25 Entangled Maternities and Sequential Theories: Sudipta Kaviraj

Sailen Routray

epgp books

 

1. Introduction

 

We live in a world that is apparently coloured with the dyes of modernity. Some like modernity’s colours. Some want to change its hues. Others rue its colour palate and want to go back to a pristine white of what they see as the traditional world. But before we can act on the inevitable fact of our modernity, we need to have some sense about how we got from ‘there’ to ‘here’, from ‘then’ to ‘now’. The question therefore, is, do all societies/social formations need to travel down the same path to reach the same destination of ‘the modern’, or is modernity to be thought through in the plural? The answers that Sudipta Kaviraj provides to the above questions is very instructive. He argues that there are many modernities that are fashioned through historically contingent processes.

 

2. Who is Sudipta Kaviraj?

 

Sudipta Kaviraj is, arguably, India’s foremost scholar in the field of intellectual history. His contributions to understanding Indian politics and the state have been immense. He has worked on two areas of intellectual history; these being Indian socio-political thought in the past two centuries, and the politics of modern literary and cultural production. His other scholarly interests include tracing the genealogy of the state in India, and social theory.

 

He finished his undergraduate education at the then Presidency College (now Presidency University), Calcutta. He has a Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He currently works as a Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University in New York. Before joining Columbia University, he has taught politics and political science at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), London, and JNU. He has also been an Agatha Harrison Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

 

Kaviraj’s books include The Imaginary Institution of India (2010), The trajectories of the Indian state: politics and ideas (2010), The enchantment of democracy and India: politics and ideas (2010), Civil Society: History and Possibilities co-edited with Sunil Khilnani (2001), Politics in India (edited) (1999), and The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (1995).

 

3. Colonialism and plural modernities

 

For Kaviraj, colonialism is a central watershed in the story of modernity in postcolonial societies such as India. He has often argued that telling the story of modernity in postcolonial societies such as India is impossible without foregrounding the impact of modernity. While doing so Kaviraj tries to veer a middle ground between two extremes. There are scholars such as David Washbrook who have often argued that the origins of the ‘Indian modern’ temporally lie before colonialism, and processes of transformations in the Indian social formation whose results we see now all around us can be traced back to a period of time predating colonialism. There are other scholars who influenced by Edward Said argue for a completely transformative impact for colonialism. According to these scholars, colonialism completely changed everything from inter-community relationships, to relations of production, to forms of performance. Sudipta Kaviraj intervenes in this scholarship on the links between colonialism and modernity by arguing for a much more calibrated and careful entanglements between the two.

 

The scholarly work of Sudipta Kaviraj have had a sustained and sometimes invisible impact on the narratives surrounding society, politics and the state in India. Each one of his interventions has gone on to structure the academic, and sometimes even popular, commonsense regarding Indian society. His work on the intellectual history of India and the dynamics of Indian politics can be seen part of a larger project of tracing the genealogy of the modern state and a biography of modernity in India.

 

Sudipta Kaviraj argues that Western social theories regarding modernity (some would argue that the word ‘modernity’ is a superfluous word here since all Western social theory is about modernity in some sense), especially its most important strands as evidenced in the works of theorists such as Karl Marx and Max Weber, revolve around two conceptual fulcrums. One of these conceptual fulcrums constitute of the idea that modernity is a homogenous process that is singular and is explainable through a single causal principle. The second conceptual fulcrum constitutes the idea that modernity spreads from Western centres and wherever else it migrates into the world, it invariably produces societies similar to the ‘original’ Western ‘models’.

 

Kaviraj argues that there are at least three reasons why modernity cannot be homogenous. He argues that modernity as a process is essentially plural and will produce different outcomes in different contexts.

 

First, he argues that although modernity often involves significant ruptures with extant social practices, often the processes and practices engendered by modernity are not completely unprecedented. He argues analogically with the example of learning a second language. When a Bangla-speaking person learns English as a second language, often the English of such a person carries the lilt and cadence of Bangla. Similarly, Kaviraj argues, modernity carries traces of the pre- modern. And since the premodern is of a varied vintage and inherently plural, ‘the modern’ is also produced in a context-specific manner.

 

Second, Kaviraj argues, that modernity is a plural process. Based on actual historical evidence of various societies’ experiences with modernity, he says it is possible to argue that unlike what most Western theorists of modernity posit, no single causal process can produce all the artefacts and institutions of modernity. Further, he argues, the actual ways in which social processes occur and connect with each other have a strong bearing on the final outcomes. Since these processes are inherently plural,  the  outcomes cannot  be  singular.  In  this  context,  he  gives  the  example  of secularism in India. By the time democracy with adult suffrage arrived in Western societies, they were sufficiently secularised. Hence in the West, there was no major conflict between democracy and secularism. But in the Indian context, democracy with adult suffrage arrived in a country where group loyalties, including religious loyalties, were important and society was not sufficiently secularised. Hence, in the Indian context, there are fault lines between constitutional demands of a secular polity and the imperatives of a non-secularised society.

