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Author's Roundtable
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Birla
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Stages of Capital
by Unit for Criticism
On Monday, November 16, the Unit for Criticism held the last of its Fall 2009 Author’s Roundtables on the first day of a historic strike for the University of Illinois and beyond. When we asked various student and faculty affiliates if they thought we should cancel the event, one student, John Claborn, replied that he thought that “the project of critical theory should continue unabated in the face of a work-action against the corporatized University” since such actions “are indebted to the spaces of critique opened up by groups” like the Unit. We wish to reply that the debt is, to say the least, a mutual one. We congratulate and thank the Graduate Employee Organization for their stirring example of courage, fortitude, principle, and pertinacity. In the months and years ahead, as the University of Illinois rebuilds its leadership, we hope that the GEO’s exemplary commitment to the core needs of teaching and research will serve as a model and inspiration.
In the focus of Monday’s roundtable, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Duke, 2009), Ritu Birla, associate professor of history at the University of Toronto in Canada, charts a new history of market society and the modern subject in India through the study of colonial governmentalities. The book describes how the standardization of the Indian economy—a transition from vernacular capitalisms to “the ideal of Indian Economic Man”—took the form of a “translation across hegemonies,” indigenous as well as colonial. Central to this process, was the growing distinction between a privatized and Orientalized realm of culture, on the one hand, and, on the other, the supposedly neutral and impersonal public realm of the modern market. Neither a celebration of “native” capitalist voices, nor a description merely of capitalist-imperial structures, Birla’s study shows us a different way of thinking through the history of globalization—an account in which the institution of the market actually creates the Indian capitalist through a process that sees colonial subjects negotiating, contesting and appropriating the new technologies of rule.
The Unit for Criticism invited three responses to the book (from Matt Hart in English, Zsuzsa Gille in Sociology, and James Warren in History) all of which we are pleased to published below. We are also pleased to feature a post from Guest Writer,Okla Elliott, a graduate student in Comparative Literature. And here is the rest of it.
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Written by Okla Elliott (Comparative and World Literature)
The Graduate Employee Organization strike so filled the air Monday night that the event began with an update from a representative, Michael Verderame, from the English department. Two of the panelists addressed the issue—Zsuzsa Gille dedicating her comments to the GEO’s efforts and Matt Hart beginning with an inspiring description of graduate students’ labor and intellectual value. Proof that their words were more than mere lip service, one of the panelists, Jamie Warren, was a graduate student in History.
Lauren Goodlad, who also mentioned the strike in her introductory comments, acknowledged the challenges we face here at UIUC (and elsewhere in the country), as she pointed out that intellectual exchanges like Monday’s author’s roundtable continue to bring joy to academic life. I will go one step further and say that it is evenings like this for which we are ultimately fighting, and they’re the reason graduate students are already willing to live at near-poverty levels just to be here. As we celebrate the apparent success of the GEO strike, I find myself hoping that the University of Illinois and others like it continue to be the locus of a kind of wealth which exceeds mere material comfort.
Ritu Birla’s Stages of Capital is as much a legal history as a theoretical analysis, a project in post-colonial studies as well as an investigation into economics. Perhaps the most fascinating feature of this wide-ranging book is Birla’s conceptualization of history and jurisprudence as translation. This is an especially apt tactic when one remembers that translators can do more than get the particular words wrong; one can also misunderstand underlying facts.
Birla’s insights into the economics of kinship as recoded by colonial law are among the strongest aspects of the book. The notion of kinship as it played out in pre-colonial Indian economic practice allowed for an extended family that also served as a business network crossing city, state, and (at times) national borders. The colonial translation of this “family business,” however, limited the family economic unit to the more western notion of an estate or residence, shrinking the business network to a single household. And so, getting the cultural facts on the ground wrong, the British translated the Indian family business network into a law that was then applied to the conduct of Indian society, thus changing the facts on the ground (though Birla also explains the back and forth reverberation between the two).
As she recapitulated the main arguments from her book, Birla reinterpreted Ferdinand Tönnies’ well known thesis about the nineteenth-century shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. She pointed to the specific laws that translated the Western distinction between public and private into a distinction between British-style market capitalism and the “culture” of Indian economic practices. On her view the imposition of the market governmentality and the consequent impact on and response from India’s vernancular capitalists created what we now think of as Gemeinschaft.
