27 Political society and the contestation of legality

Varun Patil

Introduction

How do we go about studying the specificity of “postcolonial” countries like India? What are the concepts, the categories, the theoretical tools, and the linguistic conventions that can help us make sense of a society whose history, society, and systems of ideas have been mediated by colonialism? Can “universal” theories, which originally emerged in the context of Western modernity, help us to understand our world? In this module we will be looking into the attempts by post-colonial scholars, especially the work of Partha Chatterjee, to understand and theorise the vast domain of democratic politics in the ‘Third World’ which falls outside hegemonic Western notions of the state and civil society. Termed as the politics of Political society, it refers to the proliferation of forms of mobilisation by unprivileged communities that violate law and are opposed to the civic norms of good citizenship. The module will attempt to show that the rise of political society, rather than a throwback at pre-modern politics, is a consequence of new techniques of governmental administration. We shall also look at the criticisms of Political society concept and attempts to refine it further. The main aim of the module is to show how the experience of post-colonial democracy questions the normative status of liberal democratic theory as it exists today.

1. 1 Questioning the western liberal paradigm of politics

One of the major developments in the social sciences has been the rise of Post-Colonial perspectives, which has led to the questioning and deconstruction of many of the concepts tainted by the alleged Eurocentrism of western liberalism. Post-colonial theorists argue that concepts used to understand democratic politics in the First World/North are often less able to comprehend democratic movements in the Third World/South, and hence seek to decolonize Western political thought, while reconstructing an inclusive politics. They argue for a comprehensive shift in methods of analysing and engaging in democratic politics in the South.

Much of liberal conceptualisations of politics conceives of “the world as one” and of politics and democracy as “being the same everywhere”. The view of politics as being the same everywhere was criticised initially by the subaltern theorists who attempted to recuperate a sphere of politics that had been a permanent source of anxiety for theorists of Indian modernity and democracy – the vast domain that existed outside the designated spheres of modern politics. They argued for distinguishing between a domain of organized politics and a domain of unorganized politics. In the work of Ranajit Guha (1983), the idea of politics was expanded – far beyond what its European/ Western antecedents allowed: what was seen as ‘pre-political’ (because marked by religious symbolism and not in tune with the secular domain of ‘politics’), was placed by Guha squarely in the domain of politics. The way in which peasants conducted their politics was seen as fundamentally different from elite politics.

Prominent postcolonial theorist Partha Chatterjee has been in the forefront of such attempts at interrogating Eurocentric theorisations, first with nationalism and then with civil society. He builds on the subaltern school’s division of politics into two domains. He rejects the dominant narrative of modernity and modern politics as being grounded in the formal discourse of rights and individual citizenship and insisted that there are other modes in which politics takes place ‘in most of the world’, that needs to be seriously contended with, theoretically speaking. These modes of politics, Chatterjee argued, were a constitutive part of the story of postcolonial modernity and were not just prior stages on the way to our final arrival into real (western) modernity. Chatterjee decries the common approach adopted by political theory to understand politics in third world, of positing a division between tradition and modernity, which he says, not only essentialises ‘tradition’ but also fails to see the strategies adopted by the so-called traditional domain to cope with the modern, strategies which are not in conformity with the standards of modern civil society. The question for Chatterjee is about developing a better theoretical vocabulary to understand societies of the South characterised by a modernity different from that of its trajectory in its original location.

Chatterjee’s main target is civil society, with its origins in classical social theory of modern Europe, which he interrogates for its relevance to the South of the present. Civil society refers to those ‘characteristic institutions of modern associational life originating in Western societies that are based on equality, autonomy, freedom of entry and exit, contract, deliberative procedures of decision making, recognized rights and duties of members, and other such principles’. The wider question that he asks is whether the concept of civil society is relevant for countries like India that are marked by social exclusion, inequality, and poverty. In Europe the emergence of civil society took place in tandem with the consolidation of bourgeois society, the rights-bearing individual, and the rule of law. In India, however, large numbers of citizens continue to be relegated to the margins of society. Not only do they not possess any kind of status, they are not protected by the law. Chatterjee accordingly argues that in India civil society as a bourgeois sphere is restricted to a fairly small section of citizens, notably the middle classes who speak the language of rights.

