal acceptability of this cogni-
tive representational economy was required for the success of the colonial political
enterprise. Said clearly saw the narrower fact that the plausibility of the self-repre-
sentation of Western modernity crucially depended on the convincing contrastive
representation of the Orient. Historians of imperial modernism, and even philo-
sophical thinkers like Hegel, discounted the ability of Oriental civilizations to ‘talk
back’; and this prejudice, coupled with the fact that criticisms of this hegemonic
Western view were expressed in alien languages,5 made it appear that this view
of world history gained universal acceptance. Surveys of Indian intellectual his-
tory demonstrate that immediately after these historical opinions were widely
known and circulated among the Indian intelligentsia, forceful counter-arguments
appeared in the intellectual public sphere. Ironically, though European Oriental-
ists regarded ancient Indian sages with reverence, they did not extend the same
hospitality to contemporary ideas from Indians.6 Many Indian readers of modern
European Orientalist writings saw it as an interpretative construct, not necessar-
ily as ‘knowledge.’ In other words, they clearly viewed Orientalist knowledge as a
mode of representation, and erroneous. Representation is unavoidably a proposal
from the side of the representer, and its success to persuade depends how its recipi-
ents take it. Edward Said’s demonstration showed that the self-referent side of the
Orientalist representation—persuading European intellectuals of the truth of their
view of the Orient—was immensely successful, and this representative structure
formed the basis of the historical knowledge systems about the Orient. Western
educational institutions first began systematic study of Orientalist societies accord-
ing to the methodological rules of modern positivistic history. If the predominant
but inexplicit purpose of Orientalist knowledge was to reinforce an idea of the West
to itself, that purpose was fully served. University departments specializing in Ori-
entalist knowledge simultaneously trained their pupils in high philological skills
of Oriental languages, and therefore opened a door towards the textual corpus of
these civilizations, but at the same time, in subtle, hardly noticed ways it incul-
cated an attitude of condescension towards the cultures or texts they studied. Obvi-
ously, this was a complex predicament—learning a language to a level of skill that
enables reading high literary and philosophical texts is impossible without a pro-
found respect as an elementary orientation; yet it was possible to combine that with
a general stageist disdain for the cultures which produced them. However, these
two elements of classical Orientalism—the component of philological skill and of
cultural condescension—are analytically distinct. A general effect of the critical
attack on Orientalist knowledge has been a tendency towards general ideological
condemnation of Orientalist knowledge as a whole which indirectly devalues those

5
In the case of India, for instance, writers in the middle of the nineteenth century forcefully disputed
this stagiest conception of world history, but these rejections were primarily written in the vernacular;
and could be easily ignored by the British and their Indian collaborators.
6
See, as an example, Max Mueller’s. India: What It Can Teach Us, Penguin Books, New Delhi, 2000.

13
What is Western About Western thought?

philological skills. Said’s arguments carried other, highly significant implications

that were not followed up with equal enthusiasm. The first, rather obvious ques-
tion that emerged from Orientalism was: did Oriental societies possess knowledge
about themselves, before the collection of modern forms of knowledge about these
societies commenced? What was the character that knowledge? Did they differ in
their essential quality from modern forms of social knowledge? And how? How
and why did those knowledge systems collapse with the advent of modern systems
of knowledge initially collected by scholars who did not belong to those societies?
I have argued elsewhere that the decline of pre-modern knowledge systems was not
caused by purely intellectual methods.7 Powerful sociological processes contrib-
uted to this comprehensive decline. Said’s arguments regarding Orientalism oblige
us to ask this separate question as a corollary. If we view ‘Orientalist knowledge’
as ‘inferiorizing’ and in some ways ‘strange,’ a question must follow: how did that
knowledge acquire such uncontested dominance? In fact, it became historically so
indisputably hegemonic that Said’s book devotes a long chapter to demonstrate that
such strange knowledge continues to be dominant in the Western academia and
public life of Western culture.8 Orientalist images are as frequently observed in
academic arguments as in journalism and discourses which form public opinion. If
Said’s book is taken seriously, two further historical questions emerge. The first is
how and why did this form of knowledge become dominant? The second is - if we
consider this form of knowledge/representation faulty, what could be done to over-
come its uncritical reproduction? This paper is primarily addressed to the second
question.

The Cognitive Question: Not How the Orient Is Represented, but How
It Is Known?

Immediately after the publication of Said’s work, a second kind of response

could be observed, which, surprisingly, attracted less attention—though in my
estimation this bore far more serious cognitive/epistemic implications. In a work
that appeared a few years after Orientalism, and acknowledged its deep indebted-
ness to Said’s exposition,9 Partha Chatterjee linked the representational to the
larger cognitive question by pointing to a startling aspect of the phenomenon of
cognitive colonialism.10 By drawing upon French discussions, Chatterjee pointed
out the startlingly comprehensive dominion of Orientalist cognitive structures in
the works of nationalist authors. Using Anwar Abdel Malek’s distinction drawn

7
Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The sudden death of Sanskrit knowledge,’ Journal of Indian Philosophy, 20,025.
8
Orientalism, chapter 3, 201 ff.
9
Partha Chatterjee on Said. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, Zed Books,
London, 1986.
10
Partha Chatterjee, Ibid.

13
 S. Kaviraj

from Merleau Ponty, between the thematic and the problematic in cognitive
enterprises, he pointed out a strange feature of Indian nationalist thought—which
was the primary theme of his study of the internal contradictions of national-
ism. Indian nationalists undoubtedly rejected the colonial claim to political sov-
ereignty. But in their own wider, more general cognitive enterprise, they con-
tinued to deploy, without the slightest doubt or skepticism, the entire cognitive
apparatus they acquired from the modern West. A major exception to this gen-
eral rule was Gandhi.11 Chatterjee’s reading of Said’s argument and its startling
extension represented a profoundly significant move: it crossed a crucial thresh-
old, though it was not immediately followed up with the relentless enthusiasm
like the theme of representation. The question of representation was straightfor-
ward; this was more complex—with problematic implications. For a long time,
scholarship in the academic discipline of English literature—which was Said’s
academic home and therefore received his intervention more acutely than other
fields—began a continually expansive, but unilinear development. Scholars
rummaged through texts initially in the literary and later more reflexive fields
of thinking for culpable evidence of rationalization of colonial power, or sub-
tler traces of colonial prejudice in modern European literary and theoretical can-
ons. The generality of these accusations was probably encouraged by Said’s own
occasional lack of discrimination. It was not always clear, for example, if Said’s
critique was directed against modern Western knowledge and art, or ahistorically
against European thinking of all times. Because, at times, Said, carried away by
his own rhetoric, used implausible examples like Aeschylus. If this rhetorical
statement is taken as true, Said’s critique is directed at European thought of all
times—deploying a Western/Oriental binary that both European and nationalist
thinkers has made common. But the more limited argument also seemed to be
more forceful, because it was tied to and partially derived from Said’s admir-
ing deployment of Foucault’s critique against the modern Western episteme. But
the epistemic is distinct from the representational—though these are logically
strongly connected. Faulty epistemic procedures can give rise to untrue cognitive
propositions; but analyzing representations and analyzing the epistemic processes
that produced them are separate enterprises. The literature that immediately fol-
lowed the publication of Orientalism primarily went into simple demonstration
and contestation of these Orientalist images (in some cases, authors like Nochlin
extended Said’s Orientalist charge with great effect against modern European art,
besides its literature and historical knowledge). However, Chatterjee’s extension
of Said’s work demonstrated that it gestured towards a more complex implica-
tion. This was not simply an extension of Said’s work in an unexpected direction,
it was an extension across a highly significant cognitive threshold. The trouble,
Chatterjee’s work showed, was much deeper than what Said suggested. Not just
Europeans, colonial nationalists embraced this form of modern knowledge about
their own societies. Their self-knowledge was mediated and constituted by the

11
Partha Chatterjee, Ibid, chapter on Gandhi.

13
What is Western About Western thought?

other-knowledge produced by European Orientalists. Orientalism was not a Euro-

pean, but a nearly universal problem.
Chatterjee’s reading and extension of Said’s argument was important for two sepa-
rate ideas: the first is elaborated in Chatterjee’s monograph, the second left primarily
to an implication—for potential amplification. The most evident and forceful move in
his Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World is the use of the distinction between a
‘thematic’ and a ‘problematic’ taken from French philosophy, to demonstrate a deeply
contradictory and partial character of nationalist thought as a whole. Nationalists’ stri-
dent hostility to colonial dominance was both focused on and limited to the contesta-
tion of political sovereignty. There was no inauthenticity in the nationalists’ opposition
to political sovereignty of the European powers. However, Chatterjee noted, the larger
epistemic frame through which this political argument operated—its conception of the
social world, its definition of political power, and its entire apparatus of argumenta-
tion and justification- were based entirely on the modern European epistemic struc-
ture derived primarily from the Enlightenment. Consequently, nationalist thought was
shown, first, to be partial—its contestation of European sovereignty restricted only to
the cognitive field of political questions of the state. Besides this—admittedly signifi-
cant—field of thinking, nationalist thought—broadly—did not evince much opposition
to the modern European knowledge system, and appeared uninterested in a critical con-
testation of its principles.12 Nationalism was shown, secondly, as contradictory because
its central argument was in effect a mobilization of European arguments against the
moral justification of European political dominion of the colonies. But this contradic-
tion signaled something more profound and intractable: colonial sovereignty brought
out in opposition to itself a desire of the elite of a colonized society for an end of sub-
jection, an end of colonialism in its entirety. Political nationalism, Chatterjee’s argu-
ment implied, is an imperfect, fraught project of liberation. In part, this was due to the
fact that the colonial elite assimilated European knowledge systems so completely, that
these became their own languages of being: these were the conceptual and practical lan-
guages in which they constructed their world, their own moral and political purposes,
and they directed at this social world patterns of action which replicated the European
project of modernity. This modern elite refashioned themselves—without residue—
through its epistemic frame, paradoxically, in a willing realization of Macaulay’s edu-
cational program.13 Therefore, the world they wanted to fashion for themselves was, not

12
In the Indian cases, there were a few, though significant, thinkers who were exceptions to this rule:
e.g., Gandhi and K C Bhattacharyya. See, M K Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, (ed) Anthony Parel, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1997, and K C Bhattacharya, ‘Svaraj in Ideas’ (1928), Chapter 7, in Nalini
Bhushan and Jay L. Garfield (eds) Indian Philosophy in English: From Renaissance to Independence,
Oxford University Press, New York, 2011, 101-112, and also Jonardon Ganeri, ‘Freedom in Thinking:
The Immersive Cosmopolitanism of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya’, Chapter 36, in Jonardon Ganeri
(ed) Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2014, 718-736.
13
In the literature of postcolonial literary studies, works of Homi Bhabha and others advanced this argu-
ment of colonial mimicry. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994.