 

Third, Kaviraj puts forth, modernity is characterised by reflexivity in two ways. In the first sense, modern institutions and practices are directed as much towards the other, as they are towards the self – towards their own societies. In the second sense, reflexivity refers to a recursive process through which the technologies of modernity get refined and perfected over a period of time. Because of this fact, it is not likely that colonial and postcolonial societies will have to repeat the experiences of Western societies in order to become modern.

 

The introduction of Western state practices under colonialism in India did not lead to a duplication of the experiences of state-formation of Britain or of other European countries in India. Because of reformation and the growth of absolutism in Europe, nation-states had developed a form of sovereignty in internal affairs that had no parallel in India. The colonial state in India also operated within a framework of orientalism where certain state practices and legislative imperatives that were seen as important in the European context were simply not extended to the colony of British India. Thirdly, because of the very structure of Indian civilisation and society, the practices that were introduced by the British in India went through, what Kaviraj calls, an ‘accent shift’.

 

4. Fuzzy and enumerated communities

 

For Kaviraj, as it must be clear by now, the question of modernity is inherently entangled with the question of colonialism. For him, therefore, the question regarding what is produced by the process of colonialism has an important obverse – what confronted colonialism in the first place, or what is it that was changed by colonialism. Thus, we are confronted with the old question of civilizational/cultural/societal difference.

 

Pre-modern society in Europe had symmetrical hierarchy. This meant that along all the axes of power, the ranking of communities could neatly map onto each other. But Kaviraj has often argued that we can understand precolonial and colonial Indian sociality as being structured through the principles of asymmetrical hierarchy, where aspects of social power are dispersed across social groups unevenly. This meant that whereas one community could be in the middle of the hierarchy with respect to ritual ranking, with respect to political power it could at the top. This also meant that precolonial India was a peculiarly segmented society where the state was marginal with important executive powers but limited judicial and legislative powers. The state in India operated through the principle of subsidiarity; because of the specific nature of social power in precolonial India, it could never claim sovereign powers.

 

Kaviraj then goes on to provide a powerful story of how the earlier social formation based on the existence of ‘fuzzy’ communities in India changed substantially through the imperatives of the colonial state such as the decennial census. No aspect of identity of a person could have claims of complete representation of all aspects of selfhood in India in precolonial times. Before colonialism, communities were ‘fuzzy’ in broadly two senses. First, no aspect of a person’s identity was absolutely central for her in a context-independent way. Second. The organisation of these communities involved a fine and complex ordering of differences, and therefore, getting a sense of numbers and sizes would have been next to impossible.

 

In this social field of graduated differences, colonialism introduced new forces. The boundaries of communities started hardening through processes of colonial enumeration such as the decennial censuses. Because of the process of institution by the colonial state, a regime of liberal rights in the economic and social spheres and the resultant carving out of the sphere of politics/the political, communities (aided by the newly instituted technologies of enumeration) started engaging with the colonial state on a platform of claim-making. This meant that a process of associationalism produced the network of enumerated communities as we know them today. Thus, Kaviraj posits a strong relationship between the establishment of the colonial state in India, its interventions in Indian society, and the production of communities in India as we know them now.

 

5. Emergence of state sovereignty in colonial India

 

One key difference in the exercise of political power in India after the British conquest was the way the state conceptualised its power and exercised it. Before the advent of British rule in India the exercise of state power (if the matter can be framed in such a manner at all) was through the principle of subsidiarity. The state did not have ‘legislative’ powers, so to speak. Its ability to dictate the everyday functioning of the communities were extremely limited; these were mostly governed by caste rules and councils. The state definitely had ceremonial majesty (the best example of which is perhaps the Mughal Empire) and could successfully exercise significant extractive imperatives. But it could not significantly change the ways in which society was organised and governed in India. The state in precolonial India thus had spectacular majesty, but was socially marginal. This provided for long-term social stability to Indian civilisation. It also meant that the state was not ‘sovereign’ in the ways in which the modern nation-states in Europe were beginning to become sovereign over the societies that they governed.

