EUROPE AND THE QUESTION OF MODERNITY 13 pioneering work of Women's Role in Economic Development (1970) was a major alert against the real designs behind the development paradigm. In 1974, the Status Committee under the leadership of Phulrenu Guha and Veena Mazumdar, applied the tools that are supposed to be contaminated by western modernity, to point out the betrayal of women by the dominant development process set up by the nationalist elite. It is by using the Enlightenment-generated techniques of quantification and numbers that it was possible to demonstrate the inadequacy of this ameliorative approach. Modernity, therefore, is a hydra-headed monster that cannot be expunged simply by turning 'anti-modem'. Having begun with the 'modernity' of Europe as a self-ethnicising device, I would like to end on a speculative note. The European studies that Professor Bhattacharji and envisaged was, for him, an integral part of the arduous process of decolonising our English Studies. This might sound paradoxical at best; at worst, compromisingly liberal. Unless, however, we study Europe and its culture in a spirit of ethnography, in a spirit of area studies, with adequately sensitized comparative methods devised within the societies that have undergone the humiliating process of colonisation and are being subjected to a revamped exploitation through W.T.O.s and conditional loans, we shall contribute to our further enslavement. This attempted displacement of Europe from the position of the central norm will also enable us to look at our neighbours immediately to our East and West, not as Far East and Near East, and acknowledge a globe that has no East or West. The methods of enquiry should certainly preclude the assumption that rationality and enlightenment could originate only in one place and time. While we fight the notion of contemporary India as a truncated version of modern European nation state, we also fight the notion of India as nestling within a number of pre-modern communities nurturing benevolently toiling women and men, minorities and other marginal groups. This is the image that marauding modernity from the West has always imagined India to be. 'Modernity' is a predicament, not a telos. Europe is implicated in it as is the rest of the world. I shall end by going back to the technologies. Confronting capitalist modernity can be attempted not by eschewing its technologies, although they are technologies of power. If Indian women, for instance, are being subjected to technologies of reproductive control discarded as unsafe in the West, they cannot be kept away from modem medical knowledge under the ruse that knowledge is power. Kant's motto 'dare to know' may be the central message of European Enlightenment. But it is a also the motto of the powerless and dispossessed. Europe may stake its claim of monopoly over the moment of 'modernity'. Its momentum, however, is for anyone to seize.