13
 S. Kaviraj

surprisingly, a replicative universe of European modernity.14 Nehru’s explicit argument

held that modernity was a preferable historical condition to precolonial pre-modernity,
and therefore the end of colonialism was a condition for the realization of true moder-
nity in India. From a radically different perspective—like Gandhi’s—the end of politi-
cal subjection was then to be a condition for a more comprehensive re-subjection of
the life-world of the colonial society to that of modern Europe. In Gandhi’s telling
phrase, that form of ‘emancipation’ would merely mean a comprehensive adoption of
Europeanism without Europeans—quintessentially, a continued condition of colonial-
ism rendered compatible with political sovereignty. Implicitly, Chatterjee’s analysis of
three moments of thinking within Indian nationalism—from Bankimchandra, Gandhi
and Nehru—yielded a dual typology of fundamental philosophical positions on moder-
nity and colonialism. The three arguments examined could be divided into two elemen-
tary types—a refusal of political subjection (Bankimchandra) that led, ironically, to
a project of regeneration of colonial society through an adoption of and subjection to
the modern European-style state, or a more profound refusal of the offer of modernity
itself—which would consist of a rejection of the ‘modern social imaginary’ based on
modern epistemic systems (Gandhi). Nationalism was divided, decisively, inexorably
into two incompatible forms—Nehruvian or Gandhian, a modernist or an anti-modern-
ist world imagination. By separating the political from the epistemic—in the deeper and
wider sense—Gandhi revealed the complex predicaments of colonially produced his-
tory in the non-European world in general. Colonial dominance possessed at least three
different layers/levels of subjection: first, the explicit dispossession of political sover-
eignty; second, from the late nineteenth century, nationalists exploring the discipline of
political economy demonstrated the connection of political sovereignty to an economi-
cally extractive imperialist structure15; but Gandhi’s philosophically intransigent stance
revealed a third, deeper level of colonial subjection—of the imaginary itself, a reliance
on the modern epistemic system. By a more radical reading of the deeper implications
of Said, postcolonial theorists could arrive at this question of cognitive predicament,
not merely the theme of representation.

14
Chatterjee’s analysis of Nehru’s ideas—which he names ‘the moment of arrival’ for the trajectory of
Indian nationalism—presents this argument. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, chapter 5. I agreed with
this view at the time: now I feel that Nehru’s ideas contained aspirations towards a theory of ‘a non-
national state’—i.e., a state structure that was constitutionally liberal but based on an idea of people-
hood or of a collective political community that was a contrastive model to the European nation-state.
I have argued this point in Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Democracy and the non-nation state,’ in Nadia Urbinati
(ed), Thinking Democracy Now: Innovations and Regressions, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2020, and in a Bengali
essay, ‘Sahabas: kacher lok kara?,’ Anustup, Puja Sankhya, 2022.
15
Though the clearest exposition of this argument could be found in Lenin, Indian nationalists from
the time of Dadabhai Naoroji developed a powerful argument about exploitation, economic drain
and dependency, and early version of the theory of ‘development of underdevelopment.’ Dadabhai
Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, Publications Division, Government of India, 1962, R. C.
Dutt, The Economic History of India, two volumes, Publications Division, Government of India, Delhi,
1970; the phrase ‘development of underdevelopment’ is taken from the later work of Latin American
economists like Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America: underdevelopment or revolution; essays on the
development of under development and the immediate enemy, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1970.

13
What is Western About Western thought?

I have said in other contexts that in understanding the causal effects of ideas, it is
inadequate to accept a simple model of making and taking of ‘theory’: the plausible,
but flawed idea that a theorist/author constructs/makes an argumentative architecture
which readers simply take from his works. Taking of a work or an argument needs
to be further refined into two distinct activities: an activity of ‘reading’ which aims
simply to grasp what the author was trying to say, and a separate subsequent activ-
ity of ‘using’ which often requires a decomposition of the elements of the argument
to choose one which can be redeployed by the user or extended in lines unintended
or unexpected by the author. This is simply because in the reader the text encounters
a different context of problems from the ones in terms of which the text was origi-
nally written. Said’s work—like all generative thinking—invites use-extensions of this
kind, and Chatterjee’s reading was a most interesting example of such an unexpected
‘unthought’. Common readings of Said do not trouble themselves excessively with the
question of large knowledge systems—though that theme always hovers in the back-
ground of Said’s analyses about representations. His own representation invites exten-
sions in two immediate ways: the first, Chatterjee’s startling registration of the fact
these representations are often not merely believed by Western Orientalists, but these
also form the ground of much of thinking by anti-colonial nationalists themselves.
This is already quite close to the next issue: the power and plausibility of such repre-
sentations are accentuated by the fact that these are not random, isolated, individuated
ideas, pictures, or images, but parts of systems of knowledge that the modern epis-
temic order produced and circulated about the Oriental societies. Bringing the prob-
lem—not of single images, but of interconnected and internally coherent systems of
representation—into the discussion immediately raises the larger problem of knowl-
edge-systems. All societies produce knowledge-systems connected to internal social
practices: in order to act in a certain socially recognizable way agents often require a
descriptive account of a particular kind. Joining Said’s concerns with Chatterjee’s, we
get into a much broader historical question: how did ‘modern’ systems—produced or
enabled by the West—replace older cognitive systems these societies possessed? Why
did the earlier systems collapse so comprehensively? Why did the new knowledge
system acquire such pre-emptive plausibility/persuasiveness to the cognitive elites of
these colonial societies? Why did these modern systems remain so pervasively domi-
nant and unquestioned, even after the removal of political colonization?
Was that because these societies—under conditions of historical modernity—
required ‘modern’ knowledge systems about themselves? Did pre-modern sys-
tems fail to perform cognitive functions demanded by conditions of modernity?
If so, what were those conditions? Or is their apparent persuasiveness simply a
matter of colonial cognitive habit - co-dependence of the social life-world and
its cognitive doubles?

Dissatisfaction with Postcolonial Critiques

Although the initial impulse of postcolonial critique was felt acutely inside the
academic field of English literary studies, subsequently it affected social and
historical sciences more generally. Critique of colonialism in literary studies in

13
 S. Kaviraj

English resulted in three types of shift/transformation. First, literary texts were

conceived now not as falling into an abstract, ‘art-for art’s sake’ sphere of high
art where the only legitimate activity was to subject them to judgments of high
literary criticism. Literature was seen instead as part of a much larger config-
uration of colonialism; and works of literary art were seen as participating in
the circulation process of ideas of this colonial-imperial culture—a sociologi-
cal reading absent earlier. Second, this led to a close critical reading of canoni-
cal texts to scour for colonial stereotypes and imperial optics on the world in
general. Finally, this part of the critique led to a demand for inclusion into the
literary canon of authors or texts earlier excluded—to incorporate the textual
world of literary English outside England which successively included Ameri-
can, Australian, African-American, and colonial writers—altering the shape
and substance of the field of ‘English literature.’ The agenda of ‘decolonizing’
a discipline was carried out by a series of successive inclusions, which, altering
the frontiers of English literature, also altered the values that literary studies
explored through their scholarship. A similar charge of ‘colonial character’ of
the knowledge field was leveled against history and social sciences, leading to a
parallel demand for ‘de-colonization.’ Demanding an end of colonization of the
mind, or of thought was a powerful but vague idea. Decolonization could not be
accomplished, even attempted if what was to be erased from present forms of
knowledge was not specified. Authors in these field began to give more thought
to what was to be the content of the vague, general demand for decolonization
of thinking/knowledge.16 (Parekh, Pieterse) A significant early intervention in
this exploration was Dipesh Chakrabarti’s call for ‘provincializing Europe.’17
That work brought into a clear and coherent form some of the previous criti-
cal arguments about the cognitive presence of what Chakrabarti called a ‘hyper-
real Europe’ in the discursive structures of historical social sciences.18 First,
the characterization of Europe as ‘hyper-real’ needs to be glossed—because the
notion that something is more real than the real is not an obviously unambiguous
idea. But to those who were familiar with the everyday practice of non-Euro-
pean social science, this idea was neither unclear nor inaccurate. It can easily
be concretized through the example of Marxists using a concept like ‘the bour-
geoisie’: which worked hyper-really in several ways. First, it set up an histori-
cal norm for modern business practices, which led scholars to believe that the
logic of capitalist evolution to other parts of the world brought this norm into
realization. If modern Indian businessmen in general appeared to behave in a
different way, somehow that actual historically empirical behavior was ‘wrong’/

16
For an early attempt to specify this content, see Bhikhu Parekh and Jan Niederven Pieterse (eds)
Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge, Power, Zed Books, London,1995.
17
Dipesh Chakrabarti, Provincializing Europe, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000. It is notable
that Chakrabarti’s analysis was not restricted to history narrowly defined as an academic field, but ranged
over the social sciences.
18
Ibid.

