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Apprehending
Political Modernity: Towards a Postcolonial Regime of Aesthetics
Rohan Kalyan
Department
of Political Science
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
This paper argues for the centrality of the concept of
historical contingency in a postcolonial regime of aesthetics.
Using Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players as a
site for critical analysis, the concept of contingency allows for a mode
of artistic expression that goes beyond hierarchical representations of
Self and Other, into a mode of apprehension of political modernity that
dislocates the colonial encounter from metanarratives of historical
progress. In rendering the colonial encounter as both central to
political modernity and as historically contingent (rather than as part of
a universal history of Western expansion), Ray’s film opens a space in
which to think the radical alterity of a postcolonial encounter.
Ray does this by de-centering the western Subject as
the agent of History. Contingency serves as a pivot that opens the
historical encounter of colonialism to a countervalent reading.
Using Mughal India as the artistic and historical backdrop of his
film, Ray invites us to enter into a conceptual space where non-western
ideas of political community, artistic practice, and power converge and
conflict with British utilitarian rationalism. Rather than treating
the “pre-modern” Mughal political apparatus as predestined to be
superseded by a more technically efficient and militarily superior
colonial state, Ray offers a postcolonial critique of both sides of the
encounter, indigenous and colonial, that refuses to slip into a
representational regime of art in which hierarchies of perception
foreclose the possibility of difference in the apprehension of political
modernity.
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