It cannot be emphasized enough how critically important the theme of the Seminar is – especially for us in India today but more generally in the world at large. We need to think of the idea of interdisciplinarity in much more fundamental and radical ways today if we are to even begin to meet the intellectual challenges posed by ‘our contemporary’.

Before I proceed, let me also clarify that the term ‘indisciplinarity’ in the title of my talk, is not simply there for its shock-value. I believe that we are today at the threshold of a fundamentally new condition where there is a serious question mark over old knowledges and disciplines as they emerged in the course of the last few centuries. The crisis of these disciplines and bodies of knowledge stems, in the first place, from a recognition that those knowledges, despite their very important role and contribution, actually arose from within a very specific cultural-historical universe – that of post-Enlightenment Europe.

But it also stems from the fact that we are living in fundamentally new times, in times when most of what we know of the world, what older disciplines taught us, are being seriously questioned. Let us take the instance of the ‘economy’ and its relation to what we today call ‘ecology’. We have hitherto known the latter to be a mere ‘subset’ of the former: we have know all along that the latter exists only as ‘natural resources’ that go into the economy as raw material. Our contemporary moment presents us with another possibility – that the relationship might indeed have to be reversed and that we must begin to see the economy as a subset of the ecology.

However, this is not the only way in which the discipline of economics stands problematized. Take the problem of waste: everything that the economy was supposed to eject, expel, excrete in the course of producing the supposedly healthy, ‘high-growth’ body, has now come around to haunt it. Of course, waste still does not form the province of economics but everywhere we are haunted today by that excess, that remainder – from toxic and nuclear wastes to mountains of crushed cars, unhandleable e-waste etc – not to speak of the clogged drains, overflowing plastic and other garbage that adorns life in urban India. I shall suggest below that ‘waste’ can indeed be seen as the paradigmatic question that will haunt the 21st century just as production has dominated the last two. I will also suggest later that this is true not only of economics but also of disciplines like ‘political science’ that have yet to recognize the waste, the excess, the excreta that two centuries of its dominance have produced. In this context, it is possible that interdisciplinarity in itself may not really be enough and some indisciplinarity might, rather be in order.

In order to illustrate what I mean, let me return briefly to the history of interdisciplinarity in India. I will try to argue that the situation today is not anything like what it was in, say, the 1970s, when an institution like the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was set up to encourage interdisciplinary research and study. Even though that project failed miserably and very soon the disciplinary impulses took over, there was a serious attempt at the level of thinking institutionally about interdisciplinarity, as a result of which students were allowed (and still are), to opt for courses in centres and schools other than theirs, that is, form very different disciplines. Nonetheless, that idea of interdisciplinarity – whether in JNU or elsewhere – was based on the assumption of a secure body of knowledge known as a ‘discipline’. Interdisciplinarity meant cutting across these fully formed disciplines with their own very clearly defined objects of knowledge and very specific protocols of research. It is much less certain today, how far these disciplines are secure today either in terms of their objects of knowledge or in terms of their protocols of research. The first serious challenge in this respect came very early on, soon after institutions like JNU were set up – and needless to say, this was from feminism. The epistemological challenge of feminism, as we know, came from its very fundamental challenge to notions of objectivity and the valorization of certain kinds of masculine values within notions of scientificity. Feminist scholars attempting to study structures of women’s oppression increasingly found themselves running up against dominant assumptions in various disciplines. An early example in the history of international feminism, for instance, could be psychiatry and later psychoanalysis and its assumptions about ‘lack’, ‘penis-envy’ etc – aptly termed ‘phallogocentrism’ by Derrida. Over time, feminists also presented a serious challenge in terms of substantive questions for disciplines: notions of labour, paid work and unpaid work, notions of reproduction of labour in economics and say, notions of public and private in political theory. Indeed, at one level, some of the feminist critiques of disciplines eventually tied up with emerging ecological critiques which were beginning to raise serious questions about the logic of instrumental rationality that governed the ‘hard’ disciplines like economics and the sciences. And at some level, these were foundational questions.

And yet, unfortunately, none of these managed to seriously make a dent in the overall armature of different disciplines. Consequently, two things happened. First, feminist scholars had to individually ‘secede’ from their disciplines in terms of their research, even while remaining institutionally located within for professional reasons, which in the best of times is a big risk to take. Second, over time, they had to set up separate Women’s Studies departments in universities – a process of institutionalization which has its own attendant dangers, some of which came to fruition. Nevertheless, women’s studies did draw from a range of different disciplines and to that extent belongs (in India, at least) to that moment of interdisciplinarity. But for feminists who had to stay within their disciplines and secede at the same time, the act was truly one of ‘indiscipline’ – of violation of discipline, hence ‘indisciplinarity’.

However, the term indisciplinarity here should be understood also in another sense – as the breaking down of boundaries, of the bringing into view newer ‘objects’ of knowledge. This sense of the term resonates to some limited extent with the way Jacques Ranciere uses the term but I would like to suggest a much wider meaning as we go along. As an instance of this let me take the example of political science once again. Some of us, part of a project called Critical Studies in Politics, have lately been involved in studying politics beyond political science, largely because we have felt the discipline to be very, very limited in terms of its resources in understanding politics as such. And for this reason, let me state in parenthesis, that I consider my current ‘discipline’ to be ‘politics’ rather than political science. I would like, here, to bring in a couple of instances by way of which I think I can show how limited the disciplinary apparatus of political science actually is in terms of understanding politics today.

It is elementary now that politics is not simply about constitutions, governance, elections, parties, or even institutions and political behaviour. Conventionally these are the concerns that define the province of political science and almost always, without exception, political scientists focus on these questions from the point of view of content alone. And yet, any politician knows that politics is almost always much more about style, performance, discourse. So whether it is Mahatma Gandhi donning the loin-cloth after his return to India or whether it was Ambedkar selecting the western suit, Nehru or Maulana Azad wearing a sherwani and chooridaar to Mayawati’s taste for ornaments or Dalit leaders’ distaste for khadi – in the very ‘presentation’ of the body in public, a statement is sought to be made. Right from matters of sartorial preference and body language to questions of selecting the modes of political intervention, forms of political speech – everything is designed to (a) ‘produce’ the public one wants to address and (b) gesture therefore to what one wants to reject. It is, for instance, difficult to see a Gandhian ‘public’ in existence before the entire set of elaborate Gandhian rituals from kahdi, to charkha, ashram-life, fasting, self-purification and so on are put into place. It is likewise impossible to imagine the emergence of a Dalit public in contemporary India, without its emphatic rejection of the Gandhian khadi in the presentation of the Dalit political body (from Ambedkar’s western suit to Ram Vilas Paswan’s raw silk kurta, Kanshi Ram’s shirt and trousers or Mayawati’s ostentatiousness).

In other words, they tell us a lot more about their politics than a simple preoccupation with the ‘content’ of their politics can tell us. We can also extend this argument to look at the ways in which early Dalit politics used the statue of Ambedkar in blue suit as a ubiquitous sign of marking its space and political presence. If Dalit presence in the village context had to be hidden from view, here in a new setting were these statues not announcing the presence of the hitherto proscribed population? And what of its transformation into something quite different with the coming to power of BSP and Mayawati, where we now have huge monumental statues, special parks and designated public areas that mark this transformation. Does a study of this transformation tell us something about politics and power in contemporary India? And if we do want to study these, what are the tools that political science makes available to us? If the very same statements were made by Mayawati or other Dalit leaders in speeches or in press statements, political scientists would consider it their domain. They can deal with that ‘material’: newspaper reports or public speeches, even private interviews. But when it comes to dealing with materials like reorganizing space and time, erecting statues, the forms (architectural or otherwise) used in doing so, then the problem really reduces itself to a ‘methodological’ one: it is not that these are not political questions but our discipline does not equip us to deal with them. If we want to study these phenomena we have to look into literary and cultural studies to find tools that help us engage with forms and styles of speech, rhetoric, performance etc.

Thus, as with feminist scholars in an earlier time, Dalit scholars today are increasingly moving into arenas that have to do with ‘cultural politics’. They are engaged not only in excavating their own traditions but also interrogating the encoded cultural power of upper caste Hinduism by subjecting literature and art as well to political critique. I want to underline the term ‘political critique’ here, for this critique does not arise simply out a purely aesthetic engagement. Thus when Dalit scholars critique canonical texts of upper caste radical intellectuals, writers, artists and political leaders, and in doing this go beyond the confines all disciplinarity, an insistence that ‘this is not political science’ can only sound ridiculous. So much the worse for political science, one might say.

Or to take another instance, let us look at the Maoist movement. At one level, we might say it is a movement led by a party and a conventional political scientist is only equipped to look at its leadership, its background, the organizational structure of the party [CPI(Maoist)] and the PGLA, its ideology and so on. However, such a study would tell us very little about the movement. What we would really need to look at is also what is going on at the economic levels in terms of exploitation of tribals and extractive mining etc that is going on in these areas; we would have to look at the place of violence that is endemic to rural Indian society and how violence of different kinds produces specific kinds of subjectivity; we would have to look at the cultural world of the tribals and how they see and understand the encroachment of the state and corporations into what were their traditional habitats. We would also have to look at the ways in which historical memory of the 19^th century Santhal rebellions is being invoked and re-presented in these current battles.

The question of cultural memory is central to all kinds of politics – including the Dalit and the ‘Maoist’ tribal movements that I have referred to. It is equally central to the project of the state which therefore strenuously exercises itself in order to organize it in specific ways. Now matters like these are not amenable to study through the traditional tools of discipline like political science and we cannot but draw from the resources of other disciplines if we wish to explore these realms.

Postcolonial Studies and Cultural Studies

Today, we stand at the threshold of new times, as well as at the point where scholarship from different parts of the world has already revealed the cultural-historical limits of the knowledge-disciplines that emerged alongside the rise of modern Europe. A key moment in constituting this challenge is what we could call the post-structuralist but more specifically, the Foucauldian moment that illuminated the role of knowledge in not simply ‘representing’ the real world but in actually constituting it. Knowledge and disciplines could no longer be seen as innocent activities, living their lives outside power, governed by rules of scientificity and objectivity; they were now seen as implicated in specific regimes of power, producing their own truths/ truth-effects.

To take a now well-known example, we could look at the way in which the work of Edward Said (and in some sense, in our own country, Ashis Nandy), laid bare the assumptions that under-girded the literary and sociological discourse of Orientalism that, in very fundamental ways, framed a number of disciplines. Orientalism was not merely a representation of the ‘East’ but its ‘production’, insofar as the production of knowledge about the Orient was to inaugurate a way of seeing the Orient in which the Orient itself thereafter participated. Ashis Nandy’s work, in particular, is shot through with the idea of middle class, western educated Indians living lives structured by western categories.

The rise of postcolonial studies, in the wake of Said, even though primarily confined within the Western academy, animated a range of serious engagements and interrogation of western thought and of established disciplines. We could add to this the work on race that emerged from a new discipline like cultural studies and through the work of scholars like Stuart Hall. We are today much more aware, for example, of the ways in which Europe’s construction of the Oriental ‘Other’, also framed a whole range of disciplines from anthropology (which is of course the most well-known and the one to have made some of the most significant auto-critiques) and history (recall Dipesh Chakrabarty’s idea that Europe is always the sovereign subject of history while other societies seem to live permanently in the waiting room of History) to political science (the least self-reflexive but certainly as much constituted by notions of modernization, statehood and democracy as markers of ‘political development’ etc).  With respect to political science we can also see how its entire conceptual paraphernalia has been thoroughly implicated in the somewhat ‘foundational experience’ of what is known as ‘secularization’ and the emergence of a state disengaged from religion and the rise of a secular public sphere of rational-critical discourse. We could in fact, also look at something like Religion and religious studies as another body of knowledge that has been fundamentally framed by the idea of ‘religion’ as understood within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. A wholesale re-examination of this field of religion and the secular has been undertaken by scholars like Talal Asad whose own disciplinary location in anthropology is quite clear but which has wider resonances for other disciplines like politics.

In a sense, the rise of postcolonial studies – and alongside it, cultural studies – presented many scholars in this new field with almost the same kind of problems that had once confronted feminists. For, their preoccupation with colonial modernity made it impossible to reduce its experiences within specific disciplinary boundaries. In that sense, this moment was different from the earlier marxist one, where it was still possible to study specific trajectories of capitalism in the non-Western world, as deviating from the norm and being ‘retarded’, ‘backward’ etc but still pretty much within a certain frame of political economy. Scholars working in the field defined by postcolonialism – say those working on nationalism, like Partha Chatterjee, could no longer read western scholarship in the way marxists would read western Marxism. So, for example, even in Imagined Communities, the famous work by Benedict Anderson, it was no longer possible for Chatterjee to miss the formulation that nations were produced in the West in particular modular forms and simply exported to the colonial world. If nations are imagined communities, Chatterjee asked, then to suggest they were simply exported to the colonies left little to be imagined by the protagonists in that world. Dalit (and dalitbahujan) scholarship would later interrogate that very nationalism for its upper caste, Hindu character and look at constructions of the lower caste self in the writings of a Phule, Periyar, Sree Narayana Guru or Ambedkar in ways that would problematize the nation idea itself. At any rate, neither nationalism nor Dalit identity was possible to be read or understood within the disciplinary confines of either political science or sociology or literature alone. What these scholars were dealing with were a range of materials ranging from political speeches, political writings in newspapers, cultural texts (say the Bhagwad Gita by the nationalists or Manusmriti by Ambedkar), autobiographies, fiction etc – all at once. Many of them were combining methods of textual interpretation with ethnography and field interviews with archival work.

New Challenges in the Contemporary

If some of these instances reveal the cultural-historical limits of these disciplines and call for their reconstitution, we could take another set of examples which reveal their limits in dealing with the new constellation of our contemporary. Here I wish to return once again to my own formal discipline, ‘political science’. In a manner of speaking, there is a fundamental difficulty in identifying what exactly we mean by ‘the contemporary’ and when exactly it begins. I would like to clarify two things in this respect before proceeding further. First, the sense of being contemporary involves living in a shared time. Scholars like Johannes Fabian have made serious critiques of their disciplines in terms of how ‘denial of coevalness’ has been central to anthropology’s construction of the Other. In a sense, this was the case with philosophy itself and constituted the common sense of an entire age: the present was singular and existed only in the most ‘advanced’ parts of the world. The rest of the world was in different stages of the past (premodern etc) and slowly ‘catching up’. A big change has taken place in this respect over the past couple of decades and it is now accepted in larger and larger circles that this way of looking at Time is highly problematic. At the very least, there is a recognition of the fact that different ‘people’ might in fact be inhabiting different temporalities (i.e. have different pasts, presents and more importantly, different futures) and yet be ‘contemporary’. That is to say, they might not all be headed to the same place.

Second, we need to mark this sense of the contemporary – as in the present, generally speaking – with reference to a certain newness of experience. Very few today would disagree that we are passing through times when, quite often, we find old certainties have collapsed and old categories do not serve to illuminate our times any more.

So, what is it that marks our contemporary today?

It should be evident that we cannot really define it in terms of any single feature. However, in relation to the knowledge domain, it seems to me, our contemporary is marked by the growing sense that the problem may be more than simply one of inadequate categories; it is marked, rather, by the way in which the ideas of ‘the social’, ‘the political’ or ‘the economic’, themselves were put together or assembled. To put it metaphorically, the ‘waste’ produced by one discipline cannot be the province of another discipline.

And so here, I turn to my example of political science or politics, once again. We have had a whole tradition of theorizing that sees ‘politics’ as that secular activity related to statecraft that emerges with the disestablishment from the Church. In this tradition, we have the idea of sovereignty as vested in the state, and in some ways related to popular will. The idea of democracy as the ‘rule of the people, by the people and for the people’ is only an extension of this idea. This was also the idea championed by Rousseau – that sovereignty was the embodiment of the General Will and that this will could not be represented. Popular sovereignty was not transferable. In actual practice, political theory recognizes that this is an unworkable idea and at some level, ‘representation’ is unavoidable. It therefore, institutes the idea of citizenship through which ‘the people’ (that is, rights-bearing citizens) participate in sovereignty. ‘Democracy’ comes in to stand for this complex of will, popular sovereignty and citizenship – defined differently in different traditions (say the liberal and the republican) but the categories broadly remain common among them. You will also note that the overall framing of this constellation is possible only within the bounds of a certain idea of a political community – and that is the nation, and its territorial boundaries. Gradually, the idea of the nation seems to have lost its sheen in the West, but the nation-state continued to frame all the categories of politics. Now, some theorists (like Nancy Fraser or Habermas) have argued that all that has changed. Nation-states no longer provide the framing horizon for politics and that what we see increasingly coming into view are a global civil society, global institutions of governance, global public spheres and so on. This immediately creates a difficulty in understanding these concepts. Earlier these concepts were based on an idea of ‘the social’ that was more or less assumed to be homogeneous within the national society – the same language/s, the same law and juridical structure, broadly the same history etc. Suddenly transposed in the global context, these concepts cease to make the sense that they did.

However, this not the sense in which I am suggesting our categories fall woefully inadequate. There is another sense in which these categories can appear problematic. Foucault had, in fact, already suggested that notions of state, sovereignty, will etc are all highly metaphysical and essentialist notions and that what politics is really about is not state and sovereignty but about governmentality – about the actual practice of government where Law and normative concerns are not really what matter; what matters is ‘tactics’. All governments in fact rule, suggests Foucault, by often placing the Law and its normativity in abeyance – what he calls the margin of tolerated illegalities. And this, for the simple reason, that rule and governing are messy businesses. Foucault’s writings therefore already lead us to one kind of difficulty in sustaining the conceptual paraphernalia of political science. However, things go far beyond even what Foucault imagined.

For these have to do with another kind of waste: the waste or the excreta of nation-states and Development, in the form of their endless production of non-citizens, refugees, stateless people and development refugees. Reflecting on the twentieth century experience of nation-states and its idea of citizenship, Hannah Arendt, as far back as in 1943, published an article entitled ‘We Refugees’ in which she proposed looking at the figure of the refugee (also at that time the situation of the Jews, we must remember) in a radically different way. Arendt proposed that this figure of a person without a country and therefore without rights (remember rights accrue from membership in a political community) can be seen to constitute a new paradigm. To quote Arendt: “For him history is no longer a closed book, and politics ceases to be the privilege of the Gentiles. He knows that the banishment of the Jewish people in Europe was followed immediately by that of the majority of the European peoples. Refugees expelled from one country to the next represent the avant-garde of their people.” Fifty years later, Giorgio Agamben takes up this essay to reflect on the state of citizenship in the world in the era of the crisis of the nation-state and suggests that we take seriously Arendt’s suggestion of treating the figure of the refugee as the paradigmatic figure of politics.

Agamben’s argument begins by taking the historical appearance of refugees as a mass phenomenon from the time of the end of World War I and the collapse of the empires – the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman. The new order created by the peace treaties immediately brought into view a new situation: “In just a short time, a million and a half White Russians, seven hundred thousand Armenians, five hundred thousand Bulgarians, a million Greeks, and hundreds of thousands of Germans, Hungarians, and Romanians left their countries and moved elsewhere. To these masses in motion should be added the explosive situation determined by the fact that in the new states created by the peace treaties on the model of the nation-state (for example, in Yugoslavia and in Czechoslovakia), some 30 percent of the populations comprised minorities that had to be protected through a series of international treaties (the so-called Minority Treaties), which very often remained a dead letter. A few years later, the racial laws in Germany and the Civil War in Spain disseminated a new and substantial contingent of refugees throughout Europe.”

Agamben further remarks:

“We are accustomed to distinguishing between stateless persons and refugees, but this distinction, now as then, is not as simple as it might at first glance appear. From the beginning, many refugees who technically were not stateless preferred to become so rather than to return to their homeland (this is the case of Polish and Romanian Jews who were in France or Germany at the end of the war, or today of victims of political persecution as well as of those for whom returning to their homeland would mean the impossibility of survival). On the other hand, the Russian, Armenian and Hungarian refugees were promptly denationalized by the new Soviet or Turkish governments, etc. It is important to note that starting with the period of World War I, many European states began to introduce laws which permitted their own citizens to be denaturalized and denationalized. The first was France, in 1915, with regard to naturalized citizens of “enemy” origins; in 1922 the example was followed by Belgium, which revoked the naturalization of citizens who had committed “anti-national” acts during the war; in 1926 the Fascist regime in Italy passed a similar law concerning citizens who had shown themselves to be “unworthy of Italian citizenship”; in 1933 it was Austria’s turn, and so forth, until in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws divided German citizens into full citizens and citizens without political rights.”

Agamben concludes this discussion with the following observation:

“These laws – and the mass statelessness that resulted – mark a decisive turning point in the life of the modem nation-state and its definitive emancipation from the naive notions of ‘people’ and ‘citizen.’”

What this discussion shows clearly is that it was precisely the rise of the nation-state that, in producing the idea of the rights-bearing citizen produced, in the same stroke, masses of refugees and stateless people. In our own experience we have seen how the partition that brought into being two and later three nation-states, simultaneously gave birth to millions of displaced people. It also immediately brought into being the figure of the ‘minority’ referred to by Agamben. And lest we forget, it was this figure of the ‘unabsorbed minority/ies’ that animated a range of fascist and proto-fascistic movements all over the world including in India. MS Golwalkar, the chief of the RSS, in fact refers to precisely these ‘unabsorbed minorities’ and the threat they pose to nationhood (his favourite example being the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, whose fate invited Hitler’s aggression), when he makes his case for Hindu Rashtra and the Indianization of Muslims. We in India or in the subcontinent have seen no end of such anxieties about unabsorbed minorities that have been produced precisely by the discourse of the nation-state and have spurred perennial violent conflicts.

And how can we forget that it was this concern with citizenship that transformed the simmering anti-Semitism of Western societies into active expulsion of the Jews and their displacement onto another of those endlessly tragic sites – Palestine. The unending tragedy of the Arab world, the tumorous presence of the Israeli state implanted therein by Western guilt – all this is unthinkable without the thought apparatus of political science – citizenship, nation-state and what have you.

If we see the conceptual paraphernalia of the discipline of politics from this vantage point, that is, the vantage point of the refugee or the displaced person, we will be able to appreciate how much the problem has to do with the way the domain of politics and ‘the political’ was assembled in the last two centuries or more. Notions of people and citizen that continue to frame the discipline of politics, are nevertheless, fictions of mass democracies. At this point, I would also like to draw your attention to another possibility – and this arises from our own experience of democracy as well. The ‘people’ or the ‘citizens’ in whose name the business of politics and democracy goes on really seem to have a very ‘strange’ relationship to politics: ‘strange’ because they do not ever see themselves as participating in any sovereignty or being ‘rulers’. They hardly every see their so-called representatives as ‘representing’ them. Even in the best of times, most of them do not even vote and when they do, they do not always do so because they are choosing their representatives. Often they vote in a tactical way – to keep the players of power in good humour and thereby secure a little space in their own daily lives, free of interference from unwanted intrusions by state officials. In other words, is it possible to ask as Jean Baudrillard once did, whether notions of will, power, representation and so on are merely the concern of the political avant-garde? How does politics look like then, if we start thinking from this end – that of the refugee and the ‘people’? At this stage, we can only raise these questions. We do not have answers. But the very raising of these questions will allow us to begin the process of rethinking the direction in which our indisciplinarity must go.

It is interesting to revisit, with Sudipta Kaviraj, the field of ‘Indian Marxism’. It is an abandoned field, a piece of haunted land where no living beings go – at least not in their senses. What is more, it is a field that ‘Indian Marxists’ themselves are afraid of revisiting. It is their past – the land of the dead, of unfulfilled ancestral spirits, where the ghosts of yesteryears hang like betaal from every tree. The terror of this forbidden territory has redoubled, after the collapse of socialism. It is as if some deep secrets of the past lie buried there which they would rather not bring back to life, for fear of what might be revealed to them of their own selves. It is strange but true that Marxists who swear by history are perhaps as afraid of it as anybody else.

And yet, we must visit that forbidden land, ‘summon up the ghosts of that nether-world’ in the hope that there may yet emerge another tale, maybe many other tales, that may throw some light on an idea that once seduced generations of modern Indians. For, it is all too easy to dismiss marxism as such, and Indian marxism in particular, as a bad dream, as some illegitimate idea that once took hold of us and kept us in that trance-like situation for almost a century (one could say, from the 1920s, at least). It is almost as if there was nothing to Indian Marxism except that it pathetically tried to copy one strand of European thought and history and implant it on Indian soil. It is all too easy, as has been often done in the past, to dismiss this episode as one where entire generations supposedly sleepwalked in the mistaken belief that they were awake – living a misrecognition, as it were.   How exactly did that happen? Presumably, if this rendition of our history is to be believed, the marxists of yore were doped (or duped) by the material successes of the West into believing that they could also all become Western/ modern overnight. The problem with this all too familiar, populist representation is that it forgets that it was not only the English speaking, west-oriented middles classes who were drawn towards marxism, but also large sections of the non-English speaking people of the regional language universe. It forgets too, the tremendous attraction that this vision held for the poorer and more underprivileged sections of Indian society. Thus we owe it to ourselves and to future generations, to take a fresh look at that entire episode. It is necessary for us to revisit the haunted land.

And so, Sudipta Kaviraj must be complimented for having made this foray, if somewhat too briefly, into that world.

Sudipta’s own engagement with the communist movement and what he calls its ‘theoretical history’ has been fairly long – beginning with his doctoral thesis on the split in the Communist Party of India. While that thesis dealt with the more ‘ideological’ [i.e. doctrinal] questions – questions with which communists are as a rule more comfortable, for beyond a point they have little to do with real life – this particular essay, interestingly, deals with the problem of ‘translation’ and what in his judgement is the failure of translation. Very much at stake in this exercise then, is the question of the real world.

Sudipta begins by positing in a somewhat marxist vein, a link between thought and social positionality. If this argument is taken seriously, he says, then it raises important questions for cases where Marxism or any Western-derived theory is used to analyze a non-Western social structure: how is this theory to be ‘translated’ into the different social ecology of Indian society, which is historically and culturally different? And here Kaviraj zeroes in on caste and the way in which Marxists completely ‘missed’ seeing the reality of caste. He also suggests that the primacy of class analysis “drew radical politics inevitably towards those parts of India where this sociology could apply with some felicity” and suggests that “it was hardly surprising that these were the industrialized metropolitan regions” (187).

I find this assertion quite intriguing, and problematic. For, except for the initial successes in Bombay and Kanpur, Indian Marxism actually found a more enduring habitat in Bengal and Kerala – and largely among the peasantry (recall the Tebhaga or the Punnapra-Vyalar movements for example). Similarly, its spectacular success with the Telengana peasantry is hardly a case of success in an industrialized metropolitan region.

I will come back to the question of caste later, but for the present, let me underline a serious ‘methodological’ problem I find with this essay. My main methodological objection is that Sudipta Kaviraj actually walks into that world, already framing it in a sense, with a pre-formed, abstract ‘theory’. We cannot start with the assumption that marxism in India was the same thing that it was in the West. In large part the difficulty with the ‘translation’ problematic lies in its assumption that Marxism in India was trying to achieve the same results as its namesake/s in the West. My point is not to deny that there is a serious problem of translation involved here but we actually need to figure out what marxism in India was trying to do in different phases of its existence. And in order to do this, we need more stories of what was going on, what people were thinking and dealing with in their everyday lives. So my first point is that we must go there like story-tellers – for good story-tellers must also be good listeners and collectors of stories.

The larger intellectual backdrop for my claim is provided by an argument that Sudipta himself and others began many years ago: that there is a problem of serious misrecognition if we look at terms like ‘equality’ or ‘rights’ used by say nationalists and assume they carry the same meanings as they do in the West. It was Sudipta’s work for instance that made us aware that when the discourse of right and equality came to colonial India, nationalists quickly took these terms and transposed them from their context of the autonomous individual to that of the national community. At one level, this was a parallel argument to Partha Chatterjee’s riposte to Benedict Anderson and his claim that it was completely misleading to see nationalist thought in the colonies as a derivative discourse, as a mere import of a modular form; that even if at the level of the ‘thematic’ it drew from Western thought, at the level of the ‘problematic’, it was fashioning an entirely different set of propositions. In other words, if we are to understand the formations of thought and politics of movements in the postcolonial world, it is necessary to reverse the question: Instead of arguing that they mistranslated Marxism, we must ask, what were they doing with marxism? Were they doing the same thing that marxists in the west were doing? Always?

There is another problem that I have with Sudipta’s text: it forgets that between marxism’s birth in Europe and its appearance in India, there is a whole history that rewrote its script – the history that Gramsci called the revolution against Das Kapital. The dislocation of Marxism from its specific context of birth and its move into the largely noncapitalist world of Russia and the colonies is a crucial moment of that history. It was in this move that the first big transformation of marxism took place. From a doctrine of anti-capitalism it became a theory of anti-imperialism and anticolonial nationalism. The well-known early debate on the ‘National and Colonial Question’ in the Comintern where MN Roy famously crossed swords with Lenin, was the moment when roles were reversed. If Marxism as a text had as its addressee the European proletariat, its entry into the colonial world was one where the new nationalist elites ‘hailed’ marxism and took it over, making it perform what they wanted it to perform. And it was actually made to perform not one but many different tasks.

The structure of this thought needs much closer examination, for, here the question of equality was not absent; it certainly animated these early Marxists – but it was always subordinate to that of national independence.

For the present, however, let me briefly indicate here some of the immensely diverse ways in which marxism came to perform certain very different functions.

Let us remember that the first group of people in India to be drawn towards the marxist ideal were the mohajirs who had gone on self-chosen exile. They were religiously motivated devout Muslims and MN Roy tells us in his memoirs that once he told them that revolution meant more than simply driving the British out, they transferred wholesale, their allegiance from Islam to communism. I have argued elsewhere that neither then, nor for many years later, did allegiance to communism demand a severance of relations with religious belief for the simple reason that, at that time, it was perceived to be a political doctrine. It was not a whole new ‘world-view’ that sought to control every part of the believer’s being. I must underline that here and later on, I am referring here to a phase of marxism’s existence in India before it became fully Bolshevized and Stalinized. This period lasts till about the 1940s – and in some places, where the control of the party apparatus was weak, till much later. Many of these stories have been banished from official accounts as well. This delayed temporality of Bolshevization is itself worth a separate study. Comintern’s and Stalin’s could not be implemented immediately and in some unadulterated fashion, everywhere.

It is also interesting to note that in Bengal for example, there is a very high degree of involvement of Muslims in the communist movements as organizers and propagandists – starting with Muzaffar Ahmed and Kazi Nazrul Islam to Abdul Halim and many others. Most of these people were from very small town backgrounds, often of very modest means and not keyed into global pan-Islamism like the mohajirs, but they were believers nonetheless as Muzaffar Ahmed acknowledges in his autobiography (Aamar Jibon O Bharater Communist Party). My claim here is that as Congress nationalism became more and more a domain of the Hindu upper castes, marxism stepped in to provide a new language of anticolonialism to the Muslims who wished to stay away from the Muslim League platform. The ML, let us recall, was formed in 1906 in Bengal (in Dhaka, to be precise) and Bengal remained its important and most powerful base.

On the other hand, in Northern India there were extremely interesting other developments that were taking shape. The combined activity of the colonial state, the nationalist elites and the declining Muslim elites (in terms of their cultural power, after 1857) over the previous decades, had instituted a deep split between Hindi and Urdu paralleling the Hindu-Muslim divide. ‘Communism’ emerged here as the only platform that attempted to straddle this divide, however uncomfortably. Uncomfortably, because the Progressive Writers Association for example, remained till independence a platform of Urdu writers – viewed suspiciously by Hindi writers, despite the presence of someone like Premchand. However it did try to take within its fold the universe of common Hindi-Urdu literature apart from the distinctively Hindi and Urdu ones. Politically, too, it is important to remember that apart from Gandhi, the communists were the only force trying to unsuccessfully bridge the ever-widening divide between the Hindus and Muslims. Gandhi was trying to do so from within an explicitly Hindu discursive universe whereas communists were attempting to carve out a secular idiom for doing so. Both failed. But both were heroic efforts of swimming against a tide that was to throw the entire subcontinent into an orgy of endless violence for decades to come.

It is interesting in this context to recall that the formation of the PWA was occasioned by the fact that a collection of Urdu short stories Angaare, had been banned for obscenity under the pressure of the more aggressive religious Muslim leadership. The writers contributing to the volume, it is well known, hailed from the North Indian Muslim elite. Among their concerns then were questions of sexuality and individual liberty. This was a very different universe from that of many Hindi writers and intellectuals like Premchand (who of course straddles both worlds), Ram Vilas Sharma and Rahul Sankrityayan who came from relatively much more modest, if not underprivileged backgrounds. Ram Vilas Sharma, from his specifically upper caste Hindi/Hindu universe, enunciated the Hindi jati thesis that saw the Hindi nationality as akin to Bengali or other such, where the distinction between Hindus and Muslims was to be subsumed within a larger linguistic-national identity. It could, of course, never be acceptable to the Muslims but the fact remains that it was an influential idea in giving the Hindi public sphere a more liberal shape. The subsequent trajectory of this thesis is also worth a serious study, for as the divide between Hindus and Muslims and a parallel one between Hindi and Urdu became institutionalized, the thesis of a Hindi jati could not but become more and more exclusivist.

In a sense, to a much larger public, marxism in India as in many other colonies, was a language that was at once modern and provided possibilities for a critique of the West. It was a language that allowed a critique of tradition alongside a critique of imperialism, colonialism and aspects of  modernity in general. That was where its power and its appeal came from.

Much more can be said about the many different marxisms in India, but we can let these instances suffice. I want to now return to the question of caste and its ‘strange disappearance’. Kaviraj talks about two notions of class in Marx: class 1 that is class as a specific category that is relevant for his economic analyses of capitalism and class 2, as a more general category – a placeholder or a conceptual blank that requires more specific filling up in different context, especially non-capitalist contexts. It was here that the labour of translation was required in order to see caste as a historically and culturally specific form of class. To quote him:

“Their inability to distinguish between the two senses of class – class1 and class 2 – compounded this problem, and turned the caste-class debate particularly unpromising for social analysis, and this meant that Marxists must insist on a much more developed state of a capitalist society in India than was plausible to assert in the 1950s.”

