Indian Political Theory

Laying the Groundwork for Svaraj

Aakash Singh Rathore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315284194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

At present, a nativist turn in Indian political theory can be observed. There is a general assumption that the indigenous thought to which researchers are supposed to be (re)turning may somehow be immediately visible by ignoring the colonization of the mind and polity. In such a conception of svaraj (which can be translated as 'authentic autonomy'), the tradition to be returned to would be that of the indigenous elites.

In this book, this concept of svaraj is defined as a thick conception, which links it with exclusivist notions of spirituality, profound anti-modernity, exceptionalistic moralism, essentialistic nationalism and purism. However, post-independence India has borne witness to an alternative trajectory: a thin svaraj. The author puts forward a workable contemporary ideal of thin svaraj, i.e. political, and free of metaphysical commitment. The model proposed is inspired by B.R. Ambedkar's thoughts, as opposed to the thick conception found in the works of M.K. Gandhi, KC Bhattacharya and Ramachandra Gandhi. The author argues that political theorists of Indian politics continue to work with categories and concepts alien to the lived social and political experiences of India's common man, or everyday people. Consequently, he emphasises the need to decolonize Indian political theory, and rescue it from the grip of western theories, and fascination with western modes of historical analysis. The necessity to avoid both universalism and relativism and more importantly address the political predicaments of 'the people' is the key objective of the book, and a push for a reorientation of Indian political theory.

An interesting new interpretation of a contemporary ideal of svaraj, this analysis takes into account influences from other cultures and sources as well as eschews thick conceptions that stifle imaginations and imaginaries. This book will be of interest to academics in the fields of philosophy, political science, sociology, literature and cultural studies in general and contemporary political theory, South Asian and Indian politics and political theory in particular.

Part I
What is political theory meant to do?

1
The thick and thin of svaraj

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history,
when we step out from the old to the new,
when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation,
long suppressed, finds utterance.

(Jawaharlal Nehru)

It is an open secret that transatlantic¹ forms and categories dominate the curriculum of academic philosophy the world over, and nowhere more than India. All the central and state universities under the authority of the UGC perpetuate a transatlantic-centric syllabus, that is ostensibly balanced by healthy doses of so-called Indian philosophy. But the Indian philosophy is itself styled, organized, and taught in basically orientalist form.²

Looking at it from the other side, if you examine the curriculum of transatlantic anglophone universities, what you find in the phraseology within the content and authorship of the course readings is that nearly all theory is authored by Anglo-Americans, and only specific political situations, facts, and figures, warrants input of native, periphery-generated information. Anything with the adjective ‘global’ or ‘human’ derives from the transatlantic region, while work generated from other locales is expected to be modified by the area adjective: ‘Indian’ or ‘non-Western’, for example. Indeed, whether in political theory or comparative politics, in nearly all cases where the non-Western world is studied, the syllabus and description will be laden with key words like ‘poverty’, ‘crisis’, and ‘corruption’, and the potentially ideological normative notions that background the term ‘development’.³ In short, to borrow a trader’s metaphor, transatlantic academia is still very much in the business of manufacturing and exporting norms, and Indian academia remains in the business of their import and distribution.

Such a situation, seen from both sides, gives us the framework within which we can easily understand the abiding relevance of a call for ‘svaraj in ideas’.⁴ Such svaraj is shamefully, even obscenely absent from Indian philosophy, political science, and law departments – the three disciplines and faculties within which I generally have worked, in both India and in the transatlantic region.

Svaraj – thick and thin

What we understand by this ‘svaraj in ideas’ (Bhattacharyya 2011) is, of course, open to contestation (Vajpeyi 2012; Bhushan and Garfield 2015).⁵ I propose a thin version, one that aligns itself with what John Rawls (1985) refers to as ‘political, not metaphysical’. The distinction between thick and thin conceptions originates in Clifford Geertz’s anthropology (see Geertz 1973), but philosophers know it rather by way of Bernard Williams (2006). I do not use the term quite as either of them do; rather, my usage is intuitive, pedestrian, and unsophisticated. By thick I mean more demanding, requiring greater commitment from more of the person, metaphysical commitment for example; by thin, I mean less demanding, easier to give assent to, a sort of political compromise and not a comprehensive doctrine (in the Rawlsian sense).

Looking at the literature, svarajist writing from Lokmanya Tilak or Sri Aurobindo through to strategies of decolonizing the mind, up to Ashis Nandy and S.N. Balagangadhara and even Arvind Kejriwal, what you find is that a thick conception of svaraj tends to link it with at least two, and usually more, of the following traits: exclusivist notions of spirituality, profound anti-modernity, exceptionalistic moralism, essentialistic nationalism, and a purist orientation.

