Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia

Brannon Ingram, J. Barton Scott, SherAli K Tareen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138648821
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317234296
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In South Asia, as elsewhere, the category of 'the public' has come under increased scholarly and popular scrutiny in recent years. To better understand this current conjuncture, we need a fuller understanding of the specifically South Asian history of the term. To that end, this book surveys the modern Indian 'public' across multiple historical contexts and sites, with contributions from leading scholars of South Asia in anthropology, history, literary studies and religious studies. As a whole, this volume highlights the complex genealogies of the public in the Indian subcontinent during the colonial and postcolonial eras, showing in particular how British notions of 'the public' intersected with South Asian forms of publicity. Two principal methods or approaches—the genealogical and the typological—have characterised this scholarship. This book suggests, more in the mode of genealogy, that the category of the public has been closely linked to the sub-continental history of political liberalism. Also discussed is how the studies collected in this volume challenge some of liberalism's key presuppositions about the public and its relationship to law and religion.

What is a Public? Notes from South Asia

J. Barton Scott, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Brannon D. Ingram, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA

In South Asia, as elsewhere, the category of ‘the public’ has come under increased scholarly and popular scrutiny in recent years. To better understand this current conjuncture, we need a fuller understanding of the specifically South Asian history of the term. Toward this end, our discussion begins by considering more than two decades of scholarship that have worked to excavate this history. We propose that two principal methods or approaches—the genealogical and the typological—have characterised this scholarship. We then suggest, more in the mode of genealogy, that the category of the public has been closely linked to the subcontinental history of political liberalism. Finally, we discuss how the essays collected in this special issue challenge some of liberalism’s key presuppositions about the public and its relationship to law and religion.

Reimagining the Public

That the past decade has seen a surge of scholarly interest in publics is hardly surprising: global culture in the early twenty-first century has complicated the distinction between public and private in seemingly unprecedented ways. In South Asia, as elsewhere, new technologies have opened up intimate life to public scrutiny, whether through state surveillance of ‘terrorist’ networks, the digital self-fashioning encouraged by websites like shaadi.com, or ‘biometric’ identity cards that mark the body itself as a form of public information. Gender politics, meanwhile, have determined who can move safely in public, as the 2012 rape and murder of a Delhi college student on a city bus so tragically demonstrated. Here, too, sudden inversions of public and private have been the order of the day, whether in the 2009 ‘pink chaddi campaign’ (in which hundreds of women mailed underwear to a spokesman for the Sri Rama Sena to protest threats against couples caught ‘being together in public’ on Valentine’s Day), or in the abrupt re-closeting of gays and lesbians after the Supreme Court upheld Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in 2013. Finally, ongoing debate about the proper place of religion has occasioned still more contests over the limits of the public. On the one hand, the highly-publicised flesh of figures like Baba Ramdev and Anna Hazare was rendered a symbol for bringing corruption to light; on the other, the call to censor Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus hailed a public defined by that which it would prefer to keep hidden.

In the twenty-first century, it seems, ‘the public’ is a site where matter is perpetually out of place. In such a context, public culture as a ‘zone of debate’ becomes fixated on policing the borders of the public, even as those borders remain in perpetual flux.¹ During the nineteenth century, as Partha Chatterjee has influentially argued, the ‘inner’ domain of religion, literature and domesticity incubated an anti-colonial politics that erupted into public view only later.² The abrupt inversions of publicity and privacy that mark our contemporary moment recall this longer history, even as they point towards an undetermined future.

To understand the current conjuncture, then, we need a fuller sense of the genealogy of ‘the public’ in South Asia. This collection of essays provides one set of possible starting points for such an inquiry. In doing so, it echoes and complements other recent work that asks how fundamental categories of modern thought (‘culture’, ‘the social’) have been adapted in the subcontinent.³ As a whole, these essays suggest that South Asia is not just a special ‘case’ for the articulation of modern notions of the public; rather, we hope to show that by theorising the public from South Asia, we gain unique perspectives on how this central category of modern thought can be re-imagined today.