13
What is Western About Western thought?

inadequate judged by the superior standard of the ideal–typical behavior of ‘the

bourgeoisie’ in the Marxist theoretical model. This raises the complex question
of the relation between history and history used as theory. The theoretical power
of this constructed norm trumped the evidentiary force of the actual behavior
of concrete business groups. Chakrabarti’s own work on the social life of labor
revealed parallel trends in labor studies.19 Use of such hyper-real figures was not
restricted to Marxist analytics alone. Theorists of democracy similarly evince a
belief that capitalists or middle classes everywhere carry some deep desire for
democracy, independent of historical circumstances. European bourgeoisie in its
early career worked with attempts to put constitutional restraints on the absolut-
ist state. That fact can be seen either as a contingent occurrence, or an essential
sociological property that inheres in the capitalist class irrespective of circum-
stances. Europe was hyper-real in this very real sense. As a consequence, in the
social sciences, groups and classes and other types of social actors—individual
or collective—were ‘failing’ to act in ‘obligatory’ ways. The way social agents
actually behaved got overwritten by the way they were expected to behave—on
the basis of theories that turned the historical priority of European cases into
the theoretical priority of European norms.20 Cognitive effects of this hyperreal
Europe evidently needed to be countered. A call for ‘provincializing Europe’
was the appropriate response to this need. ‘Provincializing Europe’ acted as an
idea that helped coalesce several strands of methodological discontent into a sin-
gle identifiable critical project.

Is Provincializing Europe Provincializing European Theory?

However, the cognitive project of provincializing Europe was attended by two

problems: first, the two strands of powerful theory that Chakrabarti’s argument
invoked were both of European provenance: it echoed Habermas’s conviction that
critical social theory required a combination of analyses of ‘the system’ and ‘the
lifeworld.’21 These two theoretical methods were drawn from two strands of influ-
ential modern European philosophical thinking which stood in a relation of some
tension22: though the second philosophic strand contained a general celebration of
historical particularity drawn from earlier stages of German historicism.23 Chakra-
barti’s declaration that in understanding our social worlds we cannot do without
European social theory, and we cannot do with European theory alone—i.e., it is

19
Ibid.
20
In an earlier work, I have called this form of analysis Euronormal thinking. Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Outline
of a revisionist theory of modernity,’ European Journal of Sociology, Volume 46, No. 3, 2005,497-526.
21
Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol II, Polity Press, London, 1988.
22
Because analytics of systems needed abstraction from intentions and experience.
23
Especially the work of Dilthey whose influence in shaping modern social science methodology often
goes unnoticed. Wilhelm Dilthey, Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, (trans.
Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi), Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002.

13
 S. Kaviraj

simultaneously inescapable and inadequate—seemed to be at odds with modes

of analysis used in the work. The theoretical frame was constructed by drawing
from Marx (system) and Heidegger (lifeworld), but the theoretical counterpoise
was not provided by ‘thinking drawn from elsewhere’—i.e., outside of European
systems of thought. Playing one European theory to counterbalance or supple-
ment another is not provincializing European theory. Alternatively, counterweight-
ing European theory by histories of non-European belonging was not an answer
to the initial formulation of the problem—if the original problem was the illicit
dominance of a Europe made theoretically hyper-real. (There could be a reading
of the thesis with a different inflection—which maintained that theory itself was
‘elsewhered’ by textured, complex analyses of historical belonging—like the par-
ticularities of Bengali bhadralok sociability, or the vulnerability of the Bengali
widow, because the received theoretical categories deployed in the analysis would
not function properly in this evidentiary environment, leading to an internal cri-
sis of theory, and this would necessitate a re-theorization of crucial concepts.) The
provenance of the theory remained European, the historical analysis worked by
these theories referred to Bengal.24 If it was a form of ‘provincializing’ of Europe,
it was certainly not a provincializing of European theory.25 Rather, an implication
of an attentive reading of the book’s epistemic architecture might lead to the con-
clusion that since in writing social scientific history, we are operating within the
cognitive field of modern knowledge systems, we have no option except to work
through a combination of Western theories of our choice/preference; but we are
at liberty to bring into the theoretical analysis vast tracts of empirical, descrip-
tive material from the annals of the non-European past and present. This mode of
doing history will certainly result in a modification of the map of current historical
knowledge; but, if that would result in provincializing theory, working ourselves
away from the mandatory dominance of influential European theoretical systems is
doubtful. To a particularly unsympathetic observer, this way of doing history may
appear to reduce historical disciplines to the problem faced famously by anthro-
pology, or the early stages of collecting historical knowledge about the colonial
world. The epistemic apparatus determining the rules of cognitive operation would
remain under European cognitive sovereignty—but local agents would be allocated
role of being ‘native informants.’ Theories of history would continue to be Euro-
pean, but those frames would now reduce to theoretic intelligibility large bodies of
material from the pre-interpretative life-worlds of other cultures. If provincializing
Europe is viewed as a theoretical project, it could be argued that this procedure was
unlikely to accomplish that end. Indeed, the actual effect of postcolonial thinking
was much ingenious deployment or mixture of already influential forms of ‘critical
theory,’ but not any serious inclusion of theoretical ideas from non-European cul-
tures of thought. Serious and refined exploration of philosophic traditions of Indian

24
A radical re-reading of the argument could be that subjecting the theories to the Bengali historical
material would show that they do not work well in this historical ecology, and demand re-theorization.
25
Chakrabarti has recently drawn attention to some other infelicities of excessively global forms of his-
torical research. Chakrabarti, Parichay, Puja, 2022. At times, it is purely the connections that are valor-
ized, but the worlds or ‘somewheres’ between which the connections exist are obliviated.

13
What is Western About Western thought?

or Islamic philosophy continued; some of these works did fine critical work coun-
teracting earlier prejudicial readings of non-European traditions—for example, in
re-assessing the cognitive value of commentarial knowledge. But concepts and cat-
egories drawn from non-European cognitive systems hardly ever entered the space
of theoretical innovation.26
Similar anomalies could be observed in adjacent disciplines affected and seri-
ously modified by postcolonial thinking. Expression of discontent against ubiqui-
tous European prejudice against other cultures continued, but, on inspection, criti-
cal postcolonial work relied on an assortment of theoretical departures from modern
European philosophy—from Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, or other
preferred figures from whom the decisive philosophical framing was derived. To use
Partha Chatterjee’s term in a different context, postcolonial thinking, in its theoreti-
cal provenance, could be seen as a predominantly ‘derivative discourse.’

Is Decolonial Less Colonial than the Postcolonial?

To differentiate themselves from postcolonialism’s indecisive rupture with Euro-

pean thought, sometimes this line of dissatisfaction tended to use the separate self-
naming of the ‘decolonial.’ The demand for decolonial epistemologies comprised
of at least three separate constituent claims—each one, consequently, implicitly
pointing to a rectificatory/corrective cognitive project. The first—negative—claim
is that despite its critical self-image, postcolonial analyses were simply not suffi-
ciently independent of European theory; rather, often these were accompanied by
a competitive declaration of adherence to European philosophical schools, and in
effect, like colonial Marxists in earlier times, simply reduced the recalcitrant factual-
ity of non-European history to the pre-established symmetries of European philo-
sophical doctrines. A shift from Marx to Derrida, or a mixture, did not end the spell
of European thought, and little to provincialize European thinking. A second idea,
often associated with this general claim, has more complex and uncertain potential:
postcolonial analyses did little to restore interest in and cognitive respect to indig-
enous epistemologies. This is a more complex argument than appears at first sight.
In certain fields—like medical, biological, or environmental knowledge—claims
of this kind have immense significance. Either knowledge based on local interac-
tion with nature preserved in traditions of local medicine or more literate, system-
atized knowledges regarding the human body and its interactions with the natural
environment textually archived in disciplines like Ayurveda were systematically

26
One field in which mixtures, or ‘fusion’ often happened and worked was philosophy. Philosophers
working on ancient and medieval Indian systems have insightfully compared and mixed technical argu-
ments from ancient, medieval and modern systems. Bimal Krishna Matilal and Arindam Chakrabarti
(eds), Knowing from Words: Western and Indian Philosophical Analysis of Understanding and Testimony,
Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1994; Arindam Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber (eds), Comparative Philosophy Without
Borders, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2016,Jonardon Ganeri, The Concealed Art of the Soul: theories
of self and practices of truth in Indian ethics and epistemology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007.