 

The colonial state was, thus, an unprecedented phenomenon in India. At first the colonial apparatus in India did not intervene too much and occupied the ceremonial majesty of the state left vacant by the Mughal Empire. But it represented the great conquering ideology of enlightenment rationalism. This ideology had restructured the ethical and cognitive regimes, and economic and political systems in Europe. Therefore, the colonial state did not stay marginal for long. Although the colonial state initially kept up with the pretensions of being only a revenue gathering organisation, it started reengineering Indian society almost immediately after assumption of political power. The colonial state gradually introduced a system of liberal rights in the social and economic spheres; it thus instituted a new cognitive order that mediated people’s experience of their social world.

 

6. Emergence of politics: anti-colonialism and the growth of nationalism

 

From the time the British dominance in India was cognised by people the initial response was one of bafflement. For most thinking people in India it was inconceivable that a sophisticated civilisation such as India could be subjugated by what they saw as the ‘mlechha’ British. According to Kaviraj, when ‘Indians’ started interrogating colonial subjection and moved from a position of anticolonialism to that of nationalism – from asking questions surrounding reasons for India’s civilisational defeat to the possibilities of freedom from colonial rule – certain key processes got initiated. One set of diagnosis regarding Britain’s superiority over India and the reasons for the latter’s defeat in the hands of the former was seen as a result of social organisation. The British were seen to constitute a collectivity – a nation – and were seen to have at their command a state that acted at the behest of this nation.

 

The British colonial state in India could not completely implement its liberal, utilitarian agenda in the colony for very obvious reasons. Instituting a system of liberal political rights would have been suicidal to the colonial state in India and its ambitions in the region. Instead, what it did, as already mentioned, is to institute a system of liberal rights in the social and economic spheres. This meant that at the level of experience by the people the totality of social cognition got divided into three spheres; the social, the economic and the political. Because the sphere of the political was left without a governing framework of rights by the colonial state, over a period of time it started leading to a process of intense contestation. Politics thus became the name for claim-making on the state by communities whose very nature started changing through the processes of contestation involved in claim-making.

 

These processes of claim-making led to a peculiarly new form of ‘we-feeling’ where people could collectively work together for enhancement of collective interests. Initially these collectivities were jāti-based. But over a period of time, a sense of ‘nationhood’ started developing. For some time it was not clear whether it is language or religion or something else that can be the basis of nationality. But over a period of time only ‘the Indian nation’ was seen as capable of overthrowing the foreign yoke. But the ways in which Indian nationalism was fashioned, it was done with the understanding that a blind imitation of the Western experience will not work.

 

In this context, Kaviraj contrasts two ideal type positions. On one hand leaders such as Gandhi and Tagore argued that India as a civilisation cannot follow Europe blindly; the Western experience of modernity involved a lot that was undesirable (for example widespread violence) and India as a civilisation needs to chart out its own path of inhabiting the present moment. Nehru on the other hand saw modernity as desirable, but he also saw it as an essentially reflexive process that will necessarily involve India making different political choices for constituting the nation. Since the linguistic reality of India was plurality and diversity, imposing one language as the basis of Indian nationalism would have been counter-productive, according to this reading. Similarly in a society which is not sufficiently secularized, not taking into account the religious concerns of a substantial minority can only make the foundations of nationalism weak.

 

A parallel set of processes involved the production of ‘the nation’, the production of language-based identities/regions, and the birth and growth of politics as a domain of sociality during the anti- colonial national movement. Indian nationalism grew up as essentially diaglossic. Since European forms of social organisation such as the state were seen as key to the success of the colonial enterprise, the nationalist movement (despite contrarian noises by some key players such as Gandhi and Tagore) took as its objective the removal of foreign control over the state rather than a radical restructuring of state-society relations and politics per se.

 

7. Conclusion

 

The discussions in the module till now might seem esoteric. But they are not. Questions surrounding the role of religion and/or language in Indian politics remain important even now. As Kaviraj argues, the adoption of adult-suffrage and parliamentary democracy after independence produced an inevitable clash between democracy and bureaucracy with development as a discourse playing a role comparable to the one played by utilitarianism during colonialism. The peculiarly colonial origins of politics in India continue to mark it even now. Politics in India even now is about claim-making upon the state. The debates surrounding language and religion that were crucial to the debates surrounding growth of nationalism stay important even now.

 

But there are many ways in which the Indian experience of  dealing with the imperatives of modernity have global relevance. For example,  in the post-communist era, Europe,  especially Western Europe faces the challenge of significant and growing numbers of racial, linguistic and religious minorities in various countries. The ways in which the Indian national movement and the post-colonial state in India has tried to deal with the question of diversity as a part of a civilisational quest to chart out an alternative path to modernity can be of relevance to the originary countries of modernity now.

