The Traditional and Rural In Postdevelopment discourse

According to one of the most outspoken critics of the postdevelopment, Jan Nederveen Pieterse,
this discourse has affinities with other similar discourses of the post and that it belongs to an era of
the post and at times seems lost in the post and in the past, I would like to add. Most
postdevelopment intellectuals condemn modernity completely and there is a consequent
glorification of traditions. This makes it seem that all the traditions had much in common with each
other and that modernity had been remarkably different which unfortunately does not lead to a
more sophisticated analysis of how the economy(capitalist) works. In condemning modernity they
condemn Marxism too which is seen to be itself a product of modernity and also not sufficiently
antimodern in its approach. For example in his essay titled, Socialismsays that In the language of
currently popular post-modern theory (which in its own way also celebrates diversity), Marxs
master narrative of capitalism (his theory of capital) was appropriate to capitalisms own
attempt*my italics+ to impose its master narrative on the world. Not it certainly would be hard if not
impossible to deny that capitalism is indeed a masternarrative in the sense that it has spread all the
corners although there are diverse ways in which it has historically functioned in particular areas or
nations.
Unfettered enthusiasm for economic growth in 1945 reflected the Wests desire[my italics] to
restart the economic machine after a devastating war, the emphasis on manpower planning echoed
American fears after the shock of Sputnik in 1957, the discovery of basic needs was stimulated by
President Johnsons domestic war on poverty in the 1960s, and so, too, for the concern about
worldwide inequality. What development means depends on how the rich nations feel.
Environment is no exception to this rule. The above passage makes it seem as if the West is
monolithic entity which is not true especially just after the second world war when the divergences
must have been much more clear cut than now. And this passage completely negates the view of
many Marxist intellectuals that the post war years were precisely those years when the formerely
colonial powers had to concede to many of the demands and aspirations of the peoples in the
formerly colonised countries. As the Indian Marxist historian Vijay Prasad says, The Third World was
not a place. It was a project. During the seemingly interminable battles against colonialism, the
peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America dreamed of a new world. They longed for dignity above all
else, but also the basic necessities of life(land ,peace, and freedom). They assembled their
grievances and aspirations into various kinds of organizations, where their leadership then
formulated a platform of demands...... The "Third World" comprised these hopes and the
institutions produced to carry them forward. In my opinion it is this aspect of postdevelopment
discourse which is the most alarming-the fact that it does not acknowledged that the persuasiveness
of development is also because of the fact that it affects peoples lives also in ways which they might
agree with and that people themselves want to shape the way in which development happens and
the kind of development that happens.

Aijaz ahmad in an essay titled, Postmodernism in History finds the flaw of a lack of serious
engagement with imperialism and colonial history in much of postmodernist writing. As he says, all
that one gets on the history of French postmodernists boils down to one single moralism: Modernity
is a very bad thing, and it was very bad of Europeans to impose it upon non-Europeans.
1
In this
essay he picks out two major luminaries of postmodernism- Jean Francois Lyotard and Michel
Foucault and points out that both showed a lack of much awareness about imperialism and the
history of non-Europe in general. The problem according to Ahmad is that although postmodernism
aims to critique Modernity it fails to take into account, its relationship with colonies. He points out
that the main point of disagreement of Marxism with someone like Foucault is that for the former
no account of the making of the modern world is complete without an account of classes and
colonies.He clarifies imperialism is not a sub-plot but a central narrative of The Modern Age.
Postmodernist intellectuals often posit the pre-modern as the answer to the problems of modernity
as Ahmad demonstrates in the case of Lyotard and Foucault. This can be said to be true of the post-
development discourse which often shows a similar and somewhat uncritical preference for the
traditional and the pre-modern as against modernity which are construed as a binary which is
rather simplifying.In this paper I shall try to show how this preference for the traditional is relatively
uncritical and how this binary on which post-development rests is itself problematic.