Sudipta links the strange disappearance of ‘caste’ from marxist discourse to this ‘misleading sociology’ of the communists. I have argued at length elsewhere that this disappearance of ‘caste’ had nothing specifically marxist about it but was constitutive of nationalist modernity in both its incarnations – secular-nationalist as well as Hindu nationalist. ‘Caste’ is elided with scrupulous regularity through all secular nationalist and marxist writings (including Nehru’s) as much as it is in the discourse of Hindu nationalism. It is as problematic for the Kaka Kalelkar Commission, whose members develop serious doubts about their own report even as they submit it, as it is for RSS members in parliament debating on the bill on reservations in the late 1970s (which led to the constitution of the Mandal Commission). The discourse of the anti-Mandal agitation of the early 1990s which spoke of ‘merit’ and ‘efficiency’ as the counter to caste as also the discourse of outfits like the Youth For Equality exactly replicate the terms of Nehru’s discomfiture with the Kaka Kalelkar commission report; they are also of a piece with the Hindu nationalists on social cohesion (samrasata) as the basis of national identity. To attribute caste-blindness only to marxists and their mistaken sociology is to completely misrecognize the very constitution of our modernity.

Finally, to conclude: does this mean that we do not or should not critique Indian marxism? Certainly not. Sudipta Kaviraj’s critique of Indian marxism within the translation problematic is quite pertinent as far as it is a critique of the Stalinist apparatus and its officially sanctioned sociology. It is true that institutionalized party marxism has done immense damage both intellectually as well as ‘spiritually’. It has, in trying to seize, control and excise these other marxisms, reinstated wholesale all the problematic universalisms of Western marxism and what is worse, in schematized, caricatured form that is opposed to all innovations in thought. That marxism has become truly inward-looking and detached from all concerns to any real world – anachronistic and mummified as Gramsci once put it. At best, it is a historical document of a phase of history long past, whose outdated vocabulary it incessantly repeats. However, even with respect to this institutional Marxism, it is difficult to understand its continuing presence in the life of West Bengal and Kerala, as simply a political phenomenon. At some level, it should be remembered that this institutional Marxism draws its sustenance from the deeper cultural resources of these cultures. And that has been possible because marxism in these states has been constitutively part of the emergence of a modern Bengali or Malayali identity.

I would like to suggest that our critique of Indian marxisms must (a) be based on a careful distinction between different phases and tendencies within Indian Marxism. We must also be able to distinguish the effects of the Stalinist apparatus from the relatively more free and multiply-mediated relations into which marxism was inserted in its long journey in India. (b) It must be able to see how it did or did not relate to the dominant discourses of modernity and nationalism in India.

In the end, I wish to take serious issue with Kaviraj on his reading of the Nehru-Ambedkar relationship. In the last section of his essay, entitled ‘Judgement and Political Efficacy’, talking of two different strands of the translation of the idea of equality – radical and liberal – he claims: “There is hardly any doubt now that the more ambitious, radical Marxist version was far less successful than the liberal one represented by Nehru and Ambedkar.” This sentence ends with the footnote that says:

” It is essential, for political realism, to stress the unpopular point that Ambedkar, undoubtedly the pre-eminent leader of the dalits in modern India, was critically reliant on Congress support and Nehru’s dominance inside the Congress. A gathering impulse of hagiographic exaggeration of Ambedkar’s single-handed impact on Indian society through its constitution does serious damage to an unexcited assessment of causes and consequences in political history.”

This astonishing claim is followed up by further cogitation on how it was Nehru’s astuteness that led to Ambedkar’s inclusion in the new political elite. In my opinion, this is a complete misreading – indeed misrepresentation – of the actual situation as it unfolded during the critical years of 1946-47. Anybody even cursorily aware of that history will know that Ambedkar was actually completely sidelined in the run-up to the negotiations on the Cabinet Mission plan and the subsequent negotiations where he was not even invited. It was in that context that Ambedkar had to revive his Scheduled Castes Federation (SCF) and enter into a political alliance with the Muslim League. The May 16, Cabinet Mission plan had envisaged a three-tiered federal structure for independent India but within two days of his election as Congress President, Nehru made his belligerent statement to the effect that the Congress had made no commitment to the Viceroy or to the Cabinet Mission about the constituent assembly. This statement was actually aimed at Muslim League – for the demand for a three-tiered federation was actually the only way to avoid Partition at that point and had been considered keeping the ML demands in mind. It was this that led to the forging of the new alliance between the ML and the SCF. Nine days after Nehru’s declaration, Ambedkar was elected to the Constituent Assembly as independent member from Bengal with Muslim League support.  The weeks to follow saw joint agitation of the SCF and the ML with the leaders of the latter addressing the public meetings of the former, supporting its claim for separate representation in the negotiations.

The very existence of this alliance was a slap in the face of the Congress to represent the ‘nation’ and even if they could stigmatize the ML as ‘anti-national’, the SCF’s being in alliance was a huge embarrassment.  It was, therefore, in order to break this alliance that the wily Sardar Patel began to pursue Gandhi to meet Ambedkar. Gandhi in his wisdom refused saying that he would not negotiate with someone who was prepared to change his religion opportunistically. When every effort to convince Gandhi failed, Patel decided to abandon him. It was actually the Partition that gave Patel his real chance. Ambedkar lost his seat in the Constituent Assembly and it was at this moment that Patel, having also perhaps persuaded Nehru, offered support to get Ambedkar elected as Congress candidate from the Bombay Legislative Council. And it is this same logic that propels the new leadership to appoint Ambedkar as the Law Minister in the new government. I have written about this at length in my piece A Text Without Author: Locating the Constituent Assembly as Event, Economic and Political Weekly, May 22, 2004, also published in Rajeev Bhargava (Ed 2009), Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution, OUP Delhi. It is not necessary here to restate the entire argument or replay the entire drama here. Suffice it to mention that Ambedkar was not merely being ‘used’ by the Patel-Nehru leadership and had his own reasons to make the moves he did, once he realized that partition/independence was imminent. But that is another story.

Presented at conference organized by  Department of English (Delhi University)  February 14, 2011. The title of the  conference was “Postfeminist Postmortems?  Gender, Sexualities and Multiple  Modernities”.

Cross-posted on kafila

To paraphrase Anthony Appiah’s famous and oft-quoted question – Is the post of postfeminist the post of postmortem? That is, as in postmortem, does “post” mean definitively over, after, having transcended, gone beyond? To those who would answer “yes”, those privileged young women who float through their empowered lives in the wake of over a century of feminist struggles but disown their own heritage, to them I can only say – I’ll be a post-feminist in post-patriarchy. Or – not for a long time yet, baby.

But my answer to that question is “no”. I understand the post of postfeminism in the sense that Laclau and Mouffe understand their postmarxism. That is, post-feminist as indicating “having passed through” that body of thought; having lived through, experienced, feminist theory and politics in such a way that the terrain one now inhabits has been decisively transformed; but alsopost-feminist in the sense that in the course of this passage new objects have been configured that the old feminism could not have seen, or recognized.

It is in this kind of postfeminist moment that I locate my presentation today.

One of the key contributions of feminist theory is the making of a distinction between “sex” and “gender”, a distinction that has subsequently been developed differently by different strands of feminist thought. The initial move was to use the term sex to refer to the biological differences between men and women while gender indicated the vast range of cultural meanings attached to that basic difference. This initial distinction and the classic quote that illustrates it – One is not born but one becomes a woman – has been inflected in various ways. These different variations theorized the cultural constructions around the biological body, but stopped at the limits set by the biological body as a given natural object.

In this talk I will focus on a specific understanding that problematizes the body itself, and emerges simultaneously and in parallel streams, from the philosophical work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler on the one hand, and from the field of feminist science studies on the other. However, I will touch only very briefly on the former since Foucault’s and Butler’s body of work is quite familiar to this audience. The understanding from this perspective challenges the very given-ness of “biological sex” itself.  The body here, is not a simple physical object but rather, is constructed by and takes its meaning from its positioning within specific social, cultural and economic practices.

The body in early modernity and in non-Western cultures

I will take a moment here to note that the establishment of the rigid nature/culture divide and the relegation or location of some aspects of human life to “nature” occurs at a particular moment in human history, as Bruno Latour reminds us, at the inception of the constellation of features that we term modernity. Thus, neither prior to the 16th C in Europe, nor until the early 19th C in India, was it self-evident that bodies are naturally entirely one sex or another, that hermaphroditism is a disease, or that desire naturally flows only between different sexes.

One is reminded here of the poets of the Bhakti movement in India who expressed a kind of desire for God that travels through and refigures the body. The focus of their desire was to attain the loss of maleness as power and of femaleness as sexualized powerlessness. AK Ramanujan suggests that “the lines between male and female are continuously crossed and recrossed” in the lives of the Bhakti saints. Their demystifying of body and sexuality seems to desexualize the body by focusing precisely on it, by celebrating its autonomy, by dismantling the codes and conventions that “sex” the body. Thus, Bhakti saints turn away from sex in this world, but not from fear or hatred of sexuality, but because their sexual passion is invested so entirely and dismebodiedly in the chosen deity as lover. Ramanujan points out that when women saints like Lalla Ded of Kashmir and Mahadeviyakka of Karnataka threw away their clothes, they are offering us the recognition that modesty, like clothes, is “a way of resisting and enhancing sexual curiosity, not of curbing it. It is this paradox that is exposed when clothes are thrown away…By exposing the difference between male and female, by becoming indifferent to that difference, [they are] liberated from it.”

One of the processes that is inaugurated with colonial modernity in India is the construction of the normative male and female body and normative male and female behavior by modernizing nationalist elites.

Consider some work on cross-dressing in theatre in India, at the moment of its delegitimization by the discourses of modernity. Rimli Bhattacharya’s study of Bengali theatre shows that arguments about gender verisimilitude were made in order to end the practice of men playing women’s roles – i.e. that they didn’t look feminine enough. But Rimli shows how alongside arguments about the unsatisfactory portrayal of women by men, lay a pervasive “undercurrent of uneasiness about boys dressing up as girls/women” for entirely the opposite reason. For instance, an article on Bengali drama, while commenting on the choric dance of female companions in jatras by young boys, spends some time being critical of their unattractiveness as female figures, their “deformity” and “discordant voices”, but concludes with the entirely opposite fear – “…they imitate all posture and gesture calculated to soil the mind and pollute the fancy.”

Bal Gandharva (1885-1967), legendary male actor whose roles included those of Subhadra and Shakuntala

This scholarship is of course, but a tiny part of a vast field of work that tracks the ways in which the fluid identities and practices of pre-colonial societies were rendered legible by colonial modernity.

The philosophical and sociological interventions in Europe of the 20th C then, that problematize the natural body, are occurring some centuries after that body has been definitively produced in Europe.

Questioning “sex”

Michel Foucault  offered us the critical move of splitting Sex and Sexuality. Sex is not the natural or biological ground on which various kinds of knowledges are added. There is no such biological foundation. Rather, the very idea that sex is this – that it is fundamental, natural, given – is the historical effect of a discursive regime of sexuality. In Foucault’s words, “We must not make the mistake of thinking that sex is an autonomous agency which secondarily produces manifold effects…On the contrary sex is the most speculative, most ideal and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations and pleasures.”

Judith Butler adds a third term to Foucault’s pair of sex/sexuality, the notion of gender. Performance is the mediating term between sex and gender – gender is the performance of sex. That is, sex is constructed through a ritualized repetition of norms. Butler specifies that we should understand the term “constructed” in terms of the “constitutive constraints” that produce intelligible bodies and their obverse, abject bodies. Butler thus links the performativity of gender to the materiality of bodies. (Not “merely performance” as opposed to something “real”). Bodies are forcibly materialized over time – there is a reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects it names. Butler thus suggests a “radical discontinuity” between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. What is characteristic of this position is that it holds that the category of “woman” does not exist prior to the thinking about it. Gender is something that is constructed through relations of power, and through a series of norms and constraints that regulate what will be recognised as a “male” body and a “female” body. Through such norms, a wide range of bodies are rendered invisible and/or illegitimate – these become abject bodies.

“Real” bodies and feminist science studies

The question will be asked – is everything “only discourse” then? What about “real” bodies? This is where we come to feminist science studies. The point here is precisely that the multiplicity of “real” bodies is rendered invisible or illegitimate through the functioning of hegemonic legal and cultural codes. To suggest only a few instances – infants born with no clear determining sexual characteristics, eunuchs, or men and women who have characteristics that are “non-masculine” or “non-feminine” respectively. All these have to be disciplined into normalcy (through methods ranging in severity from cosmetic to surgical intervention), or declared to be abnormal or illegal. Our very language, held implacably as it is in the grip of a bipolarity of gender, falters in attempting to refer to such bodies.

Take for instance, a revealing letter to the medical columns of a Sunday paper from “A grieving mother”, who seeks advice about her 18 year-old son whose sudden depression she traced to the fact that “his nipples and breasts are bulging out, which disgust him.” The doctor’s reassuring reply is that nearly 30 percent of men have “suffered” from what is termed “gynecomastia” at some time or the other. In some cases, the cause could be tumors or malnutrition, but this is rare. The most common cause of “gynecomastia”, says this doctor, is simply this – “pubertal”, due to the fact that breast tissue, normally dormant in boys, is “super sensitive to the minuscule amount of circulating female hormones.” The doctor says that once the “rare causes” have been ruled out by an endocrinologist, either the condition is self-limiting, or if it is not, may require surgery. In other words, nearly a third of the male population can have “breasts”, and if it is not due to rare endocrinological causes, the condition is perfectly normal. It seems to have no other ill effects than causing “disgust”, but nevertheless, it is pathologized (“gynecomastia”), and surgery is recommended precisely when other serious illnesses are ruled out.

From the 20th c the hormonal conception of the body has become one of the dominant modes of thinking about the root of sex differences. Nelly Oudshoorn points out that the hormonal conception of the body in fact allows for the possibility of breaking out of the tyranny of the binary sex-difference model, that is, if bodies can have both female and male hormones, then maleness and femaleness are not restricted to one kind of body alone. However, the biomedical sciences have preferred increasingly, to portray the female, but not the male, as a body completely controlled by hormones. In this process, a clear nexus has emerged between the medical profession and a huge, multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry. All sorts of “disorders” in women – such as the aging of the skin, depression, menstrual irregularities – are prescribed hormonal therapy.  This pathologization clearly extends to male bodies that react to the “minuscule amounts” (as the doctor in the letter above firmly qualifies), of female hormones circulating in them.

Or consider a startling study in the USA of intersexed infants (babies born with both ovarian and testicular tissue or in whom the sex organs were ambiguous) which showed that medical decisions to assign one sex or the other were made on cultural assumptions rather than on any existing biological features. The parents ”wanted a girl”, or the tissue available could be fashioned either into a satisfactory clitoris or a small penis, and surely to live as a man with a small penis is after to be avoided at all costs.  Thus, a baby might be made into a female or male but then still require hormonal therapy all her life to make him/her stay in her surgically assigned gender.  It is also crucial to know that inter-sex people are perfectly healthy and can live long lives, even being capable of reproduction. So the only reason to shape them into the either/or pattern is cultural, not “biological”.

Again, “gender verification” tests for the Olympic games were suspended in 2000 after enough evidence had emerged that “atypical chromosomal variations” are so common that it is impossible to judge “femininity” and “masculinity” on the basis of chromosomal pattern alone.  In other words, maleness and femaleness are not only culturally different, they are not even biologically stable features at all times.

The recent experiences of South African athlete Caster Semenya and Indian athlete Santhi Soundarajan, both disqualified after winning for failing “gender tests” raise a host of questions about this biological body that is considered to be simply available in nature. Feminist scholars of science studies have directed our attention to developments in biology that show that genetic(chromosomal), hormonal and genital (visible physical characteristics of penis/vagina) sex are not necessarily linked. That is, it is not the case that if one has female genitals one necessarily has preponderantly female chromosomes and female hormones. Most bodies marked male and female in this world would not pass “gender tests” if the congruence of these three factors is being examined. Thus, women, like Castor Semenya and Santhi Soundarajan, who have all the physical attributes of women, but who have some presence of Y chromosomes, are excluded from women’s competitions on the grounds that they are “not women” but of course, as Bronwyn Davies points out, it is not concluded from this that they “are men”.

This question is particularly complicated in the field of competitive sports, because the reason that women undergo gender testing and men do not, is that having male characteristics is assumed to be an advantage in physical activities. Thus “real” women would be facing the unfair advantages that “not women” have on the field. Several questions arise here of course. First about the “fairness” of competitive events that assume “male bodies” to be the norm. But more fundamentally, about how the decision is taken to term some natural advantages as legitimate (e.g. height in basketball, American swimmer Michael Phelp’s particular body proportions that may in fact be a disease called Marfan Syndrome, but which enable him to cut through watwer more easily than “normal” men) and some others as not. Why is Phelps celebrated and Semenya vilified, is Emily Cooper’s question in a perceptive paper.

Helen Stephens wins at the 1936 Olympics

Another story from the war zone of the sports field, a story so improbable it can only be true – In the 1936 Olympics, Polish sprinter Stella Walsh, known as the fastest woman in the world, was beaten by American Helen Stephens, who set a world record. After the race, a Polish journalist protested that no real woman could run so fast, and Olympic officials performed a “sex test” on her, in which she was found to be a woman. 44 years later, Stella Walsh, who had become an American citizen, was shot to death in a parking lot. The autopsy of her body revealed that Stella in fact, who had run slower than Helen, had been a man.

How do other kinds of non-normative bodies trouble the stable boundaries of the biological body assumed to occur in nature? The body marked disabled, for instance – Anita Ghai posits an insightful distinction between the “male gaze” (much theorized by feminists) and the “stare” in the context of the disabled female body: “If the male gaze makes normal women feel like passive objects, the stare turns the disabled object into a grotesque sight. Disabled women contend not only with how men look at women but also how an entire society stares at disabled people…”  So de-sexed is the disabled female body considered to be, says Ghai, that in North Indian Punjabi families, where girls are not allowed to sleep in the same room as their male cousins, disabled girls are under no such prohibitions. The assumption that sexuality and disability are mutually exclusive “denies that people with deviant bodies experience sexual desires…”

Deviant male bodies too, face disciplining procedures and marginalization – the gay male body, the effeminate male body, the aged male body.

The point is that we are not clearly bounded male and female bodies with only a few abnormal people not fitting the bill. When a child is born, it is usually the presence or absence of a penis that dictates gender assignment. But children who don’t have penises do sometimes have internal male reproductive organs and XY chromosomes. Because females are defined in terms of lack of penis rather than presence of vagina and uterus/ovaries, it is quite common for children who are genetically male to be raised as female. Even more fascinating is the discovery of recent biological research that hormones to some extent are produced by gendered activity rather than the other way around. That is aggressive interludes produce increased androgen and periods of non-aggression – nurturing of infants or of the elderly and so on – a reduction in androgen. We must encounter then, the radical suggestion that male or female reproductive capacity does not have any necessary implication for the subjectivity or subject positions that any individual can take up.

Such a feminist position rejects the idea that scientific facts about the body simply exist to be discovered. Rather, scientific facts are deeply embedded in society and culture. “Sex” itself is constructed by human practices, of which Science is one.

Emily Martin draws our attention to the fact that science, far from simply describing natural phenomena, is in fact an interpretive exercise. Her study of scientific accounts of the process of human reproduction demonstrate how they cast the Egg and the Sperm into roles drawn from socially normative notions of heterosexual romance in the contemporary western world.  The egg is passively transported, is swept, or drifts along the fallopian tube, waiting for the active sperm to take the initiative and make her fulfil her raison’d’etre. Once released from the ovary, says a standard text-book, the egg will die “unless rescued by a sperm”.  “It is remarkable,” says Martin, “how ‘femininely’ the egg behaves and how ‘masculinely’ the sperm” (1996: 106). Even when new research suggested that the sperm’s motion is not strong enough to propel it forward, and that it is in fact, drawn towards the egg’s surface where it is held fast by the adhesive surface of the egg, this did not lead to a more interactive view of their relationship. Martin points out that instead, either the “aggressive sperm metaphor” continues to be deployed, or another cultural stereotype comes into play, that of woman as an aggressive and dangerous threat. Biology itself, says Martin, offers us an alternative model that could be applied to the egg and the sperm, the cybernetic model “with its feedback loops” and “flexible adaptation to change”, thus enabling a reading  of the egg and the sperm interacting on more mutual terms (1996: 112).

In this context, let us consider a literary re-creation of the journey of the sperm towards the egg by an early modern feminist writer in Malayalam, Lalitambika Antarjanam. In a short story (1960), she envisages the egg as the female Deity, towards which thousands of anxious sperms yearningly travel, a journey in which only one will find self-fulfilment. The narrative is in the exalted, trembling voice of one sperm. This account too, draws on local cultural resources – Mother-goddess worship in Kerala – and is explicitly a creative exercise, reworking the roles that modern science attributes to egg and sperm. Here the womb is the sanctum sanctorum of the deity; the egg, maternal feminine energy with magnetic power. What is of course striking in comparing the two narratives, is that modern scientists, as much as the creative writer, use equally emotive and locally relevant cultural metaphors to describe a ‘natural’ process

Male bodies and masculinities

Masculinity has of course, been theorized for a while now in different ways.  In The Intimate Enemy Ashis Nandy made the by now well known argument that pre-modern Indian society was marked by fluid gender identities, a fluidity erased by masculinist British imperial ideology. His reading of Gandhi as a figure embodying sexual ambiguity, his “masculinity” and his political style incorporating key elements of the feminine, has become very influential.  Sudhir Kakar, a practising psychoanalyst, argues that the hegemonic narrative of Hindu culture as far as male development is concerned “is neither that of Freud’s Oedipus nor of Christianity’s Adam. One of the more dominant narratives of this culture is that of Devi, the great goddess, especially in the inner world of the Hindu son.”  However, unlike Nandy, he does not see this as a sign of fullness and completion, or of fluidity, but as a fantasy that produces particular forms of misogyny. The most salient feature of male fantasy in India, he argues, is the composite figure of the sexual mother (who inspires rage) and the unfaithful mother (who inspires dread). This mother “pervades Gandhi’s agonizings but also looms large in clinical case histories, myths and in popular narratives.”  While across patriarchies a common response is to view women as dangerous antagonists to be subdued, Kakar says the “defensive mode” of Indian male fantasy takes a specific form – that of “desexualization, either of the self or of the woman”, the former through celibacy and ascetic longings, and the latter through transforming the woman into either a maternal automaton or “androgynous virgin.” Kakar suggests that a sublimated form of femininity may be more acceptable in masculine identity in India than in some other cultures, including the greater acceptability of bisexuality amongst men.

An interesting reading of feminized masculinity in Hindu culture is offered by Anuradha Kapur’s study of the transformation of Ram from Tulsidas’s gentle, boyish, androgynous body whose feet were wounded by the grass in the forest and who cried bitterly at Sita’s abduction, to the hyper masculinized, aggressive Ram of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement.

Consider also Fatima Mernissi’s work comparing the writings of 12th century Islamic scholar Imam Ghazali on sexuality with the writings of Freud. For Freud, coming from the western Christian tradition, civilization is a war against sexuality, while Islamic theory views civilization as the outcome of satisfied sexual energy. She shows that while both Ghazali and Freud see female sexuality as destructive to the social order, Ghazali argues this through an understanding of the active nature of female sexuality, while Freud makes his argument through an understanding of female sexuality as passive. What Mernissi enables us to see is that while both views come from specific parochial traditions, Freud, writing against the background of the newly emerging powerful paradigm of Modern Science in Europe, was able to present his views as a universal explanation of the human body as such.

Reconstituting Flesh-and-Blood in discourses around Surrogacy

New developments in reproductive science have made it possible to separate three different aspects in the biological experience of ‘motherhood’. Three different women could potentially perform what I term the key ‘mother functions’ – providing of genetic material (the egg donor), gestating the foetus for nine months (the surrogate or ‘gestational mother’), and rearing and bringing up the child (the ‘social mother’). The understanding of what constitutes ‘flesh-and-blood’ has, in this discourse, been narrowly circumscribed into ‘genes’ and ‘DNA’.

Inter-racial commercial surrogacy works on the ‘scientific’ argument that circulates in this field that since the ‘genetic matter’ of the embryo is provided by the contracting couple, the child is ‘biologically’ theirs and it will ‘look like’ them. This is important because the whole point of choosing surrogacy as opposed to adoption, is to ensure one’s ‘own’ offspring.

However, the inconclusiveness of DNA is also well-known, though always produced in popularly circulating narratives, as an exception. In DNA matching, it is accepted that a negative result proves exclusion, but a positive result only provides a “high statistical probability” that the DNA belongs to the same person, or in the case of paternity tests, that the alleged father is indeed the biological father.

Also, it turns out that people may store specific bits of relevant DNA in specific parts of their body, not in every cell necessarily. Thus, there have been at least two reported cases of accidental DNA profiling suddenly ‘proving’ that a mother was unrelated to the children she had borne through ‘natural’ sexual reproduction and to whom she had given birth.  This happened because the relevant DNA was not stored in the particular tissue that had been tested. There could well be more such instances if DNA of mothers and their children were routinely tested which they usually are not, because the biological relationship of a woman to a child comes rarely under question.

Documented incidents of black parents giving birth to white (non albino) babies, white parents giving birth to black ones, and black parents having twins, one black, one white, are all reported in the media as “medical mysteries”, or the mystery is “solved” by using the scientific terminology of “recessive gene” and “dominant gene”.

Feminist historian of science Helen E Longino goes further, and casts doubt on the authority of biotechnology to pronounce on Life. She concedes that biologists have expanded their ability “to read and reproduce the text of the DNA molecule”, but as she puts it, “knowledge of the grammar and syntax of a language does not explain instances of its acquisition and use…[W]e are very far from knowing what traits are correlated with what sets of gene sequences, and far from understanding how genes are activated” (1995:196). According to Longino, the alternative reading has always been possible that genes are causally effective only in the context of “complex and delicately timed interactions within the cell and organism.” That is, the presence of a gene in a cell tells us nothing; the question is, how do some gene sequences selectively get activated by the cellular material in which it is located. The question is shifting, as she puts it, from gene action to gene activation, which makes the cellular processes in which genes are involved, much more decisive than was thought (1995: 206).

Other feminist historians of science too have drawn our attention to the fallacy involved in anointing DNA as the master molecule and blueprint for human characteristics. Other feminist historians of science have drawn our attention to the fallacy involved in anointing DNA as the master molecule and blueprint for human characteristics. Ruth Hubbard, for instance, says that scientists have endowed DNA with a “mythic potency”, but this ideological framework dismisses other biological, (not to mention social, political, and economic) factors that contribute to make us what we are. The complexity of gene interactions and biological systems are thus reduced to simplistic readings. Judith Roof reminds us that the famous double helix of the DNA “is only a component of a gene, and a gene is only a part of a chromosome, and a chromosome is only one of many in the sum total of a human genotype, and a genotype is only partly responsible for how individuals turn out”, and yet DNA, the “secret of life itself” as Watson and Crick put it, has come to stand for it all.

What is most revealing is the diametrically opposing arguments that are used with two different kinds of parents. One – parents commissioning a surrogacy are told that in scientific terms, the baby is not related to the surrogate mother in any way. In such cases, the understanding of “biological” is restricted to DNA and genes, and doctors and pharmaceutical companies term the surrogate as merely an oven, not related biologically to the child in any way, contributing nothing to the foetus but a room to grow in, like a test-tube.

The second kind of parent is a woman carrying a foetus for herself to raise, created through the fusion of sperm with another woman’s egg, ie. a gestational mother who intends to be the social mother too. Such a woman has to be reassured that women who give birth to donor egg babies are the biological mothers. She must be reassured that the expensive and complicated procedure she is undergoing will in the end give her her “own” baby. In this context, pharmaceutical companies and doctors expand the understanding of “biological” and insist that genes are only a small aspect of how a child will turn out, because as the foetus grows, every cell in the developing body is built out of the pregnant mother’s body, and therefore she is the child’s real biological mother.

One would imagine that once science has intervened in the ‘natural’ and ‘biological’ process of human reproduction, the entire process falls completely out of the net of the ‘natural’. On the contrary. We find that the authority of Science operates, not to erase, but to reconstitute the boundaries of ‘the natural’. In other words, the nature/culture divide that is the founding myth of modern thought remains un-assailed, except that new notions of ‘natural’ and ‘biological’ are being put in place by Science, the sole discourse with the monopoly on defining the ‘natural’.

Now you see it now you don’t?

It is important to note in conclusion that feminist politics in India has confronted the limits of biology not only through theory and philosophy but through political challenges on the ground.

We can discern the tracks of two journeys made by the term “gender” in India, especially in the period since the 1990s. One journey is towards the congealing of the term and its stabilization, and the second, towards the dissolving of gender identity and the category of “woman” as such.

The first trend, arising from the governmentalizing drive of the state, has attached gender to development, so that gender is stabilized and looped right back to become a synonym for women – that is, “women” as they are located in patriarchal society. Government policies use gender and women interchangeably, using “women” to regulate development. Essentially this means using women’s specific skills and experience produced by their location within patriarchal society (that is, precisely by the sexual division of labour), to make development programmes successful. Thus – women are responsible with money, hence “gender”-linked micro credit schemes; rural and tribal women are responsible with natural resources, so key roles for them in Joint Forest Management programmes. There is much talk of “gender equity” without ever addressing the sexual division of labour.

Making gender a component of development, depoliticises feminist critique, both of patriarchy as well as of development and of corporate globalization. Feminism is harmlessly transformed by the term into “women’s empowerment”, an ally of the project of governance.

The second trend, dissolving gender, arises most notably from the politics of caste and sexuality. The politics of caste insistently poses a question mark over the assumed commonality of female experience, thus challenging the identity of “woman”, the supposed subject of feminist politics; while the politics of sexuality throws into disarray the certainty of recognizably gender coded bodies, the male-female bipolarity, the naturalizing of heterosexual desire and its institutionalization in marriage. Both trends offer serious challenges to the women’s movement in India; the first threatening to domesticate, the other to dissolve, the subject of its politics.

I argue that the more productive journey is the second one; it is when feminist politics engages seriously with the challenge offered by the second trend, that “women’s movements” remain within view of a feminist horizon.

What this means is that even as we see the body dissolving, its physicality is reaffirmed. We experience the world in embodied ways. If the body we inhabit is marked male, that has one kind of effect; if female, another kind of effect; if Black, or Dalit, or disabled, yet other effects. These effects are structural, material, phenomenological and psychological simultaneously. The business of life is the living out of these identities, either reaffirming the worth and value of the subjectivity we experience, or rejecting it and actively seeking another, or others. Once we recognize the full implications of the idea that the nature/culture division was constituted at a particular historical conjuncture – the institution of a particular constellation of modernity in a few countries in Europe – we may at last be liberated from the tyranny of the “natural”.

[This essay was first published in the Journal of Contemporary Thought, No 27, Summer 2008]

Nicos Poulantzas once made a distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘politics’ as such. In his rendering ‘the political’ referred to what can be called, with appropriate modifications, the juridical-political level of ‘the state’ (and we can include parties, elections and mobilization), while ‘politics’ referred to political practices (Poulantzas 1968: 37).[1] ’Political practices’ referred in his writings to ‘class practices’ but we can once again, suitably modify the term to include different kinds of political practices along different axes – class, caste, gender, religious or linguistic community and so on. Politics, thus seen, pervades life as such. We can also call it, after Michel Foucault, the micropolitics of power. Politics is there wherever there are power relations. And as feminism once struggled to establish, at this level, the personal is political. That is to say, from relations within the family, to relations between ‘loving couples’ and between parents and children, nothing is free of the relations of power. Indeed, the world has never been the same after that devastating intervention, however much formal political theory may try to ignore it. The great classical distinction between the polis and the oikos, reworked by moderns into the public and the private, seemed to suddenly wither under that attack.

At this stage I would also like to point out that what applies to ‘the private’ domain also holds for the more everyday and local forms of domination and power such as in the ways in which the caste rules operate in the villages or acquire a somewhat modified class/caste form in towns and cities, structuring what appear might to be ‘inter-personal’ relations. We can witness this in the hundreds of daily interactions, say for instance, between middle class families and their domestic employees, or their interactions with rikshaw pullers, vendors and such like. These are certainly not ‘private’ but bear the characteristics of the private insofar as they lack ‘publicity’.

The feminist intervention did not, of course, claim that there is no value whatsoever to the distinction between the private and the public. For, while it does draw our attention to the fact that the private is not devoid of politics and power relations, and forces us to recognize that transformations in supposedly private domains follow altogether different logics, it does not really challenge the belief that the public realm is the realm of freedom. That what goes on in the private sphere also may need to be often brought out into the public. The great liberal idea that publicity and transparency are the fundamental guarantors of liberty is, if anything underlined by this claim that the personal is political. The underlying assumption is that ‘appearing in the public’ and engaging in ‘rational dialogue’ are necessary conditions for both resolution of conflicts and freedom. Or, put in its more radical Arendtian version, to act politically (i.e. in public, in the polis) is to be free.

In the following two sections, I want to briefly consider the distinction between this idea of politics and that of ‘the political’ and underline the relationship of the latter with the idea of publicity and representation, which I will do with the help of a discussion of recent Indian history.

The Domain of ‘the Political’

Elsewhere, I have identified the conjuncture of 1989-92 as the ‘discursive break’ (Nigam 2006). This conjuncture, I argue, sees the coming together of three different currents, each with their own different histories. First, the anti-reservation (more generally anti-affirmative action) discourse, acquiring explosive and violent proportions around the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations in August 1990. Second, the discourse of neo-liberalism, instantiated through the structural adjustment programme initiated under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund, in 1991. Third, the arrival of a new, aggressive and unprecedented mass mobilization of the Hindu Right, threatening open violence against minorities, that appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Mandal Commission, in form of LK Advani’s rathyatra, and reached its climax in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992. These different political currents had their own discrete histories, which cannot be repeated here.[2] What was crucial about the conjuncture was that it marked a fundamental and complete break from the dominant discourse of earlier times – the discourse of the Nehruvian era.

