Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty
Enlightenment and Its Discontents. Reading and Teaching the French Revolution in Calcutta/Kolkata
Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty (Calcutta)
Interviewed by Benjamin Zachariah (Potsdam)
The French Revolution of 1789 is generally recognized as the embodiment of Enlightenment’s ideas of universalism, cosmopolitanism and human freedom. This talk will discuss the limits of such understanding, especially in the context of the impact of these ideas in the colonies. The first section discusses the reception of
the news of the revolution in the French settlements in India and the total disappointment of the residents, who expected representation in the colonial as-
semblies as well as other universal rights which had been proclaimed. The second section examines the revolt of the slaves in Saint Domingue under the lead-
ership of Toussaint L’Ouverture as well as the inner contradictions within revolutionary France on the one hand, and the universalist implications of the new
constitution introduced by Toussaint on the other. The final section explores the later evolution of the French narrative of the revolution over the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries which nationalized the revolution. At the same time, in the words of a French diplomat in 1910, the Rights of Man “sound like the artifi-
cial ideas dear to the Evangelists of the French Revolution”’. Separate laws for the colonies were prescribed.
Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty studied history at Presidency College, Calcutta, and taught history in different colleges in West Bengal, India. He retired from Presidency College, Kolkata. He was a guest professor at the Calcutta University for twenty-five years. He has taught and published on European history in English
and Bengali, has written on the history of Darjeeling, and on sports history in South Asia. He was a member of textbook review committee of the NCERT in India in the 1990s. After retirement, he worked at the West Bengal State Archives and organized the shifting to the archives the files of the Intelligence Branch of the West Bengal Police to enable the researchers to use them. He is a member of the council of the Asiatic Society, Kolkata and the editor of many volumes, including Uprisings of 1857: Perspectives and Peripheries (2008) and The Eighteenth Century in South Asia: New Terrains (2010). He is a co-editor of the recently published The Long 2020: Reflections on Epidemiological Times (2024). His most recent publication is an essay on the journey of the ship Komagata Maru in 1913–14.
Benjamin Zachariah is a member of the Einstein Forum research staff. He studied history, philosophy and literature. He completed his undergrad-
uate degree from Presidency College, Calcutta, and his PhD in history from Trinity College, Cambridge. He taught for many years at Sheffield University, was
Professor of History in Calcutta and Halle, and has held previous senior research fellowships at the University of Trier, the Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Trans-
cultural Studies at Heidelberg University, and the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, among other places. His research interests include the politics of historical knowledge, historical theory and historiography, global fascism, transnational revolutionary networks, na-
tionalisms, and memory. Zachariah is the author of Nehru (2004), Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930–1950 (2005), Playing the Nation Game: The Ambiguities of Nationalism in India (2011; revised edition Nation Games 2020), and After the Last Post: The Lives of Indian Historiography (2019; South Asia edition 2023). He is co-editor of The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views 1917–1939 (2015), and of What’s Left of Marxism: Historiography and the Possibility of Thinking with Marxian Themes and Concepts (2020).
Vortrag im Rahmen der Tagung Enlightenment in the World
Lecture at the conference Enlightenment in the World