Saurabh Dube
Saurabh Dube is an Indian scholar whose work combines history and anthropology, archival and field research, subaltern studies and postcolonial-decolonial perspectives, and social theory and critical thought. After teaching at the University of Delhi, since 1995 he is Professor of History – elected to the Distinguished Category of Professor-Researcher in 2009 – at the Centre of Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de México in Mexico City. Dube is a member also of the National System of Researchers, Mexico, in which since 2005 he holds the highest rank.
Saurabh Dube has been described recently as "one of the most generative, creative, and surprising thinkers of our time" as well as "a thinker who in these times is fundamental to the Global South". He has been considered as having "long been one of the most interesting and perceptive scholars addressing the dilemmas of modernity in South Asia"; as issuing "excellent reminder of the possibilities as well as the perils of modernity" at large; and as "bringing an electric urgency to the task of historiography of modernity", encompassing "the genealogies of the modern in Europe, the Americas, and South Asia".
Biographical
Dube was born to anthropologist parents, S.C. Dube and Leela Dube. He received the BA and MA degrees in History from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi; an MPhil from the University of Delhi; and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Dube has held visiting professorships several times at institutions such as Cornell University, the University of Iowa, and the Johns Hopkins University. He has been elected fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York; the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick; the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, South Africa; the Max Weber Kolleg, Erfurt, Germany; and the Institute of the Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria. Dube is an inaugural Distinguished Research Fellow of the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, part of the Max Weber Stiftung, Germany. He is married to fellow cultural historian, Ishita Banerjee. Both Dube and Ishita Banerjee were elected to the prestigious D.D. Kosambi Research Professorship in Interdisciplinary Studies of Goa University in India, a Chair previously held by Romila Thapar, Sudhir Kakar, Madhav Gadgil, and Shahid Amin.Contribution and critique
Saurabh Dube has been appreciated for setting up conversations between scholarship on South Asia and Latin America, combining "sociology, history, anthropology, and postcolonial studies to present a nuanced analysis of the challenges confronting our contemporary understandings of empire and modernity, power and difference, and nation and history". His work has been read as well for "its lyrical tenor, conversational approach and inspired indecision between the archive and the field. …an irresistible feast for the historical imagination …that is visibly kind to theoretical abstractions", while it closely addresses details, especially of the Chhattisgarh region.It has been argued that while offering broad "conceptual reflection on, and an extended dialogue with, the vast critical scholarship on modernity that the fields of postcolonial theory, history, and anthropology have yielded …Dube builds on this corpus of writings and further probes them", making an especially "original contribution" through his "deliberations on the productions of time and space by various subjects". In these ways, Dube's writing questions "the dominant models that variously encode modernity as a splitting of the past from the present, as a developmental surpassing of the past, or as the preserve of an exclusive West that narrates the contours of universal history … also destabilizes prevalent images of traditional spaces that are merely waiting to subsumed into modern history". Commenting on the urgency of this scholarship, it has been suggested that the thought and writing are "disguised as a thesis. But Dube has obviously penned a manifesto …a call for action …a benchmark by which we look at the future investigators of modernity and their ethical and privileged responsibilities for naming and changing the scripts that bind the subject of modernity".
Saurabh Dube’s most recent single-authored book, Disciplines of Modernity has been described as "an original and compelling exploration", "a tour de force weaving personal itineraries with public life... moving and insightful book cuts to the heart of the hierarchies that continue to shape the global production of knowledge". It has also been called "a unique, thought-provoking, and challenging...intervention in the fields of social sciences and humanities speaking across disciplines and archives", a work that "takes us forward from the moment of postcolonial and decolonial critique and recasts the framework within which scholars of/from the global south and the global north may henceforth converse". Finally, Disciplines of Modernity has been described as "an innovative and inviting, powerful and provocative book"..."conjoining intimacy and affect with structure and process predilections of the postcolonial are interwoven with the contradictions of modernity, the contentions of disciplines are bound to ambiguities of the archive, and accumulation and development are crisscrossed by loss and excess".
In a related manner, Dube's Subjects of Modernity was heralded as "ranging widely and globally – from histories of empires and genealogies of disciplines to recent Dalit artwork from India – to explore and carefully delineate a tension he regards as fundamental to the formation of the modern: the modern subject's inevitable entanglement with those subject to modernity. A tour de force, this book offers a critical, timely and powerful sequel to postcolonial and subaltern studies". The work has also been appreciated as modelling "a form of critical scholarship that is generous in its engagement with the work of its interlocutors even as it pushes against the latest clichés to chart new directions" ; as elaborating "a meditation of unusual insight and critical value" concerning modernity and its subjects ; and as articulating "a challenging break with frameworks that for too long have carried colonialism's intellectual heritage forward even after its political demise".
Taken together, Dube's wide-ranging corpus has been characterized as bearing "an insistence on the difficult and uneasy exercise of interpreting without reifying, of arguing without creating sociological taxonomies, of historicizing while still reflecting on the process of 'history production' …the most astute warning and also the most impressive legacy of Saurabh Dube".
Others, however, have criticized Dube's writings for being far too theoretical, unmindful of disciplinary boundaries, and immensely broad in scope.