If the decade of the 1990s was quickly assumed to be marked by the so-called ‘retreat of the state’, it soon became clear that such was hardly the case. It was the state that was indeed assuming the role of reconstituting the economy in very fundamental ways. The strategic retreat of the state from certain sectors and responsibilities did not at all mean that there was going to be a free contest between different interests and classes/ social groups. The intervention of the state was essential in the reconstitution of the labour market for instance, and it has been noted that the entire sphere of capital-labour relations underwent a major transformation without a word being changed in the statute books.[3] A similar situation can be seen in the interventions by the state in clearing out the urban space of poorer populations who had been living in metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai Hyderabad and Bangalore. Needless to say, this clearing of cities has to do once again with making the city available for the high consumption life-styles of the globalized middle classes, for the construction of shopping malls, car parks, IT parks, amusement parks and so on. In many instances it was quite clear that the clearing of small neighbourhood markets peopled by vendors and hawkers also had to do with making the market and consumers available for new retail chains and malls. The state’s and the judiciary’s intervention in forest and other environmental matters, where free play is being allowed to mining corporations at the expense of the environment, further underlines this new role of the state. Clearly, the ‘retreat’ was a misnomer; the presence of the state in the liberalization era is ubiquitous. The state or the political appears here as a critical instance in the restructuring of class relations in the liberalization era.

On the other hand, if we look at the period preceding the onset of liberalization, especially before 1991, what do we see? How did the Nehruvian state, organized along very different lines, switch over to the neo-liberal mode? That attempts at liberalization had been made earlier as well, especially in 1982 when the government went in for an IMF loan and more decisively in 1985, when Rajiv Gandhi and his men took over the reigns of power, is well-known. Both these occasions, especially the second one, had generated a vigorous public debate and laid the ground for the eventual triumph of the new vision. There is no doubt that this debate actually assumed the form of a battle that was fought in all institutional spaces including the bureaucracy, the judiciary and so on. It was fought out between the trade unions and the government, between beneficiaries of the old regime and the new entrants; it was fought in academic and media spaces. It is important to remember that on all these occasions, the change was initiated by an elected government. The third and most decisive moment of this transformation, that of 1991, was actually initiated by a minority government supported by the Left.

In a certain sense, the early 1990s represented a conjuncture where different currents were condensed into a situation where the switch became imperative. A reconfiguration of class relations had already taken place. This reconfiguration is witnessed in the rise over the 1980s of a new type of corporate capital – signified in the most extreme in the rise of the Reliance or the Sahara groups – that is a complete outsider to the old game of the sophisticated bourgeois. This new capital is at once more ruthless and populist and does not much care for the rules of the game set up by the old ‘cultured bourgeois’ of the club that dominated the earlier dispensation. It also has a very large vernacular component.[4] The reconfiguration is also evident in the parallel decline, over the 1980s, of the power of the organized trade union movement. This decline has to do with the inability of the trade unions to deal with the rapid changes – both through the arrival of new technologies as well as structural changes in the economy. There is a third aspect of this reconfiguration as well. This is the emergence of a more aggressively self-centred consumerist middle class – much more aggressively anti-poor and anti-working class.  The rise of this middle class, it ought to be noted, is tied very closely to the rise of the new kind of capital and the changed nature of capital markets, as well as with the new availability of credit for consumption. This new middle class is therefore, also structurally tied to the new global imaginary of hypermodernity. This reconfiguration receives a dramatic impetus through the collapse of the socialist bloc – and it is the symbolic significance of that collapse that is important here – that deprived the old order of much of its legitimacy.

Let me now turn to another aspect of this conjuncture. This is the rise of the Hindu Right from the beginning of the 1990s – almost coeval with the supposed ‘retreat of the state’ from the economic. Through the decade the rise of the Hindu Right parallels a major discursive shift where the institutions of the state – especially the judiciary – are seen to participate in a new project of redefinition of nationhood and intercommunity relations. I am mentioning the judiciary in particular because other arms of the state like the army or the police seemed to have fallen into this game much earlier.[5] As the rise of Hindutva marked what seemed like a radical shift from earlier times, what was truly stunning, once again, was the ease with which institutions of the state moved in to perform this new role.

It seems in retrospect that the state was itself actually deeply implicated in the very structure and reordering of (inter)community relations very much like it was implicated in the structure and reordering of class relations. From the days of Nehruvian secularism to the days of post-Hindutva restructuring of community relations, with the Muslim now decisively marked out as ‘Other’ (and later additionally as a ‘threat to national security’) in official state discourse, the signature of the state was very much apparent in the way things developed. Once again, it is not difficult to see that the sudden shift at the all-India level in the 1990s only formalized what had been the informal ‘style’ of state agencies at the local level in past decades – from Bhiwandi, Jamshedpur, Aligarh, Hashimpura, Maliana to Biharsharif and Bhagalpur. The minorities had always experienced different local arms of the Indian state in exactly the same ways in which they now appeared at the ‘national’ level. There had been localized occasions in the past when in particular states, the different arms of the state had behaved in ways that were communal in almost the same way as say, Narendra Modi’s police was. Once again, we could say that the molecular, local changes began to resonate in the macro level of the state around the beginning of the 1990s.

The point that I am making here is that the moment at which the slow, imperceptible and molecular changes at different levels of the social begin to come together at the level of the state is the moment of its irruption into the temporality of the political. That is when discrete developments begin to resonate together, producing an entirely new situation, reconstituting even the state in its wake. It is rather like what Deleuze and Guattari say of the Nazi state: ‘fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses that skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State’ (Deleuze and Guattari: 214). Neither the rise of the new bourgeoisie nor of the new middle classes, nor indeed the decline of the trade union movement and of radical mass struggles can be explained purely with reference to the activities of the state, even if certain signals sent out by the state in 1982 and 1985, may have galvanized the new processes that were already taking shape. Similarly, it is not possible to reduce the rise of Hindutva over the preceding decades to any single factor. We have enough evidence to show that, for decades, the call of Hindutva politics went practically unresponded. If some developments that provided it fresh impetus around the mid-1980s (the Muslim Women’s Act and the opening of the locks of the Babri Masjid) did bear the state’s signature, its rise cannot be reduced to an effect of that moment. We are now beginning to see the evidence of how the newly emerging vernacular middle class and capital (let us call them together the new bourgeoisie), excluded from power by the old regime, began to emerge as the bridge between neo-liberalism and Hindutva. Excluded by English-speaking secularism of the Nehruvian kind and the exclusive club of the old bourgeoisie, this new bourgeoisie seems to have become the vehicle of new transformations.

The levels at which these developments take place before irrupting into the temporality of the political, then, are multiple, complex and layered. For these developments are implicated here in everyday living, consumption, desire, power – all at once and these defy any simple delineation of the political and the social, or the economic. It is only when these different and discrete tendencies/discourses irrupt into ‘the political’ that they begin to be ‘visible’ in ways there were not earlier. ‘Visibility’ in the public domain is the condition of their emergence into the political – parties, elections, media or all of these being the vehicles of such appearance.

In the remainder of this essay, I wish to discuss tendencies, social groups or practices, that precisely because of their subalternity, always prefer to remain outside the domain of the political, which is also to say, outside the domain of visibility, representation and publicity. ‘Citizenship’, we have seen is intimately tied to this idea of publicity and representation. Here I wish to underline some of the ways in which this assumption about the public appears increasingly problematic today. I wish to do this by focusing on certain difficult areas where ‘going under the radar’, avoiding the all-powerful gaze of the ‘biopolitical state’ often appears as the condition of survival – and maybe ‘freedom’ in a sense very different from the way political theorists see it. Before doing that however, a small detour on media and the idea of the public.

In Medias Res…

A word about the idea of the public and publicity in the contemporary is in order at this stage. In contemporary society the public realm or sphere has come to mean the sphere of media representation. In some strange way, the media has become the public sphere itself. This is interesting, especially because political theorists, whose business it is to theorize the public (the polis, the political) seem to have not taken any serious note of it. When Habermas was writing of the public sphere in its ‘pristine form’ (and that is what we are concerned with here, namely the concept), he was thinking of the salons and coffee houses where speech would be free and ‘unmediated’. Individuals engaged in rational-critical discourse, and could only engage in such discourse, when they met face to face. So, at least among those who could enter the public sphere – and in principle, it was to be universal, Habermas underlines – there operated a condition of unmediated exchange. Thus when Habermas began thinking about the ‘structural transformation’ of the public sphere, one of the two critical factors he held responsible for its decline, for the decline of ‘rational-critical discourse’, was indeed the rise of the mass media which distorted, in his view, rational public debate by posing a serious threat to individual reason, submerging it under mass public opinion.[6]

Today, the mass media saturates our lives. It not only provides us information – ostensibly for making an informed choice – but it also envelops the entire domain of ‘the public.’ There are no publics outside the mediated and mediatized publics, nor public spaces where unmediated argument can take place. More importantly, ‘the public’ (as in people) is that elusive category whose ‘opinion’ has to be continuously sought, daily, hourly, through SMS’ or newspaper and television polls and the like because the voice of the public is no longer heard in public square, the chowk, a parade ground, or a boat club. The erasure of the public and the political from the street and its re-inscription in the television studio, packaged as statistic, in tables and flow charts, is one of those epochal events of the last few decades that have led to the ‘implosion of the political’. To ‘appear in the public’ now is to appear in the television or in print.[7] We then have a media-saturated public realm where it is difficult to say any more ‘what would have been’ had there been no media. Thus Baudrillard, unlike Habermas, argues: ‘We will never know if an advertisement or an opinion poll has had a real influence on individual or collective wills, but we will never know either what would have happened if there had been no opinion poll or advertisement’ (Baudrillard 2001: 213). Never, in future, says Baudrillard, will we be able to separate reality from its statistical simulation in the media. This leads, he suggests, to a new kind of uncertainty that stems from an excess of information, not its lack (Ibid: 213). In Baudrillard’s argument, of course this destruction of the political by opinion polls and the media leads him to propose another, quite unexpected way of understanding the popular, the ‘masses’ now reduced to mere statistical representations. ‘Is it the media that neutralize meaning and that produce the “formless” (or informed) mass, he asks, ‘or is it the mass which victoriously resists the media by diverting or absorbing without reply all the messages they produce?’ (Ibid: 220)

What is equally interesting in Baudrillard’s account is the larger conclusion that he draws about the ‘masses’ or the popular, a conclusion that goes far beyond the media and its effects: will, knowledge, power, representation are all concerns of the ‘enlighteners’ who have a certain defined role for the masses. The masses, one might say, paraphrasing him, are the construct of these elites. The masses seem to operate on a reverse strategy: devolition, or a secret form of the refusal of will, leaving the business of power and the burden of representation to ‘the mediators, whom Baudrillard describes as ‘people of the media, politicians, intellectuals, all the heirs of the philosophes of the Enlightenment in contempt for the masses’ (Ibid: 218-19).

Baudrillard’s ‘refusal of will’ or de-volition, is not necessarily a turning-away from the media. Diverting or ‘absorbing without reply all its messages’ must be understood as describing a more intricate relationship or strategy than mere boycott. In fact, it is the first condition of a strategy of a silent and secret refusal that it must never lay all its cards on the table; never draw a clear line of demarcation. Indeed, the very adoption of such a strategy inevitably pushes the agent to lead a ‘double life’ – one always outside or beyond the grasp of power, be it media or the state. A part of life always remains unavailable to the logic of representation, while the other appears in public, participating in all the rituals of public life like a good citizen.

In what I discuss below, I will highlight precisely this ‘refusal to appear’ or to represent the ‘other self’ in any public manner, in the context of the state – moving away from Baudrillard’s specific concern, that is, the media. The relentless drive of what Foucault called the biopolitical or governmental state, to enumerate, classify and target populations and population groups (for policy) has another side to it, especially in contemporary India. This is the drive of the state to bring all activities, especially economic activities, of subaltern populations within the ambit of the formal economy, its accounting, its taxation net, and so on. It also merges with another purpose of the national security state, that of identifying ‘aliens’ or ‘illegal migrants’ (‘Bangladeshi’ or ‘Pakistani’ being the common sign for such population groups). To appear in public is to appear in the state’s radar and almost always within a particularly paranoid discourse of ‘violation of law’.

Political Society as the ‘Constitutive Outside’

In his recent work, Partha Chatterjee has been developing the idea of political society as a central category with which we might grasp the nature of the political. He has suggested that in the very heart of postcolonial democracies, lies a contradiction – that between ‘modernity’ and ‘democracy’.[8] Democracy in the postcolonial world, says Chatterjee, has been pitted against the search for modernity.[9] In my view, this formulation of Chatterjee’s can be properly grasped only if we understand ‘democracy’ as the point where politics meets the popular, rather than as a specific set of institutions, rule of law and such like. Chatterjee sees the sphere of civil society in its ‘classical’ sense, as the sphere of modern civil institutions governed by contractual relations of entry and exit, of rights, sovereignty and citizenship. This domain that constitutes the high ground of modernity, he argues, represents a very limited sphere in societies like India. The state, on the other hand, with its welfare functions, targets the majority of people as ‘population’, and dispenses welfare to those who in practice, do not count as rights-bearing citizens. These people, the majority, live often in different degrees of illegality and negotiate with the state, through the various mobilizational avenues provided to them by democracy.

Chatterjee elaborates this idea through a discussion of the now well-known instance of a squatters’ settlement in Calcutta, on government land, which the squatters cannot ‘rightfully’ occupy. Yet, the government must, in discharging its governmental functions, take cognisance of its responsibility to the population at large. It is on this terrain of governmental practices that the moral claim of the population is recognized, even though their illegal claims cannot be addressed as rights. In another instance taken from West Bengal, he discusses this notion in the context of the political negotiation of the death of a leader of a religious sect, whose followers believed that he had merely gone into samadhi, and therefore, refused to let his body be removed. As the body lay rotting and threatening to become a health hazard, the rationalist press and public raised a big hue and cry about the government surrendering before obscurantist and reactionary elements. The resolution of the dispute and the forcible removal of the body eventually took place after a long round of negotiations and strategic manoeuvres, through which the Left Front that rules the state, sought to get public opinion to its side. This negotiation too, says Chatterjee, was a negotiation that was accomplished on a terrain distinct from that of rights, once again on that of the responsibility of the government as government. Strictly speaking, legally the government would have been well within its rights to remove the body but the compulsion of not antagonising the followers had to lead to prolonged rounds of negotiations. It is this domain – the domain of the daily negotiations of the majority with the state – he calls political society. This sphere does not always obey the rules of civil society, governed as it still is by ‘the imaginative power of a traditional structure of community’ – even though it is ‘wedded to the modern emancipatory rhetoric of autonomy and equal rights’ (Chatterjee 1998a: 282). This political society, in his opinion, ‘is built around the framework of modern political associations such as the political party.’ The political party, of course represents here a paradigmatic instance, but as Chatterjee himself elaborates at different points, these associational forms include non-party political formations, movements and such other institutions (Chatterjee 1997: 32).

It can be seen from the above that political society to Chatterjee is another way of conceptualizing what we have been referring to as the political. The major departure from conventional Western political theory here is that this move dislocates ‘political society‘ in its more classical usage as synonymous with the state to another terrain. This terrain, distinct from both the state and civil society, is the real domain of politics in postcolonial societies. Here, in this always open domain of negotiations with the state, even populations living otherwise semi-legal or illegal lives, form associations, represent themselves and make demands on it.

For many of us this notion of ‘political society’ has provided an unprecedented opening, a possibility – that of thinking the ‘unthinkable’. I will go so far as to say that the enunciation of the idea of ‘political society’ has been one of the most important conceptual interventions of ‘postcolonial’ political theory – that is to say, political (and social theory) produced from/in the postcolonial world; an intervention in theory that for the first time brings the postcolonial experience into its very heart. I shall even claim that the potential and possibilities of this concept are of far wider applicability than the geographical ‘third world’ and can provide a lens for looking at the so-called first world itself. I will return to this point briefly towards the end.

For the present, I want to underline that when the idea was first put forward, it appeared to provide a way to enter a world that is not amenable to the neat and sanitized categories of what goes in the name of political theory – and most certainly of political philosophy. Let us quickly recall some of the most significant points of this idea: political society is that which civil society is not; it is a domain where claims of its inhabitants can only be addressed in a language other than that of rights. It is the domain of not-yet citizens, those who are not modern, individuated citizens (in the specific sense this has come to acquire in western political and social theory) and whose imaginative world is governed by notions of community. These populations of the not-yet citizens are not on the way to becoming full-fledged citizens; they will most probably never be. At least, one might say this is one possible reading of the notion of political society. If I may borrow and paraphrase an evocative expression by Ranabir Samaddar, made in another context: political society is peopled by those multitudes who are forever suspended in the space between the former (traditional) community and the not-yet citizen (Samaddar, 1999: 108).[10]

We need to understand the meaning of this figure more clearly. There is no teleology here for, even if they so desire, the denizens of political society will never become full and proper citizens. If any proof is required of this, one only has to look at what Hannah Arendt was at pains to point out to us: the figure of the ‘refugee’, the ‘boat people’ or ‘illegal immigrant’ as the direct product of the working of the idea of citizenship and the nation-state; of the idea of membership (with entitlements that can only accrue to members) in a political community. In a discussion of a relatively obscure article entitled ‘We Refugees’ by Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben notes how she ‘overturns the condition of the refugee and person without country’, the refugee who has lost all rights, yet stops wanting to be assimilated at any cost. He cites her as saying: ‘For him history is no closed book, and politics ceases to be the privilege of the Gentiles. He knows that the banishment of the Jewish people in Europe was followed immediately by that of the majority of the European peoples. Refugees expelled from one country to the next represent the avant-garde of their people’ (Agamben 1994). Re-reading this piece by Arendt almost half a century later, Agamben sees in the refugee ‘perhaps the only imaginable figure of the people in our day’ (Ibid). Thus Agamben: ‘Indeed, it may be that if we want to be equal to the absolutely novel tasks that face us, we will have to abandon without misgivings the basic concepts in which we have represented political subjects up to now (man and citizen with their rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker etc) and to reconstruct our political philosophy beginning with this unique figure’ (Ibid).

Agamben refers to the history of the ‘first appearance of refugees as a mass phenomenon’ at the end of World War I, with the collapse of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, when ‘the new order created by the peace treaties profoundly upset the demographic and territorial structure of Central and Eastern Europe.’ Millions of refugees resulted from those developments.

Closer home Papiya Ghosh’s recent study (Ghosh 2007), shows how the Partition produced refugees in their millions, some of whom, stranded between Pakistan and Bangladesh continue to live illegal lives. The close connection between the logic of the nation-state and the production of ‘unassimilated minorities’ is now a story too well-known to be repeated. Samaddar’s study referred to above remains a trail-blazer in bringing the figure of the ‘refugee’ under a broader field of reflection of the postcolonial ‘nation-state.’

This illegal non-citizen is a ubiquitous figure of contemporary societies – not simply an external ‘infiltrator’. The ‘illegal migrant’ in late 20^th and 21^st century India (and in other parts of the world) is not just the ‘Bangladeshi’ or the ‘Pakistani’. It includes the torrent of development refugees flooding the postcolonial city. These ‘development refugees’ – uprooted from their own habitats through mass displacements – have lately been labeled by the Supreme Court of India (Justices Ruma Pal and Markandeya Katju) as encroachers, pickpockets, and thieves.

This story cannot be assimilated into the well-known fable of Marxist Wonderland – the Fable of Primitive Accumulation, supposedly a historical process that necessarily accompanies capitalist development. In some versions of the primitive accumulation story it lays the basis of capitalism – thereby ante-dating it. It is difficult to see how it can both lay the basis for and accompany capitalism. If it antedates capitalism, as is the case historically and in Marx’s own reading of it, then its relationship to capitalism can only be contingent. At any rate, it cannot be that historical development everywhere in the world will always first dispossess peasant populations so that capitalism may come and take hold of them as free labour. In any case, such a clear correlation, even Marx admits (“it’s most classic form”, he says), exists only in England. Not even in other parts of Europe do we find such a replication. These development refugees, then, are not produced by any objective historical process but by the active and planned attempt by the state elites to ‘become modern’, to usher in modernity. If capitalism – especially the individual bourgeois right to property – is the sign of that becoming modern, then so be it. There are according to some estimates, roughly 21 million such development refugees in India today. Towns like Tehri and Harsud (not to speak of thousands of villages) that are now under water did not perish under the effect of an inexorable objective historical process such as primitive accumulation; they perished under a well-deliberated plan, codenamed desiring-modernity.

In Kalyan Sanyal’s recent rendering (Sanyal 2007) such dispossession is an inevitable consequence of primitive accumulation. Sanyal follows Marx in this but then goes on to delineate what he understands to be the specificity of postcolonial capitalism. Sanyal argues that even though primitive accumulation necessarily accompanies capitalism, the difference here is that postcolonial capitalism appears at a time when a governmental state is already in existence. This is a pastoral state that takes care of its population. It must see that the population does not starve, that it gets some alternative ways of earning a living. The discourse of ‘development’ in Sanyal’s reading, serves precisely this function. Now, according to Sanyal, these dispossessed people constitute the wasteland of capital but the specificity of postcolonial capitalism lies in the fact that these dispossessed must go through a process that he calls ‘de-capitalization’ and be re-united with their means of labour and will eventually constitute the informal sector, thanks to governmentality and the development discourse. Sanyal calls this the sector of noncapital – a term I prefer to Chatterjee’s non-corporate capital, though the precise dynamics of this domain still need to be worked out. Chatterjee agrees with his exposition adding that it is not merely national governments but also globally circulating technologies of poverty management, and the overall normative climate (globally) that enable governments to put in place mechanisms that thus reverse the effects of primitive accumulation (Chatterjee 2008). In this last intervention, Chatterjee thus adds a further dimension to political society: it now becomes also a domain to manage non-corporate capital. It is here that I think that the immense promise of the concept, in terms of enabling us to think the unthinkable has given way to just another version of a negotiated social peace.

Let me elaborate a bit on what I mean by the ‘unthinkable’, in the context of the idea of political society. The idea clears a space, potentially that is, and opens a window into the ‘other’ of civil society. This ‘other’ is not simply unthinkable; it is unthinkable because it is unrepresentable. In most modern, contemporary societies, there exist large sectors of the population who live a semi-legal or illegal existence. Some of them may ‘form organizations’ and associations and ‘make demands’ on the state and negotiate with the government but they often do not. Even those who do, lead a double existence – one ‘for the state’ and another, far away from its watchful gaze, as I have mentioned earlier. James Scott called this the ‘hidden transcript’ (Scott 1992). His context was the relations between the dominant and the dominated in the village – the landlord and the poor peasant, for instance. Now, one cannot disagree with Chatterjee’s position that rural life in India has changed fundamentally in the last twenty-five years and the old kind of landlord does not exist any more. I also agree that gradually the lure of modernity and the city has transformed the imaginative horizons of the peasant but that is not the issue here. What is important is that these hidden transcripts operate in this world of this ‘other’ existence vis-à-vis the very government with whom they perforce interact and on whom they make demands. Not only peasants, we all live – to a greater or lesser extent – this same double existence, it is just that given the asymmetries and inequities of power, this is much more significant in subaltern life. Much more in subaltern life remains illegible before the gaze of the state.

Here, I also want to point to another aspect of this life. This aspect is encapsulated in the figure of the ‘pirate’ – a pervasive figure of our times, the nightmare of corporate capital and a product of post-fordist information capitalism in particular. Recent work done by colleagues in Sarai-CSDS and Alternative Law Forum for instance, illustrates the world of this newly resurrected character. It shows that the simple pleasures of sharing – from seeds and everyday medicinal knowledge to music – can in one fell swoop, through a definitional fiat, be transformed into the illegal and thus pushed into this netherworld of civil society. If large populations in the postcolonial world live this double existence and if the second realm remains always beyond the possibility of representation, articulation and expression, then the idea of political society needs to be conceptualized differently. Rather than approach it from the side of the state and see it as a space for ‘managing’ social conflicts, we need to approach it from the other end – that of subaltern life. We will then be able to see how, even what appear as ‘negotiations’ and resultant social peace from one vantage point, might appear as something entirely different from the other end. The daily brush with the state in all its manifestations might appear, as Samaddar suggests in another context, as just one more hurdle, one more mine to be successfully negotiated in order to go about the daily business of living.

Unfortunately, it is precisely these explosive possibilities that are not incorporated by Chatterjee into his exposition of political society. They are all relegated to the ‘outside’, thus domesticating and taming political society and making it palatable for liberal tastes. What logical justification do we have to relegate a vital part of this civil society’s ‘other’ to the outside of political society? What if, one might ask, political society itself were the outside, the constitutive outside – of civil society?[11] What if – and here we step into the domain of the truly unthinkable – political society were the constitutive outside of all government and state? Why would there be anything like governmentality, were everything to be legible and rationally orderable into clear-cut principles of rule? Governmentality only makes sense because there is something that escapes the high principles of rule and threatens them. What if, in that case, government and state were not the decisive element but this outside that determines the structural limits and possibilities of all government? Let me push this question a bit further. What if one were to extend this logic into the domain of capital and noncapital? That is to say, what happens if we see noncapital as the constitutive outside of capital and capitalism? In other words, what I am suggesting here is that we see both the domains of state/government and capital not as enclosed totalities but as incomplete ‘structures’ that confront this outside (political society, noncapital) as externalities. In other words, I am resisting here the dominant modes of understanding capital and capitalism that see all forms of noncapital as merely functional appendages of capital.

This kind of theorization has held and continues to hold sway over our understanding of capital – though it is true that neither Partha Chatterjee nor Kalyan Sanyal hold such a position. In such a theorization, once free labour was seen as essential to capitalism. However when dealing with slavery and the color line in the modern working class, such an understanding encounters no difficulty in claiming that slave labour is also ‘essential’ in some sense to capitalist profit. Everything from the sixteenth century on is seen as a part of this capitalist world-economy because integrated into a world market. If the different social and economic forms had not, despite centuries become capitalist in their organizational structure and had not been fully incorporated into the logic of accumulation, there was always the unhappy theory of the ‘formal subsumption of labour under capital’ to tell us that they are already integrated into the capitalist market and will therefore, soon, be fully incorporated.

The simple fact that I wish to underline here is that despite two centuries of colonialism and another sixty years of independent capitalist development, fifteen years of frantic ‘globalization’, India still remains a predominantly agricultural country and still not fully incorporated into the logic of accumulation. The same holds for most of Asia and Africa, even South America. Neither colonial ‘rule of property’ (Ranajit Guha) nor the passive revolution of capital has made these parts of the world capitalist. I agree with Chatterjee that we need a new conceptual framework and also think that the intervention made by Sanyal is of critical importance in explaining the inability of capitalism to develop ‘fully’ in the postcolony. Sanyal’s notion of de-capitalization or the ‘reversal of the effects of primitive accumulation’ through governmental interventions provides an important lens through which to see the continuous reproduction of the ‘informal sector’ (or noncapital) through the very workings of capitalism and governmentality. However, what we need to also account for is the fact that in India and most of the world, the predominant forms of noncapital are not reversals of primitive accumulation; they are continuations of other forms of life reinvented and reconstructed to deal with or survive in the world of capitalism but continuations nevertheless.

This is a problem that has worried many ideologues of capitalism. The entire activity of IMF and the World Bank, after all, is geared towards implanting bourgeois institutions including the individual property right in all parts of the world. That was their brief and we could say with confidence that it has not succeeded. More recent theorizations of property by the ideologues of capital point to something very interesting. In a strangely perverse way, they give us an insight into the contemporary crisis of capital as well as to the difficulties of instituting bourgeois property rights as the sole form of ownership. I am thinking here of Hernando de Soto, whose work has provided new impetus to institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, the UN, as well as to a whole new range of NGOs, obsessed with the idea of instituting formal property titles and ‘documenting’ all property into deeds and individual entitlements. The Title of Hernando de Soto’s book is telling: The Mystery of Capital – Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. As the title itself shows, the book investigates what is sees as capitalism’s colossal failure (‘failed everywhere’). What de Soto means by this ‘failure’ of course, is precisely that the bourgeois property form has failed to take root everywhere, frustrated by the modes of living and being in the Third World. Let me quote him:

‘Imagine a country where the law that governs property rights is so deficient that nobody can easily identify who owns what, addresses cannot be systematically verified, and people cannot be made to pay their debts. Consider not being able to use your own house or business to guarantee credit. Imagine a property system where you can’t divide your ownership in a business into shares that investors can buy, or where descriptions of assets are not standardized.’

This, in de Soto’s view, is the general picture of life in the ‘developing world’, home to five-sixths of the world’s population. He believes that life in these parts of the world shows how, contrary to the Western perception that sees capitalism as the answer to global underdevelopment, it hasn’t even been tried here yet. For, ‘in a capitalist economy, all business deals are based on the rules of property and transactions which do not even exist in the Third World. Their property systems exclude the assets and transactions of 80% of the population, cutting off the poor from the global capitalist economy as markedly as apartheid once separated black and white South Africans.’

This last bit might lead us to believe, as it has misled many well meaning NGOs, that the intention here is to draw the poor into the charmed circle of development (one can almost see Sanyal smiling!). The assets of the poor can also be legally titled and the potential capital trapped inside can be released, he says. Nothing of the sort is actually intended. The real problem, it seems, is that capitalism has entered a serious crisis, largely because, in most of the world it does not have the kind of ‘market’ it wants. This is a very specific market; not a market of consumer goods.

This is best understood in de Soto’s own rendering. Some years ago, Hernando de Soto was invited by the Indonesian government to advise it on identifying the assets of the overwhelming majority of Indonesians living in the ‘extralegal sector’ – said to account, according to him, to close to 90 percent of the population. Though no expert on Indonesia, he says, as he strolled though the rice fields of Bali, he noticed that a different dog would bark as he entered a different property. The dogs knew very well which assets their masters controlled. To determine who owned what in Indonesia, he advised the Cabinet to begin by ‘listening to the barking dogs.’ One of the Ministers responded, he says, by exclaiming: ‘Ah, jukum adat—the people’s law.’

Indonesia represented to de Soto all that is wrong with the third world economies. It was the great merit of capitalism in the West, he believes, that governments adapted the ‘people’s law’ into uniform rules and codes that all could understand and respect. ‘Ownership once represented by dogs, fences, and armed guards is now represented by records, titles and shares.’ This was what transformed the entire logic of capitalism in the West. With titles, shares and property laws, houses were no more mere use-value (as shelter); they could now be used as capital (security for credit to start or expand a business). (From “The Hidden Architecture of Capitalism”, http://www.ild.org.pe/eng/articles_en1.htm).

This is of capital importance. It is not enough to own individual or family property. If it remains simple use-value, it is simply ‘dead capital’. Every bit of property should be able to live a double life – as credit security, as share and such like.  The astute eye of de Soto is quick to realize that

‘(T)hroughout the Third World and the formerly communist countries, neighborhoods buzz with hard work and ingenuity. Streetside cottage industries have sprung up everywhere, manufacturing anything from footwear to imitation Cartier watches. There are workshops that build and rebuild machinery, cars, even buses. In many countries, unauthorized buses, jitneys, and taxis account for most public transportation. Often, vendors from the shantytowns supply most of the food available in the market, from carts on the street or from stalls in buildings they built themselves. The new urban poor have created entire industries and neighborhoods that have to operate on clandestine connections to electricity and water’ (De Soto, Citadels of Dead Capital, http://www.reason.com/news/show/28018.html).

But alas! All this remains dead capital till it is brought within the fold of the formal economy. To conclude, it will be worthwhile to reflect briefly on the words ‘dead capital’ a bit. To be sure, from de Soto’s own descriptions, this capital is anything but ‘dead’. It is very much alive and happens to provide livelihood for millions of people across the globe.  More importantly, this ‘capital’ is a source of constant anxiety for both ‘formal capital’ and the state, though for different reasons. To ‘formal capital’ it poses a threat to its profits, especially in the figure of the ‘pirate’ that has now become a pervasive metaphor for the illegal, the unruly and the unregulated.  The pirate today is one who copies, multiplies and distributes or sells with scant respect for the original except as object of consumption. The pirate produces the ‘copy’ or the ‘fake’ and throws it alongside the ‘original’ into the market, duping the original branded producer. Often, though, s/he who is called the pirate, merely shares information and products with others. ‘Intellectual property’, copyright and trade mark have thus become the new banners of capitalist aggression – as it stands threatened by such pirate or contraband capital – its own cheap copy. To the state, it poses another kind of threat by depriving it of what it believes are its legitimate revenues – all the transactions in this domain being completely ‘off the record’.

Given all this, such contraband capital can be considered to be dead only by not being available for corporate capital and the state. But it precisely by being outside the pale of the formal economy, that it eludes the mechanisms of disciplining and policing that are put in place by state elites in countries like India in order to bring the entire ‘economy’ within the domain of the ‘formal’. It is not simply a question, I submit, of ‘managing non-corporate capital’ as Chatterjee puts it. Political society and noncapital, must certainly be seen as analogous and even overlapping domains, but precisely for that reason, always threatening to government and civil society.

Let me also point out that this figure of the pirate or of noncapital is a pervasive figure even of contemporary Western societies. Even a cursory look at the China Towns in the various American cities is enough to show that the idea of political society, thus redefined, is a pervasive domain of contemporary Western societies as well. Recent battles in the US over ‘illegal immigrants’ and their claims to citizenship have brought out unprecedented numbers of people on the streets of US cities illuminating at least one thing: Civil society in the form in which Chatterjee sees it, does not exhaust the public life of Western societies. Even in the citadels of world capitalism, people in their millions live double lives – one always away from the surveillant gaze of the state.

To conclude then, we could say that the political today faces a double implosion: At one level, with the media taking over the entire space of ‘the polis’ and the sheer excess of ‘noise’ – the endless flow of packaged information, images, statistical simulation – that Baudrillard so beautifully captures. At another level, its concept too is imploding as it becomes clear that a whole domain of life that was hitherto supposed to be on its way to being integrated into the logic of citizenship and rights, is probably not waiting for that elusive goal. Not any longer. Maybe it never was!

[I thank Ravi Sundaram, Awadhendra Sharan, Ravi Vasudevan and Rahul Govind for their comments on parts of this essay and for the ongoing conversation on some related questions. I am especially grateful to Nivedita Menon for going through successive drafts. I also thank Moinak Biswas for having provoked me to write a part of this essay as a response to Partha Chatterjee.]

REFERENCES

Agamben, Giorgio (1994), ‘We Refugees’, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-we-refugees.html

Baudrillard, Jean (2001), Selected Writings. Edited and introduced by Mark Poster, Standford University Press, Stanford, California.

