Published in The Hindu

Edward Said maintained, though ‘general liberal consensus’ appears to foster true knowledge, it hides the ‘obscurely organized political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced.’ Contemporary Indian producers of historical knowledge include two major factions. Majoritarian sympathizers of religious victimhood promote pseudo-histories. Countering them are powerful and glitterati guardians of history who also reflag victimhood consensus recounting colonial crimes perpetrated by British hands. And the digital age risks making historicist battles more divisive, disserving and dangerous. Saugata Bhaduri’s Polycoloniality paves the way for a third wave, that of the multicultural ethos of Bengal under seven European powers—Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, French, Swedish, German and even Russians—though not all of them occupied ‘colonial’ positions, not at least in a commonsensical understanding of the word.

Europe in the previous millennium became interested in Bengal with the medieval Italian writings of Marco Polo and John of Montecorvino, although these authors had most probably never set foot in the state. Coming to the seventeenth century, Bhaduri makes explicit a marginalized thesis. Calcutta—widely held to be built by the British around 1690—began instead as Portuguese, Dutch and Armenian experiments in urbanism. The Portuguese post at Howrah since 1560s, the Armenian settlement around Sutanuti since 1620s, and the Dutch colony at Baranagar since 1650s were the cornerstones of Bengal’s capital. Of course, not all Europeans arrived with hearts of gold. Thanks to the slave trade run by Portuguese helmsmen in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century India, thousands of Bengalis were dispersed in Europe, including the recently popularized eighteenth-century slave, Zamor, who travelled from Chittagong to France before the French Revolution.

Bengal shares legacies of administration, culture, cuisine and even language with the Portuguese, Dutch, French and Danish. The Portuguese gave Bengal its first brush with print culture, besides early forms of dairy sweetmeats with which it wages cultural battles today with neighbouring states. The first modern colonial college in Bengal was the Hooghly College, built by the Dutch in Chinsurah, in 1812, five years before the Presidency College. The first modern ‘colonial’ university, not just in Bengal but in Asia, was built by the Danish as the Senate of Serampore College (University), in 1827, thirty years before British Presidency universities. The French abolished sati and slavery much before the British, and also encouraged Chandernagore’s Vaishnavite pluralism in contrast to Calcutta’s Brahminical attitude. Such obvious facets—well-entrenched though widely suppressed—besides many unknown factors and characters are sustained over two hundred and fifty pages. Bhaduri’s deceptively readable treatise defies monocolonial and monistic notions of Bengal’s past.

Manichaeism, the religion that flourished in the third-century Sassanian Empire, continues to rear its ugly head dividing social and historical realities into straitjacketed measures of good and evil. Polycoloniality tunnels us back to a world with Marquezian possibilities—magical, multivocal and nonlinear as in the world of the Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez—instead of the Manichaean. Consider the Danes in Bengal. In 1756, Siraj ud-Daulah sought Danish support before attacking the British. With little capital and almost no ammunition, the Danes refused, only to be fined Rs. 25,000 by Siraj. Later, not only did Danish Serampore offer asylum to French refugees fleeing from British tyranny, it also became a bastion of British Baptist missionaries, spearheaded by William Carey and armed with pamphlets published in the Serampore Press, who even allied with French spies against the British themselves. Around this time, Carey also popularized Raja Rammohun Roy in American and British Quaker and Unitarian circles, while the latter was redefining ‘Hinduism’.

That bafflingly rich universe of stories has been obliterated by our colonialism-bashing and colonialism-bribing—often faces of the same coin. Books like Polycoloniality are not seismic cultural shifts. Instead, they lie at the roots of the slowly simmering substratum of history’s multicultural voices, whose music is bound to explode sooner than later. Bhaduri invites readers and writers to join.

The author is a Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University