One important thing is that many of these who use these binaries do not define clearly what they
mean by modernity or tradition. In contrast critics of culturalist modes of thinking like Shamir Amin
and Meera Nanda point out that the main features of modernism is securalisation especially the
separation of religion and politics. As Nanda goes on to say in the last chapter of her book, Prophets
Facing Backwards, modernity does have an essence and that is secularization of society and a
disenchantment of nature which allows for greater human agency in changing their destinies thrugh
collective struggle. The crucial thing is that both Nanda and Amin think that there has not been
sufficient modernisation especially in the peripheries and that rather than modernity being the
problem, the curtailment or the insufficiency of it is the problem. As amin points out, The reason
for the impasse is that modernity requires an abandonment of metaphysics.The failure to recognize
this leads to a false construction of the question of cultural identity and a confused debate in which
"identity" (and" heritage") are placed in absolute contrast with "modernization, "viewed as
synonymous with "Westernization."
Several intellectuals have critiqued the so-called post-development discourse for some of its
problems and some of the issues that it ignores/suppresses. In my opinion many of the post-
development theorists make similar mistakes as some other postmodernist intellectuals who while
they often are very sensitive to essentialist positions and homogenising attitudes of others often
themselves behave in a similar way. In short they often do what they accuse the others of doing. The
postdevelopment discourse often talks of tradition and modernity, rural and urban, macro an micro
or glabal and local etc while forgetting that these binaries have so often been critiqued in the social
sciences and the fact that todays complex realities whether it be of capitalism, imperialism or
modernity or even of the kinds of effects these have on so call traditional or pre-capitalist societies,
need methods of explication which needs must overcome such binaries whose frequent use often
leads to a simplistic understanding of things. As Majid Rahnema says in one of the essays in The
Development Dictionary, Here lies another fundamental difference separating the grassroots
universe from that of modern technology. The latter starts with a macro blue-print, a predefined



idea of what should be done and how. As a rebuttal of this kind of frequent use of binaries it can be
pointed out that the rural and urban were never such mutually exclusive entities in India at least
even in the ancient and medieval pasts. As the Indian sociologist A. M. Shah writes in his article on
the rural-urban networks of India, Fortunately there is a realisation among sociologists of the fact
that India has had urban centres since the time of the Indus Valley Civilisation several centuries
before Christ, and that towns and cities small and large- existed in all parts of India throughout its
recorded history...Frequently the formulations of the nature of social change posit change from the
rural past to the urban present, ignoring the urban past. This make it quite clear that the rural urban
binary is quite problematic especially in the case of India. Shah goes on to reflect on the state of the
discipline of sociology in India and says that now there is a tendency to promote urban studies
which he welcomes but is wary of the way in which it has led mainly to a juxtaposition of rural and
urban studies. He argues in the article that it is necessary to go beyong such juxtaposition, and to
study structures and institutions that link the two which are supra village and supra town, or which
are networks linking villages and towns. I feel that postdevelopment also needs to move beyond
such binaries and dichotomous thinking(Pieterse). Shah also attacks the notion that villages in India
in the past were self-sufficient which surely has been a dominant point of view propunded by such
influential figures as Thomas Munroe, Charles Metcalfe, Henry Maine, Karl Marx, and their many
modern followers including Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narain. According to
him such a view assumes that the rural sector was undefferentiated which as a matter of fact it
was not as it was divided into a number of hierarchically organised castes and sub-castes. These
castes were specialised in certain occupations and the tools required were bought in the towns.
Besides this towns were centres of great traditions of Hindu religion and culture
Many sociologists who have studies particular traditional societies and how modernity is
influencing these societies have found that the traditional elements in those societies were often
enough if not always, themselves very exploitative for certain sections/castes of these societies.
Mukul Sharma in his article on the musahars of North Bihar titled The Untouchable Present has
highlighted how the musahars were able to find some agency in changing the traditional structures,
by engaging with the dominant discourse-changing it and being changed in return, producing new
social spaces. The traditional activities of the musahars have been taken over by machines and due
to the fact that other people can also do such work now for wages. Although this has made it even
more difficult for the musahars to find work in or nearby areas they have begun to migrate in large
numbers to do agricultural and industrial labour to states such as Haryana, Punjab, Delhi and U.P.
but as Sharma points out that although this migration of male members is a pain for the community,
for even when outside degradation continues to exist but it is outside their society, which cannot
be seen. Sharma says, This musahar who migrates, is a new untouchable, who is away from his
traditional skill , and is now in a place where cash income is the centre of his activity. He is primarily
involved with an economic activity which is highly competitive and also integrated with the national
and global market. So although he points out how the mushahars have been driven to newer forms
of exploitation, there has also been an increase in the number of options which allows them to
escape the humiliation inherent in their traditional activities which included such work as removing
dead cattle belonging to anyone in the village. Migrating to do wage labour in far away areas
provides mushahars withsome bargaining power, gives basic sustenance to their families and has
lead to changing relations in the village, where they are able to escape relatively the constant work
humiliation inflicted on them locally.
