The Politics of Self-Expression

The Urdu Middleclass Milieu in Mid-Twentieth Century India and Pakistan

Markus Daechsel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415544467
• eBook ISBN: 9781134383702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The 1930s to 1950s witnessed the rise and dominance of a political culture across much of North India which combined unprecedented levels of mobilization and organization with an effective de-politicization of politics. On the one hand obsessed with world events, people also came to understand politics as a question of personal morality and achievement. In other words, politics was about expressing the self in new ways and about finding and securing an imaginary home in a fast-moving and often terrifying universe. The scope and arguments of this book make an innovative contribution to the historiography of modern South Asia, by focusing on the middle-class milieu which was the epicentre of this new political culture.

1
POLITICS AGAINST SOCIETY

The politics of self-expression is an anti-societal form of politics. Although often pre-occupied with issues of political identity, its practitioners were mostly uninterested in the question of how people construct and negotiate relationships with one another. There was little positive recognition that human beings are embedded in a ‘fabric’ of society. Ideas about the exercise of social or political power remained crude. If acknowledged at all, the conflict over the allocation of social and cultural resources was resolutely kept at the margins of political thought. Instead, the politicians of self-expression contemplated sealed, self-absorbed and un-networked subjects that engage in a game of fierce mutual competition without any clear aim. The only discernible objective was the desire to express an inherent sense of being and to have this being recognized as ‘authentic’ and ‘strong’ by an imaginary audience – often called ‘the eyes of the world’ or the ‘golden letters of history’¹ – whose nature was no less nebulous than the nature of competition itself.

This anti-societal attitude marks a clear break from the kind of interest-based politics that the indigenous notable and professional classes of India pursued throughout the late colonial period. Without conceding any real possibility of independence, the colonial regime had largely succeeded in channelling political activity into the straightjacket of limited self-rule, confined to institutions such as municipal boards, provincial assemblies and other closely circumscribed bodies. By forcibly reducing political interest to bread-and-butter issues or matters of prestige relevant to elites, colonial rule could simultaneously co-opt and divide the most articulate and powerful sections of Indian society. This was the kind of politics that the activists of self-expression knew and hated, and that they wished to replace with their own apocalyptic visions. The pathological nature of self-expressionism was thus rooted in the more general pathology of the colonial regime. Despite fundamental formal differences, the politics of interest and the politics of self-expression were connected by historical experience. The politics of self-expression emerged in the cracks and fissures, so to speak, of the old politics of interest. This breaking-out of the colonial straightjacket was signified by a political language of statehood and militarism that often went beyond the usual parameters of the political as conventionally understood. Abstract power became the be all and end all of politics – a shift that did not only deny society, but ultimately also historical agency in any meaningful form.

This chapter and the next seek to sketch out the contours of the politics of self-expression so as to open it up for wider socio-cultural analysis. This necessitates a recapitulation of the politics of interest – both as a body of political theory and as a historical formation – a task to which the first two sections of this chapter are dedicated. Having thus created an appropriate space for the discussion of the politics of self-expression, this chapter moves on to an exposition of the thought and political practice of the most important ‘prophets’ of self-expressionism. Separate sections deal with the contributions of Subhas Chandra Bose, V.D. Savarkar and Inayatullah Khan ‘Mashriqi’. The chapter ends in an examination of how self-expressionism became part of the political mainstream – focusing on the politics of Muslim nationalism, where this process can be most clearly demonstrated. At this point it will become apparent that self-expressionism was not simply a discourse – a body of arguments expressed in writing – but a wider political formation with a distinct grammar of action. It is in Chapter 2 that the analysis shifts accordingly from text to practice, from discourse to historical experience.

The political science of rulers

The story of the ‘politics of interest’ – a pseudo-liberal framework of politics supported by the British colonialists for the purpose of making control over a foreign country easier – has been extensively covered in the historiography of South Asia. Particularly important in this context has been the contribution of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’, a loose grouping of mainly British historians and their disciples who began research into the regional politics of Indian nationalism at the end of the 1960s, and whose approach has been replicated in numerous case studies until up to the late 1980s. The basic assumption was that ideological convictions could be eliminated from historical explanation by uncovering an intricate network of individual interests behind the actions and pronouncements of leading political players. Particularly relevant for the subject area of this book are the works of Francis Robinson, Christopher Bayly, Ian Talbot, Ayesha Jalal, Peter Reeves and B.R. Tomlinson.² Despite some differences in theoretical and political orientation, these contributions shared a common focus on the interface between Indian elite politicians and the colonial regime. The tools of interpreting ‘native’ political behaviour were directly borrowed from the wisdom of high colonial officials. This practice of replication was not seen as problematic but, on the contrary, as the most natural and sensible way of coming to grips with South Asian political realities.³ The main justification was that since little more than a couple of thousand Europeans managed to rule over hundreds of millions of Indians for one and a half centuries, there must have been substantial truth in how the colonialists interpreted the workings of Indian politics.