13
 S. Kaviraj

marginalized by colonial epistemologies.27 Often, the religious ontology standing

behind these practices was incomprehensible to modern knowledge practitioners;
and as a consequence, these cognitive systems were imperiously judged invalid. But
it is clear from recent developments in the field of medical research, for example,
that such naive rejection is now being reexamined, and local epistemologies of the
natural and human environment restored to their legitimate place as finely tuned
knowledge of these local ecologies. However, there are obstacles to a generalization
of this argument to all cognitive fields. It is not self-evident that similar arguments
can be made unproblematically about knowledge systems whose objects are social
and historical rather than natural facts. Ayurvedic systems speak about the human
body and its characteristics that have not changed with time, or been transformed
by the impact of colonial sovereignty. In these fields, what is local knowledge, or
the indigenous epistemology, is itself a matter of debate. It is true that in the Indian
past, intricate systems of sastric thought dealt with political power28 or parallel ana-
lytical systems in Islamic statecraft were available and widely circulated.29 But it
is not apparent that the statecraft of the Arthasastra or Islamic medieval treatises
can provide a serious evaluative vocabulary or explanatory apparatus for theoretical
adjudications required for serious analytics of modern democracy. A simple conse-
quence of the elementary historicist distinction between natural science and social
science disciplines is that, given that division in the epistemic nature of the sciences,
and historical obsolescence of social knowledge, it becomes impossible to gener-
alize the claim about indigenous epistemologies. It is not easy to conceive what
‘indigenous epistemologies’ in the fields of history and society will mean for a pro-
ductive discussion.30 Cognitive verities about natural processes, biological objects,
and medicinal properties of plants do not change in historical time. The social life-
world of power is profoundly altered by interventions of modernity and colonialism,
making it impossible to reapply insights from indigenous systems of social knowl-
edge by simply willing away the dominance of colonial epistemology. Moving from
the postcolonial to the decolonial appears initially as a further radicalization of the
demand for critical cognitive change. Serious reflection on the complex assertions
implicit in these claims reveals that its negative argument—that postcolonial think-
ing does not leave European knowledge behind—has considerable force; its purport-
edly positive proposal about what to do in producing knowledge is not unambiguous
and effective. This realization must force a rethinking on people who are seriously
invested in the question of decolonization of knowledge. A simple radicalization

27
Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The sudden death of Sanskrit knowledge’, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Volume
33, No,. 1, February, 2005, 119-142 examines this historical process.
28
For example, the Arthasatra, the rajaniti sections of the Dharmasastras, or the very different treat-
ment of the same subjects in the Sukraniti.
29
For example, Ziaul Barani’s Fatwa-i-Jahandari or the Fatwa-i-Alamgiri.
30
That of course does not mean that ordinary people do not have epistemic coping strategies in dealing
with the world of politics: extracting those ideas from the ordinary life of politics can be an interesting
field of new research. But that will require at least a two tier cognitive enterprise: the first would have to
be an immersion in the local experience of politics in the vernaculars, and second, a conversion of that
knowledge into theoretical forms.

13
What is Western About Western thought?

of the demand for cognitive change leaving the category of ‘European knowledge’
uninterrogated does not resolve the problem. What kind of knowledge are we talking
about: about Aristotle’s reflections in Nicomachean Ethics, Aquinas’s Summa Theo-
logica, Bacon’s Novum Organum, Descartes’ Discourse on Method, Machiavelli’s
Prince, Hobbes’s Leviathan, or quantum physics, genome sequencing, or techniques
of heart surgery? ‘Decolonizing’ procedures of cardiology is unlikely to prove popu-
lar among the aged in the non-Western world, nor an unqualified embrace of indige-
nous epistemologies in medicine. Abandoning European knowledge is an unpromis-
ing project because of the lack of clarity about the specific forms of knowledge that
are to be rejected. This list of texts fall into three distinct categories: natural sci-
entific knowledge like atomic physics, astronomy, genome sequencing, and cardiac
surgery belong to the first type where considerations of decolonizing do not apply.
Bacon’s reflections on scientific enquiry and Descartes’ on philosophical method too
belong to a type of general thinking which, despite their historical origins, are cir-
cumscribed in their relevance to their particular time and space. Curiously, Aristo-
tle’s analysis of the nature of ethical thought is similarly relevant across chronotopic
boundaries, as evidenced by the periodic redeployment of his arguments in social
theory. In the second type belonging to Machiavelli’s Prince—clearly a text that
reflects on its own times—though as Koselleck pointed out, his language of thought
is un-temporalized. There are no ‘periods’ is political existence of humanity. Levia-
than is an examination of the conditions of political order of his times but in a new
language that is deliberately divested of temporal markers—deriving its arguments
from ‘man’snature.’ Marx’s theory of the capitalist economy, Weber’s theses about
disenchantment or secularization, and Foucault’s analysis of discipline are clearly
cognitive projects for the explicit understanding of modernity—which belong to a
third type. It is in the case of the second and third types of ‘knowledges’ that the
features of historicity and possible decolonization are intertwined.

What is Western About Western thought?

I wish to suggest that the intractability of the problem comes from a lack of critical
reflection around the idea of ‘Western knowledge’ or European thought. Interest-
ingly, despite their noticeable differences, both post-colonial and decolonial modes
of thinking start from a premise that in order to decolonize our thinking, we must
question, suspect, reject, modify, critique ‘Western thought.’ The first difficulty
stems from the excessive generality of the referent—‘Western thought’—which, as
is now widely accepted, encounters difficulties from numerous angles. If ‘Western
thought’ is viewed in a truly historicist fashion, it becomes paradoxically clear that
this characterization cannot apply to pre-modern forms of thinking: ancient Greek
thought did not necessarily regard itself as an early version of ‘Western thought,’
because the present idea of Europe and of ‘Western thought’ is a relatively modern
conceptual construction.
I wish to suggest that a resolution, at least a clarification that will assist a resolu-
tion, might lie in a different direction: in asking the counterintuitive question: what
is Western in Western thought? If we can draw a conceptual boundary around an

13
 S. Kaviraj

offending form of ‘Western thought,’ which causes the familiar problems of epis-
temic slippage, substitution, or obfuscation, we could focus on dealing with those
and need not wrestle with the problems of what to do with ‘Europe’ or ‘Western
thought’ in general/as a whole. This involves suggesting, more counterintuitively,
that all Western thinking is not Western in the same sense; and while some forms of
Western thought must be critiqued and averted, there is nothing wrong in continued
use of other elements of Western thinking. But how can we find a criterion of dis-
tinction between different modes in which thinking can be characterized ‘Western’?

Refinement of the Historicist Rule

To get a grasp of this question properly, it is not enough simply to restate the basic
principles of German historicism, because that will lead back to unhelpful overgen-
eralizations. Dilthey’s assertion that all human expressions are externalizations of
human experience, and therefore things that could, in principle, be decoded by other
humans, is only partially true.31 It states correctly that to understand any expres-
sion, scholars need to reconstruct the circumstances in which it was given objec-
tification; but that principle might easily turn in our hands into an impossibility
theorem, if those originary circumstances are hard or impossible to reconstruct;
and additionally, it is hard to convince ourselves that the reconstruction is accurate
enough. This elementary rule of historicism needs to be refined, and expanded—if
it is to do our work. To judge our question, we need to supply a new feature into the
discussion besides the circumstances of origin—the ‘context’.32 All ideas are pro-
duced in some context, but the contents of those ideas vary. Some of these ideas
refer back to the context itself, or, more precisely, to something located inside that
context itself: thus, without that contextual element it is impossible to grasp either
the meaning or the validity of the relevant statements. To take an example from
Marx, his lifelong attempt to analyze and understand the nature (how it was) and
dynamic (how it was likely to evolve) of a capitalist economy in Western Europe
is an example of this type of a referential loop. Marx’s theory regarding capitalism
is produced inside a context of capitalist economic development in Europe: but its
object of theorizing is also the same capitalist economy—something chronotopically
specific. However, some of the ideas/arguments which formed the enabling condi-
tions and background assumptions of his theory of capitalism were not historically
specific. For instance, his belief that all societies possess a fundamental structure

31
Some of these difficulties with Diltheyan historicism are well-known, and have been explored at great
depth by critics like Gadamer. For the detailed arguments, Wilhelm Dilthey, Formation of the Historical
World in the Human Sciences, and Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Book 2.
32
The Cambridge School explored this side of the question in detail: Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and
understanding in the history of ideas,’ in Visions of Politics, Vol 1, Cambridge University Press, Cam-
bridge, 2002; Dunn, ‘On the identity of the history of ideas.’ Philosophy, Volume 43, No. 164, April, 1968,
85-104. But ‘context’ is invoked by radically different schools of theories of reading: for example, Jacques
Derrida, ’Signature, event, context’, Margins of Philosophy, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1982.

13
What is Western About Western thought?

that could be characterized as a ‘mode of production,’ or in less economic terms, a

‘social formation,’ is not similarly chronotopically circumscribed. This constituted
a general proposition for historical explanation: i.e., while not denying that there
were quite distinct and nonequivalent modes of production in history, this general
theory claimed that the study of ‘the mode of production’ was the key to an under-
standing of the nature and dynamics of all human societies. There is no necessary
contradiction between a thinker accepting a historicist view of the social world and
making general theoretical or methodological claims about historical knowledge.
To continue with Marx’s work as our example, there is another stratum of Marx’s
detailed economic analyses which refer not to Europe, but to specific chronotopic
events or processes in the English, French, or German economies. I regard Marx as
a preeminent historicist thinker (many Marxist thinkers (Lukacs, Gramsci) accept
that characterization, against the principal objection coming from Althusser); but
even if that is contested, it should be clear that in Marx’s massive analyses of eco-
nomic history, there are three types of analytical operations. Some ideas belong to
the class of general observations about history—which are purported to be true of
all societies, not chronotopically specific ones. A second class of statements per-
tain to properties of the chronopically proximate historical world—of Europe of
his time—the time of capitalism. A third class refers to states of affairs that are too
obviously circumscribed by locally defining chronotopic properties which simply
cannot be transferred to any other historic setting.33 The primary claim of this paper
is that when we use a characterization like ‘Western thought’ or Western theory,
it is essential to keep this range, and the distinction between these three separate
levels of generality/specificity clearly in sight. For the simple reason that much of
the epistemic complexity and consequently the associated disputation is concerned
with the second level of ‘historicity.’ The third level is too evidently local for any
serious analyst to be tempted to lift it out of its specific circumstances and expect
its ‘application’ to another setting to yield serious cognitive results. Ideas at the first
level—of high generality—can be contested about their philosophical acceptability,
but not on ‘historical’ grounds in this sense. Theories of technological determin-
ism of social processes, or in Marx’s case, determination by the mode of production
can be claimed to be wrong—but that must be on general philosophic grounds, not
historical ones. I shall take two well-known examples from Western social theory—
from Hegel and Marx—to illustrate this observation.
In order to make our main point, I think we need to fashion an argument that is
similar to Hegel’s thinking in the Phenomenology. Just as in that text Hegel shows
surprisingly that the concept of truth need not be bivalent, it can be thought as a gra-
dation—such that ideas can be called not just either true or false, but meaningfully
more or less true, we have to work an operation inside the concept of historicity,
such that we move away from the binary division between historical or ahistorical
propositions, but into propositions of lesser or greater historicity/historicality. More
accurately, we could think of historicity as a scalar quality/property: yielding a scale

