The Imaginary Institution of India

Politics and Ideas

Sudipta Kaviraj

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780231526517
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie politique

For decades Sudipta Kaviraj has worked with and improved upon Marxist and subaltern studies, capturing India's social and political life through its diverse history and culture. While this technique has been widely celebrated in his home country, Kaviraj's essays have remained largely scattered abroad. This collection finally presents his work in one convenient volume and, in doing so, reasserts the brilliance of his approach.

As evidenced in these essays, Kaviraj's exceptional strategy positions Indian politics within the political philosophy of the West and alongside the perspectives of Indian history and indigenous political thought. Studies include the peculiar nature of Indian democracy; the specific aspects of Jawaharlal Nehru's and Indira Gandhi's regimes; political culture in independent India; the construction of colonial power; the relationship between state, society, and discourse; the structure of nationalist discourse; language and identity formation in Indian contexts; the link between development and democracy, or democratic functioning; and the interaction among religion, politics, and modernity in South Asia. Each of these essays explores the place of politics in the social life of modern India and is powered by the idea that Indian politics is plastic, reflecting and shaping the world in which people live.

1

On State, Society, and Discourse in India

This essay seeks to place the relation between state and society in India in a broader than usual perspective. It tries to do so in two ways. It tries first to set out the processes of modern Indian politics in terms of a long-term historical understanding, rather than pretend, as is often done, that all the causalities of politics somehow sprang up in 1947. Second, it suggests that the historical argument reveals problems of a theoretical character, and that without dealing with some of these methodological and philosophical issues it is impossible to tackle some of the difficulties faced by empirical explanations. The essay is divided into four parts. The first makes some preliminary theoretical remarks, the second assesses some of the initiatives or proposals for modernity that the colonial power set in motion, the third tries to analyse what happens to these after Independence, and the final part returns to some questions of theory.

It is often said that to use concepts like ‘state’ and ‘society’ is not helpful because of their abstractness and excessive generality. But I think that it is possible to begin at a still more radical starting point. To analyse the relation between state and society in India, it could be argued, is impossible because they do not exist in India, at least not so securely as to enable us to apply these concepts unproblematically to analysis. This may help us understand something quite fundamental. ‘Society’ can mean just any set of actually existing social relations, and that is the sense in which it is often used in the social science literature. But it can also mean a specific kind of society, known often as gesellschaft. ‘State’, similarly, can mean either any system of political rule or regime, or a specific, historically indexed style of impersonal governance, and, of course, there is a close historical connection between these ways of seeing society and the state.¹ A state of this modern kind can exist, some types of social theory would assert, only on condition that it is embedded or surrounded by a ‘civil society’ of this kind. And it has been argued that one of the major problems for political construction in India is precisely the setting up of a modern state without the presence of a civil society.² So the underlying theoretical questions here would be: what are the conditions in which society and state, in the generic sense of these words, allow themselves to be shaped into states and societies in the second sense; and are these processes such that collective intentionalities, like legislation or constitution-making, are able to create them, or are they products of something more glacial, less intentional, more mysterious?

If all societies have ‘structures’ (in the sense in which structuralists use the term—it can be very different from the self-description of the formal organization that a society offers), and if states have to obey their logic, and adapt to its compulsions, it becomes necessary to begin the story of the Indian state somewhat earlier than the point at which it is ordinarily done. It becomes necessary to tell the story of modernity as inextricably linked to the story of colonialism. This will, as we shall see, alter the punctuation and the shape of this narrative quite significantly at some points. In order to understand some of the present political difficulties of the Indian state, it is necessary to think in ways that are undetermined by the dominant myths and narrative strategies of nationalist historiography.

But it is important to see that modernization theories also give rise to a largely parallel illusion in the analysis of social change. It is one of their serious drawbacks to encourage the notion that it is only modernity which has institutions, and it is only modernity which is rational. It is clear that if we work with a thin theory of rationality, then many of the practices condemned as hopelessly traditional (and devoid of any possible rational justification) can be rationally justified, unless the abstract definition of rationalism itself is surreptitiously packed with presuppositions of European Enlightenment thinking. Getting people to ground their practices differently is not just dispelling a false consciousness, but a contestation of rationalities differently constructed. Similarly, modernity does not build institutions in an empty space. It has to rework the logic of existing structures, which have their own, sometimes surprisingly resilient, justificatory structures. The entry of modernity into the discourses and practices of a society depends, I shall argue, on a gradual, dialogical, discursive undermining of these historically rational grounds. And this cannot happen without extending much greater hermeneutic charity towards the practices we try to destroy. For the first condition of setting up a critical, dialogical relation with them is to identify these beliefs correctly, and to see their structures of justification.

