Navigating the Planetary Polycrisis with Dipesh Chakrabarty

...of people who did not look like my cousins or their ancestors. So I always felt that this was like a costume drama. Like you had to almost wear European costumes to play out a European drama of conflict between classes. And I was aware of that and that was the beginning of my troubled with Marxism or let's say troubled relationship to Marxism. I was still a Marxist, so I kind of thought that Marxism was a universal philosophy, but I was getting uneasy about using these categories which had one kind of both universal resonance as well as universal

Wszyscy go czytają. I dlaczego nie wszyscy czytają historię bengalińskiej klaski? I as I thought about it more, I realized it's not only English nationalism or national identity writing itself in the title of the book. A larger thing happened, which is that the transition debate in Europe, Europe's transition from feudalism to capitalism, structures the debate in the rest of the world about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. I w tym sensie zrozumiałem, że Europa jest metasubjektem wszystkich historii modernity. I dlatego All historians have to read European history, but European historians don't have to read our history.

North is industrialized, South is peasant. You can then see that within Europe, in the countries that are not typically part of Western Europe, that is Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, there is a differentiation being created whereby There is a modern European rediscovery of its peasantry. Sometimes as a negative condition of its history, that we are still peasants. Sometimes as a positive condition of your history, like I think the Solidarity Movement was a kind of positive moment. And I think Indian history was trapped in the same problem.

But equality was the youngest but the most powerful idea. Easiest to grasp or easiest to inspire. It inspires you. And I thought even in India, the idea of equality before the law. Not equality in the eyes of God. Islam had come and preached the message of equality in the eyes of God. Hinduism did not. Buddhism has preached a certain kind of negative equality by a negative theology, never defining God. But equality in this life, in earth, while you are alive, in the eyes of law, was a concept that the Europeans brought for all their problems and faults.

We Europeans only have 200 years old history. And I used to say to them that if that was true, you would not know what to do with the church. The church was invented a long time ago. And that invention is part of your history. I mean, you've carried that history onto this land. So yeah, that's how So that's the journey from rethinking working class history to provincializing Europe. You have already referred a couple of times to the provincializing Europe. It has now been over a quarter of a century since you published the book and also 18 years since its Polish translation appeared. So that is roughly the same amount of time that in our legal system and also many other Western

Your Europe, that you may want to claim as part of being European, and the Europe that I want to claim as part of my heritage, because that's what European imperialism did, it made Europe everybody's heritage. And whether you go to a university in Madras or Calcutta or Lucknow or here, A lot of the syllabuses in the universities would have things in common. So if you go to a class on political thought, they'll be reading more or less the same people, if not the same textbooks. The major people. I mean, you know, the minor people would obviously be different. So it was critiqued from the very beginning, the book, when it came out.

And these people faced. But it was interesting to see that Europeanists in India who teach Russian history, European history, taught an older Europe, right? And I thought they were factually right. I didn't have the amount of knowledge ...that a Koselleck would have had in thinking about European history. I mean, he was a specialist. He controlled many more languages than I would. But the thing is, the world had come into a position where my question had a life. To say that I owe something to Europe, but I don't have to be European through my modernization, that question had become relevant.

We knew these things as Czechoslovakia in 68, Hungary in 56, but this is the eruption of Eastern Europe as a problem both in Soviet imperialism, but in European history. So actually, as I was saying before, Eastern Europe, not even by that name, was present in our Marxism, which is why Zasulica's question to Marx Names mentioned. Names mentioned. Names mentioned. Names mentioned.

He may or may not have, but I had it thanks to him. So the thought is that a book begins when a loss or a wound becomes a question. And I think the loss of my Indian Europe I the emergence of Europe as a question was to do with my migration to Australia. Again, the discourse figure that I was talking about. And loss of that innocent relationship to Europe was a loss. I mean, you never thought that street lanes were European. Ruchy trafiku były europejskie. Zgady trafiku były europejskie. Kraków był europejskim meczem, o którym bardzo znany indyjski myślnik Ashish Nandy mówił kiedyś, że kraków był innym meczem, zbudowanym w Anglii.

Więc w moim użyciu słowa, jak mówię, prowincjalizacja nie jest negatywnym słowem. Więc prowincjalizacja Chin to znaczy głębsze połączenie z Chiną. Napisałem artykuł, Which was a lecture I gave in Shanghai that invited five or six Indian-born intellectuals to go to China and talk about India, globe, etc. And I always put this question in that article both to Indian and Chinese friends saying, when the Europeans colonized us, Wielu z nich zrobiło złe rzeczy. Slavery, zniszczenie społeczeństwa indywidualnego. Wszyscy to wszyscy wiemy.

Ale powiedziałem, że oni również dawali nam wepony intelektualne, z którymi krytykować Europę. I dawali nam... Byli w stanie tego zrobić, ponieważ rozwinięli tradycje wewnętrznej odsługi. Mówiłem o marxizmie i liberalizmie jako dwóch z tych wepon, które kolonizowani mogliby używać przeciwko Europie. Even stretching categories like Frantz Fanon says that Marxism has to be stretched when you take it to the colony because Marxism has no theory of race. Race has to be explained. And someone like Frantz Fanon would grant European failure and yet say all the elements for human liberation are there in European thought. Europeans couldn't use it. So I would say to them that you want to be powerful nations.

You see less, you eat less, you hear less. And Indian Hinduism says you should celebrate that. Because part of your life is about withdrawing, retiring. You mentally leave society, right? It's a great philosophy because it is enabling you. It's saying, OK, you're experiencing these things. It's a very positive thing. And I think these are global resources. These are resources for all people. But I don't see the kind of critical traditions that I get from Marxism or, you know, or even post-structuralism, whatever European traditions. I don't see that having been mainstreamed in Europe, in India. I mean, one reason may be that the most critical tradition within theology, but the Buddhist tradition,

And Indians managed to vanquish Buddhism, send it overseas, but at the same time you have Buddhist countries carrying out atrocities. I mean, I have, you know, Burma in mind on their Muslim Rohingya population. So it's not, religion is not a guarantee, the doctrines are no guarantee, like Marxism is no guarantee that a Marxist would be a nice person. So, but at the same time there's something about European debates, maybe because Europeans have been the most violent people, I would say. Honestly, Europe is a zone of peace, zone of rationalism, zone of wonderful art and culture with museums. Europe has the best museum traditions now in the world, best public sphere with all its problems.