Chatterjee, Partha (1997) “Beyond the Nation? Or Within?”, Economic and Political Weekly, Jan. 4-11

—————————- (1998a) “Community in the East”, Economic and Political Weekly, Feb. 7

————————–(1998b), “Introduction”, Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-State, Oxford University Press, Delhi

————————– (2004), The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, Permanent Black, Delhi

——————— (2008), ‘Democracy and Economic Transformation in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 19 April 2008

Deleuze , Gilles and Felix Guattari (2005), A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London

Foucault, Michel (1994), Power, Essential Works of Michel Foucault Vol 3, Edited by James Faubion, The New Press, New York

Ghosh, Papiya (2007), Partition and The South Asian Diaspora – Extending the Subcontinent, Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, London, New York and New Delhi

Menon, Nivedita and Aditya Nigam (2007), Power and Contestation: India Since 1989, Zed Books, London and Orient Longman, Delhi, Hyderabad.

Nigam, Aditya (2006), The Insurrection of Little Selves: The Crisis of Secular-Nationalism in India, Oxford University Press, Delhi

Poulantzas, Nicos (1968), Political Power and Social Classes, Verso, London

————————-(1978), State, Power, Socialism, New Left Books, London

Samaddar, Ranabir (1999), The Marginal Nation – Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal, Sage Publications, New Delhi & London

Sanyal, Kalyan (2007), Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism, Routledge, London, New York, Delhi

Scott, James (1992), Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press

[2] The interested reader may see Nigam (2006) and Menon and Nigam (2007) for further details.

[3] Presentation by lawyer Mihir Desai at the “Judicial Nineties” workshop organized by the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, 10-11 May 2008.

[4] This is not to say that the new entrants were all vernacular, populist and cutthroat. Indeed there is a substantial mix of different kinds, but this section seems to me to have been the most decisive in effecting this transformation.

[5] The army seemed to have been less implicated than the police and seemed to enjoy a greater trust as an impartial player during communal violence. However, in other areas, like Kashmir or most parts of the North East, it was and is generally a hated institution.

[6] Early products of the print medium such as books, periodical and journals could still be seen as a part of the public sphere, still ‘unvitiated’ by mass media culture.

[7] In practice, one should probably make a distinction between the televisual and the print as the latter, even though controlled by powerful interests, at least cuts out the ‘noise’ where debates simply become versions of the Big Fight or the World Wrestling Federation. At least on less controversial matters the individual voice can appear occasionally without the ambient noise of the screaming television anchor.

[8] I have paraphrased this part of his argument in the discussion that follows, from some of the earlier texts by Chatterjee (1997, 1998a, 1998b).

[9] This particular construction about democracy is mine.

[10] Samaddar’s formulation about the postcolony is well-known: it is forever suspended in the space between the former colony and the not-yet nation.

[11] The notion of ‘constitutive outside’ is taken by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe from Derrida’s writings and deployed in the political field. At one level, this notion suggests a radical openness of the ‘structure’ as opposed to the enclosed ‘totality’ that it becomes in structuralism. It therefore introduces a radical indeterminacy into the very idea of a ‘totality’ or ‘structure’, where its content is determined, not so much by what it is, but also, equally what it excludes. This outside, at another level, then can be seen as something that gives the structure it’s meaning.

Foucault has had enormous and wide-ranging influence on Indian scholarship, (and scholarship on India), but I am going to focus here only on one concept – governmentality. This concept has implicitly and explicitly shaped some very significant work trying to understand the shape, form, nature and content of “modernity” in India. I will take up two such bodies of work: first, a debate among a number of scholars (largely historians) about the nature and impact of colonial intervention in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and second, Partha Chatterjee’s take on the idea of governmentality, through the lens of which he reworks, in the context of postcolonial democracy in India, conventional political theory understandings of the civil society/political society distinction.

To begin with, a short account of Foucault’s argument about “governmentality.” (Foucault 1991).

In the late 16^th and early 17^th C, the “problematic of government” (88) emerges, which can be clearly distinguished from “sovereignty”, the concept that had concerned political theory until then. Earlier, from the Middle Ages to the 16^th C, there had been a “juridical principle” that “defined sovereignty in public law: sovereignty is not exercised on things, but on a territory and consequently on the subjects who inhabit it…” In contrast, what government has to do with is not territory but rather a sort of complex composed of men and things. The things with which in this sense government is to be concerned are in fact men, but men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility etc…men in their relation to other kinds of things, customs, habits etc…” (93)

“To govern a state will therefore mean to apply economy, to set up an economy at the level of the entire state, which means exercising towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behaviour of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of a family over his household and goods.” (92)

Legitimate sovereignty is about ensuring the common good, which Foucault points out, consists of a state of affairs where all subjects obey the laws, accomplish the tasks expected of them, respect the established order. “This means that the end of sovereignty is circular…The good is obedience to the law, hence the good for sovereignty is that people should obey it…” With government, we see “emerging a new kind of finality. Government is defined as a right manner of disposing of things so as to lead not to a form of the common good…but to an end which is ‘convenient’ for each of the things that has to be governed. This implies a plurality of specific aims: for instance, government will have to ensure that the greatest possible quantity of wealth is produced, that people are provided with sufficient means of subsistence…In order to achieve these various finalities, things must be disposed…” (94-5)

With sovereignty, the instrument that allowed it to achieve its aim (i.e. obedience to the laws) was law itself. But with government, it is not a question of imposing the law, but “of disposing things” - “that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics – to arrange things in such a way” that certain ends may be achieved.

However, until the early 18^th C, this doctrine of government could not develop, because of the great crises of the 17^th C (97). Also because of “mental and institutional structures”. As long as sovereignty remained the central theoretical question and principle of political organization, the “art of government” could not be developed. “Mercantilism, the first rationalization of the exercise of power as a practice of government” (97), was blocked by the fact that it “took as its essential objective, the might of the sovereign”, (98) it sought, not to increase the wealth of the country but to allow the ruler to accumulate wealth. (98) “The instruments mercantilism used were laws, decrees, regulations, that is to say, the traditional weapons of sovereignty.”

It was in the 18^th C that things changed. The new factors were demographic expansion, an increasing abundance of money, expansion of agricultural production. (100) It was due to the perception of the specific problems of population, and to the isolation of “the area of reality we call the economy”, that the “problem of government finally came to be thought, reflected and calculated outside of the juridical framework of sovereignty.” And statistics becomes the major technical factor of this new technology.

Unspoken here by Foucault is the role of European imperialism and colonialism in bringing about the transformations in Europe in the 18^th C that made governmentality practicable. Indian scholarship inevitably does focus on this factor, but such a focus does not, I think pose a challenge to Foucault’s theory of governmentality so much as it lights up a dark corner indicated by it.

I

The debate among historians of India that I focus on is over whether there is a sharp break between pre-colonial and colonial India as far as identity formation is concerned. It is generally recognized that the colonial census intervened critically in processes of identity-formation. What is interesting is that Foucault’s understanding of governmentality undergirds both positions in the debate (at least implicitly) – the disagreement lies elsewhere. At the risk of flattening the contours of a rich and complex debate, I will broadly sketch the two major positions.

One kind of argument holds that modern community identity as we know it today was produced by the colonial censuses and other official enumerations of the late 19th century. Sudipta Kaviraj, for instance, argues that people who lived in pre-modern social forms, while they had a strong sense of community, did not define themselves primarily in terms of their difference from other groups, and did not perceive themselves as belonging to only particular communities and not to others. It was the mechanisms of modern governance introduced through colonial rule that reconstituted the meaning of community along the lines primarily of religion, sharpening the hitherto “fuzzy” boundaries of overlapping community identitites (Kaviraj 1992:20-21). “Modernity does something quite fundamental to the logic of identities, to the ways in which people fashion self-descriptions.” (Kaviraj 1997:27).

Dipesh Chakravarty argues that although pre-modern government too used statistics of produce, land and revenue, it was not systematic or regularly updated in the way it was with modern government. This systematic, regular process of census-taking, which the colonial government introduced, led to the hardening of community boundaries and the fixing of religious and caste identities. The “fuzzy” boundaries of pre-British times became, through enumeration, distinct and discrete. Further, the logic of modern electoral democracy, the fight for numbers, operating at every stage of the nationalist movement, meant that “communities” had a vested interest in enumerating and clarifying their boundaries. The logic of modern competitive politics was such that people came to fit the categories that colonial authorities fashioned for them. Dipesh Chakrabarty goes so far as to argue that the fact that these identities in contemporary India are based on religious categories is a result of the reification of “religious identity” by the British. Had the British picked language as a criterion of community demarcation, he holds, the result would have been conflicts along the lines of linguistic community identity (Chakrabarty 1995:3377). Ayesha Jalal too states that it was the various provincial censuses of the 1850s that made religion the central factor superceding all forms of social relationships. (Jalal 2003:40, cited in Guha 2003:150)

The position counter to the one outlined above contends that colonial authority was not the exclusive source of community identities as they are constituted today. Rather, a “critical public” was already in place in India, as C.A. Bayly for example, argues (Bayly 1994:9). This public was the body of intelligentsia and administrators who represented the views of the populace to the rulers during the late Mughal rule and afterwards. Thus, this argument emphasises the agency of this indigenous domain of social and political critique in constituting identities of various sorts. That is, the colonial state only took over and took further, existing ways of constituting the self. The precolonial state did not simply extract revenue from a society composed of “a harmonious mélange of syncretic cults and local cultures. Both as a revenue extracting apparatus and as an accumulation of knowledge, the state in immediate pre-colonial India was more formidably developed than this suggests.” (Bayly 1999: 368 Cited in Guha 2003:162)

Sumit Guha, who shares Bayly’s understanding, in a recent paper, focuses on enumeration, acknowledged as a crucial process in state-building and identity formation. His purpose is to establish that the Mughal empire, by the late 17^th C, already had begun the process of enumeration, and its administrative practices were widely appropriated by contemporary and successor regimes. In short, “the warm fuzzy continuum of pre-modern collective life was not suddenly and arbitrarily sliced up by colonial modernity. Local communities had long dealt with intrusive states that had penetrated along, and augmented, the fissures in local society.” (2003:162)

What is fascinating about Guha’s paper though, is that his rich evidence in fact goes against his stated theoretical position. Again and again we come across evidence from his own work that shows how colonial modernity marked a break with previous ways of identity-formation. For instance – “The political norm in pre-British times was that of vertical ties of subordination…So fewness, exclusivity, was the point of honour…The mature colonial regime inevitably undermined these structures. Vis-à-vis the colonial masters, distinctions among black people were not hugely significant to the average British official.”(160). Further, the gradual emergence of institutions of representative democracy, however limited, meant moves towards homogenization of communities in order to establish “majorities”. “Thus 20^th C changes in the political system required a homogenization of communities whose dominant elements had previously sought to differentiate and structure them. The relevant communities increasingly came to be religious in character.” (161)

He shows how political anxieties of the colonial regime impacted on census categories – the 1945-6 census was conducted in a period of outbreaks of insurgency among forest tribes. The Governor of Bombay, in order to ascertain “turbulent and predatory” classes, proposed that “instead of the confused medley of communities”, the next census should classify people into 8 groups which, apart from 7 religious and caste groups, would include “Wild tribes”. (158)

Tellingly, he draws a link between the “Western race-science project”, which grew “with the world-wide spread of colonial science” and the use of the machinery of the GOI by ambitious young ICS bureaucrats, to generate the ethnographic data they needed. This is particularly evident in the all-India censuses of 1901 and 1911, says Guha, which “apparently revealed” the existence of different races.

Radhika Singha is another historian who places herself on this second side of the debate. She studies colonial law – the creation/transformation of criminal jurisprudence and in more recent work, the “drive towards legal rationalization”, that locates the female subject “for various projects of colonial governance” (2003:87). Again, I am struck by how Radhika’s own painstaking, rich and detailed research shows that colonialism, far from introducing no break at all in contemporary indigenous modes of thinking, economy and social arrangements, rather made the move towards erasing the kind of ambiguity and multiplicity in existing forms of jurisprudence – the situation so clearly evoked by Sumit Guha in the paper we discussed above. Of course in this process it had to work with existing notions of identity, but as she demonstrates, the colonial intervention decisively transformed indigenous notions and brought them in line with the requirements of modern legal discourse.

In one of her essays (Singha 1998) she takes great pains to refute an argument, attributed primarily to Ranajit Guha, that colonial rule was “an absolute externality”. She holds that “new conceptions of sovereign right had to find expression through existing agencies of order and information” or as the editors of the volume in which that essay appears put it in the Introduction, “Denying…that the colonial judiciary began with a tabula rasa, she (Singha) shows nonetheless how both resistance from and cooption by indigenous ruling elites shaped the edifice of Anglo-Indian justice” (S. Guha and M. Anderson 1998). Thus both the editors and Singha set up the contours of an argument that they are concerned to refute – this argument is apparently that colonial power acted upon a tabula rasa and reshaped Indian society out of thin air. Now who exactly makes such an argument? In Singha’s paper, Ranajit Guha is quoted as making the argument mentioned above, that colonial rule “had no mediating depth”, and provided no space for “transactions between the will of the rulers and the ruled” (in his paper in Subaltern Studies volume VI, 1992). This perspective, argues Singha, would not take us very far “in examining the realignments of agency, and the reorientation of cognitive structures involved in the construction of colonial law.” She concedes that Rule of Law under a colonial despotism was riven with contradictions, but nevertheless it provided the legitimacy for British rule – a despotism based on law was said to be better than the arbitrary oriental variety. She also concedes that the colonial magistrates and judges while displaying sympathy for indigenous norms of patriarchal authority and values of masculine honour brought these norms (as they did other indigenous norms) into line with the legal claims to superiority of the state. That they engaged with indigenous norms at all, (resulting in the “realignments of agency” she refers to above) in her own argument is understood to be in order to ensure that the standardized procedures of British courts would not be threatening to Indian elites. Thus, all persons of “high caste and rank” were exempted from taking a religious oath in court and could use an affirmation instead. Singha sees this concession as “ironically introducing a certain ambivalence into the principle of equality before the law.”

I find interesting the word “ironic” used in the context of the ambivalence in the Rule of Law as introduced by the British, for it appears to me that this refracted operation of Rule of Law was the only possible form a colony could have. And how is this argument so different from Ranajit Guha’s which we discover on going back to the paper cited, refers to the “fear which haunted so many of the more perceptive British observers during the second quarter of the 19th century…that the regime’s isolation from the people under its rule would gravely undermine its security” (243) and therefore adopted the political strategy of persuading the indigenous elite “to attach themselves to the colonial regime.” (242) After such an argument therefore, when Ranajit Guha says that the colonial state was “structured like a despotism” (as opposed to a bourgeois state – the term despotism serves this specific purpose here; see 273-274) with “no space provided for a transaction between the will of the rulers and the ruled”, what he means is simply that the kind of exchange between Indian elites and the state under these circumstances was necessitated by reasons of security of the latter, and was hardly an exchange between equals. There is no suggestion of a tabula rasa upon which the colonial state operated.

Further, the adherents of the first position do not necessarily hold that processes of modernity began with the entry of colonialism. It is not inconsistent with their position to recognize that the Mughal state had, by the 17^th C, begun to use certain enumerative technologies. The point is that there is something distinctive about colonial modernity. So although posed in this way, the debate is not really about whether there was a complete break with the past, a tabula rasa on which colonial government wrote, for nobody makes this argument. I suggest the debate is about something else altogether – the “continuity” school is really addressing the problem of a supposed traditionalism, an indigenism that they see in the work of the first set of scholars.

Take Sumit Sarkar in his two essays critical of certain kinds of “postmodern” influences in the writing of Indian history (Sarkar1997 and 2002). The dominant thrust of the Subaltern Studies project, under the influence of a certain kind of “postmodernism”, notably that of Dipesh Chakrabarti, Gyanendra Pandey and “above all” Partha Chatterjee (2003:186) has become, he says, “focused on critiques of Western-colonial power-knowledge, with non-Western ‘community consciousness’ as its valorized alternative.” (1997: 82) The result is that “Radical left-wing social history…has been collapsed into cultural studies and critiques of colonial discourse, and we have moved from [EP] Thompson to Foucault and even more, Said.” (1997: 84) Sarkar is critical of “the assumption that the postcolonial nation-state was no more than a continuation of the original, Western, Enlightenment project imposed through colonial discourse.” (1997: 93) He interprets the arguments of Partha Chatterjee for example, to be assuming that power is located uniquely in the modern state, whereas power within communities matters less. (1997: 101)

At the same time, Sarkar is concerned to recuperate Foucault’s understanding of governmentality from Partha’s reading, which he believes to have ignored the really “original and disturbing” thrust of Foucault’s arguments, that is, their “search for multiple locations of power and their insistence that forms of resistance also normally develop into alternative sites of domination.” (1997: 101). He also, as part of the recuperation, points to “creative” and selective appropriations of Foucault in South Asian scholarship outside the Subaltern Studies project, citing Radhika Singha’s work (2003: 187) in this respect. The concern is that with the assumption of a total pre-colonial/colonial disjuncture, “The polemical target is no longer the state as related…to class rule, exploitation, and forms of surplus appropriation, but rather, the modern state as embodying Western (mainly rationalist) values – against which indigenous communities need to be valorized.” (2003: 187)

This kind of selective appropriation of Foucault, it seems to me, is an attempt to escape the destabilizing implications of the “postmodernism” of Foucault while retaining what can be retained within the modernist world-view. We find both Sarkar and Sumit Guha arguing that to ascribe any uniqueness to the colonial state’s intervention is to deprive indigenous actors of agency – “real historical agency is fundamentally western” (Guha 2003:151) and “the colonized intelligentsia is virtually robbed of agency” (Sarkar1997:91). This is a rather naïve understanding of “agency”– as if to argue that colonialism built on existing indigenous practices gives “agency” to indigenous elites, or on the other hand, that the colonizing elites show “agency” if they break with existing practices. Both possibilities are inscribed within the practices of governmentality, and to that extent “agency” and subjectivity are implicated in crucial ways with power. To take Foucault seriously is to recognize, however reluctantly, that there is no real way out of power – governmentality, in a sense then, works despite the actual historical agents it works through. Subjectivity has to be understood very much more complicatedly – Foucault sees power as productive – of subjectivity, of identity. Through the mechanisms of “governmentality”, the subject of governance is created – and subjected to classification, surveillance, normalization (the increasing homogenization and organization of society in modern times). The huge bureaucratic machinery evolves endless ways of classifying people. The construction of subjectivity by those who tell us the “truth” of who we are – doctors, psychologists etc – is at the same time a subjection to the power they exercise. Here we come to the old charge laid at Foucault’s door – What about resistance? But as he said in an interview, an important indication of the existence of power, is a display of resistance to it. “At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom.” (1982). Thus wherever there is power, there is the possibility of resistance.

Interestingly, there seems to be a similar selective appropriation of Foucault in other postcolonial contexts. For instance, Roman de la Campa, in Latin Americanism describes Foucault’s work as a divided corpus – the first Foucault (Order of Things, Archaeology of Knowledge) focuses on discourse and its simultaneous potential for empowerment and constituting the prison house. The second Foucault (History of Sexuality, Technologies of the Self) emphasizes the “micropolitics of subjection”. In de la Campa’s reading this second Foucault, rather than permitting the theorization of colonialism, imperialism and agency, leads to a cul de sac of aetheticism. (Cited in Trigo 2002) This kind of sharp distinction between a Foucault assimilable within modernist “emancipatory” discourse, and the other, uncomfortable “postmodern” Foucault, ends up merely reiterating common modernist wisdom – power must be resisted, “the people” have agency. This kind of selective appropriation also leaves us with no understanding of, within a Foucauldian understanding, the tension between, and the inter-penetration of, language/reality, resistance/discipline.

A characteristic misreading in this mode, of the “invention of caste by colonial government” argument is a recent article by Irfan Ahmad (2003). Answering a question he chooses to pose thus: “Is caste a colonial invention?” he argues that while upper caste Hindu and Muslim organizations campaigned against the inclusion of caste in the census, in order to produce larger, homogeneous Hindu and Muslim communities, low-caste Hindu and Muslim organizations demanded recognition of caste in order to highlight their oppressed condition. He reads this phenomenon as – “for the former, caste was a colonial invention” while for the lower castes, “the caste question was one of recognition.” That is, he seems to understand “invention” as referring to something unreal, made up, while “recognition” is of something real. It is worth reiterating the crucial point here that the term “invention” in this kind of argument does not mean creating out of thin air, (or working on a tabula rasa) – “invention/imagined” is being counterposed, not to “real”, but to “natural” – something that merely needs to be seen and recognized, but which exists outside all forms of “seeing” and “recognition.” Thus, to argue that the Nation is an imagined community is not to deny that is real, simply that the land mass in the Indian Ocean could have been understood by its inhabitants in various different ways prior to the advent of nationalism. Further, in Ahmad’s view, by implication, to argue that “caste was a colonial invention” is to succumb to indigenism/traditionalism, thus affirming powerful groups in their project of projecting their own leadership of homogeneous communities, while to accept that “caste was already in existence” (prior to the census-defined category of caste even?) is to recognize caste oppression. But going by his own evidence, what I see is that whether certain groups resist identities offered by particular types of colonial classification or demand inclusion within those identities, they are participating in the practices of governmentality. What is in question is not self-identification (which is in any case, inextricable, in Foucault’s terms, from practices of subjection) – in both cases they seek recognition and affirmation by the state.

At this point I would like to draw our attention to what I think is the real problem that social theorists of our postcolonial condition have to deal with, a problem rendered unrecognizable by the terms in which the debate in Indian historiography is set out. I suggest that what is understood as “indigenism” in the work of the “Indian communitarians” (as they have been termed by Sarah Joseph) is better understood as a recalling to memory of the manner of entry of modernity into our societies.

The fact that this encounter with modernity occurs through a political system which is at its core, violent, radically distinguishes “our” modernity (to use Partha Chatterjee’s evocative phrase) from modernity as it emerged in Europe. The dislocation caused by modernity in Europe four centuries ago was equally brutal, but in Asia and Africa there was a double violence involved – the simultaneous disruption caused by modernity and colonialism. However, this disruption does not mark a complete break between state and subjects – on the one hand we have a “despotic” colonial state strategically making adjustments at various levels with different sections of the subject population, and on the other, there are the differing kinds of investment these sections have in the modern norms and institutions brought in by colonialism.

What is puzzling for the student of politics is that scholars like Sumit Guha and Radhika Singha can produce subtle and layered accounts of the transformation of the public sphere by the colonial state without evoking any sense of the violence involved in this transformation. Such accounts are possible only if the colonial state is understood to be just another administrative system, and all the protestations that it did not act upon a tabula rasa (a straw man to knock down if ever there was one), seem to suggest that. the fundamental transformations introduced by the British were simply an “alternative legal system” as another scholar, Sandria Freitag puts it (Guha and Anderson 1998: 108). Such a characterisation effectively airbrushes out the force and coercion which characterised the imperial state.

The point is that it was the “despotic” colonial state that was also the bearer of modernity and modern values, a package not unambiguously emancipatory for colonised societies – other significant research shows how colonial transformation of judicial discourse and administrative institutions, and the emergence of the language of rights had devastating consequences for many subaltern sections (sansiahs, Nayar women and female mill workers in Bombay) who were drastically marginalised and disciplined by the operation of modern codes of identity and governance.[1] The Indian state after independence inherited this judicial discourse and the legitimacy to intervene in practices of society.

What follows from this understanding is a question-mark upon on the agenda-setting legitimacy of the contemporary state. This is understood by historians of the second school outlined above, to be a return to traditionalism, which, I have argued above, is not the case. To explain this further, in the next section I will look at Partha Chatterjee’s development of the concepts of civil and political society, that is based on Foucault’s governmentality, and that leads us from looking to the state to “reform” society, to a more complex notion of political transformation.

II

I find suggestive here the distinction that Partha Chatterjee makes between civil society and political society in postcolonial democracies (Chatterjee 1997, 1998a, 1998b). “Civil society” according to Chatterjee is constituted by the institutions of modern associational life, and is marked by modernity, while “political society” is a domain of mediating institutions between civil society and state, and is the sphere of democracy. There is a contradiction between “modernity” and “democracy” in his terms – what characterises non-western modernity (that which marks postcolonial societies) is precisely the hiatus between the two. That is, between civil society, composed of a small section of “citizens”, and political society, composed of “population.” Chatterjee acknowledges that Foucault was one of the earliest philosophers to recognize the crucial importance of the conceptual move from the idea of society as constituted by the elementary units of homogeneous families to that of a population, differentiated but classifiable, describable, and enumerable. This new concept, Foucault noted, was central to the emergence of modern governmental technologies. (2002:173)

In the way in which Partha Chatterjee produces the distinction between the civil society of citizens, and the political society of population groups, the latter, unlike citizens, are not the product of rational contractual association, but rather, are the target of the “policy” of the legal bureaucratic apparatus of the state. The civil society of citizens, on the other hand, shaped by the normative ideals of western modernity, excludes the vast mass of the population, towards which it assumes a “pedagogical mission” of enlightenment (1997:31-32).[2]

Political society – parties, movements, non-party political formations – channelises popular demands on the state through a form of mobilisation that is called democracy. “The point is that that the practices that activate the forms and methods of mobilisation and participation in political society are not always consistent with the principles of association in civil society” (1997:32) Democratic aspirations in other words, often violate institutional norms of liberal civil society. However, precisely because this is so, if we accept this understanding, then it is clear that the struggle to reclaim and produce meaning will have to be waged in this uncomfortable realm, that of political society.

Secularism in India it seems to me, has functioned almost exclusively in “civil society” understood in this way. The affirmation of secularism has been through the state and its institutions, and by the rational contractual associations of civil society – for instance, schools and universities, the English media. Take for example, the recent controversy over the re-writing of history text-books. The Hindu Right-directed project of rewriting standard history textbooks produced in the 1970s by historians of world-wide repute, follows the explicit agenda of redressing what is claimed to be a distortion of the past. In this redressal, the declared aim is to valorize “Hindu” achievements and to present the “Hindu” community as one that has existed from time immemorial, one that has always been and continues to be egalitarian. This community that is evoked is a homogeneous one that basically looks like the 19^th century, North Indian, upper-caste version of Hinduism, with all its taboos and beliefs presented as eternal, but with caste inequality carefully excised. The other aspect of this project is the assimilation of all religions other than Christianity and Islam into the fold of Hinduism, and the location of these “outside India”, forever alien and inimical to Hindu civilisation.

On the other side in this controversy are historians and social scientists ranging from left to liberal persuasions, but who would broadly identify themselves as secular, who lay emphasis on the need to recognize society as historically constituted, in terms of underlying structures rather than manifest appearances, and for whom therefore, power relations and conflict over power cannot be ignored while writing history. The Hindu Right’s project therefore, is rejected by them as a distortion of social reality.

What is significant is that the textbooks that the Hindu Right wants to do away with have been in use for several decades. Generations of school-students have read them and learnt history the secular way. And yet, every college teacher knows that the majority of students who come into her class in the first year of the undergraduate course invariably tell the story of India the way “they” tell it. That there was a Golden Age of Hinduism, when women were respected and educated, that the Muslim invasions destroyed an egalitarian society, that “India” has existed since the “Vedic Age.” Tourist guides at historical monuments all over the country retell this story in various ways, alleging the previous existence of temples at almost every monument built by “Muslim” rulers. In other words, secular history had dominated the academy and intellectual circles (civil society), Hindu communal history, the streets and common sense – political society.

In reading “political society” in this way, I unhitch Chatterjee’s notion of “political society” from its link in his argument to the “welfare” function of government. I find his more recent explications of “political society” that emphasize this function reduce the initial potential he offered of understanding a hitherto untheorised realm. In “On Civil and Political Society in post-colonial democracies” Chatterjee outlines four features of political society (2002: 177). Two of these are significant – that many of the mobilizations in political society make demands on the state that are founded on a violation of the law and that such demands are made on behalf of a collectivity, not as individual citizens. However, the two other features that he outlines, while they may have been true till the 1980s, fail to capture the changing nature of political society since the liberalization era of the 1990s, when the state withdrew more and more from its “development” obligations. These two other features are a) that mobilizations in political society make demands for governmental welfare in the form of “right” and b) that agencies of the state and NGOs deal with these people not as citizens, but as population groups deserving welfare.

Certainly demands from political society are made in the form of demands for rights, but no longer in the form of demanding “welfare”, and nor do government agencies assume that they “deserve welfare”. NGOs too, no longer conform to the 1980s picture of “voluntary agencies” working on behalf of the poor – there are powerful NGOs in civil society that make demands on behalf of “legitimate” citizens, pitting their interests against those of political society. For example, NGOs that demand the “right” of citizens to clean air and safety of property (that involves say, removal of slums and closing off common thoroughfares through middle-class residential colonies, from neighbouring working-class settlements). Recently, an NGO was formed in Delhi on the issue of “blackmail” by autorickshaw drivers who were on strike demanding fares be raised. This NGO issued advertisements in English newspapers addressing commuters, and lobbied with the government to ensure the protection of the “rights” of the middle-class clientele who use autorickshaws. In short, “political society” in Chatterjee’s sense is better understood today as a problem for civil society’s conceptualisation of democracy and development, rather than as the target of that development.

Of course, the problem with “political society” understood in this way is that the activities here would not necessarily conform to our understanding of what is “progressive” or “emancipatory”. They could be struggles of squatters on government land to claim residence rights (which would include illegally tapping electricity lines, for example), but they could as easily be the effort of a religious sect to preserve the corpse of their leader in the belief of its resurrection[3] or the decision of a village panchayat to kill a woman accused of adultery. The point is not to romanticize and valorize this realm as “subaltern”. Indeed, “political society” in this sense is inhabited by many new kinds of loci of power and new elites. The point rather, is that any project of radical democratic transformation would have to engage and collide with the ideas, beliefs and practices in this sphere. It cannot remain in the rarefied realms of “civil society” where in fact both the struggles of the “unauthorised” squatters as well as that of the religious sects would be dismissed as uncivilized. On the other hand, there is nothing inherently “progressive” in the realm of “civil society. From the point of view of constitutional norms, the large grey realm of survival strategies of the urban poor can only be dismissed as simply “illegal.”

I would therefore, relocate “political society” as the realm of struggles that attempt to fashion an alternative common sense – alternative that is, to the common sense of civil society. This alternative common sense may not always be “progressive”, but we have no alternative but to engage with it. It is in political society understood in this way that points of resistance may be found, that resist the hegemonic governmental practices of “civil society.”

REFERENCES

Ahmad, Irfan (2003) “A Different Jihad. Dalit Muslims’ Challenge to Ashraf Hegemony” in Economic and Political Weekly November 15, 2003.

Bayly, C A (1994) “Returning the British to South Asian History: The Limits of Colonial Hegemony” South Asia Vol xxvii no.3 December.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (1995) “Modernity and Ethnicity in India: A History for the Present” Economic and Political Weekly December 30.

Chatterjee, Partha (1997 ) “Beyond the Nation? Or Within?” Economic and Political Weekly January 4-11

———————–(1998 a) “Community in the East”, EPW February 7

————————(1998b) “Introduction” in Partha Chatterjee ed. Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-State, Oxford University Press, Delhi.

———————–(2002) “On civil and Political Society in postcolonial democracies” in Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani ed Civil Society Cambridge University Press (South Asian edition).

Foucault, Michel (1991) “Governmentality” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, ed. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality Harvester/Wheatsheaf London, Toronto, Sydney.

———————-(1982 ) “The Subject of Power” in Dreyfus and Rabinow Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Guha, Ranajit 1989. “Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography” Subaltern Studies Volume VI Delhi OUP.

Guha, Sumit (2003) “The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India c. 1600-1990”, Comparative Studies in Society and History Volume 45 No. 1 January.

Guha Sumit and Michael Anderson (1998) Changing Concepts of Rights and Justice in South Asia Oxford University Press, Delhi.

Jalal, Ayesha (2000) Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Routledge, New York

Kaviraj, Sudipta (1992) “The Imaginary Institution of India” in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandy eds, Subaltern Studies VII Oxford University Press, Delhi

——————- (1997) “Introduction” in Sudipta Kaviraj ed Politics in India, OUP Delhi.

Sarkar, Sumit (1997) “The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies” in Writing Social History , Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

—————— (2003) “Postmodernism and the Writing of History” in Beyond Nationalist Frames, Permanent Black, Delhi.

Singha, Radhika (1998) “Civil Authority and Due process: Colonial Criminal Justice in the Banaras Zamindari, 1781-1795″ in Michael Anderson and Sumit Guha eds. Changing Concepts of Rights in South Asia, OUP Delhi.

———————-(2003) “Colonial Law and Infrastructural Power: Reconstructing Community, Locating the Female Subject” Studies in History 19, 1.

Trigo, Benigno (2002) ed Foucault and Latin America: Appropriations and Deployments of Discursive Analysis Routledge, New York and London.

(This paper was originally delivered as a public lecture in December 1999 at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore as part of a series called State of the Discipline in the Social Sciences jointly organized by NCBS and Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore.)

Why does political science call itself a “science”? The tag of “science” is an aspiration towards the high reaches of verifiability, quantifiability, systematization and applicability to “real life” which are seen as characterizing the natural sciences. Standard text-books on political science, for instance the excellent series produced by IGNOU, make a claim for the label of “science” because political analysis is about the study of “political reality”, while “political philosophy” for example, is partial because it excludes “practical aspects.” Further, behavioural and post-behavioural approaches are characterised as “modern”, as opposed to “traditional” historical and normative methods. It must be recognized that here, “traditional” means traditional within the discipline – which is itself modern. “You would come across the claim,” the student is told, “that approaches which are identified as modern, are considered more scientific.” Despite all the critiques of the fact/value dichotomy that was brought into social analysis by the behavioural revolution, the presumed (and desired) link between science and transformation continues to inform the self-styled social sciences. Society is to be studied in scientific ways, in order that it can be effectively transformed in accordance with scientific values.

The social sciences are of course, an invention of the 19^th century. The natural sciences emerged around the time of the transition in Europe from feudalism to capitalism. The assumption on which they were based was that natural phenomena behave in predictable or at least analyzable ways and are therefore subject to intervention and manipulation. The struggle to establish the legitimacy of this perspective encountered the resistance of religious authorities who believed that such a view would undermine social stability. The social sciences make a similar assertion about social phenomena, that these are predictable and can be manipulated. Immanuel Wallerstein argues that it was the French Revolution, which crystallized the issues involved in this understanding and legitimated the notion of deliberate social change. However, the question, “Is political science a science” acquires its full meaning in the 20^th century, in the context of the influence of positivism. Positivism holds that science is the most reliable form of knowledge we have of reality and that is it is possible and desirable to develop a natural science of society. The distinction between knowledge and reality is central to the positivist position.