The Structure of Traditional Society and the Space of the State³

Several features of the traditional construction of Indian society must be noted if we are to understand exactly where the state is placed and exactly what it can and cannot do. First, the caste system is significant not only for its great internal complexity, but also the principles on which this complexity is constructed. Unlike pre-modern European societies, which seem to have had a symmetrical hierarchy, its internal principle of the organization of inequality was an asymmetric one. By this I mean that if social hierarchy is a complex concept, and it is disaggregated into several different criteria of ranking individuals and groups—say, between control over economic assets, political power, and ritual status—the rank ordering in India would be asymmetric between the upper-caste groups. That is, if ritual status ranks groups as ABC, political power might rank as BCA, and control of the economy CBA. Of course, caste had a history, and the jati system which actually functioned on the ground was quite different from the ideological self-presentation of the varna system. But the advantage of seeing this model as presenting a sort of faded but still discernible background ideology of social practices is that it helps account for the relative infrequency of lower-order defiance in Indian history. It makes it cognitively more difficult to identify the structure of dominance because of some dispersal of power among the superordinate groups. Second, by this dispersal, it also imposes a strong necessity of a broad coalition among the upper strata in Indian society.

A second feature is the relation between society and the state. This depended on the way in which the social groups that were given to people's immediate ‘natural consciousness’ were themselves structured. Since the scale of social action was small, and highly segmented—despite the recent discovery by Cambridge history of much large-scale economic activity which they call, a trifle boldly, the growth of capitalism—this had some interesting consequences for the reach, structure, and form of political power. The ‘sovereignty’ of the state was two-layered. (This is to indulge in something I have been criticizing: for one of the major problems of theorizing the field of power is precisely the absence of something like ‘sovereignty’ in modern Europe; yet let us approach the unfamiliar first through the familiar.) Often, there existed a distant, formally all-encompassing, empire, but actual political suffering was caused on an everyday basis by neighbourhood tyrants. There were also considerable powers of self-regulation by these communities. (However, calling them in some ways self-regulating does not mean romanticizing them into democratic communities, or unchanging ones. Self-regulating communities can also create and maintain hierarchies of the most debasing sort.)

Thus the state, or the upper layers of it, which the colonial and the national regimes saw themselves as historically succeeding, sat in the middle of a peculiar segmentary social arrangement. I shall call this, by a deliberate misuse of a Hegelian metaphor, a circle of circles, each circle formed by a community of a neighbourhood mix of caste, religious denomination, and occupation. The state would occupy, to extend the metaphor, a kind of high ground in the middle of this circle of circles. It enjoyed great ceremonial eminence, but in fact it had rather limited powers to interfere with the social segment's internal organization. Its classical economic relation with these communities over which it formally presided would be in terms of tax and rent. And while its rent demands would fluctuate according to its military needs and its ability to despoil, it could not (in its own interest or in the pretended interest of the whole society) restructure the productive or occupational organization of these social groups. One of our crucial points is that the conceptual language of acting ‘on behalf ’ of the society as a whole was unavailable to this state.

Two implications follow from this. First, the eminence or the spectacular majesty of the state (at least the large state at the imperial centre) was combined with a certain marginality in terms of both time and space. Incursions by this high state were in the most literal sense spectacular—both wondrous to behold and unlikely to happen every day. The large and high state therefore had an ineradicable link with spectacle, pomp and majesty, and symbolic rituals, rather than the slovenly and malodorous business of the everyday use of power, a sort of double image which one finds in both the British period and after Independence.

But there is another implication of this picture which is of some importance for an understanding of the communal problem in India. I submit, against the grain of nationalist mythology about the common Indian past, that we must see the process of admission of alien groups into Indian society in a slightly altered way. For the standard nationalist picture of what happened, which normally goes under the name of a composite culture, is implicitly a self-congratulatory Hindu idea celebrating the great readiness of the Hindus (and later also of Muslims) to absorb outsiders after a few initial battles. In order to make my point, I shall use another theoretical distinction.

Using Tönnies's idea of gemeinschaft, I should like to suggest that the sense of the community can be of various types. I shall make a distinction here between what I shall call fuzzy and enumerated, or counted, communities. The traditional sense of community, I suggest, was fuzzy in two senses. It was fuzzy first in the sense that the construction of individual or collective identity depended very heavily on a sense of context. Belonging to varying layers of community was not seen as disreputable or unreasonable. Given different situations, a pre-modern person could have said that his community was either his religious or caste or occupational group, or his village or his region. He might find it difficult to render these varying communities, to all of which he belonged, into some unimpeachable hierarchy, either moral or political. But I do not think such a person could be accused of lack of precision in the use of social concepts: he would have fairly clear ideas about how to deal with unfamiliarity, or likeness and unlikeness, and be able to sort these things out for appropriate moves in social practice. The distinction I am drawing then is not between a precise and an imprecise way of thinking about the social world, but between precisions of different kinds. And of course very different types of social worlds could be constructed out of these different ways of thinking precisely about likeness and difference.