33
The title of Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) points to this specificity.

13
 S. Kaviraj

on one end of which we can place propositions that are inescapably local, such that
their locality or historicity simply cannot be obscured or denied, and at the other end
we place propositions that are quite independent of historicity: statements that are
general or universal in the full sense of the term.
I am redeploying an idea fairly common in Marxist analyses of economic structures,
which has a potential to be generalized across all discussions about social forms, not just
the narrowly economic or productive systems to which Marx applied this technique. Marx’s
thinking is clearly influenced by Hegel’s use of the distinction between ‘the abstract’ and
‘the concrete’—in which moving from the thick particularity of the concrete towards the
more general properties of the abstract includes some advantages of covering more numer-
ous examples, but also carries a cost of losing the fullness of existent features present in the
concrete. Marxists would call these ‘levels of abstraction.’ The present argument, therefore,
is a combination of an older Hegel-Marx methodological insight with later ideas taken from
Dilthey’s reflections on the hermeneutic bases of human sciences. But Dilthey’s persistent
focus on particularity and intentionality tended to obscure the fact that historical sciences
(geisteswissenschaften) too required a counter-movement towards ‘gathering together’ that
involved the two interconnected activities of collation (in the old sense of gathering together
for purposes of comparison) and abstraction that systemic theories performed. Joining these
separate insights from the methodological discussions of modern German philosophy, we
can reconstruct a range of methodological acts which ought to be seen in two ways simulta-
neously—as a range and as a three-level scale. At the lowest level of this range are analyses
that are so ‘concrete’ as not to tempt any serious historical scholar to believe that a simple
transposition of this analysis would bring any illumination to another particular case. A com-
parisonal juxtaposition between two such instances might highlight the difference between
the two cases, but not their similarity.34 This is followed by a second level of abstraction/
generality in which, for example, Marx is making arguments about ‘capitalism, not capital-
isms’ in Weber’s memorable observation: that is, he is describing features of the produc-
tive economy which co-exist in all European societies which are going through a period of
advent of capitalism. Weber’s remark points precisely to both the logical separation between
these two levels, and the danger of their conflation. Generalization of wage labor in place
of labor for direct consumption, the creation of an integrated national market, and produc-
tion of goods primarily as commodities—these general features of a capitalist economy are
now presented as properties of a type of economy designated as capitalist. Without these
properties, an economy cannot receive that defining name. Like the previous level, this char-
acterization also consists of a bundle of features; but—this is the crucial difference—those
features are taken from several different particular examples, and then conceptually bundled
together—to serve its specific designating function. This might also be the reason why often
users of concepts would confuse between the middle-level generality of such concepts, and
the abstraction of wholly general ones. Finally, there is a third separate level of this scale
where a thinker/author is making a truly general statement about some subject—which is
intended not to be circumscribed chronotopically—by restrictive particularity of either space
or time. Aristotle’s writings on rhetoric and poetics or ethics will belong to this group, just
as Bhartrhari’s philosophy of language or Abhinavagupta’s philosophy of aesthetic rapture

34
These considerations highlight the need for fresh discussion about the logic of comparison, the pre-
cise mix and balance between the capture of similarity and contrast internal to this activity.

13
What is Western About Western thought?

(rasa). Naturally, these theories work through, and use as examples material from ancient
Greek tragedies, or the Sanskrit and Prakrt literary corpus, or great works from the Sanskrit
dramatic canon: but that does not make them theories only of ancient Greek tragedies or the
Sanskrit language or Sanskrit drama. These are theories of art and ethics, of language and
of aesthetic experience—applicable in principle to all cases that will fall into those catego-
ries. I think some of the problems in deciding what is Western in Western thought would be
resolved if we work through this schema of levels of historicity or historical generality. Evi-
dently, more research is required into the logical operation of these intermediate or mezza-
nine categories and arguments in social science and history. Just as positivistic social science
errs by assuming all social science knowledge should aspire to generalizations of the high-
est level, Diltheyan hermeneutic makes the opposite mistake by immersing history entirely
into the particular—turning historical thinking into an unrelenting search for the unique: the
unique subject, the unique act, in a unique moment. We could provide two examples of diso-
bedient reading of European social theory.

Hegel and Historicizing the Indian Past

First we shall read Hegel’s Philosophy of History through this method of gener-
ality-disaggregation. Hegel’s seminal work—which defined philosophical
approaches to history decisively in the early stages —consists of two very differ-
ent parts—which makes its reader wonder about the logical frame by which the
whole work is held together. That logical frame/figure is common to Western
philosophy of that period, and therefore, it requires closer analysis. Hegel’s
claim is that he is subjecting the conventional material of history—accurate
accumulation of empirical temporal facts—to a new kind of exposition which is
‘philosophical’ and ‘universal.’ His cognitive object is not specific chronologies
of particular societies or peoples, but ‘universal history’: and the only method
that can produce this knowledge is ‘philosophical’. Hegel’s work wants to leave
behind what he would have regarded as pre-philosophical modes of constructing
history - concerned primarily with accuracy of facts and chronological patterns
found in the work of earlier philosophers like Voltaire or Hume. Identifying
chronological patterns is not enough for a ‘philosophical’ approach to the sub-
ject of universal history. Philosophy brings to history a search for ‘meaning’ or
direction in a more capacious, comprehensive sense: the object of historical
knowledge is ‘universal history.’35 Earlier practitioners of the discipline of his-
tory never intended enquiry to be directed at knowledge of ‘universal history’:
history was definitionally, irreducibly local/regional—i.e., chronotopically finite.
For Hegel, that is why the task of philosophical knowledge about history is dis-
tinct from conventional knowledge of history: precisely its character as ‘absolute
knowledge,’ a form of knowledge that is not dissected, separated from the total-
ity. For him, a philosophical knowledge of history consists in theoretically

35
Though this locution is found earlier in Kant as well—e.g., from a ‘universal point of view’ or ‘cos-
mopolitan point of view’.

13
 S. Kaviraj

grasping large bodies of human social experience gathered together—collated—

under the predominant principles which define discrete cultural periods. Entirely
consistent with the general Hegelian idea that Spirit seeks embodiment and
extrusive objectification in a cultural system, the task of philosophical history
then turns to the discovery of a specific ideational principle that defines each
particular ‘past.’ Following this methodological strategy, Hegel offered philo-
sophical analyses of universal history by analyzing the pasts of Persia, China,
India, and Europe. However, Hegel’s actual argument shows a split between two
segments of universal history. Hegel retains the promised scope of universality
by including substantial segments that analyze the pasts of the Chinese, Persian,
and Indian civilizations, and afterwards turns to an examination of European
history. In a purely formal sense, Hegel’s analysis conforms to the methodologi-
cal declaration by spelling out in each case the principal ideas that in his view
characterize ‘the spirit’ of each society-culture. But the interesting feature of
this exposition is the radical division between all other societies and ‘Europe’
(Notice, not just modern Europe). While the other societies display a single ide-
ational principle in the entire temporal span of their past, Europe is the only con-
tinent with proper ‘history’—because it shows that the European people—in the
historical singular—possessed the creative capacity of ideational self-transfor-
mation. Each temporal segment of the European past displays an identifiable
principle of self-expression through which their common historical experience
can be approached and correctly ‘known’ (which means a coincidence of our
understanding of their culture with theirs). Three different periods with distinc-
tive speculative ‘principles’ can be grasped philosophically—‘beauty’ for the
Greek period, ‘order’ for the Roman, and after a somewhat problematic interval
of the Middle Ages, ‘freedom’ for the modern. The mutual exception between
the two sides of history—non-European and European is the remarkable feature
of this exposition—presence of the historical principle in case of Europe and its
radical absence in case of India. I am not interested in restating the Orientalist
charge against Hegel—a characteristic his thinking shared with other Western
theorists who thought about universal or comparative history, but in the meth-
odological question from our perspective: what can we get from Hegel’s histori-
cal reflections? Should we take anything at all? It seems eminently possible to
interact with the Hegelian theory in a productive and interesting move. Even
without accepting Hegel’s thesis that the temporalization36 of the historical
past—dividing the time of the past in periods that are based on some analytic
criterion—should be based on an ideational category of ‘spirit’ like beauty or
order or liberty, it is possible to assent to the idea of periodization—though now
we can see that there can be either different candidates for performing the crite-
rial function, or we discover different criteria which yield overlapping temporal-
ities. Despite the logical similarity of temporalization, the difference between
Hegel’s periodization and Marx’s is striking. Marx treats Greece and Rome as
part of the same productive structure based on slavery; for Hegel, these are two

36
I am using the term used by Koselleck. Rinehart Koselleck, Futures Past: on the semantics of histori-
cal time, MIT Press, 1985.