In many ways, the mainstream discipline of Political Science in India continues to reflect a positivist understanding of knowledge, although many scholars today with a formal training in political science are concerned with areas ranging from cinema, literature and theatre to ecological movements. However rarely would one find their work reflected in school or university syllabi. What is considered to be Political Science is still constitutional studies, electoral politics, political parties, and other such issues that relate to the state in particular ways and that can be studied using quantitative methods like census data, surveys and objective type questionnaires.

Disciplines are distinguished from one another by the kinds of problems with which they concern themselves, the kinds of questions they ask about these problems and the frameworks within which they ask as well as attempt to answer these questions. Of course, we also know that these are not natural attributes of disciplines but conventions constituted by the communities of scholars who work within them. For liberal as well as marxist political scientists till the beginning of the 20^th century, the central preoccupation was the study of the state. In the 1930s, the view emerged that the study of the state was too narrow. Power was declared to be the central category of politics by the writers of the Chicago School, who defined power as an attribute of individuals which enabled them to achieve their goals. The emphasis was on the study of individuals, institutions being conceived of as aggregations of individuals, and politics as a market in which political man competes for power. It was also held that empirically verifiable data was to be derived from the actual behaviour of individuals, and behavioural scientists tried to evolve a working definition of power which could be used to identify power relations and measure the relative power of individuals.

This view came under attack from marxist positions which see power not as the attribute of individuals but as arising from class divisions in society. Power in this understanding, is not only economic (control or ownership of resources) but political (power of the state apparatus which may be directly controlled by the owners of resources or indirectly via the political elites) and ideological (as exercised by religious leaders or by the mass media and educational system). David Held defines ideology as “systems of signification or meaning which are mobilised to sustain asymmetrical power relations in the interests of dominant or hegemonic groups.” Thus power is divided between political, economic and social institutions all of which set up multiple pressures to comply with dominant structures and values.

If the object of study of political science then, is power in this broad sense, it should be no surprise to discover that the preoccupation of the discipline with the state continues. The state in modern society is the crystallization of power in that society – it is the supreme form of political organization whose laws override all others. No-one, whether individuals or groups, can withdraw or retire from the authority of the state, and it is the state which has the monopoly on the use of coercion.

In this paper I work through one particular prism – that of the nation-state – to trace the trajectory followed by the discipline of political science in India. The shifts and transformations that have taken place in the discipline, not unsurprisingly, reflect shifts in the Indian polity on the understanding of the nation-state and its legitimacy. I must emphasize that my intention in this paper is not to offer a survey of writings on Indian politics, which would be an impossible task in so short a piece, but to look at the shifts in the ways in which political scientists and later, scholars of other disciplines, have understood the state and its relationship to democracy in India.

Political Science in India Mark I: Building the Nation

Immanuel Wallerstein points out that by the mid-20^th century, the basic unit of analysis within which almost all of social science was written was the state – “…either a sovereign state, or a claimant to state status. The ‘society’ of each state was then judged as more or less ‘cohesive’, and more or less ‘progressive’. Each society had an ‘economy’ which could be characterised…Each society had a ‘culture’, and it had minorities with sub-cultures, and these minorities could be seen as having accepted or rejected ‘assimilation’”. What Wallerstein is pointing to, is the legitimisation within the social sciences, of the conceptualization of the nation as the natural and desirable whole, with a distinct and homogenous character. This desirable homogeneity is resisted internally only by troublesome parts, refusing union with the whole. The nation in addition, is seen as compact and self-subsisting, its economy having internal coherence and permitting independent analysis as a unit in a system of other such nation-states.

This was the dominant form of the discipline as it had developed by the 1960s in the American academy, when the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa began to become areas of interest. In the Cold War politics of the time, these regions were areas of concern. Were the new states going to be successful in bringing about development and stability, or were they going to collapse under the explosion of “traditional” identities – religious, ethnic, racial, regional and caste?

From the point of view of the elites of the new states, development and stability were seen as the primary tasks. The anti-imperialist struggles were meant to culminate in the modernisation of their societies through economic development. Not only were modernisation and development considered to be practically synonymous, there seemed in addition to be a self-evident relationship between the nation-state and development. Indeed the claim to legitimacy of the of the state structures set up by the elites of the newly emerging nations of Asia and Africa lay in their promise to deliver economic development to their populations.

Nation building, then, was the concern of political scientists studying India and the axes along which this project was mapped were those of Tradition/Modernity, Development and Stability.

The classic and early work of the British scholar WH Morris-Jones (1964) establishes a continuity of the post-Independence state in India with the institutions of British rule. What he calls “mediating institutions” – the legislative bodies, the judiciary and the law – were taken over by the nationalist movement with “respectful care”. Through these institutions, values which were “not native to the Indian soil” took firm root here. There is then, “the presence, the confrontation and…the mixing of political idioms” which gives the Indian political scene its distinctive tone. There were two such idioms – the modern and the traditional – the language of the mediating institutions and that of the institutions of caste. But Morris-Jones identifies a third idiom – that of the modern politician at the local level, who is able to exploit the traditional idiom. In his revised edition written seven years later, Morris-Jones draws on the work of several American scholars – Paul Brass and Myron Weiner, who identify the Congress as one of the great meeting places of these three languages of politics and Harold Gould, who gives a twist to the Tradition/Modernity divide. The latter, cited by Morris-Jones approvingly, suggests that behaviour in political parties is in some ways an extension of behaviour learnt in a world of caste groups. For Gould, “Indian politics manifests a largely unconscious jati model…If caste is seen as retreating in the face of new institutions it must also be seen as having in some measure already shaped its replacements.”

For these scholars, the Indian political system has acquired stability through this unique mode of accommodating modernity within tradition. Morris-Jones was optimistic that the forces of disintegration were weaker than those which would preserve India’s unity, even if one of the latter was the most powerful non-Congress party at that time, the Jan Sangh, for its anti-Muslim Indianization slogan was strongly unitarist. However by the late 60s, Morris-Jones can see the tendency towards increased violence and extra-constitutional action – “the established avenues cannot cope with the issues which seem to press.” The main reason for this as he sees it, is the weakening of what was “virtually the sole integrator”, the Congress as an umbrella, centrist party. The process of development as well as the failures of development created a series of social tensions seeking expression.

Writing at the same time, Rajni Kothari took issue with Morris-Jones on his understanding of disintegrative possibilities within the system, specifically, his reading of the linguistic reorganization of states as a disintegrative move. Rather, he argued that the coming forward of “indigenous elite groups” was healthy for Indian democracy. Kothari was generally in tune with Morris-Jones on the question of the stability of the Indian state, but his own understanding of nation-building was sharply critical of the suspicion towards “parochial tendencies.” Kothari saw this suspicion as arising from the Western experience of the establishment of centralized nation-states out of the break-up of feudal structures and empires. But he argued that in the new nations such an approach could in fact, be a recipe for disintegration. “The task facing the elites of the new nations is to establish a centre, penetrate the symbols of this centre, involve other centres into its dominant framework through coalition-making and bargaining, and mobilize the population into this framework”

Politics in India is pre-eminently the politics of integration, for Kothari. The “seeming discrepancy” between centralized bureaucratic planning and a widening electoral base could have been met by increasing centralization and an authoritative structure of political leadership. Rather India’s elites chose an alternative path to development which had no previous model to follow. “To attempt a simultaneous achievement of political and economic development while at the same time undertaking a reconstruction of a hardened social structure was a unique undertaking.” India chose to give precedence to the task of mobilizing intermediate and peripheral structures “through a simultaneous pursuit of both aggregative and participatory goals, rather than simply to re-map its institutions for the primary purpose of extracting from the people a growing economic surplus for the state.” The latter goal is to be achieved as part of a total process of social and political mobilisation and not through authoritarian manipulation. Indeed, Kothari feels the authoritarian formula may not work in “cultures where the central symbols of secular authority have not penetrated into the regions and where subnational identities have yet to be woven together into a viable federation.” Authoritarianism in such a context may lead to disintegration, not integration.

Kothari decries also the “paranoid concern with stability” (reinforced by the foreign policy perceptions of dominant nations), which leads to a suspicion of political participation in a semi-literate and socially fragmented society. “The hold of an amorphous theory of secularism and the concomitant concern with a movement from “communal” to “associational” organizations [i.e. from “tradition” to “modernity”] colours the analysis of caste and tribal associations.” He argues that the preoccupation with national identity as an overriding theme of political development leads to a neglect of intermediate mechanisms of containing political demand and the role of differential (including parochial) identities in political institutionalization. It is the neglect of these intermediate identities, Kothari argues, that leads to the notion of “the revolution of rising expectations,” which is meaningless outside the context of the demand-oriented polity of the West.

During this process of simultaneous institutionalization and dispersal of political opportunities, the traditional sectors are mobilized as much as the modern ones. On this question of Tradition/Modernity, he agrees broadly with the Rudolphs, who, in their influential work, The Modernity of Tradition, argued that the distinction between tradition and modernity blurs as they “infiltrate and transform each other.” The caste association representing “the adaptive response of caste to modern social, economic and political changes”, reveals the modernity of tradition. “By creating conditions in which a caste’s significance and power is beginning to depend on its numbers rather than its ritual and social status, and by encouraging egalitarian aspirations among its members, the caste association is exerting a liberating influence.” This is the converse of the argument made by Gould, discussed earlier, who saw “traditional” patterns of behaviour in “modern” institutions. Rudolph and Rudolph suggest rather, that traditional identities were transformed by modern institutions. Kothari saw their model as less dichotomous than others, which present modernization as a rejection of tradition, or conversely, tradition as resistant to modernization.

Political Science Mark II: The Fragmenting Nation

In a later incarnation, Kothari was to considerably rethink his thesis of the integrative model of Indian politics, but by that time, the project of the nation state was itself fraying at the seams. Francine Frankel, writing in 1978, could not see the “multi-systemic model” of Kothari, but rather, pointed to the “paradox of accommodative politics and radical social change”, processes which to Kothari had seemed compatible. In the mid-70s, only a small minority of the population had been incorporated into the high-productivity, high-wage industrial sector of the economy and 80 percent of the population continued to earn their livelihood directly from agriculture while only small pockets of modern agriculture could be created in the rural sector.

By this time, despite continuing invocations of “the modernity of tradition”, the Tradition/Modernity dichotomy re-established itself in the lexicon of political scientists – Frankel noted that among the poor, “traditional relationships based on religion, caste and family” overrode any sense of an Indian identity. Similarly, Robert L Hardgrave Jr was writing, in his book published just before the Emergency, that India’s diversity – “there are more than 2000 castes, or jati in India” – “has been accompanied by patterns of social and cultural fragmentation, historically rooted in and sanctioned by…Hindu tradition.” Hinduism and the concept of dharma creates “resignation, fatalism and passiveness”. Citing Gunnar Myrdal, Hardgrave argued that religion at a “higher level” may not be in conflict with the goals of modernization, but the “inertia of popular belief” remains a major obstacle to social transformation. Here however, it would be fair to note that his position is closer to that of EMS Namboodiripad, that while caste associations enabled peasants to rise in struggle against feudalism, such associations which foster community separatism must be transcended if the peasant is to be organized as a class.

Hardgrave also documented the fact that by emphasizing growth per se rather than development, India opted for production without social change – the disparities of the green revolution “underscore the tension between economic justice and a narrow production orientation.” Identifying the existing class structure of India as posing a challenge to economic growth with social justice, he quoted the CPI’s statement of 1968 (that the state in India is the instrument of the national bourgeoisie as a whole, in which the big bourgeoisie and landlords hold powerful influence) as “more accurate” than the CPI(M)’s assessment of 1973 that state power in India is shared by the landlords and industrial bourgeoisie, under the leadership of the monopoly capitalists. Fundamentally, he agreed with Baldev Raj Nayar’s opinion that political and state power have rested in the hands of the “middle sectors” – the educated and professional groups, town merchants and small businessmen in the urban areas, and the middle peasantry or kulaks in the villages.

Frankel comes to three conclusions which suggest a similar understanding:

a) Without radical agrarian reform the goals of economic, social and political development cannot be accomplished. b) The dominant land-owning castes that had benefited from commercialised farming and the wider market economy no longer felt under the obligation to meet the responsibilities of the traditional patron-client ties of the interdependent subsistence village economy. At the same time the vast numbers of marginal farmers and landless labourers were being pushed into greater dependency on the landowning castes. Under these circumstances, any attempt to bring about social change through panchayat and cooperative institutions in the villages only strengthened the power of the dominant peasant castes. c) Accommodative politics will have to be given up for a polarization of the political process by organizing the peasantry into class-based associations. Frankel argued that even conservative political elites would have to satisfy new criteria of legitimacy based on the premise of removing mass poverty within the foreseeable future, given that large numbers of the illiterate and impoverished were now active and vocal participants in the political arena.

The Emergency which suspended democracy and concentrated unlimited formal powers in the hands of the central government, was one attempt to deal with the impasse reached by the attempt to bring about growth without radical agrarian transformation. As Rajni Kothari was to write later – “The real fact is that growing popular expectations cannot be fulfilled except through basic structural changes. But the elite…uses a crude mixture of socialism, developmentalism and statism according to which the fate of the poor rests solely in the hands of the state…”

In the mid-80s, Pranab Bardhan and Sudipta Kaviraj published two important Marxian critiques of India’s political economy. These addressed the impasse reached by the Indian state’s development strategy in terms of the impossibility of bringing about a thoroughgoing bourgeois revolution without first effecting radical agrarian transformation through land reforms. Kaviraj used the Gramscian notion of “passive revolution” to explain this pattern of development. Both writers assume the relative autonomy of the Indian state from the ruling classes, for two reasons. One, as with other post-colonial societies, the Indian state at independence inherited a vast and well-developed state apparatus, that is, a civil and military bureaucracy, which had served the colonial purpose. Thus the state had the potential to be more than merely an ‘instrument of the ruling class’, a potential further enhanced by the fact that colonial policies had resulted in a comparatively weak and unstable bourgeoisie which is incapable of controlling the state apparatus on its own. It is therefore a coalition of ruling classes which controls the state, and the contradictions between the interests of fractions of the ruling classes are as crucial in determining state policy as are the contradictions between the ruling class and the ruled. Nevertheless the bourgeoisie does exercise a leadership function in this coalition because the non-capitalist sectors and types of production in the economy have been subsumed, economically and politically, under the logic of capital. The other components of the ruling class are rich farmers, the bureaucracy and the urban professional middle classes.

Another reason for the relative autonomy of the state is that since the bourgeoisie is weak and capital resources low, the state was the only agency at independence that could draw together scarce capital resources and invest these in basic infrastructural areas which need large initial investments and yield slow profits. Within the constraints posed by the dominant propertied classes therefore, it was possible for the state to act autonomously, being an important part of the economic base itself.

This explains the ‘socialistic’ pattern of development adopted by the Indian state in the three decades after independence. However, without the implementation of land reforms, which could never be effected because of the influence of landed interests in the coalition of ruling classes, the entire planning process has been a futile exercise in trying to balance short-term poverty alleviation measures with investment of resources in growth.

The Nation and its Fragments: The Collapse of Disciplinary Boundaries

Up to this point the characterisation of the post-independence state as an ally in progressive transformation, economic and social, was an inevitable hangover from the independence struggle. The rhetoric of national integrity therefore, continued to have currency, and social movements too, by and large, had an unproblematized relationship with the idea of the “nation”, so recently carved through a mass struggle encompassing different currents. By the mid-70s however, the legitimacy of the post-Independence elites had begun to erode with the economic and political crisis precipitated by the failure of development planning. There was a resurgence of militancy in every section of society. Political repression followed, and the imposition of the internal emergency by Indira Gandhi’s government in 1975, finally lifted in 1977.

This phase also marks the beginning of rethinking, both among movements and among political analysts, on the legitimacy of the national integrity argument. Critical questions were arising as to whose interests were being protected by this “integrity.” By the mid-80s various regional movements were challenging, as one observer puts it, “the inherited idea of Indian nationhood…[T]he Assam and Punjab movements had a distinct edge which was ‘anti-India’ (as distinct from the ‘anti-national’ of the officialese) – in the sense that whether or not they were explicitly secessionist, they sought to renegotiate and redraw its cultural-political boundaries.”

A significant shift was the one evident in the women’s movement’s thinking on the demand for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC). A variety of positions were emerging, which basically expressed the need to turn to other agencies and initiatives than those of the state, to bring about gender justice. By the time of the Shah Bano judgement in 1985 it was becoming increasingly clear that in every way in which the nation was being constituted by dominant discourses, the powerless and the marginal were being defined out of its boundaries. Along with this, the routine invocation of “the integrity of the nation” by judicial pronouncements in cases involving Muslim personal law, in order to castigate minority communities as “anti-national”, gradually made it imperative for feminists to delink the national integrity argument from the gender justice argument. Above all, there loomed the growing presence of organised Hindu communalism in the 80s and the sharpening edge of the Babri Masjid controversy. The appropriation of the demand for UCC by these forces, which characterised the Muslim community’s resistance to the UCC as its inability to integrate into the nation, brought into crisis the hitherto unquestioned relationship of partnership between radical social movements and the nation-state.

Increasingly also, the highly questionable role of state apparatus during “communal riots” was also becoming disturbingly clear, whether in innumerable attacks on Muslims or most dramatically and incontrovertibly, during the carnage of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984.

These developments were, naturally, reflected in the discipline too. A shorthand way of characterising the shift in the discipline of political science would be to term it “From Rajni Kothari to Partha Chatterjee.” From “Politics in India” to “The Nation and its Fragments.” From nation building to understanding the collapse of that project. And at this point there is a Kothari Mark II as well, as we have mentioned earlier, and whom we will encounter more fully in this section.

Simultaneously there is another trend at work in this period. If the object of political science in India is to grasp the nature of the Indian state and to characterise the processes that circulate around the production and deployment of power in contemporary India, then we see that the most significant contributions to debates on these questions in the late 80s and early 90s do not come from political scientists. (Except for two notable exceptions – Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj.) They come from historians of the Subaltern School, such as Dipesh Chakravarty, from sociologists like TN Madan and from the maverick psychologist Ashis Nandy. And from economists like Pranab Bardhan and CT Kurien.

It is also important to note that the shifts in the understanding of politics in India do not conform to a simple Liberal/Marxist divide. The axis along which the debates fall rather, is that of the conception of the nation-state – its role and its legitimacy. Up to the 80s, whether liberal or marxist, political scientists took for granted the legitimacy of the nation-state’s pre-eminent role in setting the agenda for development and social transformation/modernization. What we see after the 80s is a dilution of that certainty.

Related to this was a particular kind of rethinking on the meaning of “secularism.” Partha Chatterjee and Ashis Nandy were among the significant contributors of the insight that secularism in the Indian context was but one aspect of the modernizing and nation-building project of the postcolonial elite, and could not be understood simply in terms of the relationship between state and religious community. With the challenges to that project, secularism too would have to be reconceptualised.

Ashis Nandy in “An Anti-secularist manifesto” (1985) and TN Madan in “Secularism in its Place” (1987) both responded to the crisis in this vein. Madan argued that secularism as the privatization of religion cannot work in South Asia because here, society “seethes with…vibrant religiosity.” Secularism remains therefore the dream of a minority that cannot shape society, because in a democratic polity the state will reflect the character of society. Communalism and fundamentalism are produced, he argued, not by religions, but by the marginalization of religious faith. In other words, it is secularism that is responsible for these phenomena and what secularism means in effect, is the enhancing of the power of the state to make it the arbiter among communities and their protector. Madan essentialises “religion” and “belief” considerably, but his argument is significant for being among the first in the 80s to grapple with the diminished legitimacy of the nation-state to define progressive change and to assume for itself the responsibility to bring this about.

It was Nandy’s provocatively titled piece that had fired the first salvo. He is “anti-secularist” because secularism is the ideology of the modern state, which, having rejected and nearly defeated religion as false consciousness, has set up its own “priestly classes like the scientists, the bureaucrats and the development experts” who expect the same blind obedience that religion once did. It is equipping itself with the technological means to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, like God itself. In the North, said Nandy, this is called scientific advancement, in the South, development. Nandy argued that communalism in India was produced by modern state techniques of governance, which deliberately marginalize “religion-as-faith” which is “definitionally non-monolithic and operationally plural.” The modern state permits space in the public arena only for “religion-as-ideology”, through which “those loyal to the modern idea of the nation-state…try to hitch ethnicity to the state…They try to create a social basis for secularism by linking it to the reward system of the state.” Communalism in this understanding, is the instrumental use of religious identity, by elites similarly intolerant of the eclecticism of lived religion, to control state power. By excluding religion from public life, secularism facilitates its takeover by science, and as we have seen, Nandy is sharply critical of the globally hegemonizing partnership of science and the state.

His project, that of building a more tolerant society, involves defying “the imperialism of categories” which allows the concept of secularism, inextricably linked to the state, to hegemonise the idea of tolerance. As he put it, the condition of the Indian state is such today that to expect the religious traditions to abide by the values derived from it is ridiculous. Few would believe that any religious tradition has any moral lesson to learn from the Indian state, or expect it to be an impartial arbiter between religious communities. The need is to recover the resources within religious practices which make it possible to live with “fluid definitions of the self,” an idea inimical to modern state practices which require the straitjacket of the identity of citizen.

The implied claim in Nandy that the pre-colonial communitarian space was more tolerant and that the modern public sphere introduced authoritarian impulses is problematic, as I have argued in an earlier paper. The “fluid” notions of the self in precolonial South Asian cultures may have provided protection from the alienation and objectification produced by modern rules of governance, but this fluidity did not extend to the possibility of renegotiating traditionally ascribed, even if multiple, positions within overlapping communities. This circumscription ensured the exclusion of lower castes, women and other stigmatised groups from socially valued cultural and economic resources. However, the point of Nandy’s critique that is valuable is the recognition that the sphere of secular citizenship is not inherently emancipatory either. His critique calls into question the pre-eminent role assumed by the modern nation-state in setting, defining and activating what will be “the national agenda”, and what will be acceptable values in the public sphere.

While Madan and Nandy engage with the crisis of the 80s through a critique of modernity, Rajni Kothari’s rethinking on the project of nation-building is explicitly not anti-modernist. However, he is concerned that the richness and diversity of our societies is under threat from “the new juggernaut that is taking place in the name of modernity.” This is a process that is taking away from the people their capacity to intervene in the political arena – this is “an approach to modernity that will leave no ground for creative interventions.” It is a kind of development driven by the needs of global capital, which is destroying the resource base of the country, its sustainability as well as people’s access to it. For Kothari, the crises of “ecocide, ethnocide, and militarization” are inevitable outcomes of processes unleashed by the three dominant projects of the state – Development, Secularism and Security. “The three projects are interrelated because the development project based on narrow principles of economism is centralising and homogenising and secularising.”

It seems to Kothari that the modern state has still an alien character in India. It was being indigenized through the national movement and later, the Congress Party, but this process has been disrupted. “Ironically,” Kothari writes, “the main source of this disruption has been the modern westernised and urbanised elite keen on building a strong Indian state.” This elite has a homogenising vision of “not a humane but a hegemonic state, not relevant but latest technology, not a liberating but a libertarian ethic of consumption, culture and communications.” The basic crisis facing India is “institutional erosion in the face of massive change.” The distinctively Indian model of nation-building, which Kothari Mark I had labelled the Congress System, had been identified as the ability to build a centre that would integrate the peripheries, building a plurality of centres in the process. This system had rigidified, he argues, by the late 60s. Distributive justice was not built into the nation-building design and the development model. The state apparatus became increasingly centralised and correspondingly more indifferent, even hostile to the people. This growing recognition is leading to the rise of a new political process, grassroots movements that aim less at seizing state power and more at “managing things at manageable levels.” If the state continues to adopt repressive attitudes towards such initiatives, Kothari sees no option for them but to move out of the existing democratic political framework.

Global capital and the Nation State

From the point of view of the economists, the developments of the 80s have considerably reduced the relevance and scope of operation of the nation-state. CT Kurien establishes that in 1980 the beginning of the directional change in domestic industrial policy was made in India. The theory behind the first three decades of planning had been that redistribution of incomes and property was necessary to create a market for goods and services. Since 1980 however, the rationale is that development can be achieved on a limited market. A small enclave was to be created, with enhanced purchasing power, and in addition the international market was to be opened up for Indian industry through incentives for export promotion.

Bardhan, in the epilogue of 1998 to his 1984 book cited earlier, argues that the lack of serious opposition to reforms should not be understood as proving a lack of substantive reforms. Rather, he points out that over a period there have been large-scale reforms on a piecemeal basis, which has had the effect of diffusing resistance. One important trend he identifies in this process is “diffusion of resistance through regional fragmentation.” That is, as power has shifted more to the regions, (not just to regional parties but through increased autonomy of regional wings of national parties), some regional governments, backed by regional capital, have permitted the breach or non-implementation of existing rules restricting capital vis-à-vis labour. These Bardhan calls “reform by default.” Another trend is “reform by stealth”, whereby labour laws protecting job security and automatic promotion are being increasingly circumvented by voluntary retirement schemes, use of contract or casual labour and by sub-contracting to backward areas and to the unorganized sector, where existing laws can be ignored. The net effect of these processes is the retreat of the state from large areas of the economy.

However, Bardhan points to a “major disjuncture between politics and economics”. That is, while the economic sphere is becoming increasingly market-friendly, the developments in the political field over the last two decades or so have been “essentially anti-market.” With the coming to political power of the backward and lower castes and the diminishing hold of elite control, there has been, he argues, “a steady erosion of the institutional insulation of the decision-making process in public administration and economic management.” The “propagation of group equity and caste rights…amount to a drowning of considerations of efficiency in the name of inter-group equity.” Bardhan offers the “interesting” if “cynical” hypothesis that the retreat of the state is in fact more acceptable to the upper castes and classes because they are losing their control over state power in any case, and therefore seek greener pastures in the private sector and abroad.

Nevertheless, despite his recognition of the splintering of the nation-state’s agenda, Bardhan takes issue with those he terms “anarcho-communitarians” – Partha Chatterjee, Ashis Nandy, the later Rajni Kothari and Ranajit Guha – who question “the agenda-setting presuppositions and legitimizing myths of state-directed development led by a ‘rational’, ‘modern’ elite.” Bardhan suggests that on the contrary, the rising tempo of ethnic and communal conflict could have to do with, not the diminishing of the modernist vision, but rather, the inadequate hold of this vision. The answer, his analysis suggests, lies in refurbishing the modernist project of the nation-state, ensuring that it is better administered. He urges that we not lose sight of the crucial role that a supra-local authority plays in conflicts between subaltern and local communities. Parochial and traditional communities look to the modernizing, Westernized elite as protector and arbiter against other parochial communities, he says, citing “anti-Brahmin cultural solidarities” in the South.

While agreeing with these critics that decentralised development is in principle a good thing, he points out that the highly complex structures of production and exchange require the state inevitably to take a central role. Local communities are marked by inequality of access to resources and power, and in addition, are not capable of seeing the larger picture, since they would naturally prioritize their local concerns. This can have disastrous consequences for the environment. Autonomous local development can in addition lead to regional inequality; a weak centre may work to the advantage of more powerful regions. And finally, given the powerful interests of multinational capital at work, a strong nation-state is an absolute necessity for countries of the global South.

In Bardhan’s defence of a strong state, it is interesting to note the possible outcomes, as he outlines them, of the retreat of the state. The alert reader would note that the very phenomena that critics attribute to the success of the logic of the Indian nation-state are those which Bardhan presents as the eventualities that a strong centre can mitigate. In other words, ecologically unsustainable development, regional inequalities, and the growing control of the economy by global capital – these are not trends that have emerged despite the nation-building project of Indian elites, but precisely are what “anarcho-communitarians” point to as the result of that project.

“The Indian Communitarians”

Bardhan’s critique of the “communitarians” locates the tension in their work in the positing of community against state. He also seems to recognize, as is evident from the discussion above, that “community” in their work refers to solidarities that are not necessarily “traditional.”

In this respect, his is probably the only critique that escapes the mould into which other critiques have tended to fall. Broadly, there are two types – those that tend to take “communitarianism” in India to be set against liberal individualism and those that recognize it to be posited against the state. (While the liberal individualist position presupposes the state as the guarantor of individual rights, the second critique of communitarianism is directed more specifically at the attack of the communitarians on the agenda-setting legitimacy of the state.) Both understand the alternative being suggested to be some sort of “authentic tradition.” Historian Sumit Sarkar noted in the immediate aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid that the valorization of the authentic indigenous by Nandy and others opens up common ground between Hindutva and its anti-secular critics. Sarkar labels this as a “traditionalistic critique, “situated in the past rather than in the present.” A more recent argument is that of Sarah Joseph, who uses the term “Indian communitarians” to refer to the work of Nandy, Chatterjee, Kaviraj and Madan. Joseph sees their work as mounting a strong critique of what they consider to have been the dangerous consequences of “trying to understand Indian society and politics through the lens of alien and individualist categories…The revival and strengthening of community has been put forward as a way of coping with the increasing alienation and violence of social life in India, and as a way of bringing us back into relationship with our cultural traditions.”

I think that the kind of understanding discussed above, of the work that emerged in the 80s as a response to the diminishing legitimacy of the project of nation-building, misses two very crucial, inter-related points. First, that the “indigenism” prioritized in this body of work cannot be simply taken to be traditionalism, and second, that the work is predicated on the problematization of the very process by which the categories of tradition/modernity have been produced. (Although there are important differences in the arguments of Nandy, Chatterjee, Kaviraj and Madan, I will here take them as one body of work, as do their critics.) In other words, the plea for “community” vis-à-vis the state does not imply going back to some assumed traditions, but rather, must be read as part of a larger body of scholarship that raises questions about the process of the formation and concretization of community identities as we encounter them today.

Dipesh Chakravarty and Sudipta Kaviraj have explored the construction of “community” boundaries through the modern practices of the colonial state. The colonial state used techniques of measurement – surveys, censuses –to carry out its task of governing India more effectively. Although pre-modern government too used statistics of produce, land and revenue, Chakravarty argues that it was not systematic or regularly updated in the way it was with modern government. This systematic, regular process of census-taking which the colonial government introduced, led to the hardening of community boundaries and the fixing of religious and caste identities. The “fuzzy” boundaries of pre-British times became, through enumeration, distinct and discrete. Further, the logic of modern electoral democracy, the fight for numbers, operating at every stage of the nationalist movement, meant that “communities” had a vested interest in enumerating and clarifying their boundaries. The “religious communities” being identified as “traditional”, in other words, were created over a period of less than a hundred years, over the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Some recent historical work could be read in a similar way, as suggesting that the functioning of colonial jurisprudence erased ambiguity and multiplicity in existing forms of jurisprudence, transforming indigenous notions of justice and honour, and bringing them in line with the requirements of modern legal discourse. In the process, “custom” was created, codified and protected as “tradition.” The participation of indigenous elites in this process, of course, was crucial. The colonial state was the bearer of modernity and modern values, which, while empowering many subaltern sections against indigenous elites, was not unambiguously emancipatory for all. Many subaltern sections – sansiahs, nayar women, female mill workers in Bombay – as the essays in the collection cited above show, were drastically marginalised and disciplined by the operation of modern codes of identity and governance. By reading such historical work in this way, I would point to the casting of the present as the product of certain historical processes, thus enabling the questioning of seemingly fixed and given boundaries and opening up the possibility of their renegotiation through political practice.

Thus for Nandy, as we saw in an earlier section, traditional community structures have more effective civilisational resources to resolve conflicts and tolerate difference than the modern state, but the “community” he sees is already a construct of modern governmental practices. If there is a “going back,” it is in order to access those resources, that style, to deal effectively with current dilemmas and conflicts, to evolve ways of living together in the present, not to recreate an assumed past. That past is lost.

I suggest that what is understood as “indigenism” in the work of the Indian communitarians is better understood as a recalling to memory of the manner of entry of modernity into our societies. On the one hand there was the despotic colonial state strategically making adjustments at various levels with different sections of the subject population, and on the other, there were the differing investments these sections had in the modern norms and institutions brought in by colonialism. The fact that this encounter with modernity occurs through a political system that was at its core, violent, distinguishes “our” modernity (to use Partha Chatterjee’s evocative phrase) from modernity as it emerged in Europe. The dislocation caused by modernity in Europe four centuries ago was equally brutal, but in Asia and Africa there was a double violence involved – the simultaneous disruption caused by modernity and colonialism.

The move from the early theorising of Indian politics to this point is quite sharp. Contesting the reading of modernization theorists, Rajni Kothari in Politics in India was concerned with demonstrating that India was not unique, not different from the West. Discussing a feature peculiar to India – that democracy here preceded industrialization and rapid social change, unlike in Europe, where democratic compulsions did not hinder rapid capitalist transformation – Kothari argues that this is not a problem in any way, as modernisation theorists suggest. Rather, it enhances the true spirit of democracy. Development here was based on reconciling common good with self-interest, through a process of drawing new sections of society constantly into the arena of power. He compares India to its advantage both to Europe as well as to revolutionary experiments in which political competition was barred from the process of development – while in India “politics provides the larger setting within which decision-making in regard to economic development and social change takes place.” The understanding of the Tradition/Modernity split here is that India should not be seen as having not modernised yet. Rather, we are simply extending the true spirit of modernity.

For later theorists, there is a difference. “Our” modernity is qualitatively different precisely because of the mode of its entry into our societies. Sudipta Kaviraj, for instance, sees in the same phenomenon – of mass democracy preceding industrialisation unlike in the West – the possibility that the simultaneity of these processes could mean that “the logic of one could seriously affect, hinder or alter” the logic of the other.

The task of the non-Western political theorist, according to Chatterjee, is “to find an adequate conceptual language to describe the non-Western career of the modern state not as a distortion or lack, which is what inevitably happens in a modernisation narrative, but as the history of different modernities shaped by practices and institutions that the universalist claims of Western political theory have failed to encompass.” Chatterjee’s “community” is composed of “concrete selves necessarily acting within multiple networks of collective obligations and solidarities to work out strategies of coping with, resisting or using to their advantage the vast array of technologies of power deployed by the modern state.” The instance he uses to work out this definition is the study of a group of squatters, poor migrants living close to a railway track in Calcutta, on land belonging to the state-owned railways. Chatterjee here makes a distinction between civil society and political society, which is central to understanding the ramifications of “our” modernity. The struggle of the squatters not to be evicted from government land is not conducted on the site of a “civil society of citizens” dealing with a state in whose sovereignty they participate. They are located, rather, in “political society” where they negotiate claims and benefits with governmental agencies for whom they represent obligations based on calculations of political efficacy. They have to use strategies that build links outside the community, both with other such groups as well as with more powerful sections with which they engage in social and economic exchanges (such as employers and middle-class neighbours).