We all know this story begins with Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1986). In Hind Swaraj (1909 in Gujarati; 1910 in English), Gandhi develops a series of oppositions between what he calls ‘Western civilization’ and ‘Indian civilization’. Western civilization is irreligious, and displays ‘the tendency . . . to propagate immorality’ (Gandhi 1986: 233). Indian civilization, on the contrary, has ‘the tendency to elevate the moral being’ (ibid.). Western civilization is ‘satanic’; it is the ‘Kingdom of Satan’ dominated by the ‘God of War’. In contrast, Indian civilization is the ‘Kingdom of God’; it is ruled by the ‘God of Love’. For these reasons, India is ‘fitter to teach others than to learn from others’ (ibid.: 232).

In India, as elsewhere, hearkening back to a pre-modern golden age has also been a frequent trait of nationalist thought. Gandhi evokes the ‘ancient civilization of India which . . . represents the best the world has ever seen’ (Gandhi 1986: 272). And again,

the tendency of Indian civilization is to elevate the moral being, that of the Western civilization is to propagate immorality. The latter is godless, the former is based on a belief in God. So understanding and so believing, it behoves every lover of India to cling to the old Indian civilisation even as a child clings to its mother’s breast.

This is nothing other than the archetypal quest for authenticity, and we have seen its appearance many places and times in history, such as in Wagner, with Heidegger, and on and on.

The profound anti-modernism that is coupled with Gandhi’s exceptionalistic moralism is also well known: ‘Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilization. . . . It represents a great sin’ (Gandhi 1986: 256). Elsewhere he states: ‘I cannot recall a single good point in connection with machinery’ (ibid.). ‘Good travels at a snail’s pace’, while ‘evil has wings’ (ibid.: 258).

Gandhi eased up on many of these ideas as his thought and practice matured. But the 1919 Indian edition appeared with no alteration of these dichotomies, and no added refinement. Lest it appear I am judging or condemning Gandhi for these excesses and strategic hyperbole, let me state plainly that I am not. All these opinions and tropes of his are easy to explain when understood in the context of his audience, of the provocation of G.K. Chesterton, of the terrorism to which he was opposed, and so on. My point, as should become clear, is that though his thick conception is easy to explain and sympathize with, it leaves an indelible mark on the dialectics of nationalist and critical thought up to this day.

A decade after the appearance of the Indian English edition of Hind Swaraj, K.C. Bhattacharyya (KCB) (2011 [1928]) gives his intriguing talk on ‘Svaraj in Ideas’. In this lecture, we find one of the preeminent and earliest attempts to thin svaraj;⁶ that is, to minimize the attributions of India’s exclusivist notions of spirituality, profound anti-modernity, and exceptionalistic moralism, though traces of essentialistic nationalism remain strong, with a purist orientation deeply suspicious of hybridity, referring to it as ‘sterile’ and ‘slavish’. (Hybridity is a concept we will return to in Chapter 8.) In short, what we observe in the text of KCB is a gambit: in thinning out much of the comprehensive commitment demanded by Hind Swaraj, KCB unwittingly begins himself to thicken the idea of tradition, native genius, and distinctiveness.

In tracing this genealogy of thick svaraj, we cannot fail to mention the recent philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi (RCG). Indeed, there is a direct, non-metaphorical line from RCG back to Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. KCB’s gambit simply helps form a passage – what genealogists call a collateral line – to the thick conception of svaraj that riddles the writings of RCG.

RCG’s (1984: 467) argument that ‘advaita is a distinctive identifying feature of Indian consciousness’ is as thick a conception of svaraj as is available, demanding onto-epistemological commitments that are so exclusionary it is frightening even to a moderate traditionalist. I say ‘exclusionary’, but if you examine it closely, RCG’s approach, to bring otherness into the fold of sameness, equally highlights one of the dangers of inclusion, which is a term generally regarded positively, especially with respect to the inclusion–exclusion binary. But this sort of inclusion, the assimilation of the minority into the paternalistic fold of the majority, runs against the essence of svaraj conceived politically. The sva (self, auto in Greek) and raj (rule, giving the law, nomos in Greek), seen in this classical understanding of autonomy, or giving oneself the nomos, the name: is this urge to name oneself, to self-identify independently of the majority, to say ‘no, I am not advaitin’, is this not decisively at the heart of svaraj?

In 1984, an Indian Philosophical Quarterly special number appeared on ‘Svaraj in Ideas’, arguably one of the most important documents in the contemporary history of Indian political philosophy. In it, Dharmendra Goel offers insightful critique of what he calls KCB’s ‘naive conservatism’, suggesting that he tends to equate sanaatana traditions to the ‘core’ of India’s distinctiveness. As Goel says: ‘As far as his taken-for-granted attitude toward an integrated spiritualistic core of Indian culture is concerned, I find his uncritical assumption regarding the continuity, individuality and distinctiveness of Indian Mind, its thought, spirit and values, totally untenable’ (Goel 1984: 431).

