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"Saurabh Dube's book will make a signal contribution to the political and theoretical legacy of South Asian subaltern studies. Based at the Colegio de Mexico and in conversation with scholars and intellectuals based in Latin America, Dube has written a book that will enhance the dialogue between Latin American critical social thought and subaltern studies already underway. Historically grounded and theoretically sophisticated, "Stitches on Time "conveys the feeling of a new gaze in the tradition of subaltern studies, an awareness of a daily life out of place in relation to the subject of scholarly pursuit."--Walter D. Mignolo, Duke University

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Stitches on Time

Duke University Press

Chapter One

An immaculate conception of the epiphany of travel spells the end of memory. Yet memory strikes back-as empires have done, again and again-to be reunited with travel through a surplus of longing. Consider the following interchange: "Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better in his travels. 'I should think not,' he said. 'He took himself along with him.'"

Overture

The light and baggage discussed in this chapter belong to the civilizing mission of God and the enlightened modernity of the Savior. Several years ago, Bernard Cohn invoked the image of "missionaries in the rowboat" to remind us of some of the ways in which memory, forgetting, and travel are bound to each other through excesses of longing. In the passage that follows, the anthropologist-historian is primarily questioning a model of anthropology as an a historical practice, but the metaphorical charge, critical force, and current implications of his writing extend rather wider. He writes that

the missionary, the trader, the labor recruiter or the government official arrives with the bible, the mumu, tobacco, steel axes or other items of Western domination on an island whose society and culture are rocking along in the never never land of structural-functionalism [tradition], and with the onslaught of the new, the social structure, values and lifeways of the "happy" natives crumble. The anthropologist follows in the wake of the impacts caused by Western agents of change, and then tries to recover what might have been. The anthropologist searches for the elders with the richest memories of days gone by, assiduously records their ethnographic texts.... The people of anthropologyland, like all God's Children got shoes, got structure.

In tune with this testimony, my discussion of the worlds shaped by missionary travels questions the privilege accorded to Western origins of change-and queries the primacy given to Euro-American agents of transformation-in non-Western arenas. Indeed, by emphasizing the contradictory location of the mission project in the creation of colonial cultures of rule, I also seek to think through the imaginings of a singular West that simultaneously underwrite Eurocentric celebrations of a triumphant modernity and undergird nativist laments for ravaged traditions. The dialectic of enlightenment and empire negotiated enduring bonds between colonial power and evangelical knowledge, but the reworking of Western truths through vernacular apprehensions accompanied and interrogated such key complicities.

Second, in keeping with the tenor of Stitches on Time, this chapter traces quotidian cartographies defining spaces in time and places in history on the margins of the West. My reference is to mappings that probe the bloated typologies and immense reifications underlying authoritative imaginings of the metropole and the colony. The master languages of reason and race contracted lasting links between civilization and the Savior, but the recasting of European idioms through vernacular translations attended and subverted such close connections.

Finally, elaborating and extending the critical spirit of Bernard Cohn and carrying forward the combative concerns of other scholars, this chapter seeks to consider particular connections between the past and the present. I have in mind here possible complicities between the travels of many missionaries (and similar mandarins) and the journeys of certain anthropologists (and other academics). This last move rests on a retreat to Heidelberg, a journey to Germany that has to await the end of the chapter.

In the Shadow of the Cross

J. W. Shank was a pioneer Mennonite missionary who traveled from North America to northern Argentina in the early twentieth century. He was a participant-as witting apprentice and hapless journeyman-in the ceaseless trek of a traveling West. Here is what he wrote on the missionary as a civilizing agent in the Christian Monitor: "He opposes slavery, polygamy, cannibalism, and infanticide. He teaches the boys to be honest, sober, and thrifty; the girls to be pure, intelligent, and industrious. He induces the natives to cover their nakedness, to build houses.... It is hard to overthrow the long established heathenism, but slowly it yields to the new power and the beginning of civilized society gradually appears. In every country where mission work has been done we find that the first lasting changes for a higher social order began through missionary effort."

The order of immanence and the design of transcendence that shore up this statement are both matters of temporality. This should not be surprising. At least since the Enlightenment, renderings of a universal history cast in the image of an exclusive Western civilization have rested on a critical opposition between sacral (enchanted) societies rooted in myth and ritual on one hand and dynamic (modern) orders grounded in history and reason on the other. Here the many modes of colonial domination-a plethora of ideologies and hegemonies and varieties of epistemic and physical violence-are premised on a temporal privilege, a franchise for the future accorded to Western arts of civilization by the blueprint(s) of a universal history.

The idea that modern journeys shaped by such schemes simply forget the past and the present-or the place and the point-of their departure is disabling fiction. Actually, these trails lead us toward the immense monumentalization of a spectacular memory. A singular mapping of modern Western civilization plots the past and future of other peoples. Such cartographies reveal that beyond the self is more than the other, with the imaginary lines instead unraveling hierarchies of otherness. There is just one road to true modernity, but different peoples have reached its distinct milestones. Furthermore, these varieties of otherness share a similar logic with the severalty of Western selves. The fantasy of the absorption of the other through the rigors of travel is a ruse (and more) for discovering an ever enchanted past of the self-erased from contemporary memory through the disenchantment of the Western world-in the timeless presence of the primitive/native. Therefore, there can be striking symmetry between the evangelical persuasion of those who would convert Hindu heathens to Christianity in the last century and the sa(l)vage mind of those who today fetishize and freeze tradition to prevent the loss of a timeless primitive/native.

In discussing the light and the baggage of the civilizing mission of God and the enlightened modernity of the Savior, I focus here on evangelical enmeshments in central India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The point is simple. If we wish to rethink dominant metageographies-"the set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world"-as a necessary condition of reconceptualizing colonial cultures and postcolonial pasts, we could do worse than think through the perspectives drawn from the margins. The patterns of evangelical entanglements in the dim and dusty land of Chhattisgarh are no less important than the designs of dominance in the smart and spruce sites of London or Delhi for exploring the widest questions of meaning and power. It follows, too, that margins can invoke other mappings of the world. A story of the...