Frederich Jameson in his essay, Globalisation and Political Strategy has pointed out the problems of
using the word modernity. He says that capitalism has no goal and to talk about modernity serves
to mask this fact. It then means that the project of modernity is not really a project in the sense that
it has no goal and that the development of capitalism is then an anarchic one with many unintended
consequences which cannot be ignored and demands careful analysis as well as handling.About
some of the effects of globalisation and the possible ways in which it can be challenged he says that:
At the cultural level, globalization threatens the final extinction of local cultures,
resuscitatable only in Disneyfied form, through the construction of artificial simulacra and
the mere images of fantasized traditions and beliefs. But in the financial realm, the aura of
doom that seems to hang over globalizations putative irreversibility confronts us with our
own inability to imagine any alter-native, or to conceive how delinking from the world
economy could possibly be a feasible political and economic project in the first placeand
this despite the fact that quite seriously delinked forms of national existence flourished
only a few decades ago, most notably in the form of the Socialist bloc.
At this point there is a hint of some similarity between the post-development and a Marxist like
Jameson at least about the harmful homogenising effects of globalisation but the excerpt also shows
where they might and in fact do disagree. This is at the level of strategy because where someone like
Jameson would like to find out how the legacy of socialism can also possibly be of help in
understanding how this perceived need and desire for delinking can become a reality whereas there
is no serious discussion of such need of delinking and any other kind of political strategy that can be
used to resist the homogenising effects of the market and its associated discourses about which the
post-development intellectuals seem to be so sensitive about. Rather most of the essays in the book
The Development Dictionary seem to suppose that the traditional societies, cultures or practices
were necessarily better than modern ones. For example in the essay Market ,the author rightly says
that to a certain extent the rural areas are protected from the homogenising effects of the market:
rural areas, particularly so-called backward ones, are to a certain, albeit declining, degree protected
against this disintegrating modernity, as well as against the increased criminality it engenders. But
this statement too betrays a mainly almost completely negative view about the influence of markets.
This point of view seems incapable of appreciating some of the ways in which the same forces of the
market can be and indeed has been beneficial to the marginalised sections of the rural poor which is
not to say the globalisation or increased access and spread of the market is always good or beneficial
to the marginalised. It also seems oblivious of the view of many intellectuals that some semi-feudal
areas are allowed to survive and which in turn allows small peasants in such areas to be produce for
the market or as agricultural labourers for conditions which might be even worse than wage
labourers. Prabhat patnaik for example, has pointed out how capitalism is viable only when some
surrounding pre-capitalist spaces are present as interaction with the precapitalist sector is what
keeps the capitalist sector viable, always experiencing a level of activity that ensures the minimum
rate of profit without engendering accelerating inflation.
The notion of the traditional that these intellectuals have and the simplifying binary upon which it is
based seem incapable of dealing with or even explaining the challenging and rapidly changing
realities in rural areas. It is for this reason that there is almost no discussion of exploitation in rural
areas which might have preceded the apparently only destructive intervention of the market in
these traditional societies. As one of the critic of ecofeminism, Meera Nanda says, This defense of
the village community easily takes on nationalist and patriotic connotations, as the village is made to
stand in as a symbol of Indian civilization threatened by Western science and technology.
In the introduction of the development dictionary Wolfgang Sachs says that the campaign to covert
traditional man into economic man failed and that catching up those in front- the so called
developed countries, was said to be the primary task of those who were underdeveloped-in short
the diverse people who constitute the majority of the world. As he says, from the start,
developments hidden agenda was nothing else than the Westernization of the world. This theme
and the several aspects about how the development discourse was popularised throughout the
world with great success has been highlighted in so many essays of The Development Dictionary.