By contrast, Goel presents a much more plural account of India’s internal diversity, troubling the priority of what he calls the ‘vedic Brahminical orthodoxy of Sanskrit pandits’ (Goel 1984: 424), to tease out numerous other equally authentic Indian vestiges of tradition, arising in far-flung edges of the sub-continent, or variegated sects, communities, amongst tribals, and so on and so forth. Goel’s paper is as brilliant in its undermining of the homogenizing and purist elements of thick svarajist or nationalist tendencies as it is in fact mis-directed. For, I see no real evidence in KCB’s ‘Svaraj in Ideas’ toward this homogenizing essentialism. Quite the contrary, there are as many passages identifying Indian tradition with subalterns as there are identifying it with its elites. For example, there is the particularly eloquent remark claiming that our ‘Indigenous ideas . . . pulsate in the life and mind of the masses’ (Bhattacharyya 2011: 111).

But note that I say misdirected rather than incorrect. For the proper direction Goel’s critique should have taken would have been toward RCG rather than toward KC Bhattacharyya. It is of course also possible that Goel had a broader understanding of KCB in mind, as there are fairly clear orthodox tendencies in his published philosophical works.

Speaking of the life and mind of the masses, the same day that KCB was delivering his lecture on ‘Svaraj in Ideas’ to an elite, upper-caste audience at the prestigious Hooghly College overlooking the Ganges, Dr B.R. Ambedkar was addressing a gathering of labourers and common men in a Bombay slum. In his speech, Ambedkar offered elements of his own interpretation of svaraj. I will quote from Ambedkar, what I call a thin conception of svaraj: ‘Swaraj must be a Government of the people, by the people, and for the people. This is the raison d’être of Swaraj and the only justification for Swaraj’ (Ambedkar 1990: 366). In Ambedkar’s view, nationalist thought is only a means to an end, not an end in itself. The worth of svaraj is determined by the nature of the society that is constructed thereby. The end of svaraj, its sole justification, is in bringing government to the people, low as well as high, having a government by these people, and not just for these people. For Ambedkar, svaraj means profound democratization, tied up with the agency of the governed. This is a crucial point. Svaraj is not a time-travel back, but a place-travel down, to the lived experiences of the masses.

But with this sense of thick and thin established, I want to move away from this genealogy of svaraj, and turn instead to the thought that has unfolded with midnight’s children; specifically, the direction – also, ultimately, svarajist – that this thought seems to decisively have taken. I would call this a teleology of svaraj rather than its genealogy.

The dialectics of recent Indian socio-political thought

This teleology, or rather sort of quasi-Hegelian dialectic, refers to the cunning of globalization (about which see below), indicating the obscure sources of momentum and inspiration for many scholars of Indian political theory who have been trying, against the odds, to inaugurate and cultivate a new tradition of Indian social and political thought in recent years.

Alongside the emergence of precisely that sort of modernity that Gandhi despised, we have witnessed three generations of Indian political philosophers, representing three broadly distinctive orientations. My use of the term ‘generation’ here is both literal, as well as metaphorical. In some cases these are literally generations of teachers and students. Otherwise, you can think of it in the sense of the three ‘generations’ of human rights, for example, blue, red, and green rights (we discuss these generations of human rights more in depth in Chapter 5).

The first generation were the first to formulate systems of thought breaking free from the recapitulation of the ideas of the pantheon of freedom fighters whose thought and labour had contributed to India achieving independence in 1947. This generation, including early scholars like Rajni Kothari, was the first to articulate normative social and political ideas both evoking the distinctive character of Indian thought, while also attempting to surpass it and step comfortably into the secular modern. It is this central preoccupation with modernity that really characterizes their thought.

In parallel, also starting from the 1970s, was a different group of this first generation, consisting of anti-modernists, proponents of resurrecting the tradition. Scholars like V.P. Varma, G.P. Singh, or a bit later V.R. Mehta, did not see free India as the modernists did, a laboratory for decontextualizing the concepts of transatlantic political theory, importing them to India, and recontextualizing these Western forms by filling them in with Indian content. This second group, rather, rejected derivative thought, linked the spread of the dominant liberal ideas with the traumatic imposition of colonial modernity, and often romantically longed for that former ‘wonder that was India’. Though anti-modern, this camp still belongs firmly in the first generation due to their basic preoccupation with, and resistance against, the project of modernizing India.

Then there was the group of scholars who catalysed the passage from this first generation to the coming second generation. This was a welcome development for many. For example, in 1977, Mrinal Miri published an incisive critique of the then-current condition of academic philosophy in the Indian Philosophical Quarterly (Miri and Miri 1977). At the same time, R. Panikkar (1978) was championing the renewal of the vitality and role of Indian philosophy. Just following this, as though seeking to address these and other complaints, the initial period of Subaltern Studies erupts onto the scene (exemplified by Ranajit Guha’s early 1980s writings; see Guha 1983, 1988a, 1988b) and the era of prolific scholarship in the wake of Edward Said’s path-breaking text Orientalism (1978). The work appearing in this transitional period (1978–85) was crucial for the emergence of the next generation of Indian political philosophy. For example, Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction: time for a new Orientalism?
• PART I What is political theory meant to do?
• PART II The inadequacy of transatlantic political theory
• PART III Preconditions for svaraj
• Conclusion: toward a political theory of svaraj
• Index