This implies an answer to the question that early nationalists inflicted on themselves: how could such a large entity as India be so easily colonized by the British? The short answer is that the question was wrong. The horizon of belongingness and consequently of conceivable social action was such that there was no India to conquer. Since the British inhabited a different discourse of social science and looked at historical and social reality quite differently, for them there was an externally given object—India—that was the target of their political control and conquest. But the Indian opposition they had to face did not reason through similar concepts. Thus, one princely ruler looked on with unruffled equanimity at the undoing of his immediate neighbour, perhaps his immediate predecessor in the British agenda of conquest, and deplored philosophically the changeability of the human condition, including those of small princes. Basically the fuzziness of their sense of community meant that it occurred to none of them to ask how many of them there were in the world, and what, if they agreed to bend their energies into a common action, they would be able to wreak upon the world to their common benefit. At one level it was of course a society like any other: people lived in groups, had wars, peace, conflicts, births, deaths, and diseases. But the great difference was that they suffered or enjoyed these constituents of their common fates more passively, without any idea of their magnitude or numbers.

Another result of this was the manner in which external groups were allowed into this society. Contrary to nationalist ideas and narratives, when new groups with hard, irreducibly different social attributes and markers entered into this society, they did not automatically create a new culture composed of elements of both; more likely, they would be allowed to enter into the circle of circles by forming a circle of their own. Initially, this would make the society's general architecture lose its shape a little, but it would generally adjust to their presence. But this circle—of Muslim culture and community—existed not in any open dialogic communication with the rest of society, but as a circle unto itself. It existed in a kind of back-to-back adjacency with the rest—by way of a very peculiar combination of absorption and rejection.

The Proposals of Colonial Modernity

Into such a society—a circle of circles, but each circle relatively un-enumerated and incapable of acting as a collective group—colonial power brought a series of basic changes. Ironically, such changes could have been brought in only by an external power—external not merely in terms of coming from outside, but also in the sense of using a social conceptualization that was fundamentally alien to this arrangement. Even the Mughal state could not do it, because it would have accepted eminence at the price of the traditional marginality. It could be done only by a political apparatus which had totally different moral, political, and, most significantly, cognitive values.

Curiously, however, British colonial policy did not have a single, unhesitating answer to the question of what to do in this very unfamiliar society. Its political history shows that it went through two policy phases, or at least there were two strategies between which its policies actually oscillated, sometimes to its great advantage. At first, the new colonial apparatus exercised caution, and occupied India by a mix of military power and subtle diplomacy, the high ground in the middle of the circle of circles. This, however, pushed them into contradictions. For, whatever their sense of the strangeness of the country and the thinness of colonial presence, the British colonial state represented the great conquering discourse of Enlightenment rationalism, entering India precisely at the moment of its greatest unchecked arrogance. As inheritors and representatives of this discourse, which carried everything before it, this colonial state could hardly adopt for long such a self-denying attitude. It had restructured everything in Europe—the productive system, the political regimes, the moral and cognitive orders—and would do the same in India, particularly as some empirically inclined theorists of that generation considered the colonies a massive laboratory of utilitarian or other theoretical experiments. Consequently, the colonial state could not settle simply for eminence at the cost of its marginality; it began to take initiatives to introduce the logic of modernity into Indian society. But this modernity did not enter a passive society. Sometimes, its initiatives were resisted by preexisting structural forms. At times, there was a more direct form of collective resistance. Therefore the map of continuity and discontinuity that this state left behind at the time of independence was rather complex and has to be traced with care.

Most significantly, of course, initiatives for what has come to be known as modernity came to assume an external character. The acceptance of modernity came to be connected, ineradicably, with subjection. This again points to two different problems, one theoretical, the other political. Theoretically, because modernity was externally introduced, it is explanatorily unhelpful to apply the logical format of the ‘transition process’ to this pattern of change. Such a logical format would be wrong on two counts. First, however subtly, it would imply that what was proposed to be built was something like European capitalism. (And, in any case, historians have forcefully argued that what it was to replace was not like feudalism, with or without modificatory adjectives.) But, more fundamentally, the logical structure of endogenous change d...