Most of the authors contend that market, state and science have been the great universalizing
powers of modernity and Westernisation which are assumed to be more or less the same thing. This
view of modernity is in my opinion paradoxically Eurocentric. Samir Amin in the first chapter of his
book Eurocentrism titled Modernity, defines modernity as the view that human beings individually
and collectively can and must make their own history. This according to him marks a radical break
with all dominant ways of thinking in the past and in all traditional societies of the world which were
based on the principle that God, having created the universe and mankind, is the "legislator" of last
resort. He further goes on to elaborate what is known as modernity and capitalism constitutes two
facets of one and the same reality and this accounts for the bourgeois character of modernity.
Further according to Amin the second chapter in modernity was inaugurated by Marxs criticism of
bourgeois emancipating reason and he calls this chapter modernity critical of modernity. Now this
is one of the chapters of modernity which seems to have been ignored by much of postmodernism
as well as associated ways of thinking like post-development. About this the Indian historian Sumit
Sarkar in one of his essays titled Postmodernism and the Writing of History has also said that,
terms like Enlightenment rationalism-as well as Marxisms relationship with it-may be in need of
greater refinement than is often allowed within the rather homogenised polemics of much
postmodernism.
I want to argue that this homogenised polemics of the postmodern makes modernity or the various
strands constituting modernity or even the Enlightenment seem much more monolithic and and
therefore uncritical or less reflexive than it really is. As Eisenstadt has said his essay Multiple
Modernities while endorsing the view that modernity is liberatory from the point of human agency:
While the common starting point was once the cultural programme of modernity as it
developed in the West, more recent developments have seen a multiplicity of cultural and
social formations going far beyong the very homogenising aspects of the original version. All
these developments do indeed attest to the continual development of multiple modernities,
or of multiple interpretations of modernity and above all to attempts at de-Westernisation
depriving the West of its monopoly on modernity.
As has been pointed out by Pieterse in characterising development as completely western and
therefore imposed upon, postdevelopment denies agency to the people in developing countries.
Although post-development intellectuals do not deny that market forces are affecting the rural in
various ways and they also often talk about the homogenisation that it leads to and therefore talk of
resistance in terms of grassroots movements. The only problem here is that they do so without
taking into account the kinds of politics and agenda these specific movements have and the nature
of the concrete steps that they may be taking to solve the problems relating to the continuous
widening spread of the market or globalisation. Meera Nanda has convincingly highlighted how right
wing ideologies have drawn from postmodernist critiques of modernity and their uncritical
glorification of indigenous communities and traditions.
Raymond Williams in his book The Country and the City talks of the devastation of the commons in
England and how this relationship of the country and the city in which the rural poor are exploited as
well as expropriated is gradually extended to the colonies:
The unprecedented events of the nineteenth century , in which Britain became a
predominantly industrial and urban society, with its agriculture declining to marginal
status, are inexplicable and would have been impossible without this colonial
development........ .....the economy by the middle of the nineteenth century was at
the point where its own population could not be fed from home production. The
traditional relationship between city and country was then thoroughly rebuilt on an
international scale[my italics]. Distant lands became part of the rural Britain, with heavy
consequent effects on its own surviving rural areas.(Williams 280)
Williams goes on to talk of how this process of imperialism was reflected in the novels of the
nineteenth century. But what is important in Williams account of the transformation of the country
and the city emphasises how the colonies performed an important role in capitalist development
from the very beginning and underlines the exploitative relationship between the colonising and the
colonised country which in turn is bound to effect the internal developments of both. At the end of
the second last chapter he says, But as we gain perspective from the long history of the literature of
country and city, we see how much, at different times and in different places, it is a connecting
process, in what has to be seen ultimately as a common history. What this implies is that capitalism
is not simply a western phenomenon and therefore all contestations of modernity cannot always be
characterised as Westernisation. This kind of a history of the rural and the urban or which might
also be called the history of the relationship of capitalism and that of the so called traditional or pre-
capitalist societies is in sharp contrast to the simplifying conceptions of modernity and tradition in
much of the post-development.

References:
1. Immanuel Wallerstein-Historical Capitalism
2. Surinder S. Jodhka-Village Society
3. K. L. Sharma and Dipankar Gupta- Country-Town Nexus
4. Utsa Patnaik-Primitive Accumulation and the pesantry in the Present era of Neolibralism with
Reference to the Indian Experience
5. Prabhat Patnaik- the last chapter in his book Value of Money
6. Jan Nederveen Pieterse-Development Theory
7. Archana Prasad- Environmentalism and the Left
8. Aijaz Ahmad- Postmodernism in History