The distinction made above between civil society and political society is key to reconceptualising democratic politics today. “Civil society” according to Chatterjee is constituted by the institutions of modern associational life, while “political society” is a domain of mediating institutions between civil society and state. The mark of non-western modernity is the hiatus between civil society, composed of a small section of “citizens”, and political society, composed of “population.” Population groups, unlike citizens, are not the product of rational contractual association, but rather, are the target of the “policy” of the legal bureaucratic apparatus of the state. The civil society of citizens, shaped by the normative ideals of western modernity, excludes the vast mass of the population, towards which it assumes a “pedagogical mission” of enlightenment.

In order to understand the principles that govern political society, we must begin with the relationship of the “development state” to population, which it attempts to regulate through the governmental form of “welfare.” Political society – parties, movements, non-party political formations – channelises popular demands on the state through a form of mobilisation we call democracy. “The point is that that the practices that activate the forms and methods of mobilisation and participation in political society are not always consistent with the principles of association in civil society.” Democratic aspirations in other words, often violate institutional norms of liberal civil society.

In the context of the latest phase of globalisation of capital, a transnational public sphere has emerged whose moral claims proceed from the assumption of the existence of a universal civil society. Chatterjee includes in this domain “many United Nations agencies, non-governmental organizations, peace-keeping missions, human rights groups, women’s organizations.” These act as an external check on the sovereign powers of the nation-state, “assessing the incomplete modernity of particular national political formations.” This framework of global modernity can only structure the world in “a pattern that is profoundly colonial.” The framework of democracy on the other hand, will “pronounce modernity itself as inappropriate and deeply flawed.” However, the domain of political society cannot be understood as “traditional” as opposed to the “modernity” of civil society. Rather, the argument here consistently is that what we are dealing with is different forms of modernity.

Conclusion

For over a decade now, the boundaries of the discipline have been opening up with the theoretical challenges posed to the centrality and legitimacy of the state and nation. On the one hand, practitioners of the discipline have recast their theoretical understanding in the face of political developments over the 1980s, and on the other, the very shift in focus away from the state is also an attempt to reshape the political terrain. Further, it looks like we can finally start to think seriously about the much used term “multidisciplinary approach”. What are the implications for any discipline if its boundaries are breached by a serious multidisciplinary intervention? How can we engage with methods and insights generated by other disciplines without losing the training of our own? And finally, today in the 21^st century, when the exalted status claimed by “science” has been sufficiently challenged for over five decades by philosophers of science, isn’t it time we dropped the tag of “science” from the nomenclature of this discipline?

Endnotes

Introduction to Political Theory and Institutions, Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi 1989, Block 1, P7.

Op cit P 17

Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World Economy The States, the Movements and the Civilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 1984 (See Ch 17)

Agnes Heller, “The Concept of the Political Revisited” in Political Theory Today ed. David Held Oxford: Blackwell, Polity Press, 1991

See Sarah Joseph, Political theory and Power Second Edition New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2004

David Held Political theory and the Modern State Stanford University Press 1990

Immanuel Wallerstein, op cit

WH Morris-Jones The Government and Politics of India BI Publications, New Delhi 1984. First edition 1964, revised (third) edition 1971.

Op cit P 39

op cit P 43

ibid

op cit P 64

op cit P 66

op cit Pp 69- 70

op cit Pp 246-50

Rajni Kothari Politics in India Orient Longman, Delhi 1986 (first published by Little Brown and Co., 1970) P 114 n 20.

Op cit P 17

op cit p 4

op cit Pp 15-7

op cit P 6

Lloyd I. and Susanne H. Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition, Chicago, Chicago University press, 1967, P3. Quoted by Robert L Hardgrave Jr in India. Government and Politics in a Developing Nation Freeman Book Co., Delhi 1979, P 111

Lloyd I. and Susanne H. Rudolph, “The political role of India’s caste associations” Pacific Affairs Vol 33, March 1960 pp 5-6. Quoted by Robert L Hardgrave Jr, op cit P 114

Rajni Kothari, op cit P 86

Francine R Frankel, India’s Political Economy 1947-1977. The Gradual Revolution OUP Delhi 1978 P 3 (Emphasis added)

ibid

Francine Frankel op cit P xii

Robert L Hardgrave Jr, India. Government and Politics in a Developing Nation Freeman Book Co., Delhi 1979, (First Indian edition ) Pp 6-9

op cit P 115

op cit P 79.

Op cit P 137

Francine Frankel op cit pp 548-50

Rajni Kothari, State Against Democracy. In Search of Humane Governance Ajanta Publications, Delhi 1990, p 257.

Pranab Bardhan , The Political Economy of Development in India, OUP Delhi 1985 (First published by Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1984); Sudipta Kaviraj, “A critique of the Passive Revolution”, EPW 1988 Annual number.

Aditya Nigam “Antinomies of secularism” (Review of Secularism and its Critics ed. Rajeev Bhargava, OUP Delhi 1998) Summerhill

See also Pranab Bardhan, who makes a similar argument about the social sciences in “The State Against Society. The Great Divide in Indian Social Science Discourse” in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal eds., Nationalism, Democracy and Development. State and Politics in India OUP Delhi 1997.

In the 1990s there has emerged a rich body of work on democracy, secularism, development, civil society and electoral politics by a number of political scientists. I should clarify here that in this essay I cannot possibly engage with everything written on contemporary India. As I specified at the beginning of the essay I focus on a particular strand of work in order to highlight one particular shift in the understanding of the nation-state that I consider to be significant in the study of Indian politics.

Ashis Nandy, “An Anti-secularist manifesto”, Seminar 1985, Vol 314 pp 1-11; TN Madan “Secularism in its Place”, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol 46 No. 4 1987 pp 747-59

TN Madan op cit., republished in Secularism and its Critics ed. Rajeev Bhargava, OUP Delhi 1998 pp 297-315

See also Rajeev Bhargava’s discussion of Nandy in Secularism and its critics op cit P

Ashis Nandy, op cit. Also see Nandy, “The politics of secularism and the recovery of religious toleration” in Rajeev Bhargava ed. Secularism and its Critics op cit. Pp 321-344

Nivedita Menon, “State/Gender/Community. Citizenship in Contemporary India” EPW January 31 1998, P PE-4.

Rajni Kothari, State Against Democracy op cit P 230

ibid

op cit Pp 2-3

op cit P 96

op cit Pp 32-33

op cit P 95

CT Kurien Global Capitalism and the Indian Economy Orient Longman, New Delhi 1994

Pranab Bardhan op cit, Epilogue in 1998 edition, P125.

Op cit P 126

op cit pp 132-4

op cit pp 134-5

Pranab Bardhan, “The State Against Society. The Great Divide in Indian Social Science Discourse” in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal eds., Nationalism, Democracy and Development. State and Politics in India OUP Delhi 1997 P 184.

Op cit. P 191

Op cit. P 194

Op cit. Pp 192-4.

Term used by Sarah Joseph, Interrogating Culture. Critical Perspective on Contemporary Social theory Sage, Delhi 1998. P 152

For example, Sarah Joseph op cit. Gurpreet Mahajan too, thinks “community centred perspectives” associate liberalism with individualism, although she argues this is a mistaken understanding of liberalism. Identities and Rights. Aspects of liberal democracy in India OUP Delhi 1998. P 26

Sumit Sarkar “The Anti-secularist Critique of hindutva: problems of a shared discursive space” in germinal vol 1 1994.

Op cit. P 102

Op cit. P 104

Sarah Joseph op cit. P 152. Emphasis added.

Dipesh Chakravarty, “Modernity and Ethnicity in India. A History for the present” in EPW December 30 1995; Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Imaginary Institution of India” in Subaltern Studies VII ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey, OUP Delhi 1992.

Kaviraj, op cit.

See essays by Sumit Guha, Radhika Singha, G Arunima, Sandria Freitag and Radha Kumar in Changing Concepts of Rights and Justice in South Asia ed. Michael Anderson and Sumit Guha , OUP Delhi 1998

From the title of Chapter 11 of A Possible India. Essays in Political Criticism OUP Delhi 1997.

Politics in India op cit. P 9

“Dilemmas of Democratic Development in India” in Democracy and Development ed. Adrian Leftwich, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996 P 132.

Partha Chatterjee, “Community in the East”, EPW February 7 1998 P 279.

Op cit. P 282

Asok Sen, “Life and Labour in a squatters’ colony”, Occasional paper 138, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, October 1992. Discussed in Chatterjee op cit. P 281.

The following discussion is based on “Beyond the Nation? Or Within?” EPW January 4-11 1997 Pp 30-34, where Chatterjee initially worked out this distinction more fully.

If we accept this understanding, then it is clear that the struggle to reclaim and produce meaning will have to be waged in this uncomfortable realm, that of political society. I have explored the consequences of this understanding for a radical political practice in my book Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law (Permanent Black, Delhi and University of Illinois Press, 2004). In reading “political society” in this way, I unhitch Chatterjee’s notion of “political society” from its link in his argument to the “welfare” function of government, and relocate it as the realm of struggles to produce an alternative common sense – alternative that is, to the common sense of civil society. It seems to me that the kind of political practice with the capacity to challenge the hegemonised will – radical politics in short – can be carried out only in political society understood in this sense, not in civil society, the domain of constitutionalism.

Caste and the Writing of History

By Prathama Banerjee

Caste is seen as both the most archaic and the most contemporary reality of India – a persistent but paradoxical presence in historical time. Perhaps for this reason, caste seems to act as a challenge to the writing and teaching of history. This essay seeks to understand the ways in which caste as a category has, for a long time, escaped history as a discipline. It also explores the newer ways in which historians today try to interrogate and renegotiate history itself, in their effort to fashion modes of writing adequate to the workings of caste in India. This essay therefore is as much about history-writing as it is about the category of caste.

Caste and Nation

History, as we practise it today, emerged in India in the second half of the nineteenth century, as a colonial-modern form of knowledge that sought to reinvent time, both as concept and as experience.[1] Of the many ways in which time was reconstituted – as past-present continuum, as empty numerical chronology, as unidirectional progress and so on – most crucial was a new way of imagining the past. In history, this past, to make any sense, had to be represented in its entirety, as a single story of necessarily a single protagonist, namely the nation. In this imagination of history as always already ‘history of’, the past appeared comprehensible only in a totalized form, i.e. only by virtue of its identity with a unified entity. Once the past thus became a singular narrative and an undifferentiated space, categories like that of caste emerged as a problem for history-writing, for such a differentiating element as caste could only reappear as a dangerous contaminant that threatened to undo the unity and coherence of the nation’s, and the historian’s, story.

Early texts of history, written by the early beneficiaries of colonial education, namely upper-caste, middle-class male professionals, took great pains therefore to make caste into a benign category. Many histories, for instance, did not acknowledge caste as a differentiating element at all, arguing instead that the caste structure actually served to keep Indians together, despite economic inequalities, in a systemic whole – this being what made Indian society superior to western societies fraught with class antagonisms.[2] Some histories reconfigured the caste system as a rational division of labour and occupations.[3] Others saw caste as a spiritual hierarchy, and therefore superior to hierarchies generated by crass material parameters like wealth and state-power.[4] Of course, there were histories which did admit that caste actually prevented the rise of national unity. Yet many of these saw specific caste practices like untouchability as recent corruptions of an earlier and more rational and justifiable ancient varna system. Gandhi himself, till the 1940s, was one such thinker who sought to fight the ‘evils’ of caste while expressing faith in the varna system as a fundamental historical institution of the Indian civilization.[5]

However, already by late nineteenth century, these historicist strategies to gloss over caste for the sake of the nation seemed to be failing decisively.span> For one, the very act of history-writing was now appropriated and redeployed by lower-caste groups, jeopardizing the objectivity-claims of history itself. A very large number of lower-caste counter-histories began to be written and published, which defined caste-status – neither as an ancient and immutable tradition nor as a permanent birth-mark on the individual – but as a contingent and arbitrary attribute, acquired by a people at a certain historical moment in the past, at the moment of defeat or fall, so to speak.[6] For the other, there was also the emergence of numerous lower and middle-caste associations, fighting for greater power and enhanced status, which challenged the upper-caste monopoly of public space and civic institutions.[7] And there was, above all, the gross failure, by early twentieth century, of nationalist organizations to mobilize, in the name of a united nation, lower caste (and Muslim) peasantry in united anti-colonial activism.[8] Needless to say, all this forced a recognition of the ‘caste-question’ onto mainstream history-writing by the early twentieth-century.

Yet, even as caste began to be acknowledged as a question before history, caste was incorporated into the discipline through a strategy of subordination. Caste in history-writing was relegated to being a ‘social’ category, different in conceptual status from self-evidently political categories like the nation (and later, in the Marxist tradition, class). It is well known that the crucial point on which Ambedkar and Gandhi fell out was precisely this.[9] Ambedkar alleged that Gandhi, by reducing the issue of caste to issues of social reform and ethical protocol, was actually seeking to prevent caste from becoming a full-blown political question, which would determine ways in which independent India would imagine the state and the region, rights and representation, even marriage and succession. Needless to say, this conceptual distinction – between the social and the political – that was produced by nationalist politics – would be later institutionalized in terms of academic domains and departments in independent India.

Not surprisingly, therefore, in academic locations of the newly independent nation, it was sociology that would become the ‘natural home’ for the study of caste. History as a discipline would have very little place for it, preoccupied as it was with what it saw as clearly political categories like the state (colonial and pre-colonial) and with political economic categories like class and modes of production. Political and political economic categories, it was implicitly and sometimes explicitly argued, functioned through a structural and impersonal logic of change. All that which did not follow such a consistent and rational transformative logic, all that which persisted against reason, all that were local and particular, all that could only be explained in terms of customs and culture and not in terms of generalisable laws of history and causality seemed to fall in the messy, everyday domain of the social. This was a domain that was amenable to empirical description, perhaps even to empathetic understanding and occasional policy intervention, but not quite to whole-scale politicization in terms of a national agenda and a national future. In so far as history and historians were concerned, caste resided in just such a domain, the domain of disciplines like sociology and in some cases, anthropology, against which history as a discipline sought to define itself.

In other words, caste as a category remained repressed within texts of history precisely because history above all was the narrative of the nation and its political development. It is not surprising, therefore, that mainstream political language, today as in the first half of the twentieth century, has often judged caste mobilizations precisely in these terms, of being either national or anti-national. The Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu had once faced the charge of anti-nationalism as did Ambedkar himself, for his stand on separate electorates and what was seen as a pro-Muslim League position on federalism and regional autonomy. Even today, the pro-liberalisation polemic of Chandrabhan Prasad[10] or the global presentation of caste as a human rights issue in the UN[11] are positions that are overwhelmingly accused of being anti-nation. Could one then go on to argue that caste can be adequately historicized only when the nation as a territorial integrity is decisively put to question? This is not merely to argue that historians must expose the limits and dangers of nationalism as ideology, or go beyond nationalist historiography. Most serious historians have already successfully done so. This is to make a more difficult proposition – that history in our context can no longer be simply written as Indian history – which all of us seem bound to do in terms of disciplinary and institutional definitions – if historical understanding has to do justice to caste as a category.

There are two dimensions to this proposition, one that is already being worked upon by historians and another that is not yet fully formulated. The first dimension is to acknowledge the ‘region’ as a crucial location for historical studies. This is something, which mainstream coalition politics has already made us admit in the electoral arena in the last couple of decades.[12] Historians, primarily of the south but also elsewhere, now argue that understanding caste and caste-movements is only possible if we set our study in context of the region, where the region becomes more than and different from merely a geographical or cultural unit of national territoriality. The region in such work must be recovered in its full autonomy, in its defiance of the hegemonic national story, and in its contingent and changing relationship with the national. It is in this mode that we must draw upon historical works done on caste, in terms of the regional stories of the Nairs and Namboodris and the Iravas and Pulayas of Kerala, the Nadars of Tamil Nadu, the Mahars of Maharashtra, the Chamars of Punjab, UP and Chattisgarh, the Balmikis of Delhi, the Namasudras of Bengal and so on.[13] We must admit that such histories have served to irreversibly disaggregate the dominant national story. At the same time, we must also take note of another kind of regional history that have emerged recently, which actually helps us imagine alternate extra-national regionalisms. I have in mind as example work on the Bay of Bengal caste-network of the Chettiars or the Indian Ocean caste-network of the Gujrati bania, stretching as far as the east coast of Africa, or the caste dynamics of labour migration, say from Bhojpur to Mauritius or from Jharkhand to West Indies.[14] In fact, once seen through the speculum of caste/region, the question emerges whether one can talk of a nation at all that pre-existed the emergence of the fundamentally caste-inflected identity of the Maratha or the Dravidian or the Bengali bhadralok. Or whether we must indeed talk of a nation-effect that was produced late nineteenth-century onwards, out of the conflict and consolidation of jati-s, where the term jati actually worked to ensure, significantly, the critical slippage and oscillation, as context would demand, of identity between locality, nation and caste.

There is however another question about caste and the nation which is yet to be formulated clearly by historians, and I believe, the reason behind this is that writing the history of India, till today, always already takes the form and practice of Indian history. This is the question of the place of caste in the definition of India – that is, the question of whether caste as a form of stratification is peculiar to India as a nation and if so, is caste then really for us the national form of inequality. In other words, is subalternity experienced in India in a unique, different and over-determined manner – that is, via caste – which sets India apart from the rest of the world and thus historically makes India a nation? (Responses such as there is caste also in south-east Asia and in a different form in Japan, I think, only postpones the question) The difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of this question is apparent.

Recent historiography argues that what we see as caste in today’s India is really a very recent invention – the product of Orientalist discourse, of colonial ethnology and of modern technologies of census and governmentality.[15] The argument goes as follows: that caste was neither an over-determining category in pre-colonial times, nor were the categories of jati and varna exactly the same as what we experience as caste in contemporary times. Caste, therefore, has never been a quintessential national trait, and that, it is argued, contemporary caste experience is really the product of a very specific and contingent kind of colonial-modern encounter and should never be seen as the primary way of defining ourselves as Indian.

There is no denying the strength of this argument. And yet this position also invites the criticism – both from historians and activists – that such an argument really functions as a kind of disguised nationalism, which seeks to exonerate pre-colonial India from owning up to the evil of caste and gets away by blaming, as it were, the colonial masters for everything. The critics point out that the very long-term and historical nature of caste injustice in India is thus vicariously denied in this argument, defeating at the outset the ongoing political struggle against caste in our times.[16] The paradox, of course, is that this critique itself ends up equating caste and India, in a kind of eternal national formula, which in turn defeats the equally political struggle of making caste appear historically contingent and thus, amenable to immediate change and even abolition. My argument is that this strange impasse about caste within history-writing is actually an impasse inherent in having to necessarily think history via the nation – which disallows the staging of the question of caste in any way other than in terms of its being, or not being, a national reality. Despite powerful critiques by historians of nationalism as ideology and framework, the nation as hegemonic category thus continues to throw its shadow over, and thus keep repressed, narratives of caste.[17]

Caste and religion

One way in which history-writing in India has rendered caste somewhat invisible is through its particular kind of foregrounding of religion. At the most obvious level, we must admit that Indian historiography till date has generally seen the religious/communal division between Hindus and Muslims as the main question before the nation, and the problem of caste therefore as somewhat secondary. This was of course the case with conventional nationalist historiography. However, this particular way of problematising the nation via religion and identity continued well into the 1990s, when, with the rise of Hindutva forces, ‘communalism’ reappeared in a new way as the most popular theme for history-writing in India. This long-term dominance of the question of religion/secularism resulted in a subsumption of caste as a question under the question of nationalism/communalism.

The critique of nationalism as ideology that was developed by historians of communalism like Gyanendra Pandey[18] in the 1990s was indeed pathbreaking – in that it showed up communalism and nationalism to be continuous rather than oppositional phenomena, as nationalist history had argued till then. In the process, nationalism and its apparently secular-modern rhetoric was exposed for sharing in the very same self-other logic which fuelled communalist mobilizations – working to constitute the Muslim (or Pakistan) as an external, and yet paradoxically, also as an internally threatening, other. While studies like these changed the nature of Indian historiography for good, they, however, stopped short of setting religion up as a category for problematisation (beyond recording that the modern notion of Hinduism as a unitary doctrine, with a scriptural foundation and witha historical antagonism with Islam, was indeed a colonialist Indological construction). This silence about religion itself – even in studies of religious mobilisation – is particularly significant for us, because religion as a central question had had been placed on the table, as it were, by theorizers and critics of caste very early in India’s colonial history.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, when the phenomenon called communalism had consolidated as a recognizable form of modern political mobilization in India, we see Ambedkar offering a re-defintion of religion as a category through his work on Buddhism and through his arguments surrounding marriage as an institution. We also see Periyar debating religion and atheism. There has been a great amount of historical discussion on Gandhi’s political use of dharma, yet there is this strange silence about Ambedkar or Periyar’s general commentaries on faith and religiosity – clearly because their experiments with religion were perceived as part of the caste question rather than as a question before the nation. Very similarly, the early twentieth-century debate about representation via separate electorates has almost always been reduced to the question of religious representation in Indian history-writing, even though separate electorates were as importantly a part of the question of dalit representation. Again, while Partition is seen as the crucial closure to India’s colonial history and colonial-modern experience with religion, Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism only a few years later, along with a mass of his followers, appears in Indian historiography as a relatively minor incident, even though this moment could as well be formulated as another community’s spectacular exit from the nation itself. In other words, the framing of Indian history in terms of the Hindu-Muslim question has resulted in a glossing over of the fact that religion as a question itself was being radically re-theorised through the caste question in the twentieth century.

Recently, however, some historians have argued for a simultaneous re-writing of the caste and the communalism problematic. In context of Bengal, for instance, P. K. Datta[19] has shown how the fear of an impending Muslim population explosion caused upper caste Bengali men to campaign for a numerical expansion in the ranks of Hindus. It was this imperative of creating a Hindu majority, which brought the caste question centre-stage, as it began to be strongly felt that untouchables and tribals, who were till then seen as outside the pale of varna samaj, must be ‘Hinduised’ and brought into the Hindu fold. Shekhar Bandopadhyay’s work on the Namasudras of Bengal[20] and Sumit Sarkar’s essay on Bengali Muslim peasantry[21] also show how resistance by the rural underclass produced amongst the literate classes of Bengal, both Hindu and Muslim, a nationalistic polemic about communitarian identity, self-improvement and religious emancipation. M. S. S. Pandian shows for Tamil Nadu how the rise of the Brahmin as a dominant, and therefore, a defied figure happened through exchanges about religion, in a public sphere constituted both by missionary and civic and judicial institutions.[22]

More directly, historians like Dilip Menon have proposed a straight and almost unmediated connection in modern Indian history between instances of caste and communal mobilisation. According to Menon, this can be shown as a trend from late nineteenth to as late as the end of the twentieth century. If there were a series of communal riots in the 1890s, he argues, it was the direct outcome of lower-caste associations and lower-caste movements that had mushroomed in India in the 1870s and 1880s. At the other end, the rise of Hindutva in the early 1990s, the Babri Masjid demolition and the following riots were also events directly responding to the backward caste mobilization that happened in north India after the 1989 Mandal Commission. He also tries to demonstrate similar connections for the 1920s communal riots and the 1940s Partition violence. Dilip Menon’s basic argument is that the structural violence inherent in a caste society such as India has been repeatedly sublimated in Indian history into violence against an external other, namely the Muslim – as a way of saving the nation-ness of the country, as it were. The nature of lower-caste participation in communal violence– whether it be the Namasudra involvement in the 1946 riots or the so-called tribal and low-caste involvement in the Gujrat anti-Muslim violence of 2002 – shows itself up precisely, therefore, as a displacement of potential caste conflict in local contexts.[23]

Whether or not one agrees with such an unmediated link between caste and communalism, one thing seems undeniable in the light of the above body of work – that there is need for a re-formulation of the problematic of religion from perspective of caste. There has of course been a long-standing debate in mainstream academia about caste that poses the caste/religion question as follows – is caste to be seen as a religious (a la Louis Dumont) or as a socio-political (a la Nicholas Dirks) phenomenon? In context of the above discussion, this now seems to be the wrong kind of question. While nobody seriously sees caste any longer as an articulation of the encompassing spirituality of Indian society, to dissociate caste from the workings of religion in modern times is also to avoid taking the bull by its horns. It is also a refusal to take seriously the concern that critics of caste – from Bhimrao Ambedkar to Kancha Illaiah – have always shown about the problematic of religion and religiosity. In other words, newer kinds of history-writing must rescue the question of religion from the communalism paradigm, for communalism has been the only way in which the nation, and therefore modern historiography, has admitted, and at the same time neutralized, the question of religion, as it were. It is only thus that we can also restage the question of caste in all its centrality.

There is still very little work in this direction in India, if only because our historical and political common sense continues to understand the functioning of religions through a very simplistic self-other formula, borne out of Christianity versus Islam, Islam versus Hinduism and such stories of civilisational encounters. Clearly, such a formula sits easy with the framework of culture/civilization/nation that structures politics as well as the discipline of history globally. What remains underplayed, however, in this version of religion is the long history of the fashioning of the self, the community, and everyday practices thereof, that has marked religion as a changing domain – a domain in which questions of morality and purity, death and sexuality, suffering and liberation, authority and subjectivity, law and custom have been negotiated through time. In ‘our’ religions (and I say religions in the plural to indicate Hinduism, Sikhism, Islam and Christianity, all of which harbour caste, even when professing formal equality), caste, and resistance to caste, seem quite central to the history of this fashioning of the self/community and its internal, transformative dyanamics. There is of course interesting work on Gandhi and his practices of the self – and on the place of untouchability (and sexuality) in it. However, the myth of Gandhian exceptionalism somewhat nullifies the significance of such work. Taken further – perhaps through a study of various lower-caste sects and alternative faiths, both of colonial and non-colonial times – a history of practices of selfhood, community and conflict might emerge that would bring back caste into serious reckoning.

Caste and the Body

Talking of caste and practices of the self brings to the fore the question of caste and the body. It is particularly important to raise this question because with it comes the question of the materiality of caste as a category, the precise nature of which has till very recently escaped history-writing. Caste is a very particular form of structural inequality, no doubt, but discourses of modernity have always sought to subsume caste under surrogate categories, namely, either class or race. It is this which has ended up displacing from centre-stage the specific and peculiar materiality of caste itself.

We all know the history of this century and more long process of subsumption of caste. It began with the ethnologisation of caste by colonial governmental agencies in the late nineteenth century. What emerged was a regime of colonial-modern biopolitics which sought to fix and count caste groups in India as instances of ethnic identity and products of ethnic intermixing. The very fact that the traditional Brahmanical versions of caste also emphasized control over marriage and demonstrated a strong fear of miscegenation only seemed to confirm the coloniser’s argument that caste was actually biological race. But more importantly, this ethnologisation also allowed sections of colonial indigenous elite to ‘primitivise’ so-called tribals and untouchables, and thus both to create a temporal distance from and impose a modernization regime upon them.[24] Even more importantly, this technique of racialisation of caste was on occasions even turned around, as in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, to the advantage of lower castes themselves –when the myth of Aryan conquest was re-presented historically as a process of establishing Brahmanical control over indigenous races of the country. True, the understanding of race in the latter case was more cultural-linguistic rather than biological, yet the equation of race-culture-civilisation-caste was unmistakable in it. As unmistakable was the fact that the mobilization of lower castes against the alleged Aryan-outsiders resulted in a conflation of caste solidarity with a form of nationalism – whether it be Tamil linguistic nationalism in the south[25] or the Maratha tradition of kshatriya valour in the west.[26] Needless to say, the strategic advantage of reducing caste collectivity to a kind of counter-nationalism was not available in all parts of India. But even more significantly, the identification of caste with race, and thus with a nation, produced a new kind of identarian politics, that in turn caused a new kind of exclusion of the dalit by dominant backward castes both in the south and the west of the country.

Almost simultaneous to the racialisation of caste late nineteenth century onwards, therefore, there also had to be another representation of caste. This was the parallel mode of constituting caste as primarily a form of economic inequality. Phule himself reconstituted the lower caste question as a peasant question, and the upper-caste/lower caste binary as a form of primordial class antagonism.[27] In fact, even as he worked on his historical understanding of Aryan invasion, he foregrounded caste-exploitation through the then globally available political economic category of slavery. In Tamil Nadu as well, as M. S. S. Pandian, shows, despite its articulation through the Dravidian movement, ‘backward’ caste mobilization had also to be articulated on the ground that lower castes were the ones who really provided the resource and the labour for the Brahman, the temple and the landlord. In other words, the lower castes were really the productive classes of society and their exploitation and subordination was, therefore, really a structural form of resource extraction. And even as Martin Macwan, in 2001, argued that untouchability should be broadly seen as a kind of racialism, he put land reforms first on his agenda, almost in the same way as the Indian communists had traditionally done. In other areas, this caste-class equation became the mainstay of radical politics of change. Bihar is the best instance of such an equation, where the fight for minimum wages for rural landless labour and the fight for the dignity of the dalit appeared one and the same thing in the 1960s and 70s Naxalite movement. Twentieth century history-writing, especially people’s history of the Marxist variety, we know, worked further to institutionalize this caste-class conflation, in which caste sensibilities were seen as a pre-modern and displaced form of consciousness of economic interest, which the right politics and the right narrativisation could be eventually purify and resolve into modern class consciousness.

I believe that this incessant vacillation of caste as category between these two categories of race/nation and class is particularly significant. It of course explains why caste remains somewhat repressed in dominant historical common sense even today. But to say this is not really to adequately interpret the issue. My argument is that the tense positioning of caste between the categories of race and class is actually an expression of our inability to truly grasp the materiality of caste as category. In the conventions of modern history-writing, in fact in social sciences in general, materiality is recognized primarily in the form of economic interest, in the language of hunger and its satisfaction, disease and its remedy, and debt and its remittance, as it were. This is not merely the local problem of materialist/Marxist schools of thought, which have been repeatedly accused of being economistic and reductionist in their understanding of social reality. It is actually a far more generalized position, shared across ideological divides, which understand materiality as a domain, in which the human body becomes the locus of the operations of larger historical forces. The body – whether starved, bonded, sick or violated – becomes proof and product of material processes. The body is recognized precisely because it carries the mark of such material histories. By itself, however, the body is seen as bare life, biology, opaque, merely a receptacle, and therefore, not quite thematisable through history.

This understanding of the human body as irrelevant, except in biographical intimacy of disease, death, sex and hunger, is something that fails to make sense of the material experiences of caste and above all, of untouchability – wherein matters of touch, sex, food, filth, flesh, skin, work, worship, bondage and mobility all come together to produce the socio-political realm via deployment of the body, and above all, the body. Which is perhaps why, in response to class formulations, it appears attractive to a large number of critics of caste to invoke the idea of race. For in colonial modernity, race seems to be the only mode through which the body is admitted into public political discourse. It is only through discourses of race justice and human rights against violence that claims to autonomy and rehabilitation of the body appears possible globally. The telling case, already mentioned above, is the debate that emerged when dalit activists sought to present caste injustice as a case of race discrimination and human rights violation on the international forum of a the United Nations Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban in August-September 2001.[28] I do not quite believe that dalit activists actually innocently understood caste as race, nor do I believe that they saw the invocation of a universal humanity and human rights as the ultimate way towards abolishing of caste in India. I see the caste-race conflation here as really a deliberate and strategic reminder – that the materiality of caste is above all that it is a politics of the body – to all those who talked of an abstract notion of democratic equality and empowerment, including existing dalit political parties like Bahujan Samaj Party and the Republican Party of India, big electoral players who had maintained an uneasy silence all through this controversy.

Not surprisingly, if there has emerged today any recognition of this problematic of the body vis a vis caste it has come from feminist writers, and not all of them historians. To begin with, there is the clear assertion being made by feminist writers today that caste as a structure is centrally reproduced through a patriarchal enforcement of endogamy, where marriage and the control of women’s sexuality are paramount. Uma Chakravarty’s work, both on ancient India and on the 18^th century Brahmanical Peshwa regime of Maharashtra, shows this clearly, as does G. Arunima’s work, on the restructuring of patriarchy through a forcible transformation of Nair matriliny into the ‘modern’ form of patrilineal family in Kerala in colonial times.[29] This perhaps explains why Ambedkar emphasized so much on the centrality of marriage in his understanding of the genesis of caste[30] and why someone like Periyar needed to fashion an alternative form of man-woman partnership in his version of Self-Respect marriages.[31] Though neither of these thinkers formulated this issue as a feminist problematic, they clearly had an intuitive understanding of the centrality of women’s body in discourses of caste – an understanding that later theorizers would build on.