13
What is Western About Western thought?

entirely different social forms centered around quite divergent ideational ‘princi-
ples.’ Therefore, a simple transfer from one temporalization to the other is not
easy. However, clearly Hegel and Marx are in agreement that the modern period
is distinct and based on the rise of some principle of ‘freedom.’ What should we
take from Hegel, if anything? Interestingly, ‘to follow Hegel’ here becomes a
contradictory or contrarian enterprise. ‘Following’ him can mean two opposed
procedures of approaching the archive of the Indian past. A first mode can be to
follow Hegel’s own judgment that Indian history does not require periodization,
because it is the chronicle of a cold, unhistorical society whose entire past was
an endless eventual elaboration of the same principle. But a second, more prom-
ising mode, would be to assert that what Hegel demonstrated about European
history—that it had successive, distinct periods—was true of all history without
exception, and then to look for adequate temporalizations of the Indian past.
Additionally, as the recent debates about an ‘early modern’ period in Indian his-
tory demonstrates, temporalization needs corrective revision as new facts and
archives are progressively discovered. The span of time that was regarded as
unproblematically ‘medieval’ is split open by discovery of new material—pro-
ducing a new temporalization which should not be called a subset of the medie-
val, yet is not an uncontestable prefiguration of colonial modernity. If modernity
could arise before colonialism, this demands a profound reassessment of the dif-
fusionist assumptions working within the history of global modernity. What
should or can we get from Hegel, a ‘theory from elsewhere’? First, if there is no
pre-existing theory ‘here,’ at least no relevant theory, we could take a theory
from elsewhere as a hypothesis—a preliminary frame meant from the inception
to be emptied out and refilled with more appropriate conceptual temporaliza-
tion on the basis examination of further evidence. Second, Hegel’s own direct
statements/propositions about Indian history are based on arguments that we
find unacceptable. But third, the idea of appropriate temporalization—i.e., find-
ing periods from the evidentiary archive of that particular society—is entirely
apt: though this will mean that the task of deciding on proper periodization of
Indian history cannot rely on Hegel’s work at all; or, more startlingly, on the
lazy assumption that since European history has three customary periods, all
must also be tripartite. But we take up temporalization - an idea of universal rel-
evance and applicability in historical research, and use it for producing theoreti-
cal knowledge about Indian history.

Marxism and the ‘Universality’ of Capital

The foregoing discussion about what can be taken from Hegel is largely specula-
tive or logical, because there are few examples of actual attempts at periodiza-
tion of Indian history using Hegel’s philosophy as the principal source of theo-
retical conceptualization. That is not true in the case of Marx. After the 1940s,
study of Indian history was powerfully affected by various forms of the Marxian
approach, becoming by the sixties one of its dominant methodological schools.
Methodological influence of Marxism was not confined to the examination

13
 S. Kaviraj

of modern history alone, but extended to medieval and ancient social history
in equal measure. But before going into an analysis of how Marxist methods
affected Indian historical research, it is required, first, to ascertain what meth-
odological truths could be extracted, in principle, from Marx’s texts. Clearly in
Marx’s historical reflections, we can get two rather different ‘theories’ of univer-
sal history—though it is clear that though Marx did not analyze non-European
historical societies with a comparable directness, his statements harbored a cog-
nitive aspiration similar to Hegel’s. Propositions like ‘all history is the history
of class struggle’ show a similar desire to propose a universal methodological
explanatory principle—one that is sufficiently abstract that, with appropriate
adaptation/concretization, can be applied to historical material from all socie-
ties. Marxists across the world also evidently received this proposition in a simi-
lar universalist sense. The two ‘theories’ to be found in Marx were quite dissimi-
lar: the first was a general thesis maintaining that the productive form in every
society was the determinant logic of its structure and its historical dynamics.
The second was a detailed theory of the nature and movement of the capitalist
economy. The first theory does not admit of chronotopic restrictions; the sec-
ond obviously does. In the first, general theory, feudalism exists as an under-
determined concept37—a social formation that preceded the emerging capitalist
economy in Europe. In fact, in later reflections on these questions, Marx specu-
lated with Engels if they should refine and subclassify European feudalism into
separate ‘formations’ like the Germanic and the Slavonic—which illustrates the
working of a counter-generalizing logic in Marx’s thought.38 Methodological
analysis of the practice of Indian Marxist historians reveals two rather contradic-
tory trends—the first represents their sustained research into pre-modern struc-
tures of production,39 the second was illustrated by their insistence on classify-
ing these forms as subtypes of ‘feudalism’—against the underlying conceptual
logic of Marxist theory.40 Contrary to the demand for structural specificity and
differential conceptualization, increasingly the term feudalism became shifted to
act as a purely chronological marker for any economy preceding modern capi-
talist formations, separated radically from topic determinacy. Indian Marxist
historians were not entirely unaware of this methodological-conceptual diffi-
culty. But they chose a conceptually flawed solution. Acknowledging that defin-
ing features of the ancient and medieval Indian economies were quite different
from those that marked European feudalism, they continued using the concep-
tual appellation ‘Indian feudalism.’ This gave rise to two theoretical problems:

37
Sometimes called a ‘placeholder.’.
38
For the relevant texts, Karl Marx, Pre-capitalist Formations, (edited by Eric Hobsbawm), Lawrence
and Wishart, London, 1971; my argument can be found in Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Marx and postcolonial
thinking,’ Constellations, Volume 25, Issue 1, March, 2018, 3 - 17.
39
Though this might also be contaminated by problems of anachronism.
40
See the discussion about the use of the two conceptual terms ‘feudalism’ and ‘Asiatic mode of produc-
tion’ in Indian theoretical debates. Kaviraj, ‘Marx and postcolonial thinking.’.

13
What is Western About Western thought?

first, feudalism became a generic, chronological indicator equivalent to ‘pre-

modern’ in social science writing, canceling out the requirement of naming a
formation by a term that highlighted its primary structural feature.41 Secondly,
it also forced the term feudalism from a specific, second-level concept to a
more generic first-level concept of greater abstraction and generality. Histori-
cal scholars noted the incongruity of this conceptual move: it became a tem-
poral indicator of pre-capitalist, but began to carry the misleading suggestion
that economies of Mughal India, medieval Islamic empires, and the empires in
Latin America shared real structural features.42 In fact, the only real conceptual
content of this term was the thin logical feature of chronologically preceding the
modern capitalist economy—additionally, conflating a temporal characterization
with a structural one. Numerous familiar problems arose as a result of this trans-
position of a level 2 concept into level 1—turning a European particular into a
generic characterization of precapitalist economies all over the world. This also
obstructed clear analysis of the transition of a pre-modern caste economy into a
modern capitalistic form marked by class hierarchies. From our methodological
point of view, the primary difficulty here was a confusion about the methodo-
logical-theoretical status of a mezzanine category like feudalism, unmooring it
from its proper place in European economic history, and ‘generalizing’ its use
across radically different types of economic formations across the world.
However, use of Marx’s theoretical ideas in the non-European world was not
restricted to this type of ‘application’—which sought to follow the conceptual logic
of Marxism, ending up by illicitly subordinating even the descriptive understand-
ing of alien social structures to theoretically induced misrecognition. I shall use
an example from the work of the Iranian critic Ali Shariati to illustrate a second,
more interesting path of what Sanskrit philosophers would call sampatha—suc-
cessful reading. Ali Shariati diagnosed the tendency towards this form of cognitive
imitativeness—taking the European world to be ontologically more present that the
real world at hand, or working with a cognitively hyper-real Europe—the primary
mark of epistemic colonialism. It was a substitution of reality itself—allowing the
social world present in our world to be overwritten by the social world captured
in European theory—making this a kind of theoretical a priori: a theoretical truth
prior to and independent of real experience. Drawing from Marx’s early writings,
Shariati called this cognitive subject position intellectual alienation/estrangement.
Clearly, this was not the problem that Marx sought to capture by his resignification
of the Feuerbachian concept: Marx’s object of theorization was the nature of labor
in the capitalist economic structure. Ali Shariati’s move was not an ‘application’
of an unaltered concept, but a displacement of the concept’s connotative content—
a very different intellectual operation. But by making this move, Shariati was able
to capture and find a language for making thinkable the fundamental deformation

41
This is logic behind naming the modern economy ‘capitalism.’.
42
Victor Kiernan, ‘History,’ in David McCelland, (ed), Marx: The First Hundred Years, Fontana Books,
1983.