The classic story of the politics of interest begins at some point in the second half of the nineteenth century and takes as its base line the political economy of ‘liberal’ Empire. Despite their rhetoric of a ‘civilizing mission’ the British did not envision a penetrative or interventionist state. Colonial involvement in the fields of health care, primary education, famine relief and economic development ranged from token gestures to criminal neglect.⁴ For much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the Raj had to serve a limited number of objectives: there was the maintenance of an economic regime that allowed British entrepreneurs to trade with the subcontinent on favourable terms and to extract raw materials or grow basic agricultural commodities on the cheap; then there was the use of India as a strategic reserve, centred around the establishment of an Indian army that could be used as an expeditionary force elsewhere in the Empire. A further requirement was that neither of these objectives should cost the British tax payer anything and that Indians themselves should be made to foot the bill for the entire enterprise of their own subjugation.⁵ All this could be achieved with political intervention restricted to four general areas: tax-collection, the upkeep of law and order, military recruitment and the maintenance of a basic transport and administrative infrastructure. In all these areas as much activity as possible was farmed out to Indian collaborators who would serve as the intermediaries between colonial state power and the wider population. From a colonial point of view, politics was confined to seeking out effective local collaborators and to ensuring their compliance with the regime; from the Indian elite point of view, it meant participating in this game so as to ensure that one did not lose one’s wealth, influence and status.⁶

Imperial interests may have been fairly limited in the late nineteenth-century context, but they threw up a number of problems as the Raj entered the early twentieth century. Put very simply, there was a contradiction between the need to raise more and more state revenues in order to meet imperial obligations on the one hand, and the ability to run the country with minimum political interference on the other. The impact of the two World Wars and the Great Depression of 1929 made such balancing acts ever more difficult. By 1947, the powerbrokers at the Imperial centre concluded that their strategic and commercial interests were better safeguarded if direct political control over the subcontinent was passed on to indigenous elites. In the eyes of policy makers at the time, and of those historians who rely on the their assessment, the Raj was never really defeated. De-colonization was only a rearrangement of the relationship between metropolitan and indigenous interests within the remit of state power.⁷

As a regime largely bereft of any ideological legitimacy, the Raj did not believe that legitimate politics had a great deal to do with convictions. Elite Indians were accorded an ‘isn’t-he-a-jolly-good-chap’ kind of respect and the political freedom that went with it – as long as they were seen as ambitious and cynical men who looked only after their own ‘self-interest’. The politicking of such people posed no danger to the Empire because they could be played out against each other and bought off by considerations from the Government. The most trustworthy and ‘authentic’ of Indian politicians therefore did not even make much effort to pretend they had strong ideological beliefs. Such men of ‘influence and substance’ were easily turned into stakeholders of the colonial enterprise because they had substantial material possessions to defend. They were landlords, professionals and industrialists who knew what side their bread was buttered and whom the Raj was usually quite willing to oblige.

More troublesome were the supporters of nationalism who decried self-interest in the name of a collective common good that was not open to bargaining in the District Commissioner’s drawing room. Such politicians of conviction were made manageable with the help of manoeuvres of thought that restored a sense of smug knowingness and political mastery to the colonial mindset. The first step was to assume that these nationalists were really ‘self-seeking’ cynics who only used nationalism in order to further their own interests. They could then be subdivided into two groups: there were those who were also wealthy men of interest and therefore potential collaborators, and there were the so-called ‘professional agitators’ who had no possessions to lose and depended on political activity for their living.⁸ They could not be reigned in as easily by material concessions. In order to put any major worries about the activities of such people to rest, the political scientists of the Raj claimed in a masterful tautological sweep that professional agitators were by definition ‘un-representative’. Precisely because ‘authentic’ Indians were either entirely a-political or self-seeking materialists, they argued, ideologues of any sort could never really find any genuine followers. Rather like the proverbial student communists in front of the factory gate, nationalist activists were thought to speak for nobody but themselves.⁹