Other writers, in turn, have sought to narrate the experiential dimension of caste in everyday life to show how central the presence and movement of the body has been to the workings of this form of inequality. One could present numerous instances of this centrality of the body vis a vis caste – namely, the questions of proximity and distance through which upper and lower caste bodies are spatially located, the matter of differential clothing, posture and deportment of bodies allowed in conventions of social etiquette, notions of ablutions and defilement that mediate occasions of touch, issues of differential sexual access, by which upper-caste men appropriate lower-caste women’s bodies while lower-caste men and upper-caste women are denied contact, forms of labour, enslavement and debt bondage that must produce particular and specially inflected questions of freedom, mobility and control of bodies, even matters of association with beastly bodies by which the cow becomes the Brahman’s and the pig the dalit’s symbol and so on. Some of these bodily conventions have of course been jeopardized by the contingencies of modern life – public transport, urban migration, rise of caste-neutral institutions and professions, legal intervention etc – as also by successful resistance against them. Yet there is no denying that even today, in cities and in offices, the sweepers and cleaners are almost always dalits, that marriage advertisements are still caste-based even amongst the most elite and educated, that despite reservations, public institutions effectively function through informal procedures of segregation. In other words, attitudes towards the body still strongly inform the materiality of caste. Note, for instance, the telling reports that P. Sainath had filed on dalit daily life across the country some years back, where the organizing principle of caste till date clearly appeared as the opposition between clean and defiling labour.[32] Note also the stark way in which feminist sociologist Anupama Rao captures the body politics of it all:

Ironically, the dalit women’s physical intimacy with this most abhorred and defiling of acts, excretion, gives them a kind of secret knowledge of the domestic economies from which they are excluded. If the Brahman’s access to the secret knowledge from which others were to be excluded formed the psychobiography of his caste mark, the gendered reversal that is performed by the dalit woman’s access to the intimate gastrointestinal economies of the household is then a poignant reminder of the knowledge – of what the upper castes eat, how their shit smells, and so forth – that defiled labour produces.[33]

It is this specific kind of materiality of caste inequality – and the centrality of the (gendered) body in it – that history-writing must admit into its narratives. However, it will be a gross error to understand this version of caste as em-bodied inequality in terms of the primordiality of the phenomenon. In fact, this precisely is the problem with our sociological and historical common sense, a common sense which is the product of a colonial-modern historicism that can grasp caste only in terms of its being age-old, archaic, non-modern, a residue of the past in the present, as it were. The task of a history adequate to the category of caste, therefore, would be to show up the changes, through modern times, in the forms of embodiment and materiality of caste – changes that have come about through changing discourses, changing governmental technologies, and above all, through changing forms of resistance and politicization.

Let me end this essay, then, by provisionally suggesting what seems to me one productive way of approaching the problematic of caste, body and history (surely there could be many other ways, and in any case I am constrained by being a historian of only the nineteenth-twentieth centuries). I think that there is a consensus today that the question of untouchability must be seen as distinct and different from other general questions about caste. This position is understandable because erstwhile untouchables remain even today the most physically exploited and marginalized peoples of our society, and their question is undoubtedly therefore the most urgent of all. However, beneath this admittedly ethical/political position lay hidden a number of specifically historical questions that throw up the connected genealogies of caste and the body. Namely, questions such as when and how does the question of untouchability, and the associated question of touch and the body, get dissociated from the potentially totalizing structure of caste practices in general? Does the separating out of the untouchable happen because mainstream nationalism and its leaders like Gandhi strategically made untouchability into a distinct, localized and therefore containable evil, thus exonerating the rest of caste society from the taint of unjust bodily practices? Does the question of the ‘untouchable’ emerge as a separate question also because of the way other ‘backward’ castes mobilized and consolidated, as they did in early twentieth century in the south and the west and in the late twentieth century in north India, really at the cost of the dalit? In other words, does the special loneliness of the dalit emerge out of newer kinds of hegemonic political practice by which caste gets resisted and reconfigured in the modern nation – making the dalit into an exceptional and residual untouchable body? And does it also signify that the struggle against untouchability and defilement – the embodied form of the experience of caste – becomes the struggle for rights and recognition of a special and specific community of ‘untouchables’ rather than a general struggle for abolition of caste as a totalizing system? Or as importantly, is caste not or no longer a totalizing structure at all, only a Brahmanical fantasy?

Other associated questions also emerge – how does the metaphor of the body work in the history of naming and renaming of the untouchable-the harijan-the broken people? How do we see the figuring of Ambedkar since the 1950s – through the setting up of his many statues and the occasional desecration of them? What does the politics of language produced by the dalit literature movement, 1970s onward, tell us about the deployment of so-called vulgar, physical, crassly material usages against a sanitized and elitist imagination of the literary and the aesthetic? What does the recent centrality of the autobiographical mode of writing in dalit self-representations say about our conventional knowledge systems and the space they offer, or do not offer, for the articulation of an embodied subject? And above all, what is the role of structural violence – in its bodily immediacy – in the primary recognition of the dalit or the ‘untouchable’ as a subject? Anupama Rao, the feminist sociologist whom I had briefly quoted above, has done some significant work on this last question, which must be mentioned here, for from it history as a discipline has much to learn.[34]

Anupama Rao argues that if in the twentieth century, the rise of the dalit as identity happened through a politics of representation and reservation, no less important has been the parallel process of reconstituting the dalit as subject(ed) to special forms of bodily violence – defined by the state as legally distinct from other structural/societal practices of violence in modern times. She reminds us that at the time the Indian Constitution was being framed, Ambedkar had suggested in his draft on fundamental rights the provision that ‘[a]ny privilege or disability arising out of rank, birth, person, family, religion and religious usage and custom is abolished’. This general statement against inequality of all kinds, both religious and secular, was however accepted neither by the Draft Committee nor by the Constituent Assemby. In its place came the well known Article 17 of the constitution which read ‘[u]ntouchability is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden. The enforcement of any disability arising out of “untouchability” shall be an offence in accordance with law’. I believe that this was the moment of formalizing and legalizing the separation of untouchability as a special case, from its habitus of general social, religious and caste practices.

This was also the beginning of a longer process of law-making by which the ‘untouchable’ was produced as the subject of legal ‘exception’ and special juridical protection (in the way that women would also be constituted through the years). The Government of India passed the Untouchability (Offenses) Act in 1955, which was amended in 1976 and renamed as the Protection of Civil Rights Act (Act 22 of 1955). Later in 1989, at the same time as Mandal Commission, the state passed The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, which was much more stringent than the earlier one.

Through a study of cases under the above laws, Anupama Rao shows how through the twentieth century, dalit personhood gets juridically constituted through moments of ‘atrocity’. It was only through acts of violence against the untouchable that the untouchable gets publicly recognized – making public violence and humiliation a structural-legal condition for the emergence of the dalit as an effective and visible right-bearing individual. This also renders invisible in a new way the ordinary and unspectacular deprivations of the dalit everyday. It also leaves very little room for a recognition, in legal-juridical terms, of caste sociality in general and of the structure of high-caste personhood, the ‘normal’ citizen, as Rao aptly puts it.

The particular kind of emphasis on violence against the untouchable body also fails to recognize the changing politics of violence itself. Anupama Rao argues that in state sociology, directed violence against a dalit is almost always read as the archaic form of violence based on the ‘superstition’ of untouchability, while it can be shown that since at least the 1960s, if not earlier, such violence has been newly constituted in response to newer contexts of local political assertion by dalits. ‘As we try to navigate past a legalized caste habitus of victim and aggressor’, she says, ‘we need to acknowledge that there has been a change from violence that prevents dalits from claiming political rights, to violence that responds to their political militancy’. She also shows how juridical knowledge, and state apparatuses like the police, the court, commissions and committees, are very much contaminated by the political negotiations happening in society in general which produce criminal cases of atrocity – except that, at the moment of justice and compensation, such politics must of necessity be repressed for the sake of impartiality and evidentiality.

In other words, what we see here is a long and complex history of the changing deployment of the dalit’s body and person through which the materiality of caste gets laid out and transformed. However, it must be evident that this kind of long-term history of caste can only be imagined, and read back well into at least the nineteenth century, only if we are able to go beyond the conventional closure of modern Indian history at 1947. Seen from the point of view of the caste-question, late nineteenth to late twentieth century appears to be a far more productive temporal bracket to work with. It is also quite possible to complicate, from the perspective of caste, the grey area between late medieval and early colonial times in India – though it is beyond my competence to elaborate on this. But it can surely be said that if history-writing has to do justice to caste as a category historians must begin by disowning significantly the standard periodisation framework of Indian history, across ancient-medieval-modern periods. Not the least because this periodisation still smacks of that colonial-religious division of our history across Hindu, Muslim and British eras, which produced the nationalism/communalism paradigm, rendered caste secondary, and forcibly ended modern history at the moment of partition and the exit of the ‘secessionist’ kind of Muslim from the nation. Indeed, it is the haunting shadow of this periodisation that keeps the practice of contemporary history from really developing in our academic institutions even today. And without a practice of contemporary history, even the stories of nineteenth-early twentieth century caste mobilization would remain largely untold.

By Sudipta Kaviraj

No story of the European state can be complete if it does not take into account its successes/effects outside Europe. Francois Guizot’s classic history of the European state requires a supplement:[1] he tells half the story. His magisterial account presents the picture of the state inside Europe’s own history. But the story of the European state has an equally significant counterpart, a history that happens outside. Outside Europe the modern state succeeded in two senses – first as an instrument, and second, as an idea.

First, the organisation of European societies produced by the modern state was an essential factor in Europe’s ability to bring the rest of the world under its colonial control. Here the state functioned as an immense and unprecedented enhancement of the European societies’ capacity for collective action – in raising military resources, producing the economic resources which under-girded its military success, focusing on clearly defined stratagems of control and conquest. In fact, when other people began to reflect on the reasons for this astonishing success of Europe, they often settled on this as its intangible but indispensable instrument. By extending Tocqueville insights, it can be argued that traditional, pre-modern forms of political authority were utterly inadequate in dealing with the power of the modern European state. It could be restrained and eventually effectively opposed only through a movement that organised the power of entire populations against the colonial state in the form of national mobilisations. But it succeeded a second time as an idea. Successful nationalist movements, after de-colonisation, enthusiastically accepted the idea of a modern society centred upon the state’s sovereignty – a principle of social construction entirely different from traditional ones. Except for a few odd individuals like Gandhi and Tagore, nationalists did not object to the presence of the modern state, only to its being in the European’s control. . With independence, they did not wish, except in a few cases like Gandhi, to ‘abolish’ the state, but to use it for their own purposes. Eventually, in the gigantic transformations of third world societies which have followed on de-colonisation, for good or for worse, were driven through by using the power of this modern instrumentality of the state. In the absence of other forces – like the bourgeoisie or the proletariat- that played such an important role in European social transformations – it was the state which almost entirely arrogated to itself the power of proposing, directing and effecting large scale change. There might be great debates about judging what the state has done; but there is no doubt that it has been the most powerful collective agency. That is why the state is central to the story of non-Western modernity, and colonialism is central to the story of the state.

This paper is not about the post-colonial state in general; only the historically specific form it assumed in India. It is thus necessary to spell out what can be generalised from the Indian case, and what cannot. First, although India is a single country, its numerical significance is obvious: what happens to its people political is the collective experience of about one-third of the non-Western world. Second, as there is little dispute today about the desirability of democratic forms of government, the Indian case is particularly important. It is one of the most successful cases of democracy outside of Europe. But the ‘success’ of democracy is an ambiguous idea, capable of a minimal and expansive interpretation. The narrow, and minimalist reading of the success of democracy is simply the continuance of a competitive electoral system of government: if this system of government continues, it is generally acclaimed as a ‘success’ of democracy. But, again in Tocqueville, there is a suggestion about a different reading of democracy’s success – which is not just a continuation of a system of government, but the capacity of this government to produce egalitarian effects in society. In India, democracy has been a great success in both these senses. First, in a highly diverse society, divided by religion, castes, classes, languages the democratic system has functioned without interruption and without popular apathy for nearly six decades now. Second, and more significantly, this institutional continuation of democracy has produced in this period a fundamental social transformation which is in some respects startlingly different from the European social processes. The story of Indian democracy is of more general interest for a third reason as well. If democratic institutions spread and achieve success in the non-European world, the institutions would produce social results depending on the forms of sociability available in each historical context. In such cases of future successful democracy, it is likely that non-European societies might follow a trajectory closer to India’s than to modern Europe’s.

This paper offers a brief sketch of the post-colonial state in India. It interprets post-colonial to mean not the trivial fact that this state has emerged after the colonial regime departed. It takes it in the stronger sense to mean that some of its characteristic features could not have arisen without the particular colonial history that went before. I also believe, unlike some opther political scientists, that political change in modern India cannot be studied fruitfully – except in the long term historical perspective. To understand the unfolding story of politics and the state today, it is thus essential to start with the coming of colonial authority.

Modernity in India, and perhaps also in other European colonies, was largely a political affair. All commentators on European modernity point out the significant, if not originary role that transformations of the production and economic processes played in the making of European modernity. I wish to suggest that in India by contrast the causal powers of economic changes were far more limited. The type of capitalist development that eventually took place in colonial India was determined to a large extent by political imperatives of state control. Modernity came to India by the political route, indeed through the introduction of a new activity called ‘politics’. Indeed, the activity was so new that in many vernaculars it is still colloquially referred to by the English-derived word ‘politics’, rather than by an orthogenetic term. This new activity of ‘politics’ assumed primarily three different forms in successive stages of modern Indian history. Initially, it entered with the establishment of new institutions of colonial rule, eventually crystallizing into a colonial state/regime – which, sociologically, politics was done by British rulers and Indian elites who had transactions with them. In the second phase, its scope was extended through the popular nationalist movement from the 1920s when Indian more generally took part in this as a large, encompassing transformative activity. Although most Indian were affected by this form of politics, their participation and capacity to behave as actors depended on class and education. Nationalist politics was more the politics of the wider educated elites, much less of the ordinary Indian peasant. Curiously, even after indepdnendence, this structure of politics continued unchanged. Since the seventies, in another serious transformation, the business of politics became much more expansive, and lower caste and lower class politicians brought in the concerted pressures of their ordinary constitutents into the life of the state.

What were the central processes in this transformation? Why has politics of a discursive, representative, democratic character succeeded in India?

The basic argument of this paper is controversial, but fairly simple. There can be no doubt that in the last two hundred years Indian society has undergone a most fundamental transformation. The central point of this change, in my view, is the transformation of a society in which ‘imperative co-ordination’, to use Weber’s inelegant but useful phrase, was achieved through a religious system based on caste, with comparatively little role of the state, has been turned over to an order which is controlled by the state – its institutions, its laws, its resources, its functionaries and its place in the ordinary people’s imagination. In pre-modern times, control over the state was relatively marginal to the narratives of significant social change. The most significant upheavals in early Indian history were not dynastic or regime changes, but the challenges to the religious organisation of society through reform movements of Buddhism and Jainism against ritualistic Brahminism in ancient India, rise of the bhakti cults against Hindu orthodoxy in the middle ages. By contrast, from the middle of the nineteenth century the state’s role has been absolutely central in the passage of social change. The colonial state ended in 1947, but the new way of organising social life through ‘politics’, making the society state-centred, has not merely continued, but expanded its jurisdiction over all aspects of social life. The European state thus still dominates modern Indian life in those two senses. The institutional apparatuses introduced into Indian society by British colonial power have not been dismantled, but massively extended. Secondly, the idea of that to be modern is to live through the state, to organise society through this central institution of power, has had a great vindication –ironically through the demise of colonial power itself.

Following this main idea, I shall present my argument in three parts: first part will offer a brief outline of the arrangement of social power in traditional (pre-colonial) India[2], the second will describe the changes brought in by colonialism and the Indians’ transaction with its initiatives, and the final section will analyse what has happened to this state after independence – by its becoming a ‘nation-state’, and the manner in which principles of democracy have been interpreted by social forces in India.

1

Colonial power came to an Indian society which already had an intricate and long-standing political organisation. At the time when colonial power began to exert serious influence, power in Indian society was structured in a peculiar form. Much of Northern and central India had been under an Islamic empire for nearly six centuries.[3] Yet the presence of Islam in India was special. In most other societies, a conquering Islamic power had converted and transformed indigenous social practices and religious doctrine. In India the irresistible military power of Islamic dynasties learnt to coexist with the immovable social structure of the Hindu caste system. Indian society, thus, had a dual structure of power, composed on strange crossing of Hindu and Islamic principles. From very early times, ‘Hindu’ society[4] (an anachronistic description of a collection of different forms united by a single sociological order[5]) had a fairly explicit and intricate arrangement of social power structured in terms of castes. Caste is a peculiar structure of social power which tends to circumscribe the jurisdiction of political authority. To understand the changes that the modern state brought into Indian society, it is necessary to picture the functioning of caste society. Caste, as is generally known, has two forms – the formal, ritualistic structure of the four varnas, and the effective sociological structure of much more numerous jatis. Sociological analysts usually give less importance to the formal varna structure, but it is significant for one central reason. It shows that at the centre of the caste order is a scheme of an asymmetric hierarchy, which separated the goods that ordinary people could seek and value in mundane life, and segregated group according to these The underlying theory behind the caste order implied that the primary values/goods of human life were ritual status/ religious prestige, political power to rule over society, and the economic power to control wealth.[6] The central logic of the varna version of the caste system was to separate the social groups which exercised monopolistic control over each of these human goods. The social order of castes separated the search for social prestige and cognitive powers, political and military supremacy and commercial wealth. This also meant that, unlike aristocratic societies of pre-modern Europe, political pre-eminence, economic wealth and cultural prestige did not coincide in a single social elite. Occupational separation by birth meant that social groups lived in three types of relations to each other: segmentation, interdependence and hierarchy. Occupationally divided social groups could not seek the same goods; and therefore, it reduced, if not entirely excluded, competition for wealth and power.[7] Secondly, the caste order was based on a generally recognised social constitution, an authoritative allocation of social roles, rewards and therefore life-trajectories which governed conduct in minute details. Significantly, this authoritative allocation did not originate from political authority. Political rulers could not alter the rules of this social constitution, but were expected to uphold and administer its ‘immutable’ norms, and crucially, were themselves subject to its segmentally relevant rules.[8] Consequently, in this social world, the power of political rulers was limited to ‘executive’ functions: ie, to protect the social constitution, punish infringements, and return it to its order of normalcy. In this sense, the political rulers did not have the ‘legislative’ authority to reconstitute this order, except in marginal ways. The idea of modern sovereignty therefore did not apply to the power of the political authority in this society.[9]

However, an obvious objection at this stage of the argument can be: is this not an excessively Hindu view of political power? Since large parts of Indian society were securely governed by Islamic rulers since the eleventh century, does this model apply to those areas as well? One of the most interesting historical questions about India’s political past is about the precise relation Islamic imperial power had with the predominantly Hindu society over which it exercised control. Although Islamic religious doctrine was fundamentally different from Hinduism (e.g., about idolatry, monotheism, egalitarianism etc.), in sociological terms (i.e., the relation between political authority and the social constitution) Islam in India observed very similar principles, and tacitly accepted the restrictions caste society placed on the ‘legislative’ functions of rulers.[10] Thus, the coming of Islam was highly significant in other ways, but not in terms of the fundamental structure of the relation between political power and social order. It required a state of a very different sort, animated by very different intellectual principles of self-organisation and endowed with new types of cognitive-statistical appliances, to alter this stable social constitution and replace it with a new one. The modern state is, by definition, the state which, because of its self-interpretation in terms of the principle of sovereignty, considered this invasive transformation of society possible.

2

Although the colonial system of states meant a subordination of other societies to some metropolitan European powers, the actual transactions of colonialism were exteremely diverse. First, the European states themselves came from vastly different cultural and institutional contexts, and the differences between European states reflected themselves in the system of political power they brought into the colonial territories. Secondly, much depended on exactly when a territory was brought under European control. Third, European powers followed entirely different projects in different colonies, and though experience of colonial rule in one part of the world informed decisions about another, British rule in Africa, for instance, was very different from what it was in India. Finally, the exact nature of colonial rule depended not merely on what the colonial power was ideologically intent on doing, or instrumentally capable of achieving, but also the manner in which the colonized society deployed its own cultural and political resources. Focusing on India therefore gives us a single story out of many diverse ones of European colonial rule, and because of the strange intimacy that developed between India and Britain, it might portray European colonial domination in general in a misleadingly benevolent light. Not all groups in colonized countries responded to the arrival of European power and culture with the initial enthusiasm of the modern Indian elites. The sharing of at least abstract common political principles between the colonial rulers and the nationalist elite to produce an effective framework of political conflict was also rather unusual, as much as the negotiated nature of the ultimate withdrawal of British power.

The state established by British colonialism was precisely an historical force of this kind. Dominion established by British power, even though its immediate instrument was a commercial company, occurred in an intellectual context which presupposed sovereignty as a definitional quality of state-power. Thus, when the British eventually turned India into a crown colony, the colonial state assumed the rights of state sovereignty as these were understood in European discourses of the nineteenth century. Interestingly, however, British colonial power did not enter India in the shape of state authority: nor was the initial conflict about establishment of control in the form of a struggle between two states – the declining Mughal empire and the British crown. It is the peculiar constitution of society, and the relative externality of the state to the orders of caste practice which allowed this to happen. By the first half of the nineteenth century, British organisations already controlled much of commercial activity, military power, quasi-political administrative apparatuses and had a substantial influence on cultural life in several parts of India. When they finally decided to end the fiction of Mughal rule after the rebellion of 1857, Mughal authority was already purely nominal. But this first, and rather peculiar stage in the establishment of British power, stretching over a century, is critical for an understanding of the special dynamics of British colonialism in India. In this stage, we must try to sketch out the contours of advancing colonial power, rather than describe the structure of the ‘colonial state’. British Power, established initially through control over channels and instruments of commerce and revenue-collection, and at the second step, through the introduction of modern cultural apparatuses, slowly turned into a state of the modern kind – though, its actual institutions were quite different from European models of the nineteenth century.[11]The most significant implication of this is that Indian opinion was always internally deeply divided about colonial rule. Older aristocracies which lost their power to the British and their supporters were understandably hostile to the gradual entrenchment of British power. Similarly, traditional holders of social authority and prestige, like Brahmin conservatives, often looked at the new influences with hostility. Recent historial research has strongly underlined the fact that the British could establish their control over a large and diverse territory like India, partly because they went along with historical trends that had already started in India in the eighteenth century, and for this reason, they also drew substantial support from indigenous groups. Important sections of Indian society, like powerful commercial interests, aspirant political groups, and relatively modern elites produce by new educational institutions strongly supported the establishment of British power. Eventually, this allowed British rule in India to become an interesting arrangement of power which was administered by large groups of Indian elites who collaborated with British authority and ran the colony under British supervision.[12]

Viewed in the historical long term, the colonial state altered Indian society in two different ways. Establishment of a new kind of state, with formal legal claims to sovereignty, was itself a major transformative project, which against the logic of the limitation of political authority in the segmentary caste civilisation. It established and familiarized the idea that the apparatuses of the state, especially its legislative organs, in British or Indian hands, could, in principle, judge social institutions critically, and formally alter them. Some of the most fateful and long lasting effects were not introduced through political policies narrowly defined, but through more indirect cultural changes it induced through its administrative habits.[13] These administrative procedures, like the great statistical enterprises of the colonial regimes, though not political in themselves, nonetheless caused fundamental changes in social identities and their preparation for a new kind of politics. Surprisingly, the colonial administration changed identities by implanting cognitive practices which objectified communities, changing them from an earlier fuzzy or underspecified form to a modern enumerated one. Processes of enumeration of the social world, like mapping and census, irreversibly altered social ontology by giving groups a new kind of agentive political identity.[14] This was not political agency in itself, but a precondition for the development of a political universe in which political agency could be imparted to large impersonal groups – like castes or religious communities.

However, the colonial state was subject to contradictory impulses. It certainly set in motion large information-gathering processes under the rationalist belief that in order to rule that large, complex society the state and its officials had to know it well. But this impulse of cognitive appropriation was not part of a state-directed agenda of wholesale social reform. The colonial state was surprisingly cautious about unnecessary interference in everyday social life. One strand of colonial administrative thinking advocated a state of deliberate inactivity, which did not meddle in social affairs which colonial rulers did not understand fully, and which might unwittingly create disaffection. Even in case of a barbaric practice like sati – the burning of widows on the funeral pyre of their deceased husbands – the initial response of the colonial regime was fairly cautious. Only the righteous indignation of the native reformers eventually pushed it into legislation banning the practice.[15] Apart from cultural scruples, the colonial state also mistrusted over-expansion of its activities on purely prudential grounds. British policy oscillated between a reforming impulse, which wanted to restructure Indian society, on rational lines, and an impulse of restraint, which wanted to leave social affairs of Indians alone.[16] The self-limitation of the colonial state, justified at various times by arguments of financial prudence or cultural relativism, allowed a wide space for the development of a distinctive elite associational politics in 19^th century India. This ability to form associations, exercise group solidarity, pursue their economic interests, transact business with the colonial state, gave the modern Indian elite the confidence to develop larger projects of self-government, and led to the growth of Indian nationalism.

Ironically, the specific ideological culture in which the British colonial state operated played a part in the eventual growth of nationalist arguments in India. Interestingly, the time of the greatest expansion and power of British colonialism in India was coincided with the time when principles of modern liberalism were being established in British political arguments. The Indian empire thus witnessed all the internal contradictions of an imperialism which also sought to subscribe to liberal doctrine[17] In the nineteenth century, liberal political theorists were arguing passionately against the substantial remnants of despotic power from the early stages of sovereignty, and advocating dramatic expansion of citizens’ freedom. Such principles sat uneasily with the demands of the expanding empire, particularly after the mid-nineteenth century. Educated Indians, now well versed in the theoretical arguments of liberalism and the practical extensions of suffrage, were quick to convert to liberal doctrine and demand their instant extension to India. Liberal imperialism produced a peculiar dynamics through the exchanges between Indian and the British authors on the question of political morals. Indian intellectuals quickly realized that the best form of injustice was the injustice administered by liberals. The philosophical anthropology and procedural universalism of liberal doctrines required that political principles of liberty and equality should be declared in a universal form. Liberalism enunciated its principles in an abstract, impersonal and universal form; but often avoided realising them in practice. This was done in one of two usual ways – both unwittingly giving opportunity to nationalists for developing compelling counter-arguments. In some contexts, the universal principles were simply ignored in practice, which made it easy for nationalists to accuse the British of dishonesty, and embarrass the administration by comparing the principles with actual practice. In others contexts, theorists like John Stuart Mill tried to produce a more serious intellectual argument using a stage theory of history, of the kind common to Scottish enlightenment thinkers.[18] His writings counselled an indefinite postponement of enjoyment of liberal rights by Indians. On the grounds that although liberal institutions were, in the abstract, best for all mankind, they were not suitable for most of human societies until they had attained a required stage of civilisation.[19]This ingenious argument saved the abstract universality of liberal ideals, but justified imperial rule for an indefinite future. Yet this particular ideological configuration contributed to an extent to the surprisingly amicable nature of the colonial conflict in India. The intellectual form of the arguments acknowledged that denial of self-government was not right in principle, and could not be continued indefinitely. It also created a subtle sense of defensiveness, if not guilt, in the ideological defence of the empire. Indian nationalists appealed to the same principles in their critique of British imperial government in India. This sharing of principles at a very abstract level contributed to the slow but steady sequence of constitutional shifts, which eventually led to the transfer of power to Indians in 1947.

[The modern Indian elite did not show any signs of support to the abortive uprising against British rule in 1857, because of their extreme distaste for traditional forms of despotic government. The new elite wished to emulate European precedents by setting up a nation-state with representative, if not fully democratic institutions. To the nationalists themselves the existence of an Indian nation, who would collectively oppose British authority, had the certainty of an axiom. But in fact, the process of the construction of an Indian national identity was far more complex. The ‘idea’ of India in the name of which the national movement spoke with such passion in the twentieth century was an invention, not a ‘discovery’ as Jawaharlal Nehru had claimed. For a truly historical understanding of the process by which groups of disparate people, separated by boundaries of religion, caste, language, culture came to imagine themselves to be ‘Indians’ it is necessary to disaggregate the conventional teleological narratives of Indian nationalism in two ways. The parts of India where the British established their domination securely were subjected to the social logic of modernity, and their inhabitants, at least the elites, immediately experienced an unprecedented access of new types of wealth and institutional power. In the short term, this generated an intense sense of regional pride, particularly pronounced among the Bengalis, the first beneficiaries of a sub-imperial eminence from their association with British power. However, this did not contribute to any common sense of Indianness or a sense of Indian national pride: rather, it made the Bengalis and similarly placed elites elsewhere acutely conscious of their preciousness, and accentuated their sense of distance from other, less modern, groups. The coming of print introduced cultural processes which produced standardized vernacular languages, and with the growth of vernaculars followed an intensification regional patriotism. It was common in the early nineteenth century to find poetry celebrating this historical good fortune, and giving thanks for this happy turn of events to Britannia rather than to Mother India. From the middle of the century however this happy mood of cultural acquiescence to colonial modernity starts changing into attitudes more critical of British power. Unless these regional patriotisms were transcended, the emergence of an ‘Indian’ nationalism was impossible. If these trends of cultural modernization had continued, the trajectory of Indian history would have been quite different. But from the mid-nineteenth century this predominant cultural pattern of regional patriotism and implicit mutual separation changed in a new direction, representing a second stage in the formation of modern perceptions of identity. It is best to characterize this culture as anti-colonialist: the major argument turned into a different kind of celebration of modern subjectivity. The dignity of the modern subject was seen in enjoying political rights of citizenship, made impossible by the legal frame of British colonial rule. In parallel, the dignity of the collective subject of a people was similarly seen to lie in its desire its for its own state and its realisation. Within fifty years, the general climate of opinion and political imagination changed unrecognisably: from a celebration of the god fortune which brought Indians into contact with the modernizing British empire, leading intellectuals switched to a very different celebration of the principles of self-rule. This form of consciousness still suffered from a major indecision: its negative point – opposition to British rule- was clear, but its more positive complement – who were the people who would thus oppose the British – was much less so. The Bengali writer, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay – whose novels played a significant role in this transformation of political imagination, and in the transcendence of a regional by an Indian patriotism – was still unclear about the ‘people’ on whose behalf he was developing his visions of freedom. At various points of his development, this crucial ‘we’ seemed to be the Bengalis, or the Hindus, or all Indians. It was only by the end of the nineteenth century that the final step towards the creation of a nationalist consciousness was taken. By the turn of the century, in some ways, the intellectual horizon of Indian thinking had changed fundamentally and irreversibly. The central question of political life was, by now, opposition to British rule and eventually attainment of freedom; and secondly, the question of identity seemed settled in favour of an Indian nationalism.

Not surprisingly, even in this relatively ‘mature’ stage, after the turn of the century, Indian nationalism exhibited several distinct strands. Four distinct lines of thought could be easily distinguished– exclusivist conceptions of nationalism which believed that the nation-state could only be based on religious communities of (i)Hindus and (ii)Muslims communities, (iii)pluralistic conceptions of Indianness based on traditional ideals of religious tolerance advocated primarily by Gandhi, [21] and (iv)modernist nationalism based on ideas of liberal citizenship and distributive justice.[22] All these strands wanted to seize control of the state from British rulers, but to go on to do different things with it.

There was also a significant conflict between two forms of the nationalist imagination of an ‘Indian’ identity on which future state would be based – which could be designated as homogenizing and pluralist. Curiously, some of the traditionalists among the Congress leadership drew upon European precedents of nation-building to claim that the new nation-state could not be viable without a homogenizing vision of Indianness around a single language (Hindi), single religion (Hinduism) and a single culture.[23] All the pedagogic powers of the new state should be directed, in their view, towards producing a nationalist sentiment of this kind. This view was successfully contested by a radically different vision of Indianness which saw diversity as a resource, rather than a weakness; and which argued in favour of a federal constitution that accommodated the traditional conventions of regional autonomy and division of political authority. Being an Indian was viewed as a second-order identity that did not cancel out regional cultural identities of Bengalis or Tamils, but subsumed them within a structure that encouraged enriching exchanges between them. The constitution, meticulously discussed over two years, eventually accepted the second view of Indian identity and translated that into the animating principle of the legal structure.[24]

The new nation-state started with a pluralist conception of the democratic state; but in any historical view of Indian politics, it is essential, against the nationalist celebration of this beginning, to remember the brief, but intense period of several months during India’s partition when state authority and civilised behaviour utterly collapsed, when the British authorities, who had ruled India with such confidence for more than a century, and their aspiring Indian successors lost control over the escalating orgies of violence. The partition process released dark forces of hatred and communal violence with a loss of several million lives. At an early stage, Indians were reminded that institutions of political modernity and the undisturbed enjoyment of order and civility were fragile and reversible achievements. It was a stark and terrible lesson in the consequences of state failure. [25]

3

The defining structures of the Indian nation-state after 1947 were produced by a combination of structural pressures and conjunctural openings. The state after independence had a double, and in some ways, contradictory inheritance. It was a successor to both the British colonial state and the movement of Indian nationalism. To combine the two sets of attributes – ideals, institutions, aspirations - that emerged from these contradictory legacies was not an easy task. Broadly, the legal institutions and coercive apparatuses of the state remained similar to the last stage of colonial rule – to the disappointment of those who expected a radical overhaul of the state. During its nationalist agitations, Congress had identified education, the police and the bureaucracy as the three pillars of colonial domination, and made repeated promises to introduce radical changes in their functioning. In the event, when they assumed power, especially after the panic of the partition, they left these three apparatuses of persuasion and control entirely unreformed. On one point, however, a major transformation took place – though its full effects became apparent only after a certain historical interval. From the early decades of the twentieth century, British authorities had cautiously introduced partial representative institutions.[26] Despite apprehensions about widespread illiteracy, the new state introduced universal franchise in a single dramatic move of inclusion.[27] The ideological discourse of nationalism had also created vast popular expectations from the state once it was taken over by the Congress, in sharp contrast with the rather limited objectives of the colonial state. Apart from the conventional responsibilities of the state in law and order, it was expected to play an enormous role in the ill-defined and constantly expanding field of ‘development’. Thus the state that took over from colonial rule partly continued its legacy, partly undertook hugely expansive new responsibilities.

The entire story of the state for the half-century after independence can be seen in terms of two apparently contradictory trends. In an apparent paradox, the history of Indian politics saw the simultaneous strengthening of two tendencies that can be schematically regarded as the logic of bureaucracy and the logic of democracy. The antecedents of both these trends could be found in the history of colonial rule : the gradual domination of the society by modern state institutions which brought significant social practices under its surveillance, supervision and control, and the equally slow and cautious introduction of practices of representation – so that this increasing control could be seen not as imposition of external rules of discipline, but impositions of rules and demands generated by the society itself. Both trends became more extensive and powerful after independence.

