Modernity and Interpellated Native Subjectivity in South Asia

Abstract

Modernity is considered to be a normative social force that arrived in the Subcontinent with colonialism. Modern social organisation challenged indigenous loyalties and claims: the clan, the tribe, the village, caste relations, and the princely state. Normally, modernity is considered a unique attempt to transcend these loyalties. But celebration of modernity is an effect of colonial triumphalism and the Eurocentric desire to abnegate other such attempts in world cultures. Monotheistic social organisations were earlier attempts to transcend the family and the tribe and create a public sphere of faithful subjects. Modernity appears to succeed because of the support it received from the capitalist mode of production. For the native of the Subcontinent, such globalising attempts are not organic developments and need to be negotiated and contained. Literature and law helped the coloniser in maintaining the illusion that modernity was bringing a new and benign social order but the colony was just a site of surplus extraction.
Keywords: Modernity, South Asia, cultural transformation, literature, rationality