One of the joys of the book, for me anyway, is the wealth of specific examples from legal and economic history. Birla offers a nearly perfect balance of archival data, explanations of said data (for readers who aren’t specialists in Indian legal history), and theorizing about how these data came to cause the historical and cultural events they have.
And, finally, I’d like to call attention to a term Birla coins that I hope will find its way into Latin American Studies, African Studies, and other area studies related to post-colonialism: “vernacular capitalist.” The term nicely evokes a palimpsest of the language, culture, and commercial practices of a region. It names, and therefore brings into being, a variation on several pre-existing concepts in a way that I find immensely productive.
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Vernacular Capitalists: A Response to Ritu Birla
Written by Matt Hart (English)
Author’s Note: The day after I delivered these remarks, the Graduate Employees Organization, IFT/AFT Local 6300, AFL-CIO (GEO), suspended strike action pending ratification of a new contract with the University of Illinois. In a major victory for academic labor, the GEO won concessions on all four of its key issues: salary increases for the poorest paid, maternity/paternity benefits, restoration of the union’s right to bargain in the event of material changes to working conditions, and protection of tuition waivers. Although this victory makes my introductory comments less newsworthy, it only magnifies the sentiments behind them.
Ritu Birla is the author of a remarkably absorbing book. But before I begin responding to it, I can’t resist the chance to comment upon the GEO strike. In my time at Illinois, I’ve worked with some pretty terrific graduate students and, as I’ve moved from teaching small seminars to large lectures with TA support, I’ve learned that our students’ intellectual gifts are matched by the professionalism, dedication, and love that they bring to their teaching. It seems to me that the GEO has done a terrific job at the bargaining table, fighting back several of the University’s most regressive proposals and winning meaningful salary raises in very difficult budgetary circumstances. As you’ve heard, their remaining battle is over graduate tuition waivers or, as I like to call it, advanced humanistic study as we know it. Most of us in the Unit don’t work in grant-rich disciplines. Without guaranteed tuition waivers, we not only give up on the goal of educational equality: we will find it impossible to build sustained excellence in our graduate programs. It seems that the administration is determined to create an à la carte policy on graduate tuition, where certain departments can access new revenue streams that boost their bottom line even as they further restrict educational access to the privileged. This policy will put new pressures on department heads and on our beleaguered systems of faculty governance, which often lack the power to resist the Board of Trustees, even when they have the will. So when I say that the GEO’s struggle for guaranteed tuition is the faculty’s struggle, too, I don’t only mean that we share a common set of principles; I mean that the GEO represents the most determined, the most effective, and the most democratic means of resisting the next step in the corporatization of our University. I spent this morning chanting, “Who are we? GEO!” This is no empty slogan: as faculty, we have no better advocate than our students.
OK. Time to get back on topic.