13
 S. Kaviraj

colonialism instituted into the cognitive constitution of societies. Logically, his

‘operation’ is the opposite to the Indian Marxists’ use of feudalism. Taking a con-
cept from Marx’s analytics, Shariati takes it through a logical or semantic strip-
ping of its content, which prepares it for a resignification: it is then able to start
an innovative analysis of cognitive effects of colonialism. The first type of move is
entirely conformist, the second, dissenting. But because of the dominance of cultural
and epistemic imperialism, such dissenting sampatha would face condescension
from cognitively obedient commentators as catachresis. In fact, instead of follow-
ing Marx obediently, as the heteronomous radicals in India did, Shariati made a real
transversal movement with one of the most innovative conceptual ideas in Marx.43

Weber and the ‘Universal’ Historical Tendency Towards Secularization

However, it would be wrong to conclude that this is a tendency restricted to scholar-

ship that follows the Hegel-Marx line of conceptualization. Similar transpositions of
levels of generality can be found in the sociological literature flowing from Weber’s
theorizations about the relation between religion and modernity. Two different ideas
can be drawn from Weber’s extensive reflections on the emergence of modernity—
which would tend to go, methodologically, in separate directions. In certain con-
texts, Weber proposes an explanation for the emergence of modernity which relies
on the idea of elective affinity—the accidental coincidence of processes which, like
a chemical reaction, produced the recognizable structures of modern life. Elective
affinity explanations are clearly close to historicism —emergence of particular his-
torical events, processes, or institutions as a consequence of a fortuitous conjunc-
ture of conditions. Prior prevalence of a Protestant Ethic of frugality provides an
indispensable assistance to the rise of generalized forms of capitalist conduct among
economic agents. A corollary of this insight will be, normally, that in cultural set-
tings marked by the ‘absence’ (abhava) of such a religious ethic—in Catholic Chris-
tianity, Islam, or Hinduism—a comparable direction of social change should not be
expected—unless there are comparable religious doctrines that conjoins wealth and
frugality. However, influence of Weber also encouraged a different, in some ways,
opposite, methodological tendency—rise of an expectation that as the constella-
tion of factors that gave rise to modernity in Western Europe arose in other parts of
the world, a general tendency towards secularization would commence. This would
affect and eventually transform all societies towards modern secularized formations
in which public life will be slowly surrendered to secular laws proclaimed by the
sovereign state, and religion would be confined to ethical governance of private life.
A process of secularization was seen as co-occurring with other modern processes—
of industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of bureaucratic states. Eventually
these concurrent processes would produce conditions for a universal trend towards

43
For discussions on Shariati, see Mina Khanlarzadeh, ‘Theology of Revolution: in Ali Shariati and
Walter Benjamin’s political thought’, Religions, 2020, 11 (10), 504, and Arwa Awan, ‘Alienation and
consumerism in Ali Shariati’s anti-colonial political thought’, Unpublished dissertation chapter, Univer-
sity of Chicago, presented at MESAAS Graduate Students Conference, April, 2023.

13
What is Western About Western thought?

secularization—not merely of Western Europe, but of the world. A process of secu-

larization was shown to have occurred in Western Europe through an ingenious con-
nection between religious ideals of piety and capital accumulating requirements of
capitalist enterprise. A generalized expectation of secularization across the world
was to take this wholly persuasive argument in its chronotopic ‘province’ to an
unsupported generalization over societies of very different religious and economic
construction. Therefore, the ‘universal’ secularization thesis—which has faced sev-
eral different lines of critique—was essentially an inappropriate transposition of an
argument at the mezzanine level to a universal generalization. The effect of this kind
of ‘theorizing’ has affected research on the always historically contingent relation
between religion and modernity. Instead of starting without a prior assumption, of
taking the argument of secularization as a hypothesis, the a priori theory structures
the question. For us, Weber is already right before we have begun our exploration.

How Universality Skews the Setting Up of the Question ‘Elsewhere’

These three examples should serve to show that the problem of a slide from one
level of generality to another—between levels 2 and 1—is not confined to one or
a particular type of Western theory. It is a general problem, because both Western
analysts of non-Western societies and scholars from these societies trained in mod-
ern social theory tend to make this common move. In each case, it also confuses our
critical response to a body of generative Western thought: we leave aside what is
truly helpful, and use elements which become unproductive or misleading by over-
generalization. What does this slide or transposition actually do to our thinking? In
the more significant instances, this mode of thinking not merely pushes us towards a
false or flawed answer; more seriously, it distorts our processes of thinking at a more
fundamental point, further upstream, by persuading us to set up the question we
start from in an improper way. The title of the well-known paper which worked as a
conclusion to the feudalism debate in India revealed the incongruity of the question
itself: ‘was there feudalism in India history?’44 Why should the first hypothesis be
that what existed in India or ‘elsewhere’ must have been similar to Europe? Instead
of this premise being rejected as unreasonable, it required long effort to reach the
simple alternative premise that the history of other regions cannot be assumed to
be similar to the history of Europe. In case of Weberian sociology, there was till
recently a widespread but unexamined assumption that the trajectory of interaction
between cultural and economic change that Weber analyzed so compellingly in case
of Western Europe was a future lying in wait for all societies of the world. Mod-
ern transformational processes like capitalist industrialization, urbanization, and the
interpellative effects of modern democratic politics would inevitably corrode reli-
gious practice and push the world towards an inexorable process of secularization.

44
Harbans Mukhia, ‘Was there feudalism in Indian history?’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 8:3, 1981,
273-310.

13
 S. Kaviraj

This again generalized a correct theoretical analysis about a particular West Euro-
pean location over the rest of world—turning it from a highly instructive provin-
cial analysis into a general sociological law. Sociology of religion would thus start
with a para-question—because it is not really a question starting from empirical
facts—why was Indian society not as secularized as Western Europe? If the normal
process is for social science to start from a registration of empirical facts, and then
to demand explanation of why things are the way they are, this was an unnecessarily
recondite and misleading way of setting up the question itself. Feudalism and secu-
larization were two examples of Western historical concepts that were illegitimately
raised to a higher level of generality, causing methodological and theoretical confu-
sion. In case of all our three examples, there were general theoretical insights which
could be useful in thinking about abstract and general questions ‘elsewhere’(i.e.,
outside of Europe), and equally, other theoretical concepts that were ‘provincial’
which, unsurprisingly, lost their cognitive effectivity when taken inaptly into a his-
tory of ‘elsewhere.’

What is Meant by Thought from Elsewhere?

Two Forms of Elsewhere‑ing

What can we learn from these examples about the relation between thinking from
‘here’ and from ‘elsewhere’ in social science theory? In one sense, as Hegel’s discus-
sion in the initial section of Logic demonstrated,45 thinking is always from a ‘here’. In
one sense, strictly speaking, doing the activity of thinking from ‘elsewhere’ is impossi-
ble—thinking is done from where it is done—the relation between the chronic and topic
simply cannot be disjoined, disjuncted. But, as Hegel shows—using a different termi-
nology of ‘something’ and ‘the other’—these two logical places—the cognitive focus
on ‘something’ can be transposed. Hegel was primarily thinking of a cognitive subject
A at one time point seeking to cognitively grasp object x, and at another point turning
to engage object y. That is what is meant by his claim that any ‘other’ can be transposed
into becoming ‘something.’46 Evidently, the primary difference between this discussion
and modern ones is the absence in Hegel’s thinking of a strong ineluctable link between
the cognitive position of the subject and identity—the idea that some cognitive objects
are difficult or hard to know precisely because they bear an identity connection with the

45
G W F Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, (trans. William Wallace), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975. chapter 2.
‘On Determinate Being: Something and Other.’.
46
Ibid. ‘Something and the other are, in the first place, both determinate beings, and somethings. Sec-
ondly, each is equally an other. It is immaterial which is first named, and solely for that reason, called
something. Something therefore is self-related determinate being, and has a limit in the first place, relative
to an other; the limit is the non-being of the other, not of the something itself, in the limit, something lim-
its its other. But the other is itself a something in general; therefore the limits that the something has rela-
tive to the other is also the limit of the other as something, its limits whereby it keeps its first something as
its other apart from it, or is a non-being of that something; it is thus not only the non-being of the other but
the non-being equally of the one and of the other something, consequently of something as such.’

13
What is Western About Western thought?

self of the knower. Today it is impossible to think of the cognitive subject simply as an
occupier of an infinitely transferable logical ‘place’: it is essential to recognize the con-
nection between subjectivity and its own anchoring in experience. Yet the deployment
of experience as an essential category in thinking about the knowledge process can
obstruct facile connections and attributions of identity. Is a South Asian scholar entirely
trained in the cognitive practices of the Western academia ‘South Asian’? Or entirely
‘Western’? Because, here the attribution of identity itself can become fragmented: is
the primary identity one of ‘coming from’ South Asia, carrying its experience (as if
that is homogeneous), or it is one of cognitive self-constitution? This immediately
shows that the famous injunction to think of ‘location, location, location,’ despite its
rhetorical force, is not as unproblematic as it appears initially. At least three ways of
location or positioning can be seen in such instances. The first instance is a location
as origin of some kind—even in second-generation South Asians in Western societies,
the connection with South Asian forms of thinking or relating the world might not be
erased: these might work substantially effectively—sometimes more potently simply
because of their going unrecognized, into unrecognized spaces of the self. Ajanta Sub-
ramaniam’s research reveals how the operation of caste selectiveness continues among
Indian technological professionals working fluently in the American capitalist technol-
ogy market.47 A complete makeover as an economic agent does not necessarily erase
sociological ‘memory’. The second meaning of location is the more apparent one of
being part of and produced as a social agent by the structures in which the cognitive
work functions—location inside cognitive institutions and circulatory processes. But a
third meaning is also easily glimpsed: any sociological type or role constrains subjects’
behavior only partially: ‘being’ White, or Black, or minority, or academic can be done
in multiple and divergent ways, and it is essential to recognize the possibility of willed
variations in individual conduct. These are some of the rather obviously difficult impli-
cations of linking cognitive positionality with identity.48
Existing cognitive practices of social science show us two kinds of thinking or
knowledge ‘from elsewhere’.49Ideally, we should have less of one type of such knowl-
edge, and more of the other. A first form of ‘thinking from elsewhere’ refers to the
endemic problem of modern social science theory. The subject of cognitive explora-
tion is from the non-European world, but even the initial descriptive approach itself—
which is obviously theory-laden—uses thinking from elsewhere. During the recent soc-
cer world cup in Qatar, a widely circulated video clip showed a street corner in Kolkata
where a group of particularly devoted fans of the Argentinian soccer team, especially

47
Ajantha Subramanian Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass. 2019. chapter 7.
48
This is a large question that requires a separate discussion.
49
I am using with thanks Bhrigupati Singh’s title for the workshop—‘Thinking from Elsewhere’—
which generated the papers in this collection: because of the generative ambiguity of the term/concept
‘elsewhere’—some of its implications need to be explored much beyond what is allowed by the scope
of this paper. Thinking from elsewhere can obviously mean two quite different ideas: thinking that is
done—i.e., thought—elsewhere—i.e., not where I am doing my thinking. It can also equally easily mean
thinking that is done elsewhere being brought into the place where I ordinarily think.