Under British rule, extension of bureaucracy was mainly sanctioned by a rhetoric of state efficiency; under nationalist leadership, this was substituted by the rhetoric of ‘development’. For entirely fortuitous reasons, at the time of the state’s foundation, Nehru came to enjoy an extraordinary degree of freedom in shaping its basic policies. The death of Gandhi and Patel, who had very different ideological inclinations, left the conservative sections of the Congress without effective leadership. Unopposed temporarily, Nehru imparted to this state a developmentalist and mildly redistributive ideology. According to this ideological vision, the state was seen as the primary instrument of development with extensive responsibilities in the direct management of production and redistribution. In part, this was because the massive industrialisation programme that India undertook after independence could not be financed or managed by private capital; in part, because private capitalist development was expected to increase income inequality, while state-managed development could simultaneously contribute to redistribution of wealth. Eventually, this led to a massive expansion of the bureaucracy without a corresponding change in its culture. Rapid over-extension of the bureaucracy intensified its inefficiency, reduced observance of procedures and produced large zones of corruption and malpractice. Eventually this led to a paradox of the over-extended state – it was expected to supervise all aspects of activity – from the management of the army, to running the administration to the provision of schools and hospitals. Its vast reach and responsibility resulted in a reduction of the reliability of delivery of social services. The state in contemporary India became ubiquitous, but also universally unreliable. But over the hald century of its existence, subtle changes took place in the developmental state itself; its structures and practices changed imperceptibly. Initially, during the Nehru years, the state was seen primarily as an engine of production, specially active in the production of essential industrial capacities and infrastructure. But the ideological justification of this constantly expanding state machinery was in terms of arguments of distributive justice. If the state managed heavy industries, the argument went, existing inequalities of income would not increase; and it would also act against the concentration of resources in a few private hands – classical Marxist arguments for socialist politics. In the first two decades after independence, state institutions with the responsibility of establishing and running heavy industries performed with reasonable efficiency. They helped setup and run a considerable heavy industrial base driven by the current economic theory of self-reliance and import-substituting industrialization. By the early seventies, a certain change in the character of state enterprises was discernible, and in their nexus with political authority. ‘The state sector’, as it came to be called in India, came to control vast economic resources – through its gigantic, interconnected networks of financing, employment, contracts associated with both productive and welfare activities of the state enterprises. Nehru’s government accorded to these enterprises a relative decisional and managerial autonomy to ensure technical correctness of decision-making. With the vast increase of their resources, political leaders and ministries began from the eighties to impose more direct control on their operations. By the mid-seventies, these enterprises and the state machinery in general had changed their character significantly. The government leadership under Indira Gandhi slowly abandoned its aspiration of serious direction to the economy through directive state planning. Instead of being seen as segments of an internally coherent policy of development planning, these enterprises sank into a logic of uncontrolled bureaucratisation, sinking deeper into inefficiency. Anxiety over inefficiency made managements more dependent on support of political leaders for survival. The price they extracted for this support was indirect access to the use of these resources for political ends. The huge economic bureaucracy of the developmental state increasingly had nothing to do with actual redistributive objectives, but became utterly dependent on a disingenuous use of that rhetoric. The sizeable economic surplus under the state’s control came to be used for illegitimate purposes by elected politicians who developed a vested interest in defending this large, over-stretched, inefficient state.

The other undeniable historical process in political life was the logic of democracy: but the lines of its movement were at times surprisingly different from European democracy in the 19^th century. First, unlike the gradual, incremental development of the suffrge in most European states, democracy was introduced to India is a single grandly dramatic gesture of political inclusion. Although the colonial administration had slowly introduced representative institutions from early twentieth century, the electorate at the last election under colonial administration was about 14 % of the adult population. The constitution adopted in 1950 installed universal adult suffrage in a country that was 70% illiterate. The new entrants into the arena of politics thus instantly outnumbered social elites already entrenched in representative institutions. This was likely to result in a conflict over representation, entrant groups contesting the claim of elite politicians to ‘represent’ the entire nation – an eventually that did happen, but after a lapse of time. The probable reason for this was that traditional habits of deference towards socially dominant groups, upper caste and classes, decline slowly, over a period of time. For about two decades, although the poor and the disprivileged in Indian society had the formal right to vote, they actually left the arena of institutional politics entirely in the hands of the social elites. Paradoxically, the institutions of democratic government seemed to function with impeccably formal propriety precisely because levels of participation were low, and popular expectation from democratic government were limited. The usual problems of electoral politics – resources allocation on the basis of electoral pressure, which makes long-term decisions particularly difficult – did not affect Indian democratic government in the Nehru years. It was clear by the seventies that ordinary voters, especially the urban poor and the lower castes in the countryside, had learnt strategic use of the vote. They made greater demands on the political system, and politicians from these groups began to emerge first into state governments, and later into national government. This somewhat delayed but decisive entry of the common people into the life of the state utterly transformed its character. Politics came to be in the vernacular in two senses. Literally, much of political discourse began to be in the vernacular, in contrast to the first decades when English was the mandatory language of politics; but, more significantly, politics came to be shaped after the seventies by a kind of conceptual vernacular as well, used by politicians who did not have the conventional education through the medium of English and whose political imagination was not determined by their knowledge of European historical precedents. The political leaders who had devised the democratic constitution had expected democracy to have wider social effects; but their expectations followed the familiar trajectories of European democracy. Introduction of modern democracy in Europe made the stark inequalities of class of nineteenth century capitalist society increasingly unsustainable. Radical leaders like Nehru had therefore expected that as ordinary Indians acquired democratic consciousness, they would case to identify themselves through categories of the traditional caste hierarchy, and demand great economic equality. Democratic institutions will thus lead, in the long term, to modernist movements for reduction of poverty. But what happened through half a century of democratic politics defied and confounded such expectations. Democracy certainly led to vast revolutionary effects in the Indian context as well – but that historic change resembled Tocqueville’s revolution more than Marx’s. Democratic politics produced a fundamental transformation of Indian society – but not in terms of class. Unlike Europe the logic of democracy has not led to greater equality of income, but a real redistribution of dignity. The deep European influence on India’s intellectuals made them subtly predisposed, irrespective of ideology, to underestimate the social presence of caste. Both liberals and socialists, who dominated the discourse of India’s political world in the early decades, expected that traditional forms of belonging and behaviour would disappear under the twin pressure of the economic logic of industrialization and the political logic of electoral democracy. Historically the unfolding of modernity has proved enormously more complex. The most comprehensive defining principle of India’s social life before the coming of modern influences was undeniably the caste order. That order determined the individuals’ life chances, and the principles that governed the relation between the collective bodies of castes in the social system. The long term effects of economic modernity of this social structure has been more straightforward. In all parts of India, despite regional variations, the expansion of economic modernity – urbanization and industrial development – has led to a decline of caste observances in daily life. Hindu rules forbidding intermixture at marriage, social intercourse, commensality have lost their former ability to constrain individual behaviour and private lives. Ironically, however, in the public arenas of political life, caste seems to have become much more powerful, defying modernist expectations. Caste affiliations have not broken down or faded in political life under the impact of electoral politics; the order of caste life has simply adapted to the operation of parliamentary democracy to produce large caste-based electoral coalitions. Paradoxically, the historical demand of this form of caste politics is not the end of caste-identity, but a democratic recognition of equality among caste groups – a state of affairs unthinkable according to the traditional grammar of caste behaviour. An anomalous accompaniment of this development is the peculiar translation of the language of rights in contemporary Indian culture. In Indian society, despite pressures of modernity, the process of sociological individuation has not gone very far. Consequently, although the universe of discourse is ringing with unceasing demands for recognition of rights, rarely have these advocated the rights of atomistic liberal individuals. In a world made of very different principles of sociability – of castes, regions, communities – the strident new language of rights has sought to establish primarily rights of contending groups. Most major radical demands in Indian politics are not for group equality rather than income inequality between individuals – leading to a strange fading from the discourse of one of the poorest societies of the world of a politics centred on poverty.

It is not surprising that elite groups, who have most to lose from the assertion of demands of lower castes, have given large-scale support to a counter-move through a new kind of politics of religious communities. Hindu nationalist parties were relatively unsuccessful electorally in the period of Congress hegemony. But in a climate of intensifying lower-caste assertion, their insinuation against the Congress policies of muddled secularism – that it discriminated against the Hindus in return for secure voting support from the Muslim minority – attracted substantial upper-caste backing. Assisted by an inflammatory rhetoric, centred on an old mosque allegedly built on a destroyed temple in the sixteenth century, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party made dramatic electoral gains in the elections in the 1990s to emerge finally as the largest single party in parliament, and ruling India for the last five years with the support of volatile coalitions. But what is remarkable in this contest is that the BJP has sought to fashion a response to the politics of lower caste groups by appeal to the emotions of another form of community. Communitarianism in Indian politics takes complex and at times extremely unpleasant forms.

But democracy is a complex ideal which appeals equally to two types of political principles : it claims its legitimacy on one side, from the pursuit of conflict through established, transparent procedures, which ensure that no group loses out finally and irreversibly, so that they continue to follow their objectives through the recursive electoral contests. On the other hand, it appeals to the principles of participation in both its deliberative and expressive forms. The politics of community assertion in India has created a potential conflict between these two principles of participation and proceduralism. Political parties representing large communities with a strong sense of grievance have often regarded procedures of liberal government as unjustified obstacles in their pursuit of justice. Procedures are sometimes threatened by the politics of intense participation.

Another peculiarity of the story of modern politics in India is the simultaneous power of democracy and bureaucracy. Although theoretically bureaucracy and democracy, the increased power and reach of the state seems to conflict, in principle, with democratic demands against it, this apparent paradox is not difficult to explain. Democratic participation has increased ordinary people’s expectations about conditions and quality of life. In a society in which does not generate enough wealth to enable groups in society to pursue their institutional aims, all demands for amelioration – for hospitals, schools, roads – are directed at the state, which is the only possible source for creation of collective goods. Thus the rise of democracy has reinforced the tendency towards the extension of the bureaucratic state.

For understanding of what Europe has done to the history of other cultures over the long term, the Indian story is significant for two reasons. A common pessimistic argument asserts that the ‘export’ of the state, with bounded territories and modern institutions of governance, to other parts of the world through European colonialism has largely failed. In fact, it has forced people to live their lives, unsuccessfully, under uncomprehended frameworks leading to increased tensions and expanded violence. Eventually, the argument runs, such historical experiments have failed leading to common experiences of state collapse. The Indian case encourages a more optimistic conclusion: it shows that a country comprising nearly a fifth of the world’s population has successfully mastered the techniques of establishing the modern state and, despite widespread illiteracy learnt to work the principles of democracy in their own way. Despite the complex demands on its ideological and material resources India has not seen a collapse of its institutional structure leading to a breakdown of minimal social order. Interestingly, although its state has been evidently overstretched, it has managed to avoid complete bankruptcy and failure to provide basic services. India has avoided the threat of a ‘state collapse’ in both the economic and more fundamental political forms.

Perhaps the most astonishing part of the Indian story has been the relative success of democracy. There have long been arguments in political theory that have asserted economic or cultural conditions for the success of democratic government. Either a certain level of prior economic growth, or an underlying cultural common sense which accords equal value to individuals have been regarded as necessaru preconditions for the success of democratic institutions. The relative success of Indian democracy defies both arguments. In the politics of one of the poorest countries of the world, with a traditional order based on the pure principle of hierarchy, democracy has been for half a century a universally uncontested ideal. But ‘success of democracy’ in India can mean two different things. In much of Western journalism, and a part of academic analysis as well success of democracy simply means the uninterrupted continuance of electoral politics. Actually, however, the ‘success’ of Indian democracy ought to be viewed in Tocqueville’s terms – as the historical development of a social force that has transformed fundamental social relations of everyday lives. It is true that the historical outcomes, the political trajectories of this story of democracy have been quite different from the great European stories of democratic transformation. But that is hardly suprirising. Democratic institutions operate on the basis of template of the specific sociability available in each society. If democracy achieves success in other non-European societies in future, their trajectories are likely to resemble the Indian narrative rather than the European ones. It is impossible to predict the exact direction this narrative of political transformation of a hierarchical society might take; but, despite the fact that it has happened in relative historical silence, without the dramatic violence that accompanied the American or French revolutions, it will rank as a story of one of the great transformations of modern history.

Interviewed by Aditya Nigam, Fellow CSDS, Delhi. The interview was originally conducted for Naked Punch (www.nakedpunch.com).

Aditya Nigam: I wish to speak to you about alternative knowledge – or knowledges. But before I go into the more theoretical questions, let me ask you about your biographical entry point. Given that you are a trained psychologist and statistician – both part of mainstream knowledge-systems – and in fact, joined the CSDS as a statistical expert, how did you venture into this intellectual area?

Ashis Nandy:  That is more or less accidental. I was a trained as a sociologist. In fact, I initially went to a medical college and did three years in medicine. Later, in order to do sociology, I went to a department in Nagpur – one of the few sociology departments in India at that time. It was a department that was specifically trying to break away from the mainstream traditions of sociology. This department of sociology was very much oriented towards mathematics and mathematization of sociology. There was a major component of statistics and because I came from a science background, I found that attractive.

Ashis Nandy

Like many young fools of that time, I thought that society could be quantified; all data, all insight could be quantified. Subsequently, I went into psychology – in fact I was trained in clinical psychology, not simply psychology – and it was heavily psychoanalytic at that time and so was heavily anti-quantitative in orientation. Many of my seniors were trained psychoanalysts. But my interests in alternative knowledge proceeded in a convoluted way. I was interested in the psychology of politics. But in those days, about the only people interested in psychoanalysis and the psychology of politics were some of the Frankfurt School scholars, especially Adorno, Horkheimer – and Erich Fromm for a while. They actually made use of and combined quantitative studies with psychoanalysis and I will tell you some other time…interesting stories about that [‘the quantitative side of the story’.] But it is interesting that the Frankfurt school scholars were the only ones, and only Jews probably, who escaped the Nazi persecution because they took their own studies seriously and trusted their own data. Their survey on the ‘authoritarian personality’ revealed to them a prominent authoritarian core in the personality of the German workers, who were otherwise, technically communists or socialists. They understood that if an authoritarian regime came to power, one couldn’t trust them. So they shifted, so the story goes, their office near the station and when the time came, they escaped from there to Switzerland…but that’s beside the point.

So in that sense, there was this conflict within me also. When I came here to the Centre [CSDS] – I was about 26 – I was interested in two kinds of things. First, the psychology of politics as reflected in major social and political reform movements in India. I started going through Raja Ram Mohun Roy and his life; simultaneously, I was interested in the psychological components – and the context – of the intellectuals and the intellectual world since the nineteenth century. Not much work seems to have been done since the nineteenth century. I wanted to study this indifference and this took me towards scientists. My first independent study in fact was a study of two scientists…I was interested in the psychological and cultural sources – well psychological sources to start with – of creativity and of the kind of knowledge they produced. That gradually took me to the area of culture because I found that we cannot figure out these things – even the psychological interpretation is not complete – without paying attention to the cultural context. Ultimately this became my more sustained interest. I became interested in the culture of science itself. The question of properly scientific creativity and the destructiveness of science…The psychology of politics had already taken me in that direction of understanding violence. And ultimately this became a kind of swing and my increasing preoccupation came to be with the sources of human creativity and destructiveness. This led to my more general investigations on the destructiveness of science and a search for a radical critique of science that would focus not only on the critique of its ‘faulty’ context but would examine the very text of science itself. I found it increasingly difficult to believe that it was merely the context that accounted for its problems and that there was some thought police guarding the borders of the text itself, as it were. That took me to different kinds of knowledge systems which had different kinds of starting points and different baselines…different points of departure. I was astounded to see the sheer diversity and the sheer resilience of many of these systems of knowledge. In fact, the resilience of these systems impressed me terribly and two things struck me while attempting to understand these knowledge systems. One, that in the ultimate analysis, dominance is not ensured through political economy, though it manifests itself through it; it is also not ensured through superior technology. It is mainly ensured through categories. If you can generate categories which marginalize the categories of others, then you have forced them to play your game. And as long as that can be ensured, you can be pretty sure that your dominance will not be challenged, because that game is yours.

Aditya: When you talk of alternative knowledges or alternative knowledge systems, what are the kinds of things you have in mind? One kind that easily comes to mind are those that can be called the ‘traditional knowledge systems’. They are also defined by the fact that their importance is more local…

Ashis: Yes, it can be local, but it can have much wider relevance also. Take for instance, something like healing systems. At a rough guess, a survey by CV Seshadhri shows this, that at least 80 percent Indians go to traditional healers. It is not that they do not approach modern doctors but their approach is more like that of going to a grocery store. There may be things that do not go with each other but when you buy you do not buy this and not buy that…I think they use all kinds of systems. At least one luminary of the medical profession produced some data contesting this figure and saying that only about 40 percent people go to traditional healers. This figure is not convincing to me – you know the figure for Australia is 60 percent. I suspect that his questionnaire asked in an either/or fashion: do you do x, Or, do you do y? And because you are the kind of person you are, I mean the interviewer is the kind of person he is, and given the cultural and status baggage, the respondents give the answer they do. I have examples in my own family where my uncles have been very well known doctors. Whenever I had a cold and cough, they would immediately recommend drugs to me. Their wives, aamaar maamiraa (my aunts), would ask me what they said. I would say they asked to take such and such medicine and their response would be, “Why do you listen to them? Who asked you to go to them?”[said in Bengali]. I will give you turmeric powder and pepper in warm milk – just have it. So this is there in almost all households. I am sure my house was no exception. We take recourse to these traditional systems all the time. But at the same time there is a healthy and robust skepticism regarding these – all healing systems – often expressed in common Sanskrit saying that circulate at a popular level, to the effect that the vaidya [a traditional healer] kills by the hundreds, while the doctor kills in thousands. This robust skepticism began to fascinate me because I noticed that this skepticism was absent in modern medical culture. One third of all medical reference in North America are iatrogenic – that is one third of all diseases reported are either drug induced or doctor induced.  Not that there is no skepticism in the mainstream medical culture…but that’s repressed. Illich [Ivan] has given some instances and Manu Kothari too has given some very telling examples…For instance, one of the instances he has given is that of surgeons who operate on intestinal ulcers. The rate of surgeons prescribing surgery to themselves or to their family members is one-third the rate they prescribe to others and these are cases of elite hospitals. In fact one survey says very explicitly that by standard medical conventions, doctors would routinely under-prescribe drugs for themselves and their kind and similar is the case also with surgical interventions. So I became interested in this…I began to think that talking of a science like medicine…It enjoys a kind of sanctity and once you say that ‘science says this’ then everybody takes it as gospel truth. So this is one kind of way in which the text is also contaminated.
The other way of looking at it is this that scientists, because they operate within a particular kind of context, produce a kind of science that is itself contaminated, like the example that I have used quite often that Amulya Reddy told me for the first time: when they were coming to drop the bomb in Hiroshima, three scientists who had worked on the Manhattan project, went to Norbert Weiner and told him that they had calculated that what height they must detonate the bomb in order to maximize the casualties. Weiner said to them, “please keep me out of it.” Three of the four scientists were Nobel Laureates. Weiner himself was a Nobel Laureate, so were the other nuclear physicists. The only one who was not a Nobel Laureate was a mathematician and that was presumably because there was no Nobel Prize in mathematics in those days. I believe that responsibility has to be shared by the scientists themselves and it will not do to always pass on the burden to impersonal forces of politics, or ‘American imperialism’ or ‘military-industrial complex’ or ‘capitalism’ or ‘Nazism’ and such other things, when it comes to the destructive uses of science.

Aditya: In Science, Hegemony and Violence, you have spoken of science as the new reason of the state, which can be used to ‘kill, maim and exploit’ in the name of science and you referred to Robert Jungk’s claim about nuclear energy – that you have extended to science as such – that this produces a kind of set up that is incompatible with democracy and democratic governance. I would like you to elaborate a bit on that.

Ashis: This is really an empirical thing. Jungk was basically a journalist turned thinker. He figured out through his empirical observations that wherever you see nuclear weaponry or nuclear energy, there is a whole structure of secrecy, surveillance and authoritarian control. Everywhere, whether the country is democratic or not. It is absolutely mandatory; it is universal. In fact, that is why I am not only against nuclear weaponry but also nuclear energy. I have another reason also; I think this notion of ‘objectivity’ that science insists upon demands two splits, two kinds of splits in our consciousness: One, between the observer and the observed, or the subject and the object, if you like – the doctor and the patient, researcher and the researched; and the other is the split that science demands between your cognitive and your affective or motivational self. I call this the double split of consciousness and all this is the demand of objectivity. I have invariably seen that even if you do get probably more objective results in some respects, the division of subject and object is maintained no longer even in the philosophy of sciences. There are so many philosophers who have spoken about that. But one of the dangers of this objectivity is ‘objectification’ or what Aime Cesaire calls ‘thingification’. He states this in the context of colonialism particularly, where the subject races are treated as ‘things’ to be ‘improved’, ‘reworked’, ‘remodeled’ and if necessary recalibrated, discarded, junked or treated as obsolete, redundant or anachronistic – or whatever. And this split is in the heart of modern science – even though some of the recent work in theoretical physics and theoretical biology might protest against it, the entire culture is still very much built around this split. And once you begin to use science as the basis of deciding how to handle human affairs: whether to establish mega dams or not, whether to allow biotechnologically modified food grains, this becomes the ultimate sanction. Then it matters little if a few thousand people are killed or a hundred million killed – it all appears like some unavoidable ‘collateral damage’.

Aditya: One question here, since you speak of the ‘imperialism of categories’, about alternative knowledge systems. You have stated that modern, western knowledge systems not only produce modes of domination, they also produce and decide upon the limits of dissent, its forms and so on. Could you tell us a bit more about the alternative systems that you have in mind that do not conform to the framework and limits and criteria set by the dominant knowledge systems. Gandhi, of course, comes to mind…..

Ashis: I think they exist all around – Gandhi is only one instance and, in a sense, Gandhism is much greater than Gandhi. Gandhi himself said that what I am saying is that is nothing new and is as old as civilization.  But if you read this very good friend of mine who died recently, Syed Hussain Alatas from Malaysia, you’ll find that some of those things are there too…where he talks about laziness also as a way of subverting the norms set by the dominant, the myth of the West if you please. So these kinds of things are not unknown. There was this conference of evangelists in Bangkok a few years ago whose proceedings I was going through. They think Hindus are Satanic, because they believe that all religions lead to Truth and that actually subverts the Truth of their religion. So these different modes that simply lie outside the logic and normative criteria set by the dominant have not been unknown in history. There are many instances of this kind among the plantation labourers in the Americas and Africa – one can even argue that Cecil Rhodes’ famous description – or notorious description, if you like, of the African as half savage, half child, is partly a recognition that this is the way they remain intractable and unmanageable. But this is all over the place; it is human nature and I don’t think it is Gandhian very consciously. All large, dominant systems also create a space for dissent – in a kind of ‘Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’ style – using the same language, same conventions, to establish that dissent is sane, normal, reasonable and well intentioned. But the oppressed have no obligation to follow the rules of the game – and they do not. In a society where such sanctioned forms of dissent are prevalent, there will of course, be people in large numbers who will go towards them, but there will always be people who defy these and try to subvert the given mode of dissent and of course, they will not be seen as dissenters; they will be seen as lunatics. They will be seen as being outside the ken of conventional rights granted to dissenters. So for instance, sixty percent of the Americans believe today that torture is justified, especially, say while dealing with a ‘terrorist’ who apparently knows about an impending terrorist attack. Obviously, terrorism – rightly or wrongly, that is not the point – happens to represent then a new kind of dissent. The kind that does not conform to laid out criteria and there is always a scope that such dissent also represents a search for a different kind of world and challenges the dominant in a much more radical fashion – and the real test of tolerance and democracy comes there.

Aditya: In this context, one question about the efficacy of such dissent. …Often the sharp division and lines drawn between what is ‘authorized’ dissent and what would be considered to be reasonable dissent, lead to a situation where the latter are often reduced to ineffectivity.

Ashis: Let me say this: that the really interesting kinds of dissent that flout the norms of conventional dissent are those that use the idiom of those actually marginalized and excluded by the system. To them such dissent is truly and easily understandable; to them it does not seem to flout any kind norm/s. They constitute the heart of common sense, to an extent, even the heart of everyday life. Here it becomes a very different kind of thing. The language is limited… When Nelson Mandela spoke of resistance, armed struggle his language was truly understood by his people. Even when he changed to non-violence, his language remained intelligible to them – as with say Aung San Suu Ki. Mandela’s almost natural acceptance in South Africa, was because that is the language of the majority of people. It was only a small minority, linked to a globally dominant knowledge system, what you may call a shared global common sense of a global middle class that thought he was taking a very odd position.

Aditya: I wish to now come to the position you have enunciated in “History’s Forgotten Doubles”. History, it seems is the other pole of your critique. If science forms one aspect, it is history and the notions of Time, temporality etc that form the second aspect…

Ashis: Well, in a manner of speaking, it is the same aspect. The drive towards ‘objectivity’, its fetishization is the main problem. If History was one among many ways of relating to the past then it would be different; it would enrich our understanding of the past. But as with science, it appoints itself as the dominant and in fact, the sole way. It institutes a certain hierarchy that banishes all other modes of relating to the past – myths, legends, shared public memory transmitted over generations. And so the past of communities which do not use History, is lost. It is not merely a question of excluding chunks of past, for that can always be dealt with by invoking a counter history. History relies on exiling notions, sentiments, feelings, pain. So the voice of a survivor (of any violent event), becomes invalid – except in ‘oral history’. The pain of the survivor…or the families who have been destroyed have very little status in History. Take the Partition for example. At least two hundred books have been written on it and all excellent books but it is only recently in the 1990s, that scholars have started work on the nature of violence and suffering. We had to wait for one and a half generations before we would begin excavating this aspect of the Partition’s history. Likewise the best works on the European genocide came out only in the 1970s and 1980s. They came out partly outside the discipline of History. This is because it is not just a matter of the annihilation of a culture, or a community only in terms of numbers. It is also a matter of the trauma involved in it. It is a matter of the way in which the millions who survived transmitted the experience. One of the most tragic findings of mine in the Partition study is that those who are direct victims and suffered enormously during the Partition and saw families and children killed in front of their eyes – they still have fonder and warmer memories and openness about the community which inflicted the violence but their children and grand children do not because they only have atrocity stories. They have never lived in any situation with those communities, they have not experienced the other side of these relationships.

Aditya: I was actually struck by the way you formulate something in the beginning of the essay “History’s Forgotten Doubles”, which is otherwise such a radical critique of the enterprise of History. You say that there are people who live outside History but they also have theories of the past and that they also believe that the past is important in terms of shaping their present and future. And I wondered about this formulation, partly because I have been trying to look at issues of Time in so-called non modern contexts and one of the things that seems to be quite evident is that this separation of the Past, Present and Future – these are very modern notions….

Ashis: That is one of the problems, at least when I wrote that article. I was bothered about that because that kind of clear separation in completely missing, say, in the Indian epics…

Aditya: Not just epics but one finds so many of these instances in our own lived cultures and I was struck by a recent study of the Zapatistas where the professors from Mexico University landed up – fired by Marxism-Leninism – to organize the indigenous peasantry of the Chiapas mountains. This study has a discussion based on detailed interviews with Sub-Commandant Marcos, and it is fascinating. Marcos explains in great detail how they had to unlearn so many of the things the knew and one of these concerned the indigenous people’s notion of Time – so that when they were speaking, it was difficult to tell whether the incident happened last week or five hundred years ago or in some absolutely ancient past…

Ashis: Yes, actually that was the problem. I had to traverse between the language of History and non-history. You are right and I tried to grapple with this question while making a critique of history. You find in many of the legends and myths not only here but in many other places and folk literatures, it appears quite clearly. We Indians don’t have that kind of conception…so somebody comes from the future and goes away…or you find in the Bengali upakathas [folk tales of a kind], where the birds talk like human beings. It is not as if they are blessed by some sage or some such thing. They do not feel any need to justify it. Similarly you have someone going to heaven or to paataal [hell] and coming back. This traversing of time is very well developed in our cultures and in Latin America too it is very developed, not just Sub-Commandant Marcos… and it appears in a very interesting way that when you are talking of the Past, the present and the future are present in it, and when you are talking of the Present, the past and the future are present in it and when you talk of the Future, the past and present are present in it. So there are three modes – it is as if when you talk of one modality say the Past, that is like the dominant gene and the other two become regressive and likewise when you talk of the Present and Future…Even then you doubt whether your can call them ‘regressive’.

Aditya: One question here about your relationship with Ivan Illich  and others…How did you connect with Illich?

Ashis: Accidentally. Because he was very enamoured of India – Gandhi, India and India’s new experiences. I found his idea of “Deschooling Society”, in many ways to be a very powerful justification of [Gandhi’s concept of] Nai Taleem or ‘New Education’. All my writings have come amidst a certain intellectual engagement with alternative knowledge systems and that brought me to Ivan Illich. Illich then led me to Gustavo Esteva and Majid Rahenema and a galaxy of other intellectuals…

Aditya: One final question. Since we have talked about dissenting knowledges as opposed to mainstream systems, at least one of the important influences for you has been Sigmund Freud…

Ashis: Yes.

Aditya: And you have also mentioned somewhere that Marx – as he came to you through the Frankfurt School, especially Adorno and Marcuse…

Ashis: Yes, Adorno and Marcuse in particular. There was a lot of influence of Erich Fromm among some in India though I thought he was the weakest of the lot. So for me, it was Adorno, Marcuse and Hannah Arendt. They were the only ones at that time who were critical or skeptical of the promises of modernity. Marcuse – though he himself was a product of the Enlightenment – was able to make a serious critique of the Enlightenment. Heidegger was not so much a direct influence and I came to him much, much later when people started telling me that what I was writing resonated with Heidegger. But Marcuse was important in challenging the idea of ‘normality’, of ‘sanity’ and his concept of ‘negation’ was important. Many of my attempts to reach out to other schools of knowledge, to writers like Castaneda and other knowledge systems, involved precisely such ‘negation’. It is not that I am looking for some pristine, ultimate Truth in the alternative systems, or for an undiscovered paradise in them. I am looking for ways of making the world more fluid and more open and opened up for the future so that the next generation can define their future more democratically – in a more participatory manner. The openness and fluidity of emotional and intellectual life is what is most crucial.

India today

Issue: 118
Posted: 31 March 08

Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam, Power and Contestation: India Since 1989 (Zed, 2007), £12.99

This book, written by two academics who are also campaigners, offers the best survey of recent Indian history that I have seen.

It begins with a chapter on the political expression of caste. The authors discuss controversial proposals for positive discrimination for low castes in public employment (the “Mandal report”) and how electoral politics have been colonised by caste. These dynamics can spread out in apparently peculiar directions. The “untouchable” (or Dalit) political party, the BSP, has entered state-level coalitions with the Brahmin dominated Hindu chauvinist BJP. This phenomenon illustrates one of the authors’ central themes—a crisis in what they call the “secular-nationalist Nehruvian consensus”, which dominated India after independence in 1947.

The key challenge to this is the “Hindutva” (Hinduness) concept of the BJP and its allied organisations. For the BJP, India is Hinduness. If this is true then the “Nehruvian” vision of secularism is nothing but anti-democratic pandering to (alien) minorities. The authors provide an effective tour of the network of organisations of the “Sangh Parivar” (Brotherhood of Organisations) allied to the BJP. They also show how the Sangh Parivar used a few key issues to build support and set the political agenda from 1985 onwards.

The mainstream “secular” left has attempted to manoeuvre around these issues by an Indian version of “triangulation” (ie adopting some of their opponents’ ideas). Unsurprisingly, the net effect has been to legitimise and build up the communalists of the Sangh Parivar.

Once the authors get onto the impact of globalisation they are in their element. They clearly demonstrate how the Indian bourgeoisie and judiciary have embraced a position of validating any project that can be portrayed as modernising or developmental. All mainstream parliamentary parties have embraced this perspective.

Most notably, in 2000 the Supreme Court made a judgment that allowed the development of the controversial Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada River in the state of Gujarat. A 1994 judgment reiterating the principle of eminent domain (the power of the state to acquire private property for public use) is being used to dispossess communities of common land for developmental use, or private land with below market value compensation. In other words, we have here an example of how part of the “superstructure” is operating to promote a strategy of the “base”—in this instance, the “globalising” section of the bourgeoisie.

This globalisation has had almost perverse consequences. In the late 1980s the emergence of large scale cassette production resulted in a huge demand for recordings of Pakistani TV soaps. One of their main selling points was their use of modern (non-Persianised) Urdu. The north Indian audience found this much more accessible than the formal and synthetic Sanskritised Hindi imposed on Indian productions. The subsequent emergence of satellite TV has expanded this “cultural pollution” so feared by the ultra-nationalists. There has been a proliferation of English and Urdu loan words into contemporary spoken Hindi of the under 40s.

It was not only the bourgeoisie who embraced globalisation. The authors track the journey of the Communist Party (Marxist) (CPM), the main left party. The CPM is a curious fusion of Stalinism and old fashioned social democracy, so perhaps the story of capitulation towards modernisation and development isn’t so much of a surprise. This reached its culmination in the suppression of a popular revolt at Nandigram in CPM-ruled West Bengal.

The CPM have run West Bengal since 1977, and initially consolidated their position with a radical land reform programme. Now 14,500 acres are being compulsorily purchased for a special economic zone. Inside this zone normal labour and environmental laws do not apply—all to aid development. The protesters have been attacked both by police and by CPM activists. The authors point out that the CPM chief minister justified this by invoking the mechanistic “laws of history” argument perfected by the first revisionist, Eduard Bernstein.

The CPM’s policy is reflected at national level by its support for the pro-globalisation Congress-led coalition. This has provoked huge dissent from the “non-party” left and an unlikely but limited resurgence in Maoist groups in the most backward forested areas of the country.

The authors include a good review of one of the less known aspects of modern India—the insurgencies in the north east. They ask whether this area is really part of “India”, given its incorporation into the imperial state by the frontier policy of the British (which might also be a useful way to look at the role of Wasiristan in Pakistan). This then patches into a discussion of the recent phases of the Kashmir conflict.

The final section deals with India’s position in the world. Here the authors’ problems of perspective become significant. By failing to comprehend how globalisation has transformed the Indian state into a “great power”, they misinterpret the US-Indian agreement on nuclear power as ensuring “that the US government will decide Indian foreign policy”. In reality, the Indian government intend to behave as all great powers do—they intend to cheat. The deal is in fact a way for the US government to save its face, being unable to admit that it cannot coerce the Indians on these matters. The Indians are doing the US government a favour by going along with this facade.

This problem of perspective—that India is following a standard path of “successful” capitalist development—leads to a weak conclusion. The book simply peters out into a brief summary of what the authors have said and then ends with a limp hope that “contestations” to capital and the state will continue. Such a readable and informative book could have used its material to identify how this “normal” capitalist path can lead to another “normal” feature of capitalism—rising struggles by the growing proletariat as it becomes more aware of its exploitation by capital and, more importantly, as it becomes aware of its own power.