As you heard from Lauren, I’m neither a legal historian nor a scholar of late colonial India. When it comes to Stages of Capital, then, whatever expertise I possess lies in the work I’ve done on the vernacular. As a critic of modern and contemporary literature, I’m most interested in the vernacular as a linguistic phenomenon—that is, as dialect, nation-language, or some other written or verbal sign of indigeneity, ethno-national identity, or deviance from a presumed norm. But as any student of vernacular literatures soon learns, it’s impossible to treat the vernacular as a narrowly linguistic phenomenon. In the first place, as I’ve explored through my concept of the “synthetic vernacular,” the very fact of translating the vernacular into print opens it up to all sorts of transformations and adulterations. More importantly, the vernacular is not simply a mode of writing or speech; it is a discourse in the broadest sense, not just a language but, as Grant Farred argues in his work on black vernacular intellectuals, a language of power.1 Moreover, as such a language of power, the vernacular is not easily assimilated to a simple discourse of subalterneity; rather, because it represents the way in which the indigenous becomes expressible as such, it is an ideologically over-determined discourse that can be co-opted by sovereign power even as it can be mobilized in resistance to it. Thus, when Farred insists that the vernacular has a basically populist caste, we ought to remind ourselves, using Ernesto Laclau as a guide and Sarah Palin as an example, that populism is the emptiest of signifiers.2 And when we narrow the topic to the politics of language, we ought to remember the work done by the Africanist Moreadewun Adejunmobi, whose studies of English education in the context of the Nigerian anti-colonial struggle describe the phenomenon she calls “major discourses of the vernacular”—as when the colonial government in Lagos made indigenous language education a priority, at the same time as anti-colonial activists opted for what they saw as the universality and modernity of English.3
The social polyvalence of the vernacular is palpable in Professor Birla’s book. As you have heard, she focuses on how Indian vernacular capitalists—whom she calls “insiders in the colonial economy but outsiders to modern market ethics”—worked to “legitimize themselves as modern subjects” (3). In a fascinating series of chapters about the uneven development of Indian market governance, Professor Birla shows how institutions such as the Hindu Undivided Family or HUF, which confound Eurocentric distinctions between “kinship as a symbolic logic and commerce as a material one” (16), became the object of profound disagreement, between Indians and the British, to be sure, but also between reformers and traditionalists within Marwari society. In her chapter on gender and the making of capitalist subjects, for instance, she describes how the HUF was not only a problem for the British, who shed real tears about corporate partnerships, liability, and loss and, one suspects, crocodile tears about the morality of child marriage. Rather, as “a private system for the regulation of females, sanctioned by ancient authority,” the HUF was seen by Marwari reformers as a signal contribution “to public welfare,” while for the orthodox it “constituted the foundation of an alternative Hindu public” (222). In debates like these, Professor Birla writes, “idioms of gemeinschaft” ought to be seen as “effects of a politics of gesellschaft” (201). If there’s one thing, then, that this non-specialist reader takes away from Stages of Capital, it’s Ritu Birla’s explanation of the way “colonial authorities regulated vernacular capitalism […] by coding it as a rarefied cultural formation,” while vernacular capitalists themselves first challenged and then redeployed the very categories of culture through which they were subjectivized as Indian Economic Man (5).
Now I’ve written enough reviews to know that the easiest way to criticize someone’s scholarship is to look for sins of omission, with the corollary that the subject most often left out is (who would’ve thunk it?) the one you’ve just published upon, with the implication that the author would never have sinned had she only consulted you first. But if this reflects poorly upon the academic propensity for narcissism, it’s nevertheless defensible as a function of scholarly expertise: for we all see through a glass, narrowly. I’ve already noted my deep appreciation for the way Professor Birla adds to our understanding of the vernacular as a cultural, legal, social, and economic discourse. I hope it’s not churlish, then, to wish that she’d made her theorization of the nature and limits of this discourse somewhat more explicit. As I read Stages of Capital, I started an ad hoc list of rough synonyms for vernacular. In no particular order, I came up with the following: indigenous, gemeinschaft, pre-modern gemeinschaft, customary, convention, long-held convention, community, kinship, tradition, social customs based on religious laws, personal law, and the nexus: family, clan, caste, and ethnic/communal identity (218). Now my complaint isn’t that Professor Birla conflates these terms; on the contrary, concepts like kinship and personal law are handled with great particularity. But when such social and historical precision combines with great cultural and semantic diversity, it becomes hard to define the modifier in vernacular capitalist without reducing it to a lowest-common-denominator label like indigenous—and that, as we’ve already seen, is only the beginning of the discussion.
In the end, this seems like a fair price to pay. My objection only stands because Professor Birla has assembled such a rich historical archive, replete with examples and ambiguities, as when she writes about her focus on the unstable distinction “between law as a logic, and law as a nomos or the conventions of localized practice” (236). Stages of Capital is a compelling work of history centered on Indian market governance. If this literary critic leaves it wanting more, then that only points towards the interdisciplinary work still waiting to be done on the discourse of the vernacular. I only hope that Professor Birla is already writing her next contribution to the field.
1Grant Farred, What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis: U. Minnesota P., 2003).
2Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005).
3Moradewun Adejunmobi, Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa (Clevedon UK, Tonawanda NY, and North York, Ontario: Multilingual Matters, 2004).
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