This collection revisits and expands the project begun by Sandria Freitag’s influential 1991 special issue of the journal South Asia on ‘Aspects of “the Public” in Colonial South Asia’.⁴ Much, of course, has changed since 1991—not least, the ‘liberalisation’ of the Indian economy that began in July of that year. The major argument of the 1991 volume, however, remains as pertinent today as it was nearly 25 years ago. As Freitag insists, we should work to provincialise ‘the public’—approaching it less as a normative model for modern society than as a culturally peculiar notion caught up with the particular history of the North Atlantic region (i.e. ‘the West’). The chief task confronting the scholar, by this account, is one of translation. We should, in Freitag’s words, try to identify the ‘indigenous bases onto which western European notions of “the public” could have been grafted’.⁵ In his contribution to the 1991 volume, Dipesh Chakrabarty provides an example that helpfully illustrates the analytic issues involved in such an effort. As he shows, it is possible to describe the streets of Banaras as a ‘public’ space. In doing so, however, one risks effacing the culturally-specific distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, between home and bazaar, and the world of meanings (about family, ritual cleanliness, auspiciousness, etc.) that this distinction implies. To sound this cautionary note is not to deny the potential analogy between the concepts of ‘public’ and ‘outside’; it is simply to point out that, in drawing analogies, we need to remain aware of what gets lost in translation.⁶

In revisiting the project laid out in the 1991 special issue, we also necessarily revise it, in part by resisting too strict a distinction between North Atlantic and South Asian materials. The British ‘public’ was never a totalising sociological reality; rather, it was an unstable assemblage of shifting ideas and institutions, defined as much by its internal contradictions as by its normative force. South Asian culture, for its part, was no less dynamic. Thus, in designating particular South Asian cultural forms as analogous to North Atlantic ‘publics’, we need to be careful not to reify either set of materials or to abstract them from their complex and contested histories. What is more, we need to consider how the Anglophone term ‘public’ has, since the nineteenth century, become an integral part of the South Asian scene. As the essays collected here demonstrate, ‘the public’ is seldom a neutral descriptor; rather, as a term with legal, political and cultural ramifications, it often shapes the objects that it describes.

Freitag’s ‘Aspects of the Public’ highlighted ‘two key areas’ of inquiry: urban space and literary form. In complementary fashion, this set of essays highlights two key areas as well as two key problematics. While they call attention to the continued importance of print culture and religious polemics in defining ‘the public’, especially in the colonial period, they also suggest how the legal regulation of publics and the presence of religion in the ‘secular’ public sphere trouble the normative presumptions of classical liberalism (the body of thought with which the concept of ‘the public sphere’ is most closely associated). Where liberalism posits the public as independent from the state and defines religion as constitutively ‘private’, the essays collected here suggest a much more complex set of entanglements among these domains.

In this introductory discussion, we have three principal aims: first, we consider how scholars working in South Asian studies have approached the question, ‘What is a public?’; second, we discuss the entanglement of ‘the public’ with the history of liberalism in the subcontinent; third and finally, we turn to our two major themes—law and religion—in order to challenge one of liberalism’s dominant narratives about the public. According to one standard line of thought, the public is both constitutively separate from the state as well as linked to it; public debate places a check on the potential abuses of state power, even as the state legitimates its rule through its claim to represent the public’s interests. The essays that follow from this introduction (arranged in roughly chronological order) complicate this picture by a variety of means, including by positioning the public as the object, rather than the agent of cultural regulation.

Locations of ‘the Public’: Genealogy or Typology?

Broadly speaking, we submit that there are two ways in which scholars have gone about studying South Asian publics: the typological method and the genealogical method. Both methods, perhaps inevitably, take North Atlantic notions of ‘the public’ as a primary point of reference, but their approach to these notions differs significantly. The typological approach looks for moments when South Asian ideas and practices seem similar to, or function like, North Atlantic ideas and practices of ‘the public’. Broadly social scientific in spirit, it tries to apply ‘the public’ as a generalisable concept to South Asian materials. The genealogical approach, conversely, rejects the impulse to divorce the concept of ‘the public’ from its convoluted history. Instead, it works to further historicise the concept and practice of the North Atlantic ‘public’ by asking how this notion travelled to South Asia and how it was adapted from within particular institutions and power structures. These two approaches cannot, of course, be neatly separated. Nonetheless, they do remain distinct orientations within the study of South Asian publics.