13
 S. Kaviraj

the divine Lionel Messi, were praying for his victory—with a sacrificial fire, a proper
priest chanting incantations(mantras), surrounded by enthusiastic supporters blowing a
shankh (conchshell), and beating gongs—the full paraphernalia of Hindu ritual worship.
A social scientist has to exercise deliberate restraint in not applying the series of terms:
‘praying’, ‘sacrificial’, ‘priest’, ‘mantras’ and ‘worship’. To the agents involved in this
act, in their social world, this must have appeared to be the most forceful and ‘natural’
way of assisting Messi accomplish his goal. To social scientists, however, or to observ-
ers with modernist education, the act suffered from conceptual incoherence or incongru-
ity—of seeking divine assistance for an unambiguously secular purpose. If we accept the
assumptions embedded in the academic language of sociology, the distinction between
the religious and the secular as social properties of objects acquires a pre-descriptive
status in our thinking. These categories exist in our thinking before we encounter the
objects we subject to scrutiny. Therefore, when we view the puja for Messi’s victory,
the prior presence of ‘theory’ slants our descriptive vision in a particular way: we do/
perform two kinds of ‘seeing’—at one level we do see an elementary, integral, social
act which social agents perform fluently without hesitation. But we also have a second
level of seeing that is theoretical—which, at the same time as this action unfolds, induces
us to view it ‘theoretically’ as incoherent. It is hard to deny this pre-descriptive infiltra-
tion of theoretical ideas. But there is no doubt that this brings theoretical thinking ‘from
elsewhere,’ and throws it into the very descriptive level of capture of social reality, even
before explicit theoretical explanation begins. Does this pre-presence of theory - a theo-
retical apriori - obstruct or assist sociological analysis? There can be several reasonable
positions on this question: but this needs to perceived and stated clearly to start a seri-
ous collective examination of the problem. The sociological act of circulating the clip
on social media remains an enigmatic action: is it meant to show how odd the activity
is? Or how interesting, but ‘odd’ from the point of view of the elite, educated viewer?
Or is it a snide comment about our estrangement from the world we purportedly ‘share’
with these subaltern actors? Assessing the cognitive impact of such ‘thinking from else-
where’ - which does not occur occasionally but is built into the everyday practice of
modern social science - needs greater and closer examination.
I shall use another example of ‘thinking from elsewhere’ that concerns time and tem-
porality. It is common in social science analyses of non-European societies to encounter
an enigmatic conceptualization of temporality. I use temporality here in the dual sense
found in writers like Koselleck: to cut up time into temporal segments, which, then, makes
it possible to stamp a characterizing name or appellation on them—like modernity, the
medieval period, antiquity—or some specific characterizations like the time of capitalism,
or the time of democracy. In many cases, observers seem to be puzzled/struck by some
incongruity and capture it using a time appellation, and often resort to concepts like ‘non-
synchronous synchronicity’ (Ernst Bloch’s terms used recently by Aditya Nigam50). The
puzzlement from which this characterization stems is understandable, but, clearly, it is an
extension of a problematic conceptual practice in history where some undeniably signifi-
cant feature of a Western experience—like frequency of devastating wars in the first half

50
Aditya Nigam, Decolonizing Theory, Routledge, Delhi, 1922.

13
What is Western About Western thought?

of the twentieth century is generalized as a temporal appellation for the entire globe—an
illegitimate version of ‘global history.’ The undeniable fact that the first half of the Euro-
pean twentieth century was marked by cataclysmic military conflicts does not justify gen-
eralizing that characterization across all societies, though certainly all societies were deeply
affected in fundamental ways by the occurrence of that conflict in the West. The necessary
connectivity between space and time implicit in the term chronotope is disjointed and a
chronic characterization is generalized illegitimately across topic variation. Of course, his-
tory generally works casually with a tripartite division of ancient, medieval, and modern
‘periods‘ drawn directly from a Western temporalization, though in recent times, scholars
have offered heterodox disruptions to this tranquil subservience by suggesting disruptive
temporalities/periods like the ‘early modern’ which aims to disjoin the periodization of
Indian history from the European, and restore the adhesion of the chronic and the topic.
In a different field of social theory, it seems that there is greater requirement for
acquaintance with and incorporation from ‘thinking from elsewhere’ - but this time in
the opposite sense. This refers to the general theorization of themes that are central to
social sciences that are available in philosophical systems that evolved outside the West.
There is insufficient registration of the fact that ‘other’ philosophical systems like the
Indic, Buddhist, Chinese, post-Hellenic Islamic philosophies, and the philosophical con-
cepts implicit in indigenous cognitive systems in many other parts of the world contain
rich repertoires of ‘general’ categories and philosophic pictures which can open up new
lines of exploration and enquiry, supplementing and expanding the conceptual repertories
of current social theory.51 52 From my parochial point of view, as an Indian and a student
of political phenomena, two themes appear immediately available for integration into the
current repertoire of concepts. Tenth century Kashmiri philosophers elaborated a highly
sophisticated and expansive theory of art which offers detailed insightful examination of
the concept of representation, and the process of theatrical representation in particular—
which offers a rich double exploration—how representation occurs in theater or art, and
how representation becomes theatrical.53Both questions of representation and theatrical-
ity are subjects of central concern in the study of art and public political life.54 Just as
drawing ethical concepts from Aristotle or medieval Christian philosophy have expanded
and deepened philosophical understanding of public ethics55, borrowing from Indian or
other non-Western philosophical systems could have a welcome broadening and deepen-
ing effect on current discourses in social theory. In this case, we should search for more

51
James Tully’s exploration of Canadian indigenous thinking in Strange Multiplicity is an example; so
is the analysis of Chinese and Indian reflections on language in this collection, Brandel, Das and Puett,
‘Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere’. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1995.
52
On the benefits of parochialism, see, James Tully, ‘De-parochializing Political Theory and Beyond’ in (ed),
Deparochializing Political Theory, ed. Mellissa Williams, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2022.
53
Kaviraj, ‘Rethinking representation,’ Special Number on Representation, Philosophy East and West,
Volume 71, No. 1, 2021, 79-107.
54
For an innovative application of the Kashmiri theory of representation and theatricality to modern
democratic politics in India, Vivek Yadav, Political Drama: Geneology of a Degraded Form of Publicity,
Unpublished PH D Thesis, Columbia University, 2021.
55
For example in the works of Aladair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor.

13
 S. Kaviraj

‘thinking from elsewhere,’ not less. On this argument, historical thinking from elsewhere
needs restriction, general thinking from elsewhere more circulation.
Interestingly, the powerful rhetoric in favor of ‘going beyond’ or ‘doing away
with’ Western/European knowledge systems has not resulted in a serious re-direc-
tion of the practical epistemics of social science in a new postcolonial or more radi-
cally de-colonial direction. The reason for this puzzling state of affairs—where the
demand seems to be obviously right, but despite formal agreement, there is little
effect in epistemic practice—seems to be the excessive generality and lack of inter-
nal analytic distinction in the idea of ‘the Western.’ To produce effective critical
practice, social theory requires more logically scrupulous unpacking of this exces-
sively undifferentiated idea of ‘the West’. We must continue to explore the seem-
ingly enigmatic question: what is Western in any instance of Western thought.

Conclusion

Consequently, we should not be weighed down by guilt for using general philosophi-
cal or theoretical ideas from European thought. It is merely a result and a reminder of
our historical finitude, the way we allow ourselves to be constructed by our history: but
we collaborate in this process, by not resisting postcolonial self-construction. General
ideas do not exist only in European philosophy, but because of our recent colonial his-
tory, for both sides of the academe, ie, the academic intelligentsia in Western univer-
sities and inside postcolonies –those are the only ones with which we are familiar. It
is not that general ideas do not exist elsewhere in space and time: it is simply that we
are ignorant of them. Similar ideas of Indian, Chinese, African or Islamic origin can be
used in social theory, if social scientists become more adept in those traditions. Power-
ful general theories of theatricality can be found in Aristotle and in Abhinavagupta: it
is inappropriate to designate them as Greek or Kashmiri theories – that is, applicable
to drama produced only in these chronotopic regions. Senghor’s idea of ‘rhythm as the
architecture of being’ can be seen calmly as a general theory of dance, not condescend-
ingly as of African dance alone.56 If we can reduce our preemptive deference to Euro-
pean theory, which unnecessarily obliviates theory everywhere else, we should be able
to resist the errors of illegitimate transposition or enlargement of historical concepts. We
can then rescue Europe from its hyperreal character. When we can exorcise the hyperreal
spirit of ‘the West’, we can live at cognitive peace with Europe.

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56
Elizabeth Harney, ‘Rhythm as the architecture of being’, Third Text, Volume 24, Issue 2, 2010, 215-
226, Souleymane Bachir Diagne ‘In Praise of the Post‐racial: Negritude Beyond Negritude’, Third Text,
Volume 24, Issue 2, 241-248.

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