Chatterjee argues that it is not as though subalterns are outside the reach of the state or even excluded from the domain of politics. As populations within the territorial jurisdiction of the state, they have to be both looked after and controlled by various governmental agencies. These activities bring these populations into a certain political relationship with the state. He notes that these political relations may have acquired, in specific historically defined contexts, a widely recognized systematic character, and perhaps even certain conventionally recognized ethical norms, even if subject to varying degrees of contestation (2004: 38). He argues that this form of politics which does not fall into the sphere of civil society, needs to be theorised as a separate category.

Thus Chatterjee posits two domains in the practice of politics. One is the line connecting civil society to the nation-state founded on popular sovereignty and granting equal rights to citizens. The other is the line connecting populations to governmental agencies pursuing multiple policies of security and welfare. The first line points to a domain of politics described in great detail in democratic political theory in the last two centuries. He says that the second line point to a different domain of politics. To distinguish it from the classic associational forms of civil society, Chatterjee calls it as political society (2004: 37-38).

Political society for Chatterjee is a domain ‘lying between civil society and the state’. It refers to the proliferation of forms of mobilisation by unprivileged communities that violate law and are opposed to the civic norms of good citizenship (2004: 39). This is a politics emerging out of the developmental policies of government aimed at specific population groups. He locates the emergence of political society, in the Indian context, in the 1970s and 1980s.

1. 2 Reasons for the rise of political society

Chatterjee argues that many of the sites and activities characteristic of political society can be shown to have emerged within the spectrum of nationalist political mobilizations in the colonial period; however, he argues that it has taken on something like a distinct form only since the 1980s. He says three conditions have facilitated this process.

The first is due to a transition that occurred in modern politics in the course of the twentieth century from a conception of democratic politics grounded in the idea of popular sovereignty to one in which democratic politics is shaped by governmentality. Popular sovereignty is the founding premise of modernity—the conception of every individual as a citizen with a bundle of rights. However especially in the West, there is a whittling down of popular sovereignty in favour of the ‘management’ of sovereignty. Governance is not matter of politics but one of administrative policy, something to be run by experts and not by political representatives. Chatterjee says there is an antinomy between the lofty political imaginary of popular sovereignty and the mundane administrative reality of governmentality: it is the antinomy between the homogeneous national and the heterogeneous social (2004: 36).

Western political philosophy has traditionally understood democratic politics as one in which citizens make rights-based claims on the state, but in a context of governmentality, civil society might not be the primary avenue of political engagement. Thus one of the central arguments of Chatterjee is that “it is no longer productive to reassert the utopian politics of classical nationalism,” Because its concepts neither sufficiently appreciate the phenomenon of governmentality nor allow us to identify the “political society” that seeks to democratize the politics of the governed (2004: 23). The “politics of the governed” is thus a model of politics in which the state is neither conceptualized nor experienced as an outgrowth of popular sovereignty. Rather, “the people” are treated as a “population” that must be managedaccording to policies defined largely by the interests of political economy Following Foucault’s conception of ‘governmentalisation of the state’, he argues that in the contemporary regime of power, Enlightenment ideas of citizenship have been substituted by the concept of ‘population’ and ‘instrumental notion of costs and benefits. This regime secures legitimacy, not by the participation of citizens in matters of state, but by claiming to provide for the well-being of the population. Its mode of reasoning is not deliberative opennes s but rather an instrumental notion of costs and benefits. Its apparatus is not the republican assembly but an elaborate network of surveillance through which information is collected on every aspect of the life of the population that is to be looked after (Chatterjee, 2004: 35). The critical issue, suggests Chatterjee, is that relations of governmentality shape not merely the strategies of states, but also the forms of political demands and community that arise to resist them.

Chatterjee notes that one of the major effects of the rise of governmentality logic was the emergence of distinction between citizens and populations. Citizens inhabit the domain of theory, populations the domain of policy. Unlike the concept of citizen, the concept of population is wholly descriptive and empirical; it does not carry a normative burden. Populations are identifiable, classifiable, and describable by empirical or behavioural criteria and are amenable to statistical techniques such as censuses and sample surveys. Unlike the concept of citizen, which carries the ethical connotation of participation in the sovereignty of the state, the concept of population makes available to government functionaries a set of rationally manipulable instruments for reaching large sections of the inhabitants of a country as the targets of their “policies”—economic policy, administrative policy, law, and even political mobilization (Chatterjee, 2004: 34). Here Chatterjee elaborates on the implications of what Foucault called the “pastoral” functions of governmental systems-as governments identify populations that must be classified and cared for, these populations make demands for those benefits even if they are excluded from civil society and in violation of laws.

Chatterjee notes that with varying degrees of success, and in some cases with disastrous failure, the postcolonial states are deploying the latest governmental technologies to promote the well-being of their populations, often prompted and aided by international and nongovernmental organizations. In many cases, he says, classificatory criteria used by colonial governmental regimes like caste and religion has continued into the postcolonial era, shaping the forms of both political demands and developmental policy. For many countries in Africa and Asia, Chatterjee argues that governmental techniques predate the nation-state, especially when a country has experienced a long period of colonial rule in which populations were frequently surveyed, classified, described, and controlled.

The second condition for the rise of political society is the widening of the arena of political mobilization. Chatterjee notes that this is often prompted by electoral considerations and often only for electoral ends, from formally organized structures such as political parties with well-ordered internal constitutions and coherent doctrines and programs to loose and often transient mobilizations, building on communication structures that would not be ordinarily recognized as political (for instance, religious assemblies or cultural festivals). He adds that the proliferation of activities in this arena of political society has caused much discomfort and apprehension in progressive elite circles.

The final condition is due to what Chatterjee terms as the return of primitive accumulation logic of capital in recent times. While corporate capital is dispossessing millions, the dispossessed are neither getting absorbed into industry nor getting socially transformed, as they were supposed to, through proletarianisation. Chatterjee says that this floating mass of labour, an enormous but shifting population of potential workers, have instead become a constituent of “political society”, as opposed to civil society. Other important constituents of political society are small and marginal peasants, artisans, vendors and petty producers. The economic precariousness of political society, accentuated by primitive accumulation, forces it to use various ploys to negotiate with the State. Due to electoral compulsions of representative democracy, the State often looks the other way when negotiations with political society violate established civil society rules: urban squatters and street vendors are cases in point. Political society is thus a quasi-constitutional entity.

1. 3 Characteristics of political society

To understand the characteristics of political society and how it differs from the activities of civil society, let us look into some of the case studies which Chatterjee gives. Using the politics of the illegal squatters (in the city of Kolkata) on public land and their forming of concrete associational forms to resist governmental action to evict them, Chatterjee gives a picture of how the political society functions in India.

The first key feature of political society is that it operates outside of formal politics. Thus, a crucial part of what defines activities in this domain is ‘illegality’, or non-legality, where the state itself places the law in suspension in order to recognize the claims of the governed. Many of these groups, organized into associations, transgress the strict lines of legality in struggling to live and work. They may live in illegal squatter settlements, make illegal use of water or electricity, travel without tickets in public transport. But putting pressure on the government to give them benefits often means “bending or stretching of rules” (e. g. , laws governing property and squatting) because those rules are the means by which poor, rural, and marginalized people are kept from power in the first place. It is through the paralegal and “stretched” arena of political society only that such groups can expand their power.

Chatterjee gives the example of The People’s Welfare Association created by the residents of Rail Colony Gate Number One, an illegal settlement in Kolkata. He says that it is not an association of civil society as its politics springs from a collective violation of property laws and civic regulations. The squatters, on their part, admit that their occupation of public land is both illegal and contrary to good civic life. But they make a claim to a habitation and a livelihood as a matter of right and use their association as the principal collective instrument to pursue that claim (2004: 59).

Thus squatting by the poor on government land that is strictly speaking, encroachment in legal terms and can never acquire the status of a ‘right’, is nevertheless allowed by governments to continue through the recognition of some kind of moral claim of the poor on governments and society at large. In dealing with them, the authorities cannot treat them on the same footing as other civic associations following more legitimate social pursuits. Yet state agencies and nongovernmental organizations cannot ignore them either, since they are among thousands of similar associations representing groups of population whose very livelihood or habitation involve violation of the law. These agencies therefore deal with these associations not as bodies of citizens but as convenient instruments for the administration of welfare to marginal and underprivileged population groups. The squatters as group exists in a “paralegal” realm that is both outside the authority of the state (since they are defying the law) and inside the authority of the state (since the state has adopted multiple techniques to track and manage the squatters).

Secondly Chatterjee notes that the imaginative world of politics of the governed is driven by notions of community. Political society 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). It is a domain where claims of its inhabitants can only be addressed in a language other than that of individual rights. He notes how squatters seek and find recognition as a population group, which from the standpoint of governmentality is only a usable empirical category that defines the targets of policy, they themselves have had to find ways of investing their collective identity with a moral content. Thus to effectively make its claim in political society, a population group produced by governmentality must be invested with the moral content of community. This is an equally crucial part of the politics of the governed: to give to the empiricalform of a population group the moral attributes of a community (Chatterjee, 2004: 75).

Chatterjee notes that in the case of the illegal rail colony, there was no pre-given communal form readily available to them. Some of the residents came from southern Bengal, others from the former East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Most of them belong to different middle and low castes, although there is a sprinkling of upper castes too. However the association through its co-ordination and activities were able to turn itself into a moral community. If, for this purpose, it was “absolutely necessary to shift us from our present dwellings, ” the association demanded a “suitable alternative homestead. ” Thus, alongside its reference to the government’s obligation to look after poor and underprivileged population groups, the association was also appealing to the moral rhetoric of a community striving to build a decent social life under extremely harsh conditions and, at the same time, affirming the duties of good citizenship. The categories of governmentality were being invested with the imaginative possibilities of community, including its capacity to invent relations of kinship, to produce a new, even if somewhat hesitant, rhetoric of political claims (2004: 60).

However Chatterjee cautions that these collective forms cannot be categorised as civic associations nor are they a replication of kinship organisations, even though they talk in the language of community. What Chatterjee finds unique about the survival strategies of such marginal groups is the way in which the imaginative power of a traditional structure of community, including its fuzziness and capacity to invent relations of kinship, has been wedded to the modern emancipatory rhetoric of autonomy and equal rights. These strategies are not available within the liberal space of the associations of civil society transacting business with a constitutional state. Politics of governed is thus not a throwback to pre-colonial politics, but a result of modern forms of rule or governmentality.

The third key feature in the politics of the governed is the representatives or mediators who articulate the demands of the community and promise electoral support to government representatives. These mediators negotiate “between those who govern and those who are governed” (2004: 66). Chatterjee notes that to produce a viable and persuasive politics of the governed, there has to be a considerable act of mediation. He notes that the politics of political society allows popular leaders to take precedence over the law.

Chatterjee notes that in terms of the mobilisation of the squatters in the rail colony the key figure was the Master and theatre enthusiast Anadi Bera (2004: 64). He also draws our attention to the political role of school teachers in many of the districts of West Bengal during the communist rule. With the traditional landlord class removed from the political scene, the teachers became crucial to the new politics of consensus that the Left was trying to build in rural West Bengal. They were the educated among a society of vast illiteracy. They were familiar with the language of peasants as well as that of the party, well versed in legal and administrative procedures, and yet organically part of the village community. As party leaders in local government, they were crucial in the implementation of governmental policies in the countryside. They interceded with the bureaucracy, using the language of administration, but claiming to speak on behalf of the poor. Simultaneously, they explained government policy and administrative decisions to the people of the village. Finally Chatterjee notes that because the means of civil society are unavailable to members of political society, the latter use violence and illegalities strategically.

1. 4 Critique of political society

Chatterjee’s conception of political society has created a major debate on how to theorise politics in post-colonies. Many scholars have critiqued the concept and suggested ways to improve it.

Firstly critics have questioned the binaries Chatterjee puts forward to explain the emerging democratic politics in post-colonies. These include both the neat division between civil society and political society, and the one between modernity and democracy. They argue that while Chatterjee tries to rescuing certain forms of politics from hegemonic interpretations of western liberal theory, he ends up reinforcing many of the binaries and essential assumptions of the west.

Critics point out the difficulty of thinking of the civil and the political in terms of the spatial metaphor inherited from western political theory as not working beyond a point. For example Nivedita Menon (2010) asks, can ‘civil society’ and ‘political society’ be divided along the lines of the elite (modern) and ‘the popular’ (domain of transactions and mediations)? How does one see, in that case, other illegalities indulged in by the non-poor and overlooked by the state? She proposes that civil and political society are better seen as two distinct modes of engagement with politics, rather than as domains that can be neatly separated. Nissim Mannathukkaren (2010) argues that Chatterjee fails to understand the multifarious ways in which the binary of civil society/political society is being bridged on the ground. He argues that the strategies that Chatterjee describes as part of the political practice of the illegal squatters—the array of connections made outside the community with other disadvantaged groups, privileged groups, employers, government functionaries, political leaders, and so on— also resemble rational-purposive/strategic action in the Habermasian sense. The community itself is built from scratch in a thoroughly secular fashion and its main goal is to secure autonomy and equal rights. Therefore, it is not clear why Chatterjee privileges the community when other elements are equally present.

Many critics have questioned his opposing of democracy and modernity/civil society and regarding the later as a western phenomenon. Chatterjee famously argued that ‘the framework of democracy, on the other hand, will pronounce modernity itself as inappropriate and deeply flawed (2004: 27). Nissim Mannathukkaren says Chatterjee locates democracy in the popular assertions of the masses but does not take into account the fact that these struggles also draw upon the ideals of modernity and (European) Enlightenment and make claims on that basis (2010). This he argues drives a wedge between two essentialised categories of the East and the West and ignores the commonalities between the two, for example the discourse of individual rights, which is increasingly gaining importance in the former. Moreover, the struggles have been to attain and extend citizenship, not to remain as manipulable instruments of political society. Mannathukkaren says that this eagerness to dismiss any European ideas of modernity as somehow alien to a postcolonial consciousness makes it imperative to resurrect a democracy sans civil society and modernity (both apparently European in origin), leading to a whole lot of contradictions (2010: 300).

Secondly critics argue that Chatterjee’s critique of civil society is one-sided. Mannathukkaren concludes that despite the critique of modernity and civil society, the biggest lacuna in

postcolonial theory is its inability to propose pathways out of the present. It wants to expose the ‘contingency of instituted forms of politics and open up new forms of political sociability’, or, in Chatterjee’s words, to fashion a language that ‘must allow us to talk about community and the state at the same time’. But these arguments do not specify with any detail what the contours are of these ‘new forms of political sociability’, nor the kind of community they have in mind (2010: 301).

Mannathukkaren argues that, though we need the concept of political society, to oppose it to civil society and dismiss the former is wrong. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between the ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ conceptions of civil society, the first one as emancipatory and the second as status quo-ist. To believe that the contextual and impermanent gains made by the subaltern classes in political society without the legal institutional backing of the state and civil society are sufficient for democracy is to contribute to the erosion of citizenship and popular sovereignty. Mannathukkaren argues that what is missing in Chatterjee is precisely the dialectical nature of civil society seen in Gramsci, that is as ‘both [a] shaper and shaped, an agent of stabilization and reproduction, and a potential agent of transformation’. Instead, Chatterjee’s notion of civil society as only the domain of corporate capital resembles Marx, who saw civil society as the sphere of the bourgeoisie. Thus civil society in the South cannot be reduced to its origins in colonial modernity as Chatterjee would have it. The character of civil society is shaped by the struggles launched in society. We cannot see it merely as trying to rein in political society within the parameters of liberal norms and as only the domain of the elite and middle classes in a pedagogical relationship with the rest of society, nor see political society as always violating these norms. To do so ignores the complex and diverse ways in which civil society and political society both contribute to, and hinder democracy (2010: 300).

Thirdly Critics also argue that that erosion of popular sovereignty and the govermentalisation of state not inevitable. Mannathukkaren says that while there are inherent characteristics of institutions like the modern state, the authority of the state is not inexorably destined to be the ‘technologies of power’ as implied by Chatterjee. Nevertheless, the nature of the states determined by the kind of social forces that are behind it and the state–society relationship that is extant in a society. While Chatterjee’s diagnosis that there has been a gradual governmentalisation of the state is correct, the reasons adduced for the same and also the remedies prescribed warrant critical re-examination. The initiation of the People’s Plan by the state in Kerala, Mannathukkaren argues, is ample evidence of the fact that the nature of the state needs to be determined historically, not essentially. If Kerala shows a different trajectory from other Indian states it has been precisely because every victory of the working classes and the peasantry was institutionalised and made part of the ‘rational–legal’ order. With eachsuccessive mobilisation and struggle of the rural poor the state was forced to democratise itself (2010: 299).

Many critics have argued that the basis of political society, the pastoral functions of state, have retreated in the onset of neo-liberalism. After all, one of the defining characteristics of the State under neoliberalism is its gradual retreat from the provision of public goods and social services, especially those services that might benefit the poor and dispossessed. In the face of this well-known and well-documented fact, when Chatterjee asserts that the State has stepped in to do exactly the opposite, i e, reverse the deleterious consequences of primary accumulation, one is more than surprised.