To clarify the distinction between these two approaches, we turn to another English-language term that has gained considerable purchase in South Asia: ‘religion’. As recent scholarship has emphasised, this distinctively modern concept constrains our analysis of South Asian culture, as by implying a clear distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’. Consequently, scholars of early modern India have increasingly sought out alternate terms (e.g. ‘ritual’), which allow them to sidestep ‘religion’ in approaching topics like sacred kingship.⁷ For the colonial and post-colonial periods, however, the problem is more complicated: no longer a culturally foreign concept that we as scholars impose on South Asian materials, ‘religion’ becomes part of the conversation in South Asia, actively shaping modern cultural practice in significant ways. This was especially true for groups like the Arya Samaj, which deployed the English word strategically in their publications and adjusted their usage of the Hindi word dharm either to approximate it more closely or to avoid its semantic reach.⁸

Surely something similar is at play with the concept of ‘the public’. Like ‘religion’, this term has come to shape South Asian cultural practice. On the one hand, its prominence in colonial and post-colonial legal codes has made the concept of ‘the public’ a tool for the juridical management of society. Thus, as William Mazzarella shows here, notions of ‘public place’ and ‘public morality’ determined the types of dance that were deemed legally permissible in Mumbai in the mid 2000s. In a slightly different vein, as Ritu Birla demonstrates in her contribution, the legal concept of ‘public interest’ was central to the emergence of neo-liberal administrative power in the 1990s. On the other hand, the concept of the public also shaped civil society institutions like the press. This was in part because newspapers rhetorically aligned themselves with the courtroom as a model for disinterested ‘public’ judgement on ‘private’ matters (see David Gilmartin and J. Barton Scott, this volume). But there were also lines of influence that did not run through the state or civil society. For example, nineteenth-century intellectuals like Sayyid Ahmad Khan consciously emulated the style of the same English newspapers (Tatler, The Spectator) that are now hailed as paradigmatic for the Enlightenment ‘public sphere’ per se (see Brannon Ingram, this volume).

Not surprisingly, colonial and post-colonial thinkers have struggled with how best to translate the concept of ‘the public’ into South Asian languages. Appearing at first in English (as in Ram Mohan Roy’s ‘Appeal to the Christian Public’ of 1820), the word began to enter the various vernaculars by mid century. In the 1850s, journalist Karsandas Mulji tried to translate ‘public spirit’ into Gujarati (Scott, this volume). In the 1880s, journalist and novelist Abdul Halim Sharar began to speak of a nascent ‘Islami pablik’ in Urdu.⁹ Transliteration was easy enough, but how ‘the public’ was to be translated into South Asian languages remained something of a puzzle. Did it, as Mulji suggested, denote the ‘outward’ or ‘apparent’ (jaher) aspect of something? Or was it better, as Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi seemed to do in the 1910s, to align ‘the public’ with ‘’awamm’—a term that traditionally disting...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. What is a Public? Notes from South Asia
• 2. Rethinking the Public through the Lens of Sovereignty
• 3. How to Defame a God: Public Selfhood in the Maharaj Libel Case
• 4. Crises of the Public in Muslim India: Critiquing ‘Custom’ at Aligarh and Deoband
• 5. Contesting Friendship in Colonial Muslim India
• 6. Booklets and Sants: Religious Publics and Literary History
• 7. Ambedkar, Marx and the Buddhist Question
• 8. Jurisprudence of Emergence: Neo-Liberalism and the Public as Market in India
• 9. A Different Kind of Flesh: Public Obscenity, Globalisation and the Mumbai Dance Bar Ban
• 10. Commissioning Representation: The Misra Report, Deliberation and the Government of the People in Modern India
• 11. Postscript: Exploring Aspects of ‘the Public’ from 1991 to 2014
• 12. Index