 

8. Summary

 

This module has provided a brief biography of Sudipta Kaviraj, and has discussed why his scholarship is essential in understanding the constitution of modernity in India. As a founding member of the subaltern studies collective, his work has been influential in understanding the functioning of the state and politics in India. His work has convincingly shown that modernity has had many lives in colonial and postcolonial societies, and its biography is more dependent on the specific contexts in which it has to find its habitat rather than on any canons of Western social theory. This is especially true as modernity is a reflexive process, and reflexivity involves a process of iteration that can only produce divergent results in different contexts. Further, the Western template of modernity is also not uniform. Modernity came to India riding on the back of colonialism. Before the advent of colonialism, Indian society was comprised of communities that were governed by the rules of caste. These communities were ‘fuzzy’ in the sense that they did not have a sense of their boundaries and their number. The precolonial state was not sovereign, and did not have significant legislative powers. The colonial state on the other hand reengineered both the cognitive and the social  apparatus  for  the  governance  of  Indian  society.  Through  the  use  of  technologies  of governance such as the census and land surveys the British colonial state in India reorganised ‘the social’ in such a way that it now carved out a domain called ‘the political’ in which it was sovereign. In the process it also produced a colonial civil society in which the enumerated communities could now make claims on behalf of their members. This gave rise to the form of social action we now know as politics. Initially this politics was anti-colonial. Towards the last quarter of the twentieth century when it had identified a meta-community (that of the nation) the dominant form of politics started becoming that of nationalist agitation against colonialism. A key to this process of evolution was the growing understanding that in a country such as India the process of fashioning a nation and nationalist resistance to colonialism need not follow the models offered by European nations, and that there was nothing incompatible between being an Odia and an Indian, or a Konkani Christian and being an Indian. The form of nationalism that evolved in India during the nationalist struggle was diaglossic in nature. In the current conjuncture the future of democracy in the world can learn from the Indian experience. The anti-colonial nationalist struggle and postcolonial democratic politics in India have dealt with and have creatively tried to resolve the processes of instituting democracy and modernity in a society characterised by diversity and plurality.

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9. References

  1. Kaviraj, S. 2010a. ‘Modernity and Politics in India’ in The trajectories of the Indian state: politics and ideas. Ranikhet: Permanent Black: pp. 15-29.
  2. Kaviraj, S. 2010b. ‘On State, Society, and Discourse in India’ in The imaginary institution of India: politics and ideas. New York: Columbia University Press: pp. 9 – 38.
  3. Kaviraj, S. 2010c: ‘On the Construction of Colonial Power: Structure, Discourse, Hegemony’, in The imaginary institution of India: politics and ideas. New York: Columbia University Press: pp. 39 – 84.
  4. Kaviraj, S. 2010d. ‘On the Structure of Nationalist Discourse’, in The imaginary institution of India: politics and ideas. New York: Columbia University Press: pp. 85-126.
  5. Kaviraj, S. 2010e. ‘’Writing, Speaking, Being: Language and the Historical Formation of Identities in India’, in The imaginary institution of India: politics and ideas. New York: Columbia University Press: pp. 127-166.
  6. Kaviraj, S. 2010f. ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’ in The imaginary institution of India: politics and ideas. New York: Columbia University Press: pp. 167-209.
  7. Kaviraj, S. 2000. Modernity and politics in India. Daedalus 129 (1): 137-162.
  8. Routray, Sailen. 2011. Review of ‘The imaginary institution of India: politics and ideas’ by Sudipta Kaviraj. Contemporary South Asia 19(3): 339 – 340.

 

10 Web Links

 

  1. Download Sudipta Kaviraj’s paper on the state here, for free: http://icspt.uchicago.edu/papers/2005/kaviraj05.pdf
  2. Read Sudipta Kaviraj’s paper on the postcolonial state here for free: http://criticalencounters.net/2009/01/19/the-post-colonial-state-sudipta-kaviraj/#more-29

 

10.1  Further Reading

  1. Kaviraj, S. 2010a. The trajectories of the Indian state: politics and ideas. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
  2. Kaviraj, S. 2010b: The imaginary institution of India: politics and ideas. New York: Columbia University Press.
  3. Kaviraj, S. 2010c. The enchantment of democracy and India: politics and ideas. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
  4. Kaviraj, S. 2005. An outline of a revisionist theory of modernity. European Journal of Sociology, 46(03): 497-526.
  5. Kaviraj, S. 2005. On the enchantment of the state: Indian thought on the role of the state in the narrative of modernity. European Journal of Sociology, 46(02): 263-296.
  6. Kaviraj,  Sudipta.  1995.  The  unhappy  consciousness: Bankimchandra  Chattopadhyay  and  the  formation of nationalist discourse in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
  7. Kaviraj, S. 1990. On state, society and discourse in India. IDS Bulletin, 21(4): 10-15.