The final criticism is that Chatterjee does not look enough into the problems of political society. In not casting enough light on the negative aspects of political society, Chatterjee ignores the anti-democratic tendencies within it. Critics of Chatterjee have correctly noted that the concept of political society is very vague: it encompasses both strategic and contextual struggles for survival along with radical political movements without necessarily distinguishing between them. As a result, the concept does not understand that ‘while it is democratic to recognise the strategies for survival, it is struggles that lie beyond survival strategies that are imperative for any meaningful idea of democratization. ’

Mannathukkaren argues that Chatterjee ignores the negative side of political society; excludes the possibility that political society can be counterproductive to the goal of democratisation (2010: 307). It was precisely in the sphere of political society that exploitative forces like the regulative rentier class—the politicians, bureaucrats and village leaders, and so on—who monopolise public administration grow. He notes that one of the main modes of patronage and corruption is in the selection of beneficiaries for state sponsored programmes and resources as well as extracting a rent for publicly owned and funded resources. Although political demonstrations and patron-client relationships may bring real benefits to less privileged “populations, ” he still finds political society (the political world of those who are excluded from civil society) inadequate because it fails to give the underprivileged effective agency. Therefore, the welfare benefits that government policymakers extend at one point may subsequently be withdrawn if the cost-benefit calculations change.

Based on empirical research on the People’s Plan Campaign in Kerala, one of the most extensive democratic decentralisation programmes in the world, Mannathukkaren (2010) argues that the extension of popular sovereignty requires that we go beyond political society. Since the marginalised populations who constitute political society are focused on immediate survival, they are negatively placed in fighting for long-term structural transformation. This hinders community and collective interests and gives way to individualised interest-based politics. What the oppressed need is not the permanent insecurity of the machinations of political society but a politics which brings them together with similarly oppressed groups.

It also has to be asked how permanent the democratisation processes engendered by political society are if they are not institutionalised as part of civil society and the state. In his later works, Chatterjee explicitly tries to address issues like violence and patriarchy in political society (2011: 20). Chatterjee recognises that a local consensus among rival political representatives is likely to reflect the locally dominant interests and values. He says that political society will bring into the hallways and corridors of power some of the squalor, ugliness and violence of popular life. It would be effective in securing the demands of those who are able to find organized political support, but could ignore and even suppress demands of locally marginalized interests. Besides a local political consensus is also likely to be socially conservative and could be particularly insensitive, for instance, to gender or minority issues.

However Chatterjee argues that if one truly values the freedom and equality that democracy promises, then one cannot imprison it within the sanitized fortress of civil society (2011: 74). He also cautions that Crime and violence in political society are not fixed black-and-white legal categories; they could be open to a great deal of political negotiation. It is a fact, for instance, that in the last two and a half decades, there has been a distinct rise in the public, and political, outbreak of caste violence in India, in a period which has seen without doubt the most rapid expansion of democratic assertion by the hitherto oppressed castes. We also have numerous examples when violent movements by deprived regional, tribal or other minority groups have been followed by a quick and often generous inclusion into the ambit of governmentality. There is then a strategic use of illegality and violence here, on the terrain of political society (ibid: 76).

1. 5 Importance of political society

Despite all the above criticisms Chatterjee’s concept of ‘political society’ can be regarded as a momentous intervention in political theory that inscribed the postcolonial (in a generic sense), at the heart of political theory. It was a unique attempt to account for democratic Politics in those parts of the world that were not direct participants in the history of the evolution of the institutions of modern capitalist democracy. In much of political theory Democracy and modernity in India and other postcolonial societies always seemed to be striving to be like the ‘real thing’ that exists, apparently, only in the West. Thus as a theoretical intervention it continues to have a great impact on studying democracy in post-colonies. Subsequently many Ethnographic and historical studies have attempted to reframe important political and theoretical concepts such as civil society, modernity, governance, empire, and globalization.

Firstly Chatterjee’s work showed how the paralegal, despite its ambiguous and supplementary status in relation to the legal, is not some pathological condition of retarded modernity, but rather part of the very process of the historical constitution of modernity in most of the world (Chatterjee, 2004: 74). That we should not see the activities of political society as backward forces that modernity will overcome. Earlier it was argued that if civil society is the domain of modernity, rule of law and rationality, the question of political

society, as its negatively constituted other, was one where the problem of the ‘irrational’ erupts in politics. Chatterjee’s contribution was to show us that in many ways political society was connected with the trajectory of democratisation in post-colonies. To rescue a form of democratic politics not based on individual rational actors and civil society forms was not an easy task. After all, one of the big anxieties of the twentieth century was the rise of Nazism and a whole range of other political mobilizations that defy notions of subjectivity as propounded by the Enlightenment: as autonomous, self-willing, rational. What political society concept shows is that what counts as the “political” needs to be stretched-expanded to include the experiences, knowledge, and political agency of people traditionally marginalized in political theory.

Secondly Chatterjee’s work showed how that the functions of governmentality can create conditions not for a contraction but rather an expansion of democratic political participation (2004: 77). He argues that Modern political theory (whether liberal, communitarian, republican, or Marxist) fails to take governmentality and by the extension, the different senses of community to which it gives birth into account. Chatterjee argues that when there is a successful mobilization of political society to secure the benefits of governmental programs for poor and underprivileged population groups, one could claim that there is an actual expansion of the freedoms of people, enabled by political society that would not have been ordinarily possible within civil society. That, the actual transactions over the everyday distribution of rights and entitlements, can lead over time to substantial redefinitions of property and law within the actually existing modern state. Chatterjee argues that the politics of the governed have a transformative effect by expanding the freedoms of marginalized peoples, and that “this is the zone in which the project of democratic modernity has to operate-slowly, painfully, unsurely” (2004: 50).

Thirdly Chatterjee’s work addresses the absence of community in western paradigm of politics. The biggest lacuna of Western political theory is its ignorance of community in the theorisation of civil society and state. In the modern liberal conception of politics, the aim of modernity is to transform traditional social authorities and practices into the modular forms of bourgeois civil society. Modernity entails the transformation of traditional community into nation-state and subjects into citizens. In particular, attachments that seemed to emphasize the inherited, the primordial, the parochial, or the tradition were regarded by most theorists as smacking of conservative and intolerant practices and hence as inimical to the values of modern citizenship. Few can deny the empirical fact that most individuals, even in industrially advanced liberal democracies, led their lives within an inherited network of social attachments that could be described as community. According to Chatterjee, since the majority of the people in the postcolonial states do not have the ‘basic material and cultural prerequisites of membership of civil society’, they are denied the ‘normative status of the virtuous citizen’. Therefore for them ‘communities are some of the most active agents of

political practice’. Chatterjee argues that unlike the trajectory of democracy in the West, the notions of autonomy and representation are being claimed on ‘behalf not only of individuals but of communities’ as well, and the ‘politics of democratisation’ is carried out not in civil society but in the ‘much less well-defined, legally ambiguous, contextually and strategically demarcated terrain of political society’ (2004: 11).

Thus we can see how Chatterjee’s concept of political society based on the experience of post-colonial democracy questions the normative status of liberal democratic theory as it exists today. The greatest merit of Chatterjee’s framework is in highlighting those aspects of politics which do not necessarily fall under notions of state–civil society relationship which have come down to us from Western theory and praxis. It is important to note, as Aditya Nigam points out, that in doing so, Chatterjee does not take recourse to arcane notions of ‘indigenous tradition’ or ‘imperialism of categories’ to describe politics in post-colonial societies. In other words, even while recognizing the cultural and historical specificity of the Indian/ postcolonial situations, his intervention recognized the ineluctable modernity of the experience of politics that one needed to confront. And this experience is important, because as Chatterjee points out, it concerns ‘the political life of well over three-fourths of contemporary humanity’ (2004: 3).

In this module, we have attempted to delineate the main ideas that have made of political society a crucial and critical category in the understanding of post-colonial society. We have shown how political society provides a way of understanding governmentality in Third World societies and despite its limitations, we have shown how it continues to occupy a very important place in the political analysis of democracy and it’s functioning within the post-colonial state.

Further Reading

Chatterjee Partha. (2004). The Politics of the Governed. New York: Columbia University Press. —- ( 2011). Lineages of Political Society. Permanent Black, Ranikhet.
FoucaultMicheal, (1991) “Governmentality” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
MannathukkarenNissim. (2010). The ‘Poverty’ of Political Society: Partha Chatterjee and thePeople’s Plan Campaign in Kerala, India, Third World Quarterly, 31:2, 295-314.
Menon Nivedita (2010). Introduction in Empire and Nation: Selected Essays of Partha Chatterjee. Columbia University Press.
RanajitGuha, 1983. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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