If all this did not suffice to explain reality in a politically convenient way, the ultimate ideological weapon of colonial thought was brought to bear: the invocation of the ‘natural’ fanaticism of the Indian population. At this point the entire register of colonial political science changed from a self-assured affirmation of control over a grateful people to the angry denunciation of the irredeemable native who stood outside the realm of the political altogether. Organized political action against the Raj was interpreted as the ‘outbreak’ of mob violence that happened as if by force of nature and not due to any comprehensible political issues. Religion and superstition were wheeled in as blanket explanations for anything that may have pointed to a political failure of the colonial regime. Such an interpretation only reinforced the prejudice that Indians were inherently politically immature. Any serious challenge to colonialism was conveniently turned into yet another argument for why colonialism was necessary in the first place. The complex grievances and the growing anti-imperialist consciousness behind the Great Rebellion of 1857, for instance, were reduced to the matter of soldiers of different religious backgrounds having qualms about licking cartridges greased with animal fat.¹⁰

Several elements in this conception of politics were informed by the liberal consensus of late nineteenth-century Britain. The colonial vision broadly agreed with the basic tenet that the public good – if, indeed, there was such a thing – consisted in the individual material benefits that people could secure under the protection of competent but reticent governance. If a political process of mutual accommodation was required at all, it was to be restricted to a select group of gentlemen who had an interest in maintaining the status quo. The number of political actors deemed to be legitimate grew over time, and the institutional framework in which the colonial regime sought to contain them expanded correspondingly. But there was never any sense that politics should be everybody’s business. The Raj started off with informal consultation between colonial officials and local ‘men of note’ and ended with a truncated electoral system that gave the vote to no more than one-quarter of the total population, set apart from their countrymen by moderate wealth and education.¹¹ The restrictive nature of such politics was underscored by the fact that it was largely confined to the local and later the provincial level. The colonial provinces were in most cases artificial entities drawn up for administrative convenience. This meant that legitimate provincial politics could not move beyond a range of bread-and-butter issues that were by definition detached from larger issues of collective power and identity.

The colonial commitment to liberal politics was largely formalistic, however. The vision of a rational society of individuals was too closely associated with processes of modernization – the emergence of free trade and the free wage contract, equality before the law, secularization and so on. These achievements were seen as signs of European superiority, and had to be denied to non-European peoples that were colonized under the pretext of historical backwardness. In consequence, a place like India could never be seen as a domain populated by self-governing individuals. Instead, colonial observers attested the omnipresence of primordial collectivities that displayed all the negative features that European history had supposedly overcome. These entities included ‘tribes’, ‘castes’ and above all religious ‘communities’. They were all pre-political in their conception: their membership and internal workings were not considered as open to conflict and negotiation, but as set by essentialist and natural affinities. One simply was a ‘Hindu’, a ‘Muslim’, a ‘Brahmin’ or whatever else, and one would invariably act according to the unchanging codes of behaviour that these identities demanded.

The emphasis on collective units did not mean that the colonial worldview was ‘communitarian’ in the sense of recent political theory. In a way, colonial ideology simply superimposed the logic of self-contained individuals as the building blocks of liberal politics onto the level of communities. ‘The Hindus’, ‘the Muslims’ as well as assorted tribes and castes appeared as collective personae who pursued their own material interests in similar ways as individuals. What mattered was not the working of communities as intricate political institutions, but their existence as crude and opaque building blocks of the social world. Indian social reality was not perceived as a fabric, but as a mosaic. There was a Hobbsian twist to this vision, however. The collective personae that made up Indian life were not naturally disposed towards rational cooperation in the same way as the self-contained gentlemen of the liberal imagination; rather, their natural state was one of perpetual warfare. This was perhaps the most powerful argument that the British Raj used to legitimize itself: India was not a ‘nation’ or even a ‘society’, but a communal battleground brought under temporary control by the forcible but benign intervention of outside arbiters. In the distant past, it was the Aryan invaders who ‘pacified’ the country; later during the Middle Ages it was the Muslims; the British were only the most recent and most enlightened executers of a historic prerogative.¹² This vision implied that politics per se could ever only exist as an imposition. It had to be artificially sustained by a remote centre of power that owed its legitimacy to its disconnectedness from, rather than its embedded-ness in, local societal structures.

The colonial vision of a pseudo-liberal politics of interest in India opened up a disjuncture between the political process and the large majority of the ruled. The politics of interest could be kept safe by locking a small number of self-interested gentlemen into institutions of limited self-rule. But how could this actually ensure control over those pre-political collectivities that inherently threatened any ‘rational’ forms of politics? The answer was an assumption of political ‘representation’ that operated top-down rather than bottom-up. The colonialists were not interested in processes by which the communal building blocks of Indian society could chose their own representatives or deliberate their own political ideals and demands. The Raj simply appointed ‘men of influence’ as the representatives of such larger communities, hoping that recognition fr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• PREFACE
• NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: POLITICS AGAINST SOCIETY
• 2: STATES OF POWER
• 3: A CLASS OF BODIES
• 4: SPACES OF SELF-EXPRESSION
• 5: THE CONSUMPTION OF POLITICS
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY