Emergence of the Political Subject

Emergence of the Political Subject iiâ•…â•… Emergence of the Political Subject Emergence of the Political Subject ...

Author: Ranabir Samaddar

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Emergence of the Political Subject

iiâ•…â•… Emergence of the Political Subject


Ranabir Samaddar

Copyright © Ranabir Samaddar, 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 2010 by Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110044, India www.sagepub.in Sage Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA Sage Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom Sage Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Published by Vivek Mehra for Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 10.5/12.5 pt Minion by Star Compugraphics Private Limited, Delhi and printed at Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Samaddara, Ranabira. â•…â•… Emergence of the political subject/Ranabir Samaddar. â•…â•…â•… p.â•‡ cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. â•‡ 1.â•‡ Political science–Philosophy.â•‡ 2.â•‡ Subject (Philosophy)â•‡ 3.â•‡ Citizenship. â•‡ I.â•‡ Title. JA71.S265 320.01–dc22 2009â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… 2009034895 ISBN:â•‡ 978-81-321-0290-8 (HB) The Sage Team:â•‡ Elina Majumdar, Meena Chakravorty, Mathew P.J. and Trinankur Banerjee

To Jean Luc Racine and Josiane Racine

viâ•…â•… Emergence of the Political Subject

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

viii xi Section One: Situations

â•‡ 1 Death and Dialogue

3

â•‡ 2 The Impossibility of Settled Rule

39

â•‡ 3 The Singular Subject

79

â•‡ 4 Terror, Politics, and the Subject

104

â•‡ 5 What is Resistance?

133

â•‡ 6 A Rebel’s Vision

162 Section Two: Positions

â•‡ 7 The Labour of Memory

187

â•‡ 8 Towards a Theory of the Constituent Power

205

â•‡ 9 Possibilities of Our Trans-national Citizenship

236

10 Empire, Globalisation, and the Subject

267

Epilogue Bibliography Index About the Author

292 296 304 315

Acknowledgements

P

rofessor Anisuzzaman of Dhaka University helped me access the material on the Wahabi Trials and Professor Mesbah Kamal of the same university helped me access the material on the 1969 unrest in the then East Pakistan. Krishna Banerjee, the editor of Khoj alerted me on the availability of some of the writings of the early terrorist-revolutionaries of Bengal. Subir Bhaumik lent me the transcript of the interview with T. Muivah. Sandro Mezzadra and Bret Nielson readily discussed with me their work on borders and labour flows. I acknowledge my debt to them. The chapters of this book were presented variously over the last few years before different audiences, and as texts of lectures, these were translated, commented upon, and published in different forms and forums. My debt is to all who listened to these, discussed their responses with enthusiasm, and published. I have learnt from them enormously. The idea on which this book works was there with me for some time. As I studied the political histories of several interconnected issues of our time, I realised more than ever that we need accounts of the political subject, long pushed behind the institutional-legal veil of the citizen. A comprehensive history of the emergence of the political subject in India would not only connect the colonial and the post-colonial lives of our country and the broader world in a new and more helpful way, such a history would enable us also to see many events in a fresh light. From my early study of workers’ response to new managerial techniques occasioned and reinforced by new technologies, to my study of village history in south-west Bengal in the colonial time, to the study of the students movement in the 1960s in the last century, to investigations in various other themes that I picked up subsequently, the idea of the political subject persisted in me, often however in the crude form of agency. The philosophical works were dissatisfying; the political works seemed inadequate; and the speculative-cultural writings on the theme of subject formation were in any case not the

Acknowledgementsâ•…â•… ix

appropriate site for my inquiry. Also, the aporetic condition of what passes on as the Marxist view of politics (with its crudest variety prevailing in West Bengal) was agonising. In such condition, the current situation of globalisation and the discontent it has provoked and spread worldwide has opened fresh windows of inquiry and understanding— not only for me, I am quite sure, but for many others as well. Once again real life is opening our eyes. How lame it seems today the views of some of the European Marxist intellectuals, who had lamented once that Marx had not developed an adequate theory of politics. As if in the style of various speculative traditions including the liberal fantasies, Marx was expected to encourage such constructions. When would we realise that as world, its struggles, and the repertoire of actions develop, Marxist view of politics also develops, matures, and becomes appropriate for the changing life while retaining its fidelity to its fundamental goals. Once again life is teaching all including the famous Marxist intellectuals. This work, growing out of that dissatisfaction and realisation, can be said to be carrying the sense of politics unbound. It is not constrained by the scary thoughts of whether its theoretical implications are in congruence with political philosophy or with the views of philosophers for whom probably real politics does not exist or what exists is not politics at all. In fact it is for philosophy to draw consequences it wishes to infer and learn from politics. The truth of contentious politics is being realised at this moment everywhere in every possible way. Any such unbound position can open up to an astonishing range of material determination of a political event, and thus politics becomes free to set its own limits. I feel beholden to my colleagues and associates, who have encouraged me to think critically, which is necessary to carry on research in new areas and anticipate new themes. My debt is to these usual suspects— in India to Paula Banerjee, Sanjay Barbara, Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury, Pradip K. Bose, Subhas Chakrabarty, Sanjay Chaturvedi, Samir K. Das, Asha Hans, Kalpana Kannabiran, Ritu Menon, Bishnu Mohapatra, and Arun Patnaik; and abroad to Itty Abraham, Etienne Balibar, Manuela Bojadzijev, Sandro Mezzadra, Bret Nielson, Heikki Patomaki, Julian Read, Tim Scrase, Ruchira Ganguly-Scarse, William van Schendel, Stephen Wright, and Oren Yiftachel.

xâ•…â•… Emergence of the Political Subject

I must also declare my debt to SAGE Publications for once again agreeing to publish an experimental work, and my thanks go in particular to Sugata Ghosh, Elina Majumdar, and Meena Chakravorty. I wish I had read Javed Majeed’s Muhammad Iqbal—Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism (Routledge, 2009) when I was writing this book, particularly Chapter 3. But it came in my hand only after I had handed over my revised manuscript to the publisher. But readers particularly interested in Chapter 3 are advised to read this wonderful book on Iqbal, in which the discussion on language and subjectivity surfaces again and again, and the book explains the point in a way better than what I do. Finally, I feel enormously happy to dedicate this book to the continuing friendship with Jean Luc Racine and Josiane Racine. They have provided me warm companionship through the years and at difficult times. I want them to know that their encouragement has meant a lot to me.

Introduction

T

his book is on the political subject, the conditions of its emergence, the theoretical implications of this emergence, particularly the implications for our history. Philosophy has till date speculated on self, reason, and existence. Does politics obey its rules and findings? Does the political subject display other features—features that remain beyond our speculative texts? These questions arise as politics throws up unexpected array of actions and repertoires of experiences, and the political subject repeatedly emerges as the constitutive force of our life. Or, we can reframe our introductory inquiry in this way: Can philosophy be reconceived under colonial and post-colonial conditions? By philosophy, if we mean the philosophy of the subject, and specifically, philosophy of the political subject?

The Hermeneutics of the Political Subject There are two grounds for raising the question. First, societies under colonial and post-colonial conditions had previously different speculative and inquiring traditions largely banished today to what can be called the popular sphere of thinking, or the ‘extracolonial’ sphere of thinking.1 These traditions did not have the ‘normal’ connection that they could have been expected to have with the new political thinking under the colonial conditions, either because in the East speculative traditions had not much to offer on the materiality of the political life except by way of some advices (in India Kautilya’s Arthashastra being one of the early prominent texts and Sier Mutaqherin being one of the last when power was slipping into the hands of the new colonial rulers), or under modern colonial and post-colonial conditions the issues of concern demanded different frameworks of thought, or

xiiâ•…â•… Emergence of the Political Subject

more significantly different ways of responding to new realities where speculation was no more a preferred social activity. To recall Pierre Bourdieu of Pascalian Meditations,2 and to give the words there a twist, speculation as a social activity in this society was not popular among members of the wealthy or the political classes and the aristocracy, or was quickly dead, the sociology of meditating philosophy was nearly extinct, and as I demonstrate here in one of the reflections, what came in its place was a sociology of actions, and new theory of practice. Second, the extremely contentious colonial and post-colonial politics skipped many centuries of transitions to arrive straightaway at the problematic of the political subject. The route was not through centuries long speculation on the self, but a dramatic arrival at the great question of the political subject, as ruthless colonial rule moved the colonised societies to a resistance culture where the normal question to be asked would be: Who are you to rule? What are our roles then? Who is the ruler and who is the subject? In short, the issue of political self emerged directly under specific colonial and post-colonial conditions cutting many philosophical knots of past centuries. Political necessities led to new thinking, political subject-hood became a practical question of society. What in the Western political history required centuries of thinking to emerge as a question, was asked on the streets in the East, namely, what does it mean to act in the name of freedom, what does it mean to act politically? This was a great transition in the East, whose significance unfortunately is still not fully understood by social theorists and political thinkers and philosophers whether in India or in the West where political philosophy has had a long tradition of being connected with inquiries of self and had a sort of renaissance in the later half of the 20th century. The consequent question has therefore remained un-addressed, namely what happens if the road to philosophy is not through metaphysics, but politics? The present volume consisting of reflections on the different dimensions or conditions of the political subject is written in that background. These reflections are grouped in two ways: one set reflects on the conjunctions of the emergence of the subject; the other set is made of explanations and commentaries, which reflect on the repeated emergence of the political subject towards reconstituting the political society. The inquiry and the provisional results are all set in this perspective.

Introductionâ•…â•… xiii

Emergence of the Political Subject carries forward the argument in my recent writings to visualise politics in a new way that is to say visualising the conditions of politics in a new way so that the general lessons of such inquiry can be presented to all in a systematic manner. These reflections therefore are not to be taken as commentaries on exceptional situations; they represent a mass of material leading us towards a theory of the political subject under the rules of formation of politics. Based on reflections of a number of texts, the work tries to find out, can we reframe the notion of the political subject in a material manner—in other words, can we rid the notion of political subjecthood of metaphysical traces, which are so typical of any discussion particularly in the West on the question of subject and subjectivity? Can we discuss the theory of the political subject based on rigorous discussions on the conditions of its emergence, without an unnecessary digression into a theory of the self? In other words, I have presented here events, actions, and reflexive commentaries with the consideration that these will at least indicate a range of various contentious situations of colonial and post-colonial politics and cast an all round light on the emergence of the political subject. I must also make clear at the same time that the texts reflected, critiqued, and commented upon here to be sure never claimed that they were conceptual exercises towards bringing out in the open the nature of the political subject. I cannot burden them with the particular expectation of a reader who is preoccupied with another search. But these texts have one thing in common. They encourage us into thinking of the contentious process of politics, collective claim-making, and the conjunctions of certain specific circumstances out of which the political subject emerges in modern colonial and post-colonial history. They provide us with ‘situations’. The texts are for instance some intelligence records on a revolt of a bygone era, an interview transcript involving a rebel leader and a television broadcaster, a short tract on memories, writings of a revolutionary that can be understood only when read as testaments on transition to freedom, a forgotten journal of a group of anti-colonial political activists, a cluster of writings around four exceptional lives, a similar assortment of texts throwing light on the formation of subject under conditions of an empire, and finally a short paragraph from the writing of a great philosopher of our time that is intolerably dense and

xivâ•…â•… Emergence of the Political Subject

is about to burst out in a range of meanings. All these texts throw light on the problematic of the subject-hood of politics. They are picked up from the colonial and post-colonial intellectual, political, and administrative history of the last 160 years. They present for the readers the significant sites of politics and political thinking, more significantly they also represent 10 ‘situations’, 10 ‘positions’. In order to understand the process of hundreds and thousands of people emerging as political subjects and as political subjects authoring politics, we need to glance around for those, perhaps daily and ordinary, contentious ‘situations’ and ‘positions’ from which the political subject emerges— a ‘subject’ who was ‘subjected’ to colonial politics, but who refused to be mere object of politics and rule, and wanted to become ‘subject’. Subjection and subjectivation, the words that indicate the practices of subject-formation, are thus two interlinked processes. It was necessary to mark out those variegated situations of contention, which were often unnoticed, producing what in mainstream social sciences would be treated as minor texts—minor situations—producing minor knowledges. These situations are thus in a sense marginal situations, characteristic, and therefore remind us of the marginality of the colonial and post-colonial situation itself in established political thought. These texts do not present theories, they present what Foucault said, ‘thinking’, not philosophy, but ‘thought’, not established ideologies but subjugated ideas. Emergence of the Political Subject is not a history of ideas, but a history of colonial and post-colonial situations, situations we must understand to grasp the conditions surrounding the emergence of the political subject.

Politics

as a

Discourse

of

Actions

As ‘situation’ therefore each of these is a concatenation of circumstances, and we can consider the marginal positions sketched out in this volume as particular concatenations of circumstances. For instance, a guerrilla leader has to comment on a desirable and possible political future in course of an interview because he wants peace now; the political subject learns to dialogue and court death in order to cope with situations of deadlock, itinerant preachers try to grasp the phenomenon of colonialism and alien culture, and attempt to make

Introductionâ•…â•… xv

sense of patriotism, which would take into account both religion and language, and would thus form a community of believers based on diversity of beliefs to create a political-spiritual nation free from colonial rule; or here is a position that the early militant political activists would need against colonial rule—a position that would require justification for killing of aliens, and therefore a position that is based on replies to definite questions of phenomenology, namely, What is action? What is death? What is good for the country? What is the ethics of the collective? What indeed is ethical existence under alien rule? What is obligation? The replies of the early militant nationalists to these questions, some of them classic political questions, are all clarifying exercises; they indicate the process of reflection by which the political subject emerges under specific conditions. Variegated in composition and concatenation, they do not show any pre-existing self in order to transform into political subject-hood; what they show in these compositions are certain common situations and common contentions leading to the emergence of the political subject. These texts in the process of reflecting on the emergence of the political subject help us also to reflect on the great question of political modernity, namely, ‘how to address the contradiction between a subject defined by the freedom of rational thought and a subject grounded in the determinations of material reality’. In an intelligence report I show how the rulers view the emergence of the subject as a process of the appearance of the fanatic, unruly, violent, and unpredictable. Who is a fanatic? Who calls him a fanatic? What precisely is this fanaticism? Here is again a typical situation where those working in the area of political history would have to work more. To the extent I could, I have shown the general lessons to be learnt from these questions and the historical answers, which are important to this study of the emergence of the political subject. The political subject ‘exceeds’ the standards set by the regime for permissible violence in its determination in the pursuit of a goal, hence its unruliness, its ‘fanaticism’. Fanaticism is the readiness to go to war ‘discontinuing’ the prevailing mode of politics; it is the voice of the underground, it breaks the myth that politics is the product of E/enlightenment; it is unruly because it is still beyond the given formula of the time on the war/politics copula. Political subject exceeds rules of politics.3 In this way, the unruly colonial subject in India not only repeatedly exceeded

xviâ•…â•… Emergence of the Political Subject

the overwhelming legal realities, against which and in the midst of which the colonial subject would have to work, but demonstrated by its life experience that the emergence of the political subject is fundamentally a matter of ‘non-correspondence’ with the dominant reality. Thus, a guerrilla leader 60 years after the promulgation of the Constitution finds no help from existing constitutional law of the country in order to reconcile or radically amend politics. The anarchist revolutionaries had earlier found that insubordination even under the most extreme degrading conditions may have had an ethical core, but sadly no legal core. Or, the political subject realises today that a continent may integrate on liberal-democratic agenda, still there would be no place for those who remain outside the law, therefore as in the case of the dream of equal national citizenship the nature of the trans-national citizenship also may remain non-inclusive. In short, if politics has to set its face at times against given legal rules and codes, and given political rules, how will it act? With this great question, political philosophy under colonial and post-colonial conditions arrives at its most important gradient, namely, evolving a theory of action—action for mutiny, sedition, protest, revolt, revolution, challenging the monism of sovereignty with alternative ideas of shared sovereignty… Not that the political subject always succeeds, but s/he has set the agenda. As I try to show in one reflection, s/he faces the issue of history, memory, and action, and I have tried to argue following the way Walter Benjamin had put the matter, s/he is like the figure of a Paul Klee painting, whose face is set towards the past even though a storm propels him forward.4 In this sense political history as encapsulated in these chapters not only add new colour and form to philosophy, it proves to be fundamentally no different from political philosophy.5 This study tries to suggest a new method too—a method which is critical, genealogical, and has to uniquely combine practicality and ethicality. To think of ‘politics as a discourse of actions’ is now possible because the colonial past was never banal; each moment of the day was violently destructive for nearly 200 years, genealogy and history came together naturally, and philosophy was grounded in that shattering present. This was possible, for reason here showed itself from its first moment of appearance in split form (violence and liberal preaching combined from day one), which is its original form—it needed no Immanuel

Introductionâ•…â•… xvii

Kant to demonstrate its practical and pure aspects. Finally this has been possible, for the ethics that this political subject has needed is of a practical kind or one might say of an applied kind, in the sense, that once again ethics was asked here not as a matter of ‘care of the self’ and ‘self-caring technologies’, but as a matter of achieving transformation of the conditions outside (though here we should remember that in Gandhi and in the advices of some other leaders, caring for the country had the essential gradient of caring for the self). But transformation was and still remains the great agenda of thinking, and this produces a particular kind of reflection on the political subject. In this essentially hermeneutical task, I had two secret objectives in mind, which I admit here. First, I wanted to see if a new way of composing our political history is possible, whereby the actors of politics (whom I call in aggregate ‘the political subject’) would gain a place of more pride in our accounts than what they occupy in the present conventional ones. Second, because I knew that offering a straight definition of the ‘political subject’ will not help us much in understanding the complexities involved in the theme, this is an attempt to capture the conjuncture of events and forces—a force of circumstances—that produces the category of ‘political subject’, a category which is neither captured by the term ‘citizen’, nor by the evocation of the term ‘political society’. These two inquiries (the first requiring shorter explanation and the second requiring a somewhat longer one) have developed from my earlier work on migrants, illegal immigrant groups, refugees, informal labour, fleeing peasants, displaced population groups, and shop-floor workers of industries with sunset technologies, in short all who are most of the time in noncitizen circumstances, for whom citizenship as a legal category makes increasingly little sense, even though we know that the term ‘citizen’ will be invoked for a long time to come for the association with the words such as liberty, equality, and fraternity. I realised as I kept on pondering over these texts that they provide certain grounds enabling me to look through certain conditions at the emergence of the political subject. The condition can be legal, or it may be a dialogic situation, or a situation of nation–region–globe interface, or the inevitable use of terror as a condition or form of political activity, or conditions that may be disciplinary, such as one where the post-colonial subject is constrained with the burden of memory as it moves to claim political agency.

xviiiâ•…â•… Emergence of the Political Subject

In short, the inquiry is about the autonomy of politics: What can be the enabling or debilitating conditions affecting the autonomy of politics, the subject that claims and gains political agency? This is therefore not a work on ‘self-consciousness’ of the oppressed, though that may be a necessary and certainly hazardous task. In Western political philosophy, attempts to recover in historico-political terms such self-consciousness (for instance, the effort of Georg Lukacs in tracing the consciousness of the workers—History and Class Consciousness, English translation, MIT Press, 1972) are not rare. The hazards of such a task in extricating itself from traces of the master’s hold (Lukacs in a tract on Hegel calls him the Master waiting at a distance for everyone for the final reckoning6) are simply enormous. I am not making here any effort to write a history of the consciousness of a group, or a people. This is an attempt to understand how politics creates its subject, the subject who is not the slave of a politics guided by others, but who authors politics. How does such agency arise is the crux of this inquiry. What are the contentious conditions of politics, which allow the emergence of the political subject? What are the conditions that generate the autonomy of politics or conversely destroy this autonomy? I hope that these narratives and reflections on events will help the reader to make sense of the contentious circumstances from which the political subject emerges. Once more therefore this is a genealogical inquiry. The precondition of conducting such an inquiry is of course taking a distinct attitude to politics, which I have described in my recent work as the ‘materiality of politics, its physicality’, which I submit is the other name of ‘contentious politics’. The contention is extremely physical. Not ‘bare life’, not even ‘naked life’, but ‘bare bodies’ inhabit this politics; and ‘bare body’ expresses only one aspect of this physicality of the political process. This process is so violent and contentious, that either the sovereign power suffers the spectre of bare bodies everywhere, and therefore takes exceptional measures to cleanse politics of bare bodies, or it requires and creates a juridical structure to clothe politics effectively so that politics has little marks of bare bodies. In these reflections I try to make sense of this materiality or the physicality of the political contentions and the process, which allows through its own contentions the emergence of the political subject. The political subject emerges not through discourses, or the ideological thought of a great

Introductionâ•…â•… xix

philosopher, or even by some sacred text called the Constitution, but as a result of certain conjuncture of conflicting circumstances. ‘Situations’ create ‘positions’. In discussing the political subject we are discussing both situations and positions.

Not

the Identity of

but the Identity of

Self,

Actions

Who is this political subject? I have already indicated several marks of this figure. At one level the political subject is the citizen-militant fighting at the barricades,7 raising manifestos, assembling crowds, organising parties, writing and speaking on behalf of collectives, joining all these, voting with fervour or with feet, marching on to parliaments with petitions, organising peasant demonstrations, refusing to pay rent and other taxes, leading attacks on landlords or hunger marches, and declaring millenarian rule… However, this is more a 19th and an early 20th-century figure in the genealogy of the political subject, which lasted till the 1960s of the last century. At another level, the political subject is less of a citizen because s/he has either opted out, or s/he has not been taken in as a legitimate member of the political society. Refugees, dismissed workers, fleeing peasants, persecuted minorities, or groups or collectives demanding self-determination, or women claiming autonomy and agency in politics to frame politics show how citizenship is an inadequate expression of the figure. At the third level, we can see how the political subject is ‘subject’ to given politics, but aware of the subjection wants to subject politics to its own visions, that is authoring politics. At yet another, the fourth level, this figure does not indicate an individual militant but indicates a collective phenomenon in politics. Some say, this is the phenomenon of ‘multitude’. Finally and here is the fifth level, the political subject is the product of democracy—democracy not in the sense of formal institutions, but in the sense of mass politics. Clearly we witness situations where people start contrasting representative democracy with avenues of directly controlling the rulers, situations of ‘democratic entropy and the degradation of democratic energy’, where people refuse to play the game of representation. Political subject emerges at that conjuncture, marked by a ‘counter-democratic universe, that is

xxâ•…â•… Emergence of the Political Subject

to say, a universe composed of various manifestations of the citizens’ distrust of the authorities … leading to a new cycle of questions’,8 and a reappearance of the structural tensions in issues of citizenship, representation, and sovereignty. We cannot of course arrogantly say that in the Middle Ages when power and politics were mainly a courtly affair, it was not possible for the political subject to emerge. There are countless instances when urban groups with distinct rural followings tried to take politics in their own hand, proposing new kings, new kingdoms, new republics, and new worlds. However, with modern democratic politics, the right to do politics becomes the basic human right, and the political subject emerges upsetting at times the fine calculations of democratic politics. In all these manifestations the figure of the political subject conveys three senses: a collective sense, a sense of resistance to power, particularly to the legal resolution of issues of power, and the sense of being a supplement, in other words the figure is ‘not absorbed or exhausted by, while being marked by, political regimes, control systems, power structures, legal codification, and present political establishments’. As I explain in one of the reflections, the figure symbolises desire, new flight paths of escape, resistance, and towards new existence. For instance, keeping in mind the long history of sovereigns, kings, and monarchs, terrified at the prospect of moving bands of peasant outlaws and heretics, proclaiming legal and administrative restriction upon restriction on the right to associate and movement, so that country remains under control, I show how ‘group’ becomes the persona non grata, the entity to be decimated, killed. Similarly, I show how even while through the act of constitution-making the subjects get legal rights, become citizens, and thus now legal subjects of law, the political subject refuses to buy this legal resolution of the fundamental problem of democracy. Now, these three characteristics to be sure have to do with the specific relation of the political subject with the sovereign power. It is a material relation that goes beyond the theory of biopolitics that Georgio Agamben for instance propounds in Home Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.9 The argument of the physicality of the political life, on which this work is based, also stands on the bio-political thesis as readers will find out in the following pages; but it speaks of contentions and actions that cannot be imagined in a bio-politically closed world.

Introductionâ•…â•… xxi

In Homo Sacer, Agamben taking his cue from Foucault’s fragmentary analysis of bio-politics probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of bio-politics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle’s notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over ‘life’ is implicit. This is so because of the way the sacred becomes integral to the idea of sovereignty. Carl Schmitt had already said that the sovereign’s status depended on the power to make exception to the rules he safeguarded. Besides we have the anthropological theory of the close interlink of the sacred and the taboo. Agamben makes use of both these insights, and defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed. He finds this paradoxical in the status of the modern individual living in a system, which controls the collective’s ‘naked life’ of all individuals. The homo sacer as an individual who exists in the law as an exile is a paradox, because while law enables the society to recognise the individual as homo sacer, law also mandates the exclusion, which thus gives the individual an identity. Agamben holds that life exists in two capacities. One is natural biological life, and the other is political life. Agamben likens the natural life to Hannah Arendt’s description of the refugee’s ‘naked life’ (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951). The effect of homo sacer is a cleavage between one’s biological and political lives. As ‘bare life’, the homo sacer finds himself submitted to the sovereign’s state of exception, and though he has biological life, it has no political significance. Agamben says that the states of the political refugees, those persecuted in the Holocaust, and others in similar outlawed conditions, are the states of the homo sacer. Thus, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man prove to be completely unprotected from the power of the sovereign at the very moment it is no longer possible to characterise them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is because the basic right to claim other rights is gone. Although human rights were conceived of as the ground for civil rights, the deprivation of those civil rights (as, for example, in the case of stateless people or refugees) made them comparable to ‘savages’, many of whom are periodically exterminated, as in the camps. In this way, the regime becomes the camp. Camp as the exceptional, yet the only possible form

xxiiâ•…â•… Emergence of the Political Subject

of political life under existing conditions, becomes the question mark for democracy. Homo sacer becomes the question mark for the liberal natural rights philosophers. Yet, one may ask, does this naked person simply die? We know he must die. He is fated to die. He does not die for us, but dies as the ‘first person in the row’ to die. But does he die before our knowing, before we know the pain, the shock, the fear, the terror, the vengeance, the pity, the resignation, and the defiance—all that we know are combined with relief that the waiting is over, that s/he is finally dead? Who dies? Not you. Who is dying? Not I? The naked person; and then you, after you I… This position of the ‘bare life’ brings forth one more question pertinent to what I am discussing in this book. Bare life facing death is free from identities. The possibility of naked life assuming the barest of identities—that is, the only identity possible and this is the fundamental political identity of being counter-posed to sovereign power, meeting at times the sovereign power in a state of near death—suggests the nature of political freedom, which is if we remember the state of ‘naked life’ the condition of being in a state that makes this oppositional to the sovereign, in this case meaning fundamentally beyond law. We can see that in terms of identity, ‘bare life’ is in a perfectly ‘sayable’ or ‘describable’ condition, yet we know it is ‘unsayable’, as much of this existence as a near-death condition is un-describable. Thus, politics rearranges in a fundamental way some of the fundamental questions of philosophy, such as the meaning of Being, Truth, and so on. ‘Bare life’ therefore has a political viability, because it not only brings up the possibility of counter-posing life to sovereign power, it also extracts politics from the bareness of language, the language that ‘naked life’ allows and then the language that it suggests as a future agenda. By making death a moment to be collectively shared ‘naked life’ makes the paradox of the simultaneous existence of ‘sayability’ and ‘unsayability’ the political condition of being. We can push the point a little more. If because of the compulsions of the sovereign, bare life becomes the subject of politics, then one may ask, and as Agamben himself seems to suggest in his book, how can bare life remain the subject of politics, when the legal resolution of democracy by putting rights of ‘man’ and ‘citizens’ together closes any chance of dissidence in politics—indeed which is what Aristotle wanted? Who would have reckoned with the

Introductionâ•…â•… xxiii

possibility of bare life refusing such resolution, in other words, political actions, revolts, in short politics, exceeding the legal power of the sovereign, and the bare life never becoming good life in politics? To understand this process we need to study not so much the discourses of power, but or at least equally, the underground discourses of refusal, love, resistance, and alternative ideas of physical existence, that negotiate the problematic of public/private, polity/daily life, power/ desire in a refreshingly new way. In that fissure of bio-politics the modern political subject stands. In other words, the possibility of the political subject to emerge is due, first, to the presence of bio-political conditions in our history, and second, due to the fact that as yet these bio-political conditions never exhaust the possibility of autonomy in politics, precisely because these bio-political conditions finally bring ‘bare life’ in opposition to sovereign power. Because ‘bare life’ is never bare, but always socially constituted, it occasions exceptionality, also it occasions resistance. The political subject in one sense is the indestructible remaining of the bio-political conditions—the remaining that has claimed agency, autonomy. This is the moment I have tried to illustrate from our political, juridical, and intellectual past when the issue of claiming autonomy became an important one amidst our bio-political conditions of life. I have also tried to show in these pages that ‘bare life’ is never bare but always socially constituted, therefore the presence of ‘bare life’ before sovereign power has occasioned resistance, and political subject emerges from that confrontation. One can think in this context the emergence of women as political subject through a contentious process under which women repeatedly subjected their own selves to law in search for justice only to find repeatedly that not only justice had eluded them, but that law also has repeatedly required women to become victims of all kinds of patriarchal needs of the state. Similarly the anti-colonial Indian in order to emerge as the political subject had to pass through the colonial legal and intellectual processes and yet maintain the autonomy, at times even by thinking of resorting to bombs and courting death. Thus, the situations I present here involve studying the figure of the political subject not only in its theoretical foundations, but analysing this figure in relation to a set of practices (agitating, organising, voting, defying, negotiating, appealing to law, moving, claiming

xxivâ•…â•… Emergence of the Political Subject

rights and identity, mobilising, deliberating, associating, speaking, demonstrating, dialoguing, refusing to pay taxes, bringing out publications and selling them, writing petitions and memoranda and submitting them, articulating a vision of the future, redesigning the nature of polity, legislating, establishing congruence between political vision and other spheres of life, practising friendship and deciding ‘who is a friend and who is an enemy’, and of course preparing to fight to realise the vision, dying, etc.) that have become significant in the age of mass democracy. To conceive of the political subject is to conceive politics in the background of such practices. The theme of knowledge of politics becomes crucial in understanding how agency in politics is claimed, that is to say how self-knowledge of politics becomes the first step towards political activity, and the emergence of the political subject. It no longer remains the ‘bare body’; endowment of political knowledge becomes a form of activity. Political knowledge becomes the precursor to a theory of practice appropriate to the age. I think we can now summarise the issue of the emergence of the political subject and acquiring political knowledge in this way: 1. First of all there is a critical function involved in getting ready to do politics—to ‘unlearn’ the present state of knowledge (academic, sentimental, theological, spiritual, economic, etc.) and preparing to do politics by learning new things about society and its power relations. 2. Knowledge therefore has a function of struggle. The practice of politics is thus conceived as an ongoing war. The individuals must have the required political instruments or weapons, which will enable them to fight all through the life. Thus, training and learning to do politics become important as human activity. Political pedagogy therefore becomes crucial. 3. Political subject does not emerge from the existence of the techniques of exercise of power, particularly legal techniques, but from resistance against those techniques. The Prince is not therefore a political subject. He is a ruler. 4. Thus, in this new education, the ethics of resistance becomes somewhat akin to what morality does in building up a religious soul, or to the role that desire plays in building up aesthetics. 5. Like in any subject-formation, a set of practices becomes significant in the formation of the political subject. Innovation of

Introductionâ•…â•… xxv

a new set of practices indicates the emergence of a new subject in politics who is the new author. These practices are both discursive and institutional. 6. These practices are essentially collective, that is to say relational (contentious on one hand, dialogic on the other), and because of this, the emergence of the political subject is possible only in a collective form. 7. Finally, the materiality of all these, the physicality of the process, its contentious nature, and the transformation of the ‘bare body’ into the political subject—a contentious and dialogic subject. I do not claim that in this book I have been able to offer full explanation of these seven characteristics necessary for a study in understanding the emergence of the political subject. But the readers I hope will agree that at least I have conveyed the argument, namely, that the production of the political subject is not so much associated with a theory of the self, or human nature, or a set of cultural practices, but with a conjunction of circumstances associated with contentions, events, political practices, and new desires. As against power, it is resistance; against domination it is desire; against rule it is friendship; against sovereign authority it is bare body; against the ‘culture of self’ it is subject-hood—one can find in the story of the emergence of the political subject the overturning of the established world of knowledge. This is possible only by means of a radical ‘anti-Platonism’, a repudiation of the Kantian problematic itself, that is to say the problematic of placing the self as the central object of inquiry. ‘Not the identity of the self, but the identity of the practice’—that is the watchword for a materialist view of politics. We did not inquire the self; we inquired the political subject here—not a brand name but a generic name.

as

Political Subject the Constitutive Force

Of course the point that the hermeneutics of the political subject does not originate in the identity of the self, but the identity of the practice goes against the heritage of a model of politics, which is state-centric. In that sense it indicates an alternative way of political understanding that is transactional, contentious, continuously predicated, and the

xxviâ•…â•… Emergence of the Political Subject

worst of all sins in the eyes of all philosophies; it is experiential, and in that sense, pragmatic. This too is a model with a lineage, a lineage of continuous dissolution through new practices and transformation. One great instance of such politics is the practice of friendship where contingency rules overriding centuries long morals and mores giving rise to new notions of citizenship, solidarity, hospitality, conditions of democracy, and new notions of unity and multiplicity,10 or the practice of advice by non-rulers (mendicants, ascetics, holy men, fable readers, courtiers, Brahmins, etc.) to rulers on the appropriateness of certain conducts and the inappropriateness of certain others, as in the Mahabharata when Bhisma the elder on his deathbed of arrows counsels the pious Yudhisthira on how to manage economy (material affairs of the village and the country) and keep the subjects happy. In such politics, though strategy is a word still retaining value, what is of importance is the factor of the ‘moment’, that is tactic, the conditional relation to totality, and therefore a historicised adoption of notions of responsibility, ethics, law, justice, indeed to put the record straight, the concept of the political itself. How can we explain the phenomenon of the political subject that is not state-centric, which is to say, not politics-centric, if we go by the teaching of classic political philosophy, which says that the state is the crux of politics and the political society? I think that this transformation came in political thinking when politics came to be associated not so much with state or rule, but with war. Not that this displacement was without problem as Etienne Balibar shows in a long tract on various Marxist understandings of Clausewitz.11 But we can say at least this that from now on the identity of the practice became as important in politics as the identity of the self … a point that anti-colonial thinking quickly grasped. Several features emerged as a result of this displacement. First, politics became in a contentious framework a defensive enterprise against aggrandising rulers (added to it the factor that therefore such struggle had better chance of success, because defensive war would win finally over a tiring offensive campaign with the homeland advantage of the unity of people, army, and political organisation—a point stressed by both Clausewitz and Mao). Second, by framing politics in terms of war (but we must not forget ‘by other means’), this model of politics not only drew from the insight that war was politics by other means, it expanded the possibilities of

Introductionâ•…â•… xxvii

means (that is at times violent means); by that token it also expanded the possibilities of politics. By making the series of inter-changeability of power, politics, and war interminable, it made politics action oriented, complementary, and always moving away from the state, making new ‘flight paths’ possible. Third, such displacement opened up the unity of theory and history— the two masters of politics—as a problematic to the advantage of politics. Hitherto, politics was a matter of theory in the sense of totality, typical of a Platonic enterprise, which must accompany a theory of life, good life, just life, and become a part of it. Then it became a matter of history, whereby it must fall into a pattern, must look to precedents, and must fulfil a historical mission only to be explained by philosophy. But anti-colonial politics, and various politics of liberation, while mentioning its adherence to these masters, resisted their pressures, and conceptualised situations as singular ones. Therefore, each act was singular in possibility, each practice was to be carefully meditated before acting upon, and each possibility was to be new in history, whose antecedent may not be found in the scriptures. Therefore ancient philosophy never sat heavily on the shoulders of anti-colonial thinkers or the political subjects of the East, as they and they alone were faced with the possibility of a permanent rupture with the wise, ancient past. Fourth, and this is my final point, since anti-colonial politics began as actions against a state, and had to develop its theory of action, it looked at itself as a protracted feature (therefore the continuity of anti-colonial politics for more than one century almost everywhere), as extremely wide in scope (must cover the entire country), as a step that would isolate the enemy from the society (colonial state from the people), and build parallel power centres (in India the Indian National Congress, in China the Communist Party, or several power centres as alternative to state, etc.). The last point is important, for while political historians have a tendency to see this development with state-centric lens, that is from the point of formation of post-colonial state, this was a tremendous political advance from the point of democracy, in terms of historical orientation of popular politics against leaders, kings, governments, states, or a monopolist political leadership.12 Unless we are to say that politics no longer needs a subject (as all American neoconservatives would say following Fukuyama), it is difficult to reject the reality of this displacement and its consequences for a theory of the political subject.

xxviiiâ•…â•… Emergence of the Political Subject

The point to be made from all these brief observations is that the hermeneutics of the political subject not only cannot be state-centric, it cannot be self-centric also. Any standard history of Western philosophy will tell how the connection between the self and the state got established and has become inseparable today, so much so that it is inconceivable to even think of their disconnection. Here in the colonies and excolonies how the self, state, and politics claimed their autonomous spheres is of course another history, which has to be worked out in a complete manner, but whose fragments hopefully can be found in the following pages. Finally, a few words on the necessity at this juncture of writing this book, close upon the heels of the second volume of my Materiality of Politics, titled as Subject Positions in Politics—where I tried to show how subject positions arise in politics, how a poet shifts his poetic gaze to a political gaze as literature, or literary reflections alone prove desperately short of the requirements of an anti-colonial position in the pressing time under colonialism, or how modern democracy produces the justice-seeking subject, or the subject that seeks autonomy of politics. But I realise that more work remains to be done on an urgent basis in the study of political subjectivity, particularly now, when scholars are abandoning all theories of social subjects, and recognising subjectivities in purely individual terms. On one hand, we witness the real subsumption of society under capital and the realisation of a generalised rule of capital, destroying subjectivities indiscriminatingly, on the other hand, the resultant encounters are providing opportunities for the subjectivities to reconstitute themselves. The reconstituted subjectivities are undergoing the process of transformation within the crises and the encounters. In this critical and reflective space, always new as this space emerges, the subjective reconstitution takes place. We have to learn again from Marx here. In his works on political economy and history, he highlighted the specific process of the constitution of the subjectivity in the age of capital, and therefore the specific technologies or practices shaping this process of constitution. But this was not all. Not content with introducing the theme of the constitution of subjectivity, he went on to explore the theme of the liberation of subjectivity, in other words the theme of revolutionary subjectivity. This was at the heart of historical materialism, which has

Introductionâ•…â•… xxix

always seen subjectivity as something to be grasped in terms of the social processes of the production of subjectivities. The subject is thus both a product and productive, constituted and constitutive, participant as well as critical. This is the theory of the unruly subject that can never be expropriated by capital, as the accounts of the colonial and postcolonial encounters included in this book show. Its un-containable character upsets any equilibrium, its hatred against domination, coercion, violence, and exploitation remains perennial. Yet it is also true that state structures, legal structures in particular, are reforming. There is a desperate desire to contain the illegalities within law. The state wants to appear as a rights regime, where the social characteristics of the state are covered by its formal, legal characteristics. The unification of the juridical ordering eliminates or subordinates every other norm or form or procedure. The theme of the political subject is thus related from the beginning with law, legality, and legal subjectivity, and is thus at perennial relation with the citizen, the figure in which the resolution between the social and the legal had taken place. Many bourgeois theories of subjectivity have understood in recent time the acuteness of the problem. Thus, John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (Oxford University Press, 1971) tries to lend a social determination to being through appeals to equality and common good. The proposition of the difference principle to him is a mechanism for the development of social equality. It is the principle of justice that has the power to constitute the social being with real determinations, with preference for the least advantaged members of the society constituting the social. There must be fair equality of opportunity through institutional management of the task of attaching the difference principle with the equality principle. Yet, the constitution of the social being stops at that point. The difference principle was subsequently subordinated to the principles of liberty and of the priority of right or fair opportunity. This shows how the bourgeois society today has lost the capacity of minimum social reform. Hence its intellectual problem: Does it go back to the idea of transcendence and the idea of a transcendental subject, or attempt once more to find out a theory of the socially constructed subject, where of course it would have to negotiate the problems of idealism, particularly the idealism inherent in Kantian moral framework? Given this dilemma, militant intellectuals

xxxâ•…â•… Emergence of the Political Subject

must grasp the central ‘contradiction between a subject defined by the freedom of rational thought and a subject grounded in determinations by material reality’.13 Therefore, it is the thesis of the collective political subject emerging from contentious circumstances and owing nothing necessarily to historical inevitabilities, as Louis Althusser would say ‘wrenching history from the void’? But this would mean taking ‘politics as real thought’. And we can say to our readers, this book is a plea to allow us to think of ‘void’ as political condition, which is neither an object nor a self-constituting production in thought, but only a contemporaneity that can open up to any kind of material determination. The void may have philosophical effects, but politics is not principally concerned with that. This book comes up repeatedly with such situations of void—1857 and the years around that year, the year(s) of the first Bengal Partition and the terrorist-revolutionary campaigns (that is the first two decades of the last century), 1947, and why not the first years of this century when a rebel leader decides to talk with the Indian state?14 In speaking of the subject therefore this book does not speak of inter-subjectivity, or inter-subjective situation, as the game of cultural studies would like us to frame the question of subject and subjectivity. Inter-subjectivity, at least the way it is perceived, removes the issue of choice, option, challenge, encounter, contradiction, and conflict. In such an understanding it is all a matter of interface. From this sociological revisionism this book clearly takes its step apart. Texts and instances of encounters chosen here for study are not documents of inter-subjectivity. They are commentaries of ‘deep voids’, of situations where the political subject appears as the constituent force destroying the claims of dominant norms. All the situations described in this book address or at least raise the question: How will the subject cope with the void, and take on a constitutive programme? How can the political subject constitute itself as if in a double bind—determined yet inventing? How can the productive capacity of the subject, its constitutive capacity, be reaffirmed again and again, acts that by themselves are declaratory of a promise? Politics in this way appears as the constituent power of the subject.

Introductionâ•…â•… xxxi

Notes 1. For an understanding of the discontinuity we can read G.N. Devy’s insightful work, After Amnesia, first published in 1992, now available as part of The G.N. Devy Reader (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009). 2. Trans. Richard Nice, Polity Press, 2000. 3. I am indebted for this particular aspect to Alberto Toscani of the Goldsmiths, London, who while responding to my account of the Wahabis presented to an audience there, drew my attention to this. On this, however, we have to see how radical politics has been always discovered as against virtues of the Enlightenment, as if a legacy of the underground or the secret sects. We have to study rigorously the narrative of what is known as ‘counter-Enlightenment’ in this respect. See for instance an account of the debate on counter-Enlightenment, Robert E. Norton, ‘The Myth of Counter-Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 4 (October 2007): 635–58; historians have also recorded the collective violence, oaths of solidarity, swears, use of harsh language, ardent appeals, forceful interventions, and the display of an energy produced out of the ‘combustible mix of indignation, ritual humiliation, and the threat to shed blood’—phenomena noted for instance by William Beik, ‘The Violence of the French Crowd from Charivari to Revolution’, Past and Present 197 (November 2007): 75–110. Beik notes the moral indignation of the people, ‘their desire to punish the authorities for the latter’s abuse of power’, ‘the emergence of factional politics’ out of this hyper energy, and a clear decision among the people, ‘excluded from decision making (now) shifting their loyalty to the rioters’. Beik notes what we may call the ‘moral contagion’. 4 . Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999[1940]), 249. 5. One of the well-known historians of our time Pierre Rosanvallon has expressed the same sentiment while remarking on the close relation between the two with these words, ‘I do not think there is a necessary gap between political history and political philosophy’—Javier Fernandez Sebastian, ‘Intellectual History and Democracy—An Interview with Pierre Rosanvallon’, Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 4 (October 2007): 712. 6. Georg Lukacs, Hegel’s False and His Genuine Ontology (New York: Merlin Press, 1978). 7. Etienne Balibar notes the significant figure of the militant in the history of the political subject; see, Etienne Balibar, We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. Bruce Robbins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 176. 8. Javier Fernandez Sebastian, ‘Intellectual History and Democracy—An Interview with Pierre Rosanvallon’, Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 4 (October 2007): 709. 9. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

xxxiiâ•…â•… Emergence of the Political Subject 10. On this I have explained at length in ‘Friends, Foes, and Understanding’, in The Politics of Dialogue—Living Under the Geopolitical Histories of War and Peace (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), Chapter 6. 11 . ‘Politics as War, War as Politics—Post-Clausewitzian Variations’. Public Lecture, Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, Northwestern University, Evanston, 8 May 2006. Available online at http://www.ciepfe. fr/spip.php?article 37. Accessed on 1 January 2009. 12. Once again I draw this from Etienne Balibar, ‘The Vacillation of Ideology’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), trans. Andrew Ross and Constance Penley Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 159–209. 13. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus—A Critique of the State Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 248. 14. On this thought of void producing the subject, or correctly speaking, subjectposition, see the essays of Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005a), particularly chapters 1–2.

Section One

Situations

2


1 Death and Dialogue

O

ne of the forms in which the political subject emerges is in its dialogic role. Yet, as the agency of politics, the political subject not only dialogues, but also courts death. Is there a connection between these two functions or roles? I shall begin this discussion on the political subject with four things of this world connected with its destiny. Their presence is known to all but the significance of their interconnections in the life of the political subject is mostly ignored. Death, truth, the dialogic subject, and the rhetoric the dialogic subject employs to question death and articulate truth are the four points of interconnection. Death and truth meet each other at their final moments, and it is said that only truthfully we can speak of death, and only in the final moment of death we arrive at the question of truth. This dialogue between truth and death and the other dialogue that goes on between different truths create the dialogic subject. But by dialogue I do not mean a simple uncontested conversation. In fact the emergence of such a dialogic subject is not possible within the framework of a simple un-contested conversation. The conversation is ripe with dialogic possibilities when it is contested and is therefore marked by rhetoric. We need to explore these interrelationships to map the path of the emergence of the dialogic subject—one of the prime forms in which the political subject has emerged in our time.

MAHABHARATA, POLITICS,

AND

DEATH

The Mahabharata, studied, invoked, and sought to be emulated in the colonial time on many occasions, takes a distinct attitude to the question

4


of the ‘self’ (atman) from the one Foucault describes of the Western antiquity. As we know, in his writings on care of the self and the hermeneutics of the self, Foucault described the technologies of the self as the practices of the self on the self—practices that were essentially practices of the body, which would help take care of the self. Thus, how to speak, how to sleep, take medicine, read and write, mate, dress, bathe, take walk—all these were not mere etiquettes, but ethical issues, by which Foucault meant taking care of the self, in time this would mean ‘governing the self’. They were in Foucault’s description decisions by oneself on oneself (at times decisions taken in conversation with others, with the help of others)—strictly speaking auto-decisions. In the Mahabharata however the inquiry into the self is strictly relational, that is to say relational with the other. Thus, the essence of human life is not constituted solely by the relationship each person has with his or her self, that is to say, with the particularities of his or her body and mind, and with their specific working together in the form of desires, motives, acts, and emotions, but it is also constituted by the relationship with the other, which may be a family, or any other collective entity, society, nation, and then, nature, earth, sky, fire, wind, water, plants, rivers, and trees. Achieving a right relation with the other is a crucial factor in establishing a right relation with one’s self. The two are inextricably linked because life is relational. We can already anticipate how this has an important bearing on the question of the relation between ethics and politics—because at each historical moment of the emergence of the political subject the pressing question will be, is the new claim just? How does one justify the emerging new claims in terms of ‘human essence’? Is it enough to say that what we think to be a right claim is right? Or, why is it that the political subject has to justify the emerging claim’s righteousness in the framework of the relation that this new claim constitutes with the other? Nowhere is the relational factor clearer than in the discussions on the way in which the Mahabharata constitutes the relation between death and truth. In the Dronaparba Yudhisthira the virtuous finds warriors killed and their bodies scattered everywhere, and then with the dear young Abhimanyu being killed by the enemy, he breaks down and wails, ‘These kings and warriors are lying on the earth; “dead” is the identity they bear’ (Dronaparba, 52.12). And then he asks, ‘I wonder, why they are known as “dead”, who dies, what causes death, and why death should

Death and Dialogue

5

claim the living?’ (Dronaparba, 52.18). The answer he gets from Vyasa the wise is that death is equal to all. Diseases and illness come naturally, and therefore men die, thus no one is responsible for the deaths. In similar way pride, arrogance, vain talk, lack of self-sacrifice, excessive self-pursuit, and betrayal cause death. Death does not strike; men die. Thus, as I have indicated in the introduction we have here an appropriate theory of practice that weaves the theme of responsibility and obligation with the broader question of appropriate practice. Vyasa went further. He said that not only death is equal, people working appropriately do not fear death. Death has no power over them because they live their lives in truth, they are free of sloth and laziness, they earn wealth by proper means, and they speak only good of their teachers and the thinkers, and they are at peace with themselves and self-controlled. Not only they are not scared of death, some of them may even deny the existence of death. But death is there—both ‘drunkenness and stupor of mind’ are death. ‘Freedom from them is freedom from death’ (Uddyogparba, 42.4). Thus, if the self within, under the ‘confusion of perceptions’, is assailed by death which takes the form of greed and hatred, there is also a way out. ‘But the one recognising that death comes from confusion of perceptions, no longer fears death, now firm in the true knowledge of things. Approaching him death dies, in the same way as die all mortals’ (Uddyogparba, 42.16). Bhisma the elder makes the connection even clearer. Lying on his deathbed of arrows he says, ‘What may be done tomorrow, do it today … for Death does not ask if your work is complete’ (Uddyogparba, 174.14). Seeking truth, one frees oneself from death. And then the Mahabharata ends with these words, ‘Both death and deathless co-habit the human body. From the confusion of perceptions comes death, and from truth that which death cannot touch. It is only through truth that one conquers death’ (Uddyogparba, 175.29 and 30). Truth in this case, I shall argue, is not a philosophical problem, but a political problem. The way the subject connects death to truth is not a metaphysical one, but a very practical one. Truth here is a matter of determination in practice. It is this practice that dispels the fear of death. The Mahabharata proceeds with the problematic of truth in this way: In fact we have to note that while in the midst of war (Dronaparba) death (the most expected sight, also the most common sight) raises the issue of truth, when peace comes at last (Shantiparba)

6


it is not truth which becomes the preoccupation of the combatants, or the dramatic personae. They do not discuss death, the obvious consequence of war; they do not discuss the million slaughters the war had caused. Peace occasions the discussion of politics, practicalities, and wisdom, which connect them to the realisation of truth, deliberated on earlier in the midst of devastation, war, and deaths. We must realise the significance of this displacement further in the light of the fact, that while war should have occasioned the discussion of the practical virtue of avoiding deaths, war instead here says in a loud voice to the protagonists the necessity of death because of human evils, and the parallel virtue of truth, which, the Shantiparba will tell us later, lies in discerning the practical obligations of life. This then returns in a new way or in the form of a new theme in Shantiparba when the Mahabharata discusses truth in the form of practice, politics. What sense can we make then of this war–peace continuum, of course shown in an extremely mysterious and enigmatic way? How do all these look when one recalls Clausewitz, and think of politics as war and war as politics on the basis of the maxim—war is the continuation of politics by other means? For the political subject this is an extremely significant question. S/he has entered politics as a combatant, as a soldier; and now s/he must make sense of this politics, which is war, but not war. The wise Bhisma of course tells that to avoid war, one must perform the practical tasks of politics well, that is, govern well. In other words, one must secure and protect the practical foundations of politics so that they are not destroyed by the appearance of the ‘other’ form. War is war; politics is politics. In order to appreciate the continuum, yet maintain the specificity of the political, calculation is therefore imperative. The advices in the Mahabharata are calculations towards this maxim. The political subject must deliberate and calculate. Both analytically and normatively this is significant. Therefore both in war and in peace the actors continuously labour on this point; in fact politics entails an eternal labour on the continuum and the specifics of the two ends of this continuum. What do we mean by ‘continuum’ and what do we mean by ‘other means’, which define this continuum? We can make several conjectures, and therefore raise several questions about the juxtaposition from the position of the political subject. Does it mean that as diplomacy fails, dialogue fails, violence must ensue, as Krishna impressed on the point

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in conversation with the Kaurava emissary, Sanjay, sent by the blind Dhritarashtra? ‘You will not rectify by my counsel and the counsel of dharma, hence war shall begin.’ Then what happens to the foundations, possibilities, and therefore the power of politics? Are we then to believe that as the ‘im-political’ (impossible for politics) dimension of the political takes over, we must wait for the destruction of all save the core of the political, to wait for politics to begin? And is it not this, which has happened after every revolution, and every massive war as the Second World War? Is it then the story of the impossibility of politics, or rather ‘pure politics’, and an ever-changing combination of the im-political and the political, and thus the impossibility of politics residing within politics? What happens to the instruments of politics, for ‘instrument’ is the word that Clausewitz explicitly uses? And, to remember in this context before we set out to answer these mysteries of politics, that it is only with instruments that politics attains ‘sovereign’ capacity, which is to say an unquestioned and undeterred capacity to initiate actions, and therefore instruments that can lead politics ‘to its other’, namely war? But lest we should think that this is all a question, deliberately wrapped in enigmatic terms, about the relationship between means and end, we have to recall that in the Mahabharata it is not a technological rationality that is established between the dialogues in the Dronaparba and those of Shantiparba. True, Mahabharata eschews any notion of pure violence; and it speaks of the futility of destruction while emphasising the necessity of death. It means, and we can consider this meaning also in this respect that violence must be launched ‘politically’, which means ‘rationally’, with ‘calculation’, with ‘instruments’, and hence deceit, can be a part of it as a rational option. But if we think along that line, there is a problem we must tackle. Mahabharata places the war as an eternal theatre, while the continuum of war and politics is specifically historical. Clausewitz too insisted on the singularity of wars; by the same token we can say that we too have to recognise the singularity of revolutionary wars. It means that we cannot build any general theory on this relationship between politics and war; all we can say is that politics tends to develop into war, and therefore the political subject must be aware of the dialectical nature of this enterprise. Or, we can be a bit bold and say, only awareness, howsoever dim it may be, of that dialectic makes the subject ‘political’. This is

8


important, for Clausewitz had to deal with the two levels of war—tactics and strategy—and the capacity to wage war, which included first of all political capacity, which determined the extent of these levels. It also meant the capacity to stop wars and conclude a war with least damage. Thus, to correct the formulation just cited, the political is within the im-political, making the im-political inclined to return to politics. It is in this perpetual oscillation that the political subject finds itself. The problem of war is thus an integral part of the problem of politics. Politics thus interprets war as struggle and vice versa; revolutions are to the political subject civil wars; and political is thus not only daily negotiation, but a realisation that politics exceeds daily negotiations, and inclines to violence, and finally to war. This is because interests remain irreconcilable, and the political subject finds that they ‘will not rectify by my counsel and the counsel of dharma, hence war shall begin’. War is not therefore necessarily an anti-political instrument. But how does the political subject ensure that the im-political will remain only a possibility, and even when it happens, that the return is possible, and mostly desirable? One answer of course is that the possibility of the return to politics is to be found in the way war is fought, thus we can remember the slogan, ‘party in control of the gun’, or that ‘people’s support changes the balance of forces in a war’, or that ‘civil/national wars become people’s wars’. It is possible for politics thus reconstructed to return to the political. Only bind in this analysis is that the mutuality or the alterity increasingly becomes a difficult proposition as one fundamental condition replaces another. The only answer Shantiparba seems to suggest is that political conditions have to be prolonged as much as possible by (in case of the Mahabharata) good and judicious governance. Clearly the imagination of the author of the epic stopped there, at least on the issue of the problematising the relationship of war and politics.1 All we can say here is that after all politics was not the main concern of the author of the epic; he was writing on death and life, which at times could be read as war and politics, and the point he was making was that this relation could not be understood unless we had the problematic of truth in our mind—truth that bound death and peace with the same sense of practicality and virtue. For Lenin who saw the Bolsheviks and himself as the Jacobins of the 20th century the problematic of the relation between war and politics as laid down by Clausewitz was to be seriously studied by

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every worth a rupee student of Marx. To Marx himself class struggle was a civil war, a war of classes. To Mao, war reflected everything of the positional intricacies of politics; and to Gramsci again, war was more than a metaphor. War reflected congealed power, domination of a class, and society as the virtual theatre of war of classes, and parties. In India the long anti-colonial struggle was also like a war, and the Indian National Congress more than any other national institution adopted war-like language, with ‘generals’, ‘commanders-in-chief’, and ‘dictators’ leading the struggle, and the guerrilla wars, terrorist attacks, Hindusthan Republican Army, to be followed by the Indian National Army were all parts of the war that the colony had to wage against the ruler to gain freedom. Following that the religious communities also launched full-scale war against each other in the wake of independence. The political subject everywhere grew up in this way, India has been no exception. The truth the political subject has faced in this journey is the truth of this relation, which is against all liberal pretensions of eternal peace, at the same time against the shadowy world of guntoting generals. Against delusion, thus, the Mahabharata says in Anushashanparba, ‘What is eternally true, but contains clever distortion is in fact a lie’ (Anushashanparba, 232.18). And more significantly, ‘The way it was heard, the way it was seen, and the way it was done, to represent it through speech without distortion is truth’ (Anushashanparba, 232.17). Is truth then a manifest problem of relativity, in the same way the Dronaparba treated the issue of death and dharma? Even dharma is contingent on truth, thus, ‘I hear that dharma and truth were weighed on a scale, and truth was found to be of more weight’ (Shantiparba, 199.69), and ‘in truth alone dharma is preserved’ (Shantiparba, 162.24). Thus, we avoid the delusion of dharma with the criterion of truth. But how do we avoid the delusion of truth? That is where rational judgement, and therefore politics, which can lead to war and killings, comes in. Bhisma the elder counsels Yudhisthira the virtuous that it is difficult to determine all the time what is truth and untruth, and when to speak truth and when one must speak the untruth. ‘Undoubtedly it is good to speak the truth… Yet I shall speak to you of that which is exceedingly difficult to judge. Where truth turns into untruth, it is better not to speak the truth for in that case untruth acts as truth’ (Anushashanparba, 109.5). Further, one has to discriminate

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between the relative value of truth and untruth; dharma comes from that judgement (Anushashanparba, 109.6). Thus, the Mahabharata was reminding the enthusiastic followers of free speech, ‘truth is not confined to truth speaking’. ‘What is truth only formally in speech is not necessarily truth; one should discriminate between truth and untruth with regard to their effects’ (Karnaparba, 69.34). Thus, we can see that the political subject has not only to be aware of the ‘human condition’, in order to be aware of the human condition and its implications for politics, but it becomes the dialogic agency to swim through the currents of various relations and relationships. Politics in this way establishes the inter-passage between war conditions and peace conditions, ethics and practicalities, killings and saving lives, between truth and untruth, and finally truth and virtue. Taking cue from the Sankhya philosophy, Bhisma says that freedom is an affirmation of relationships, and not their denial. Similarly truth, memory, and nature begin with particularities of this world. And, even though relation with the other begins with consciousness of the self, there is no mysterious basis of self-knowledge. The method of inquiry is empirical. It should not surprise us therefore that for long the Mahabharata inspired the political subject in India in the colonial time, just as Clausewitz had inspired the political subject in the West.2 In the colonial time the search for a proper approach to action was critical for the emergence of the political subject. It led to a rediscovery of the Mahabharata. As I show in a following chapter on the role of terror in the formation of the political subject, a proper anushilantattva was important. Thus, the early Hindu nationalists converged on reading the Mahabharata, in particular the Bhagavadgita (BG), and drawing from there an appropriate theory of action (anushilantattva), which itself would be a part of an appropriate theory of knowledge (gyanatattva) and dharma (virtue). Thus, killings were to be part of a theory of the just. Therefore when Arjuna the warrior said, ‘I see ominous sign, O Kesava, I do not foresee prosperity after killing my kinsmen’ (BG, 1.31), his counsel Krishna the Hrishikesha (conqueror of senses) replied, ‘Just as the childhood, youth, and old age of the mortal body are for the soul, so it is for the soul to pass into another body; the Wise is not perplexed by all these’ (BG, 2.13), and then, ‘The Unreal never exists, the Real is never non-existent; the seers, who have realised the truth, know this fact’ (BG, 2.16); and ‘Whoever thinks that he kills it, whoever

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thinks that it is the killer, neither of them knows the truth; it neither kills nor is killed’ (BG, 2.19). Krishna thus tells, O Partha (Arjuna, son of Pritha), ‘Be indifferent to desire and sorrow… be prepared to fight… This advice is based on the wisdom of Sankhya’ (BG, 2.38–39). ‘Sankhya is the path of knowledge’ (BG, 3.3), and ‘He who restrains his organ of action, but thinks of the object of senses is a fool who acts vainly’ (BG, 3.6). With this theory of action, where does the Gita lead the political subject of the colonial time? It tells, ‘Knowledge arises from satva and insatiable greed from rajas; from tamas delusion, error, and ignorance arise’ (BG, 14.17). Satva is purity, the result of good karma (action, practice), and rajas results in sorrow and tamas in ignorance (BG, 14.16). This epistemology, that is Sankhya, tells us of three gunas (quality, property)—knowledge, action, and the being of the actor (BG, 18.19)—and proper knowledge would see karma (action) in connection, relation (BG, 18.22).3 Gita proceeds, as we know, through dialogues that aim for a new ethic superseding the old. The new ethic, as the anti-colonial political subject realised, would mean causing deaths to even fellow Indians in the event they sided with the colonial ruler, and war. This new ethic would inculcate a new theory of not only living (commune, akhara, ashram, with the respective protocols, such as jagna), but ‘being’ too (bramha), which would be able to combine action, knowledge, and virtue. The anti-colonial political subject learnt to wage war and kill if necessary, but this is not all, it learnt to see actions in connection. Thus, from the moment of its emergence it was to be free from any metaphysics of self, with which Western philosophy had always tried to misguide politics. It also learnt to connect truth with practice and practicality. In its moment of emergence it had learnt to face the realities of death and truth.

POLITICS, DIALOGUE, RHETORIC Strangely, war leads to a discussion on dialogue … but who is this dialogic figure? If I had argued in the preceding section that the political subject is a militant as s/he appears in the history of popular politics of which insurrection or upsurge is an important event repeatedly marking that history, my further argument, as indicated

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in the beginning, is that the political subject is conversational also, where rhetoric as a practical art of deliberation, persuasion, and judgement has left its mark through historically specific examples of argument and calculation. In fact as we proceed along this second line of inquiry, we shall see that this connects with the earlier observation on the ‘split of politics’ (politics/im-politics), almost perched on, one can say, the ‘split of reason’ (deliberation and deliberation on war that destroys the basis of deliberation). While rhetoric appears to many as the use of deceptive language, false arguments, and fraudulent practices, rhetoric as a mode of dialogue takes criticism to a new level, and has contributed historically to development of several human pursuits including politics, theology, and law. Rhetoric makes truth conditional on practical judgement, and combines, as I shall show, all the conversational weapons that the dialogic subject employs in political understanding and persuasion—in making friendship and isolating the enemy—namely deliberation, identifying the topic, characterisation, argumentation, questioning, emotion, eloquence, and judgement. Aristotle had said that good rhetorical texts were medicine, and Cicero had argued, such speakers and writers were able to bond a community. Clearly, as Michel Foucault was to show in Fearless Speech,4 speaking truth meant skilful use of rhetoric whereby the head of the weak while s/he speaks unpleasant truth on the face of the powerful would remain on the neck. How does the political subject dialogue? Think of the ancient arts of speaking and writing (more speech those days, more writing later on, and now again coming back to speech and its circulation in various ways). There are of course people who say that in these days speaking and writing are both obsolete as tools of political conversation, politics after television and direct-message-to-home technologies do not require speaking, oratory, mobilising through speech, writing, pamphleteering, using mass congregations such as religious gatherings or occupational forums or caste and other social associations. If this is true, then of course the question will be if this is politics at all. But assuming that these classic tools of deliberation are still necessary and in use, we can see how these have facilitated the emergence of the political subject, who learnt through these techniques how to dialogue. Through speaking to an audience, while being aware that this is an audience with a particular background, rhetoric has marked courts

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and legal proceedings, assembly gatherings, and public occasions, such as funeral occasions, for praise or blame. Deliberative rhetoric has developed everywhere while deciding on the course of war or peace as a mode of conflict resolution, and eventually planning for war, because persuasion is needed on such occasion. Once again, the Mahabharata provides several instances of this. Further, judicial speech has helped the development of logic, and to clarify what is main, what is incidental, and what is associational in making or seeking a judgement. Aristotle therefore spoke of ‘topics’, which meant places. Topics also suggest different strategies for discovering virtue. Topics define the order of the text. They help focus on arguments. Rhetoric thus creates pleasure and pain. This is because people on hearing speeches and reading various writings may change their lines of thinking and acting, as they are persuaded to turn to a new line of thinking. This has consequences. Rhetoric may involve the use of parable or fable, but the structure of the argument in the pamphlet has to be clear. Yet this is not all. If we think of the role of oratory, informal speech, and pamphleteering in the building of anti-colonial, agrarian, and Leftwing mass politics in India and in countries with similar conditions again we can see eloquence, persuasion, and invention all being combined in the art of argumentation. If the Indian National Congress had in the old days Suren Banerjee, Bipin Das, Tilak, and later Nehru and Subhas Bose, the Krishak Praja Party and later Muslim League had the itinerant preachers like Maniruzzaman Islamabadi, Akram Khan, and the peerless Maulana Bhasani, the Dravida Movement had Periyar, and the communists had Bankim Mukherji, Ranen Sen, Mirajkar, and Dange, all known for rhetorical skill. Their speeches and pamphlets did what a thousand learning could not have done, that is educating millions of people in politics in the shortest of time, making knowledge the most crucial element in the struggle for power. We cannot say if they knew Cicero (though for the nationalists the history of ancient Greece and Rome, and the tales of fiery speeches by English parliamentarians like Edmund Burke had an irresistible attraction), but they had to engage with questions of frankness, truth, criticism, the issue of obligations, danger of fearless speech, rhetoric, politics, philosophy, the repertory of values, the relative merit and demerit of concentrating on emotion, the need to deliberate on conflicting interests, and finally engaging with silence—silence traditionally maintained

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in society on issues now to be engaged with, silence among the present audience and the targeted readership, also the silence that will be now maintained. There is however one difference. Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, or Machiavelli, all these masters of rhetoric were members of ‘free society’, while the names I recounted in the preceding paragraph were members of a colonised society, where the purpose of political deliberation was not to win over colleagues in the ruling circles, but turn people against the rulers. Therefore, the political subject under colonial and post-colonial conditions had to wrestle with a fundamental asymmetry of power. Rhetoric was about contested values and conflicting interests. Topics here have meant shifting the point of view of the collegiums of orator, the pamphleteer, and the audience regarding matter and arguments. In this world of argumentation we must not be surprised that the legal mind flourished. After all the old Cicero had said, ‘The issue is the first conflict of pleas’ arising from the defence or answer to an accusation.5 And, it was necessary, he added, to provide ‘proof to our allegations to win our hearers’ favour, and rouse their feelings’.6 Thus, for the political subject oration and writing pamphlets in order to be heard have a cognitive dimension. In the anti-colonial world, therefore, legal minds flourished in assuming political leadership. Legal reasoning was crucial in political argumentation. Even though law was to be most rational and hence timeless, yet historical contingencies made possible for legal reasoning were to be attuned to conditions such as colonialism. R.C. Dutt, Dadabhai Naoroji, Tejbahadur Sapru, Gandhi, Nehru, C.R. Das, Vittalbhai Patel, Fazlul Haq, Jinnah, and Surahwardy, all employed legal reasoning for the purpose of political argumentation; lawyers who had to practise in courtrooms became good political orators and writers, who would make successful case against colonialism in their speeches and writings. Fact determination, evidence addition, cross-examination, comparison, allegory, exemplification, and appeal techniques, all these elements of legal reasoning were present in the emergence of the political subject in colonial India and its subsequent political practices. Community law, customary law, law of honour, law on treason, commerce and trade law, public performance law, property law—in all these areas legal reasoning spilled over the boundaries of courtroom where these lawyers were practising and got into the public squares, meetings with followers, discussions in prisons,

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village meetings, religious assemblies, publication agencies, printing shops, and magazine and journal houses brimming with countless groups of animated listeners, readers, writers, and speakers. Legal reasoning though most apparent in the Assembly proceedings would be most effective as rhetorical ploy outside the chambers of law-making and law-adjudicating—namely on the streets.7 In fact legal reasoning being closely tied with the use of rhetoric led to the detailed writing out of verdicts in modern time, which in turn led to development of case law and the growth of modern jurisprudence.8 But legal reasoning was not alone in the political subject’s engage-ment with truth—in this case the truth of colonialism and its existence. Besides, because of the use of legal reasoning as part of rhetoric another dialogic technique act developed, namely, the art of interpretation and invention of a certain style based on a mixture of modern argumentation, refutation etc. and appeal to faith and a common repertory of values. In this hermeneutical exercise (Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s writings on history, virtue, the epic Mahabharata, Krishna, character-building etc. are among the finest examples), the insistence was on the centrality of knowledge in shaping rhetorical discussions. Thus, rhetorical choice did not mean necessarily abandoning inquiry, but along with inquiry judging related parallel statements and allowing for figurative reading also for flexible interpretations. Thus, canonical texts, like Hind Swaraj, Discovery of India, Swadesh O Samaj, Sabhyatar Sankat, All India Krishak Sabha’s resolutions, or the Lahore Declaration of the Muslim League, all allowed for multiple interpretations in the vortex of political activism. Rhetoric implied an admission of multiplicity of political views, and cutting through the multiplicity to arrive at the truth. Much before the rise of the theory of post-modernism and new historicism, the rhetorical ploy of the political subject showed how a rhetorician could emphasise difference in values instead of emphasising shared values. The parallel speeches of Jinnah and Gandhi after 1940, or Nehru and the communists in 1947 (for Nehru ‘At the stroke of midnight Indian arise’ and for the latter, Yeh Azadi Jhuta Hai, in English ‘This Independence is false’—both classic instances of rhetoric) prove rhetoric’s contrasting use in developing dialoguing tools and modes. Rhetoric in short has been at the core of dialogue. Dialogue is practical reasoning, and nothing illustrates this more than the presence of

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rhetoric in dialogue. Even when Machiavelli admits and agrees with Cicero that the foundations on which all states rest are good laws and good arms,9 he has to reason in his act of reversing the priority, namely, ‘Since there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms, there are bound to be good laws, I shall set aside the topic of laws, and talk about arms.’10 But again later he says that the new Prince while securing his kingdom with arms will have to now learn from Marcus, in order to preserve and stabilise the state. It is this practical reasoning that is so vibrant in Mao’s writings, because his writings (mostly pamphlets and short tracts) combine what Aristotle had remarked as the essentials of rhetoric, namely ethos, logos, and pathos. With rhetoric came faithful advice and declarations of friendship (the Afro-Asian Countries’ Bandung Conference Declaration in 1957 is the best illustration or the Declaration of the Tri-Continental Solidarity Conference in Havana in 1966). These declarations of friendship try to create communities on the basis of political friendship, at times democratic legal communities too (for instance, in Nepal the current declaration of friendship between the Maoists and the liberal constitutional parties was the basis on which the future democratic legal community of Nepal was sought to be erected). Rhetoric helps the political subject discover the practical truth;11 at times it helps in demarcating the enemies or in forging friendship, or offering reconciliation. Therefore, while some writers think that rhetoric as an instrument of politics can create and maintain peace and order, others think that it is a dangerous instrument capable of creating social and political instability, riots, rebellion, revolts, insubordination, gangs of insane, and civil war. Yet, notwithstanding this fear, no one could deny that rhetoric created essentially a republican vision of political process, in which the speaker or the writer was essentially a combatant, a soldier, a pleader, a leader, who was in combat with other orator or writer in verbal battles to attain the goal. It was, and indeed even today, risky at that time. It offers a commoner to catch public attention with the rhetorical skill, and make a mark in politics. Ambitious orators have threatened social order, in our recent history, the instance of Periyar E. Ramaswamy Naicker encouraging dalit awakening and in the process stoking anti-Brahmin revolt is significant in this respect. Power

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and prestige are challenged in this way; and this is possible because ‘rhetoric as an art operates in the realm of opinion and contingency, assumes a sceptical epistemology, and can thus promise only probable, not absolute truths’.12 Words no longer remain secure in oneto-one relationship with things. More significantly, rhetoric succeeds where dialectics fail. The former will never promise absolute truth, as we all are used to say of a statement or speech, ‘this is mere rhetoric’. In the text of the Mahabharata also—particularly in scores of advices of Krishna and Bhisma—we can identify the connection, and it was this connection that enthused the publicists and activists in the colonial time—Bankim Chandra to Rebati Barman—to closely study the style and use it in their political argumentation. In our own time we can recall two brief texts and we should closely study them because they are significant landmarks in the history of the political subject in post-colonial India: the pamphlet announcing the peasant movement in Naxalbari in May 1967 (known as the ‘red pamphlet’, because of the colour of the paper) and the support declaration read out by the Beijing Radio at that time, titled as ‘Spring Thunder over India’. We can also pick up one more document for such study—this time to appreciate the history of the political subject in China, written of course by the master rhetorician of our age, Chairman Mao, the name of the tract—Report on the Human Peasant Uprising. We can think further along this line: Lenin’s What is to be Done? We can read Marx’s two tracts of the several, namely The Communist Manifesto and the Eighteenth Brummaire of Louis Bonaparte as instances of classic rhetorical work. We can also see rhetorical mastery at work in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. When I say these are rhetorical works, I do not intend to say that these are nothing but language games, closed games in which the subjects are born and die. Rhetoric is intended in all these writings to link the language of politics with the outside world—the audience, readers, listeners, enemies, sceptic followers, and those are still sitting on the fence. These are all dialogic tracts, significant by their use of rhetoric, landmarks in the history of the political subject. They aim at particular audiences; you can hear in those pages the muffled sounds of continuous dialogues with those audiences, with the past, and of course quarrels with settled values. They are classic combinations of ethos, logos, pathos.

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DIALOGUE

IS

CONTESTED CONVERSATION

Yet, we must not forget that as combinations these texts are polyphonic, and that is why these texts instil dialogue with various voices, viewpoints, existences, and subjects; and this is different from the phoney recognition granted to the ‘other’. As dialogic texts these must come into conversation with other agencies, issues, histories, and languages; therefore the political subject in dialoguing or in authoring these dialogic texts cannot remain a sealed self. The open and the contentious nature of dialogue is the main reason of the transformational character of the political subject. Mikhail Bakhtin had once remarked as caution in Dialogic Imagination, Such rhetorical double-voicedness, cut off from any process of linguistic stratification, may be adequately unfolded into individual dialogue, into individual argument and conversation between two persons, even while the exchanges in the dialogue are immanent to a single unitary language: they may not be in agreement, they may even be opposed, but they are diverse neither in their speech nor in their language. Such double-voicing, remaining within the boundaries of a single hermetic and unitary language system, without any underlying fundamental socio-linguistic orchestration, may be only a stylistically secondary accompaniment to the dialogue and forms of polemic. The internal bifurcation (double-voicing) of discourse, sufficient to a single and unitary language and to a consistently monologic style, can never be a fundamental form of discourse: it is merely a game, a tempest in a teacup.13

Thus, internal bifurcation is not enough, for even though, double-voiced discourse is very widespread in rhetorical genres, but even there—remaining there as it does within the bounded-ness of a single language system—it is not fertilized by a deep-rooted connection with the forces of historical becoming that serves to stratify language; and therefore rhetorical genres are at best merely a distanced echo of this becoming, narrowed down to an individual polemic.14

Bakhtin here notes that in neoclassicism this double-voicing became crucial in the low genres, especially in satire. How does then dialogue,

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the political subject engages in, attain historically transformational nature, while we note that the dialogic practice of the political subject can be at times only playing with internal bifurcation within a bounded language of politics? To attempt that answer we must follow Bakhtin’s analysis a little more. Dialogic consciousness is ‘multi-languaged consciousness’, that is to say any genuine dialogue takes places in a multi-language site, where not only different interpretations originating from the same style and language are clashing, but different perceptions originating from different languages as perception systems are also at clash. Thus, the innumerable conversations between the anarchists and terrorists on one hand and the communists on the other in different jails in colonial India were remarkable dialogues of the political subjects, for not only a new entity was born from these conversations, but these were evidence of how a ‘multi-language consciousness’ could be at the source of a dialogic subject.15 The colonial period in India had witnessed similar dialogues between the ‘nationalists’ and the ‘terrorists’ (those who followed the un-armed path and those who believed that the armed path was inevitable), and possibly more significantly between the nationalist (Hindu) Congress leaders and the leaders of the Muslim communities. Such dialogues bring radical change in the language map of the political subject, and open the latter to the ‘zone of maximal contact’ with the present with all its open-endedness. Bakhtin also remarks that this open-endedness produces a consciousness, which is different from memory, because ‘memory respects tradition’, ‘memory is the language of tradition’, while dialogue with profound historical forces of becoming opens up to transformation. Dialogue achieves its transformational nature through several ways—it is multi-form, multi-style, multi-image, and inter-animating, an accomplishment that rhetoric can bring about. Yet this is not all. From multi-languagedness comes ‘otherlanguagedness’, that is speaking in another language, which again is the dialogic mark of the political subject. Marx in the Communist Manifesto began with the question of the permanent civil war in society, evidently a language of past warriors; Lenin became a Jacobin and spoke like a Jacobin; communists in many third world countries become peasant warriors or nationalist revolutionaries, and Left political activists in many Muslim majority countries speak in the language of liberal Islam.

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Thus, to put the point briefly, the dialogic situations in which the political subject finds itself and engages in can be of various types. Both place and time are responsible for this variety. Some political language has a centralising tendency. Marxism is one, with fully developed parts, with an overall architecture, so much so that many claimed in the past that it was science. Thus, though it produced some versions such as Euro-Marxism, or Socialism with Chinese characteristics, its structural fundamentals were quite cognisable. On the other hand, liberalism as a political language is flexible, that is to say that it has conversed with the parts produced from internal bifurcation. Yet, while liberalism has rarely seriously conversed with any other political language, the life of Marxism has been one of contested and rough conversations with many languages—such as Christianity, liberalism, nationalism, democracy, and agrarian ideologies. Indeed some dialogues have claimed the life of Marxism itself. In Bakhtin’s terms, one is a case of polyglossia, the other is a case of heteroglossia.16 Thus, some produces splits outside, and is thus in constant dialogues with others, while some produces internal splits only, and therefore converses within the bounded system, but does not encourage conversation with another heteroglossia within a language, polyglossia is a case of hybridisation. Every type of intentional stylistic hybrid is more or less dialogised. This means that the languages that are crossed in it relate to each other as do rejoinders in a dialogue; there is an argument between languages, an argument between styles of languages. But it is not a dialogue in the narrative sense, nor in the abstract sense; rather it is a dialogue between points of view, each with its concrete language that cannot be translated into the other.17

Therefore, in such violent encounter occasionally one must die. Have we ever thought that in the process of countless transformation of people into militant political subjects, in particular communist subjects, how many religious, Catholic, Muslim, nationalist, Hindu, and other souls have died—to be resurrected of course in distinct political selves? In most cases, however, dialogue with the help of rhetoric achieves such transformation without that heavy cost. The civic funeral and memorial speeches, other biographies, autobiographies, and similar other tracts give us some idea of the process of transformation through

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dialogue—where words act like bullets, actions take the place of prayers, glorification of mass actions replaces self-glorification, and writing manifestos replaces writing devotional songs. In this process, where rhetoric is most active as a dialogic form, rhetoric is a consequence also. After the event of transformation the language thus changes. At times, it may not be to good effect. In such cases, as after the change from revolutionary way of communicating to the bureaucratisation of political communication in post-revolution Soviet Union or China, creative language of politics ceased; old languages of gratification, imitation, pity, decree, and censored speech, came back. The progress is therefore never straight. Reversals are always waiting for the political subject, who is thus the most tormented soul. We must therefore investigate more the problematic of open-ended dialogic processes, which are products of concrete time–place combination. Open-ended dialogue is not content only with the diversity of authorial presence and audience presence, and the accompanying insertion of other social voices. It is not merely marked by the production of heteroglossia, it engages with many languages and therefore with many agencies. It is not only internally dialogic, but it is also dialogic with other forms of communication, narration, and events. Thus, death, birth, congregation, famine, flood, mourning, ecstasy, laughter, satire, commentary, criticism, literature, and even silence are addressed by the language of politics. One needs only to see the history of the development of the rhetoric to find how politics has engaged with various languages, events, and occasions. Heteroglossia and polyglossia are thus linked as processes of splits and connections; they are evidences of how politics aims sharply and enters into polemics with the official mores of the time, and heteroglossia itself becomes a matter of dialogic relation with the outside. Politics produces dialogic ambiguity, thrives on it, yet as it proceeds, it turns towards its articulating and clarifying role. Dialogue narrows down as clarification proceeds; the impossible dimension of politics, that is the dimension that makes further politics impossible, increases—thereby threatening the foundations of politics. We can see now that the relation between dialogue and politics is thus only another version of the relation between politics and death, the mimetic version of which we get in the relation between politics and war. The year of 1947, as the year of mass killings, partitions, mass migrations, and independence, illustrated all of these—politics ended

22


as dialogues ended, as dialogues ended war began, war could begin because dialogues remained ambivalent and politics could not clear it up, which is to say politics could clear up the ambivalence only by removing dialogue. Through this extraordinary series of displacements the political subject was encountering the truth of politics—its split nature. Yet dialogue never permanently ended, even as war continued politics recommenced by re-invoking its dialogic nature from multiple sources and forms, because different actors and agencies began producing differing commentaries. The provisionality of dialogue thus characterises the dialogic subject. What is dialogue to politics is what politics is to war, and what is politics to war is what dialogue is to death—indicating thereby an extraordinary series of contradictions, reconciling today, absolute opposites tomorrow. The incessant dialogues conducted in our collective life between politics, war, death, and truth, incessant but always provisional, give rise to the dialogic subject whose mission is to prevent any absolute resolution (such as absolute war, absolute pacifism, absolute death, or absolute truth)— therefore, no absolute resolution of a contradiction, but displacement. It may be asked, if the provisional nature of dialogic act is so paramount, then what remains of the autonomy of the dialogic subject, which is after all one of the forms of the political subject? What remains of the autonomy of the will? The answer to this cannot be found in the way Kant suggests an answer. Kant beckons every theorist and believer in the will of the subject. But we have already seen that this is a closed route, and that we need a theory of actions, as the Mahabharata makes the point amply clear. Following Kant, the unconditional necessity of acting dialogically is ‘a fact of reason’; therefore pure reason should immediately make the political subject conscious of the need to acknowledge this fact because pure reason is what our (sensuous) desires or urges are. But this acknowledgement of desire in a reasonable way is a form of practical law. This practical law is like a moral law, or the fundamental law of pure practical reason, by which then we mean that the political subject will ‘so act that the maxim of (its) will could always hold at the same time as a principle in the giving of universal law’. In simpler language it means that it is our consciousness of the necessity of acting for the sake of moral law that first discloses our fundamental freedom to us. It is an acknowledgement of the overriding requirement of acting on unconditional practical principles, and thus an acknowledgement of the capacity to act. In Kant’s words,

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23

It is therefore the moral law [italics in the original], of which we become immediately conscious…that first offers itself to us and inasmuch as reason presents it as a determining ground not to be outweighed by any sensible conditions and indeed quite independent of them, leads directly to the concept of freedom…Each of us judges therefore, that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it and cognises freedom within him, which within the moral law, would have remained unknown to him.18

The problem however is not in our acknowledging or refusing to acknowledge, the problem lies in understanding situations carrying marks of all kinds of conditions and therefore politically (which means both dialogically or using war as method) acting on them. Political action suggests political capacity, political capacity tells us of political history, actions, and knowledge. Will develops not through recognition of a moral necessity, but through actions. Autonomy means thus the ‘autonomy of this process, of politics’. The autonomy of the political subject derives from autonomy of politics as process, as activity, as action. We can thus see as to why the provisionality of dialogue does not take anything away from the dialogic subject. Its provisionality indeed counts for its return, its permanent contradictory co-habitation with war as the other form of politics. Thus, violence, regulation of hatred by dialogic mechanisms, invocation of memory through dialogic exercises for the purpose of repair, resumption of violence, continuing degradation—all these remain mixed in real-life situations and make dialogic situations what Mikhail Bakhtin had termed ‘open-ended’ thus calling for politics to improvise and display its much promised creativity.19 Situations of negotiation therefore constantly emerge in the context of the constant co-habitation and interplay of legalities, semi-legalities, and illegalities, which mark the political society. The political subject has to be dialogic in such a milieu. In India, as we know, but are not probably fully aware of the significance of the feature, constitution-making after the independence was accompanied by enormous amount of informal dialogues with various groups, nationalities, semi-legal existences, and constant dialogue for coalition-making at popular level, the one single factor that resisted autocratic trends in Indian politics through the decades. These dialogues and popular coalitions carried forward the rights revolution first declared in the colonial time, and reinforced the position of the political subject in due course.20

24


In my recently published book, The Materiality of Politics (London: Anthem, 2007), I have outlined (volume 1, Technologies of Rule) five technologies of colonial and post-colonial rule, namely colonial constitutionalism, terror, right-sizing the state, the techniques of care and protection, and the policy of governing a stable population. The brief narrative I am going to describe in the following relates to an event when the colonial administration attempted to deploy one of these technologies, namely right-sizing the state and right-shaping the population, and the way the anti-colonial political subject resisted the colonial plan through a dialogic strategy, also through a combination of dialogue and confrontation as the method of encounter. We are here referring to the Bengal partition of 1905 and dialogues the partition produced.

THE DIALOGUES

OF

1905

On 19 July 1905 a Gazette Extraordinary published the resolution of the Government of India on the partition of Bengal. By this resolution a new province was to be created: [W]ith the status of Lieutenant-Governorship consisting of the Chittagong, Dacca, and Rajshahi Divisions of Bengal, the District of Malda, the state of Hill Tipperah, and the present Chief Commissionership of Assam. Darjeeling will remain with Bengal, in order to maintain associations and links, which are highly valued in both areas. (Entitled as Eastern Bengal and Assam) the capital of the new province will be Dacca with subsidiary headquarters at Chittagong. It will comprise an area of 106,540 square miles and a population of 31 million, of whom 18 millions are Muhamedans and 12 millions are Hindus. It will possess Legislative Council and a Board of Revenue of two members; and the jurisdiction of the High Court of Calcutta will be left undisturbed. The existing province of Bengal, diminished by the surrender of these large territories on the east and of the five of the Hindi states of Chota Nagpur, but increased by the acquisition of Sambalpur and five Uriya states, will consist of 140,580 square miles with a population of 51 million, of which 42 millions are Hindus and 6 millions are Muhamedans. In short, the territories, now composing Bengal and Assam, will be divided into two compact, self-contained provinces,

Death and Dialogue

25

by far the largest constituents of each of which will be homogenous in character, and which will possess clearly defined boundaries and be equipped with complete resources of an advanced Administration.21

On the basis of this resolution Bengal was partitioned on 1 September 1905. The history of the first partition of Bengal is well known, though some sections of that history still remain obscure. At least this much is true that in the countless pages written on the event, the catalytic role of the event of partition in unleashing a series of dialogic processes has remained largely unanalysed. The first partition led to various positions, reconfiguration of some earlier positions in social and political life of Bengal through unprecedented levels of dialogues between various sections of society, between rulers and the ruled, and what is most significant the event and the reconfiguration of the positions led to the confirmed emergence of the modern political subject in the colonised land of Bengal that carried in its heart the secret of all the earlier political attempts based on anti-colonialism. Ideology, action, position—all these took concrete shape around partition, and we can say that 1905 brought about the emergence of the modern dialogic political subject ready to converse, contest, and organise. Dialogues of 1905 proved in no uncertain term that dialogue was in essence ‘contentious conversation’. Let us see how the situation developed. In 1903 H.H. Risley, secretary to the Government of India, in a long memo to the chief secretary to the Government of Bengal, articulated different possible positions in favour of and against Bengal partition. In that memo, he not only carefully considered the various situations if the reorganisation of Bengal Presidency was undertaken in terms of trying to achieve the right fit between size of the territory and population (number and mix) as constituent units of the Indian Empire, but he also conjectured on the resultant political picture.22 In protest, one of the earliest modern nationalist public meetings was held in the Town Hall of Kolkata on 18 March 1904. The resolution of that protest meeting contested paragraph by paragraph the proposal of Risley, and showed how even by the yardstick of scientific and rational administration Dhaka, Mymensingh, and 24 Paraganas are integral parts of Bengal, how the Assam administration can be made to pay on its own without addition of territory to it, and how the charge of under or mal-administration of

26


the eastern part of Bengal was untrue. The case against the break-up of Bengal was argued on all possible grounds, including on the ground that the caste-marriages across the proposed Bengal divide would become difficult (Paragraph 44) in case Bengal was divided, hierarchy would return in intra-Bengal relations, language would suffer, and only an alien administration would stand to gain.23 As we know, undeterred, the colonial administration divided Bengal on 1 September 1905. The first large protest meeting was held on 7 August 1905 in the same place of the first protest—the Calcutta Town Hall. The meeting called for a dialogue and reconsideration of the government stand. The chief secretary of Bengal government, R.W. Carlyle, issued a circular to all subordinate officers on 10 October 1905 to ensure that educational institutions in the city and the districts would not be turned into protest venues. The Anti-Carlyle Circular Society was born on 4 November 1905. The All India Muslim League was born the next year in Dhaka. Hindu nationalists and Muslims did not totally agree on the partition issue, but not all Muslims supported partition unconditionally. Tagore and many others protested against partition, while they also saw the entangled nature of the issue, complicated by high landlordism (mostly Hindu landowners), religion, access to education and public employment, and other such issues. Likewise, Muslim leaders like Akram Khan, Maulana Maniruzzaman Islamabadi, and Ismail Shiraji associated with nationalist endeavours while continuing dialogues with the Congress, the predominant nationalist forum of the Hindus.24 Similarly the militant nationalists, who were the early terrorists, also worked in the mainstream opposition to partition. Finally, the partition was annulled in 1911 in the face of continuing militant public protest, but Assam became separate from Bengal. Historians see the first partition of Bengal as the early principal landmark in the development of a divisive and divided nationalist movement in the country. I see it the other way, in other words, I see that period as the dialogic moment of 1905. I shall explain briefly the reason. Led by Tagore and joined by several others, such as Krishna Kumar Mitra, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Maulavi Ekinuddin Ahmed, Arabindo Ghosh, Surendra Nath Banerjee, Pramatha Chaudhury, Sister Nivedita, Ramananda Chattopadhyay, Kumudini Mitra, Bipin Chandra Pal, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Akram Khan, Maniruzzaman Islamabadi, Maulavi Abdul Karim, and Pulin Behari Das, the debate and the

Death and Dialogue

27

dialogue became what Tilly has chosen to call ‘contested conversation’. Dimensions of organisation, agitation, pamphleteering, petition, secret activity, fund-raising, publicly arguing, mobilising, boycott of foreign goods, bomb-throwing, assassinating, processions, night vigils, public fast—all kinds of political practices were discussed. The strategy of right-sizing the state and right-shaping the population—in this case the Bengal Presidency—by itself showed how far the colonial rule had advanced in terms of the techniques it employed against the anti-colonial subject of the 19th century. Then it was more of a policy of guard, vigil, suppression, trial, punishment, and outright warfare; but now with regard to right-sizing and right-shaping, the colonial rule wanted to base its strategy more on securing consent of at least part of the population. Thus, the Government of India’s resolution of 19 July 1905 did not forget to mention, […] The Governor-General in Council is fully aware of the opposition, which these proposals (of territorial reorganisation) have encountered and has no desire to undervalue the sentiments upon which it has been based. Ties of mutual association grow up so quickly and become so closely interlaced, that territorial redistribution can rarely be accomplished except at the cost of a disruption, which is often painful and generally unpopular. On the other hand when old connections are severed, new ones almost immediately take their place growing with a rapidity that in a very short time is found to invest them with sanctity scarcely inferior to that of the associations, which they have superseded. The Government of India are encouraged by previous experience to hope that such will be the case in the present instance. They will be greatly disappointed if they are not found in the new Province elements of cohesion, which will speedily endow it with a stability and individuality of its own. In any case the Government that is called upon to decide such cases must regard them from a wider standpoint than that of purely local, in all probability transient considerations… All (proposals) have been duly considered and have not been rejected until they were found to contain flaws or drawbacks, which were inconsistent with essential aim. On the other hand the scheme, which was preferred to them, has received the practically unanimous approval of the leading officials of the three administrations whom it directly affects as well as the final sanction of the Secretary of State. The second condition above referred to, is that, as far as possible an attempt should be made to remove every well-grounded cause of

28


complaint and to satisfy every reasonable demand on the part of those who will be personally affected by the new arrangement… The result is the creation of a new Province, founded upon that, which is the secret of all good administration, namely the close contact, in so far as this is possible in areas of great size, of the Governors, with the governed.25

But if this was a refinement of the strategy of rule, the political protests also showed signs of strategic turn and improvement. There was not only a confluence of many paths, but also the dialogic moment of 1905 brought out many unanticipated strains of thought in the making of the political subject. As we know protests against Bengal partition had three major strands to rely on: (a) the boycott of foreign goods as a major step towards the attainment of self-reliance; (b) emphasis on popular unity and on the issue that the colonial authority must not be allowed to divide and rule; and (c) public meetings, songs, fasts, processions, etc., combining with secret clubs for martial training, and militant activities. The dialogues refined these three elements or strategies. We can see how the dialogues were like moves in an Aesopian language to impress upon the society the significance of these three strategies. The poet Tagore in the essay ‘Bangabibhag’ (partition of Bengal) pointed out that if divisions remained within the society, why blame the outsiders that they had utilised the same for the partition or division of the society? Therefore he urged the countrymen and women to begin work for unity leaving behind the effort to appease or appeal the colonial rulers to be kind to the ruled and abrogate the act of partition of Bengal. The people must realise what had caused the weakness in the first place giving scope to the rulers to make use of that weakness, what the roots were, and whither the path of remedy lay. Who can divide us if the roots of relations are spread deep between the west and the east (of Bengal, now to stand divided)? If power from outside wants to break us, the force of love will protect.

Invoking in this way the theme of desire against power—the power– desire opposition and dichotomy—a theme the philosopher Deleuze was to play on in his own writings many decades later, the poet went on to say,

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29

Where we are strong, we shall remain resolute. Where it is our duty, we shall remain aware and be responsible for it. Where we have our soul mates (in Bengali atmiya), we shall place our faith and reliance. We shall be never unhappy or dejected. We shall never say that with one act of the government our all round doom is scripted. If that were to be so, then we shall never be saved with an act of cleverness or an opportunity got through providence or government mercy…26

Krishna Kumar Mitra, another nationalist leader of that time, later recalled in his autobiography, Atmacharit (1937) the spirit of Swadeshi, the boycott of foreign goods, and the use of home-made goods, the debates around Swadeshi, and the all-round collection of money... Maulavi Ekinuddin Ahmed’s voice was significant. He asked, if Muslims remained backward in all senses, and if they left the institutions of education and health already created in the metropolis of Kolkata, in the temptation of an el dorado, that is the newly created province of East Bengal and Assam, how would they gain? Why should the Muslims believe in the promises of the government? And, how could numerical majority, which Muslims would gain if they accepted partition and East Bengal as a separate province, transform Muslim life? The Maulavi insisted that Muslims must see through government promises, techniques of deception, and he was sure in the context of all these, ‘General Muslim opinion is against the division. We think that instead of dividing Bengal, the government should unite Assam and other places, and instead of having a Lieutenant Governor for Bengal, it should have a Governor as Madras and Bombay (the other two Presidencies) have.’27 Another Maulavi, Muhammad Hedayatullah, was more direct. He said that the partition of Bengal had brought the two communities back to their senses. Hindus had been shown their place, Muslims have realised the falsity of government promises. The two communities would now re-adjust their positions, and would be as they were through centuries as equal subjects of rule. Then he added, the colonial rulers would give them education, ‘but not political education … but this we shall not leave or renounce… We had lost our self-confidence… If we can find the right path, we shall regain unity, and then none can stop our advance march’.28 Added to these exchanges were voices such as of Pulin Behari Das, the leader of the secret society

30


Anushilan, who would emphasise the need to build strong self-defence clubs…;29 and of course we know how secret societies such as Anushilan and Jugantar flourished in that renascent morning of Bengal. There are many instructive issues in that dialogic moment of 1905. Here at least this much we can note that the dialogic moment of 1905 was followed in a decade by the momentous Gandhi–Jinnah accord (Lucknow Pact, 1916), followed by the Bengal Pact in another decade towards a united anti-colonial movement. In fact, we can go back along this line of inquiry. Within the history of the Mutiny of 1857 we have the combined narratives of dialogues and death. We have to remember that the mutinous soldiers had to form a council of command when approaching Delhi, they had to dialogue with the emperor and his courtiers to form a political centre, the mutineers had to dialogue with the common people of Delhi as well as with wealthy merchants, Muslims with Hindus, the mutineers had to discuss with the Wahabis, different groups of mutineers conversed with each other stationed at different cities, sepoys with the villagers, one caste with another, and mendicants with ordinary people to make the Mutiny of 1857 a reality. The Mutiny was a grand exercise in local and trans-Indian dialogues to envision an independent India, and the mutineers knew that they would have to die in order to bring about their vision.30 The practice of dialogue in the history of the political subject in India has brought to light not only its co-existence with war, and consequently death, and its acceptance of the fact that at times truth is only in form of meeting death, but it has also brought out dialogic act’s open-ended nature. It also, we can say in the same context, brings to light the extreme difficulties in certain choices and the un-reconciling nature of certain choices, whereupon the dialogic subject finds itself face to face with truth—the truth of opposition, of the impossibility of certain reconciliation, and the truth of what remains as political task after legal-administrative-rational decisions have exhausted themselves as delivery mechanisms relating to the contentious issues of justice, that is, after they have failed to exhaust the issues of justice—that is to say the truth of war. If therefore as I tried to explain earlier that war and deaths proved to be the ground on which politics would be enacted after the political part of politics had played itself out, that is to say war and deaths constitute the un-exhausted ‘supplement’ of politics, I want

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31

to indicate at the same time that this dialectical logic also works in the constitution of the dialogic subject in politics, the subject that persists with dialogues after all oppositions had proved absolute, and death seems to be final resolution of all politics. We must therefore study attentively how the dialogic component breaches open the seemingly tight surface of politics not only by deployment of rhetorical means, but also by way of invoking inter-subjective experiences, the ethos and practices of solidarity, gift, and the courting of heterogeneity. All these have allowed the political subject to resume its dialogic role, and as we know after the horrible massacres of 1947, that marked the end of colonialism, conditions of politics did not take much time to re-emerge. Politics quickly resumed in less than a decade after the long history of the unconditional suppression of politics by colonialism was over. This return or resumption demanded a break with the tradition of rule of law with the help of politics of rights that was linked up with heterogeneous character of justice. We shall come back with this factor of heterogeneity in a later Chapter 3, ‘The Singular Subject’. However, at this point it is sufficient to note that democracy was redefined in this way, in the spirit of a ‘coming community’ based on affinities between subject positions in politics (peasants, dalits, women, marginal communities on the borderlands, minorities, trade unions of beleaguered workers, etc.)—a post-colonial road that was neither liberal nor elite nationalism driven. In this democracy politics of understanding and heterogeneity quickly proved to be a key figure. Affinity-based political forms emerged as independent India took to the self-proclaimed democratic path, and inasmuch as these ‘coming communities’ proved to be the occasions of social and political changes, these particular affinity-based political actions in turn made the feelings of the ‘coming community’ more urgent. It is in this sense perhaps Foucault had remarked, The problem is to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a ‘we’ in order to assert the principles one recognises and the values one accepts, or if it is not, rather necessary to make the future formation of a ‘we’ possible, by elaborating the question. Because it seems to me that ‘we’ must not be previous to the question, it can only be the result— and the necessarily temporary result—of the question as it posed in the new terms in which one formulates it.31

32


Political actions thus facilitate the emergence of the collective subject, necessarily plural and based on inter-subject affinities. I consider such a historical understanding essential for our political subject-hood—also its engagement with truth which by itself becomes dialogic—because it is only then we realise that politics advances through the opening up of closures, what the philosophers call ‘aporias’. Dialogues help those opening up of closed situations inasmuch as war appears at times as the prising tool. This route, it is worth remembering while concluding this discussion and therefore worth repeating, is different from a Kantian reading of the emergence of the subject, first because we are locating here the specificity of politics, and therefore the specificity of the political subject; second, we are looking at situations and not selves; and third, we are studying actions and not ‘imperatives’. In the Kantian view, all ethical principles and moral judgements are ‘categorical imperatives’. They arise immediately from the agent’s use of reason (to determine if the agent’s proposed maxims can stand to universal laws), and they tell what the agent ought to do—whatever his/her naturally produced sensuous desires may urge. Thus, the acknowledgement of an action as duty, as morally binding upon the will, is not conditional upon any naturally produced desire preceding the use of reason and determining the will. On the contrary the recognition of will arises independently of anything empirical; it arises solely through the exercise of ‘pure reason’. All ethical principles followed by the agent for the sake of duty motivate the agent through the ‘autonomy of will’. Kant in this formulation was not only fighting against Hume’s ghost in order to deny that ‘reason ought only to be the slave of passions’, he was denying at the same time the autonomy of actions, acts, practices—in our case in the realm of politics—so that we would have to trace the emergence of the political subject and political will in our reasoned imperatives and not in the situations and the passions these situations produce. The point I am therefore trying to make here is that the subject’s relation to truth and politics can be understood not through any reading of the will but of situations and actions, which involve both dialogue and war, and if there is any relevance of practical reason here, that practical reason is not contingent upon the ‘transcendental freedom’ of any will, or the operation of a universal form of practical reason (to Kant the two depend on each other), but on what we can call ‘concrete

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33

universals’, concrete situations producing the reasons of politics. Of course, ‘subjects means subject to someone else by control or dependence and tied to his identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power that subjugates and makes subject to’.32 Also it is true that the Kantian notion of self-knowledge can be re-read as knowledge produced through bodily practices, which means, as Foucault suggested, that the knowing subject is an effect of power. The subject is a production of knowledge, and hence embodied subjectivity is what normative practices aim to control. But to understand how politics produces its subject who then authors politics, we have not only to understand the distinct nature of politics (war and dialogue interminably changing into each other), but we have to also study the nature of political actions whose relative autonomy mark the political subject. In the emergence of the political subject, therefore sovereignty is not the only general problematic running through ages of political-juridical thinking, but the other great theme is that of rights, characteristic of political actions impacting on dialogues and clashes, and thereby constituting the modern political subject. Here we arrive at a very interesting juncture. Every discourse of public right would assume politics continuing under normal (dialogic) conditions, and every historian of rights would therefore treat war as disruption in that politics. Economy, speech, household, religion, assembly, education, health, job, security—everything undergoes disruption due to war. The historian of right therefore treats war not as an enigma, but an indicator of the precise relation of power with right, the relation that would be revealed in a different way once the public right would resume after the end of war or invasion. We are speaking here of a grid of intelligibility, and I think that the resumption of politics after the partition wars in the Indian subcontinent in 1946–48 presents us with one such occasion, rights re-emerging through conflicts, war, and deaths. This is the significance, for hereafter rights would be measured in terms of its intelligibility against the state and the sovereign power that had the power to launch violence and impose exceptional and emergency provisions, indeed a state that signified war and the military machine. War and rights are the combined but internally bleeding discourse that has marked the emergence of the political subject.

34


It is in this sense of emergence that we can recognise the subject positions in politics. The point of departure is here marked: It is the condition, which forces us to pay attention to ourselves, our positions. And, therefore in place of the age-old question, how should we know ourselves, we have the question, how should we know this world? And, more important, what should we do with this knowledge thus gained? ‘Know thy self’ appears here only in a roundabout way. ‘Take care of your self’ means here not as Foucault pointed out with the Greeks, ‘know your self’ and ‘the nature of your soul’,33 but know your actions, words, your battles and your conversations, the essentials that constitute your political condition and force you into politics. Through the analysis of these exercises the self-knowledge of the political subject grows. There is thus a double decoupling—that of self and soul, and at the same time of condition and knowledge. This is the hint we get in the Mahabharata also. As I have suggested, Mahabharata is not a story of only knowledge but two interrelated but distinct and parallel stories of knowledge and conditions, likewise not only of soul but of self also as distinct from soul. This decoupling was to stay on as a critical factor through centuries of materialist and subversive thinking till we arrive at the colonial time when we find the decoupling leading to the formation of the modern political subject for whom much of the life becomes a test, indeed the whole of life must become a test… for the actions with which we want to break the conditions. I believe a decisive historical step was taken in the annals of politics in the colonial time with this growth of awareness of life as a test. Thus, when reading, writing, conversing, questioning, learning, assembling, appealing, protesting, fasting, persuading, shaming, scolding, cursing, all these tools have been used and nothing remains, then death (at times in form of war) appears as the form of test to life, as the knowledgeable Bhisma had put it, the test of truth with which death will now face life.

POLITICS

IS ABOUT

PRACTICE

AND

ACTIONS

In making the argument that dialogic subject-hood is at the heart of the emergence of the political subject, we are not only picking up a thread of social life ignored by many, we are also drawing new significance

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35

from our history of contentious politics that makes dialogue a narrative of contentious conversations. There is another implication of this argument, which reflects on one of the most persistent questions in modern politics, the question of agency. It will be asked, by placing the dialogic tendency as one of the prime features of the political subject, are we not diluting the issue of agency? And, is not agency finally an affirmation of a monist view of political action? I wish to conclude this discussion with an answer to this great question of our time. I argued earlier in this chapter that one of the contributions of politics to social understanding is that it makes truth a practical question in life. I showed how the Mahabharata made truth a matter of determination in practice. Now this is important for two reasons. First, it means that to politics truth is born out of historically determined inter-subjectivities, therefore in political understanding more than a scientific rational understanding, an understanding based on affinities counts; truth is thus divested of all philosophical significance, in fact politics is not interested in non-practical aspects of truth. Politics is interested in affinities that actions produce, and the political truths that they create. Second, it means that contrary to many a myth, politics is not solely or so much concerned with hegemony (combination in varying degrees of domination and persuasion), but with practical truths born out of political affinities. If politics reaches a situation where not only life appears as a test, but death too appears as a test of truth with which it faces politics, the concern of politics is not so much to set control over society, but to harness and marshal resources with which it can not only take life as test—the test of political truth—but face death as the ultimate test. This is the liberating aspect of politics inasmuch as exercising hegemony is its necessary aspect of control and reconstruction. Looking back at our own history of last 200 years it will be difficult otherwise to make sense of the fact that it was not only the Indian National Congress (or its leading figures like Gandhi, or other organisations) which drove anti-colonial politics forward through decades, but the innumerable, uncountable, known and unknown, and knowable and unknowable actions that were taken to face the test of life and eventually the test of death (the final act of facing death) that drove politics on, for these actions did not create hegemony, but affinities proving the success of politics. Possibly the time has come to stop thinking of the political subject in terms of the figure

36


of the Prince—that figure is too much connected with the history of domination and too little, if at all, connected with the history of inspired political actions that have produced affinities. Deaths produce affinities, but deaths have no place in the science book of politics, which is all about how to establish hegemony. In short, politics is about practice and actions, and it is there that the issue of agency has to be lodged. That is the task of critical realist ontology. Little more than 150 years ago Marx produced in German Ideology the withering critique of abstract philosophical speculations, including moral philosophy in form of Kant’s categorical imperatives or Bentham’s utilitarianism. Normative conceptions were simply historically specific expressions, he argued, of class interests, and their claim to universality was therefore false, and thus ideological, because such claim concealed class antagonisms behind the façade of the general welfare of the moral community. In intense political time, such as in our anti-colonial revolution or in the succeeding intense political struggles against the rule of the propertied, not only the existing political-legal order was substantially damaged, but new contentions emerged constituting the new politics of the country, and making what we can call ‘the constituent power’. Politics advanced, and the limits of the juridical-political rule were constantly exposed through the rights revolution that the politics created in the country. This process was also the process of the constitution of the political subject, in which the idea of justice—at once emanating from particular circumstances and at once universal—played a remarkable part. This is the concrete universal of the political subject, dialogues among concrete subject positions contributing to the emergence of the subject. This is a theme to which we shall return in Chapter 3.

NOTES 1. For an understanding of the relation between politics and war, I have gained from reading Etienne Balibar; See endnote 10, p. xxxii. 2. For the English translations of the cited stanzas of the Mahabharata in this section, I have depended on Chaturvedi Badrinath, The Mahabharata—An Inquiry into the Human Condition (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006). 3. I use here the literal (non-rhyme) translation of the Bhagavadgita by V.M. Moharaj, and appended to his The Warrior and the Charioteer (New Delhi: Leftword, 2005).

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4. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2001a). 5. Cicero, De Inventione, trans. H.M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 21. 6. Cicero, De Oratore, trans. E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 281. 7. On legal reasoning, see Edward H. Levi, An Introduction to Legal Reasoning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). 8. On this, Jean-Louis Halperin, ‘The Court of Cassation in Nineteenth Century France and the Binding Effect of Rationes Decidendi’, in Ratio Decidendi – Guiding Principles of Judicial Decisions, ed. W. Hamilton Bryson and Serge Daucy, vol. 1 of Case Law, Comparative Studies in Continental and Anglo-American Legal History (Berlin: Duncker & Humboldt, 2006). 9. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 34. 10. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams, p. 34. 11. This is a point repeatedly stressed by Wendy Olmsted, Rhetoric: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 76–79. 12. Wayne A. Rebhorn, ed. and trans., Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 7. 13. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981), 325. 14. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, p. 325. 15. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, p.11; on these conversations there are several accounts, though not any of these descriptions studies the conversations as social and political dialogues. For some of these accounts, as for instance in the prison camp in Deuli, Rajputana, in 1930–36, see the biography of Rebati Burman, a camp inmate of those days, who was a ‘terrorist’ when he was arrested in 1930 but was already on his way of being converted to the communist ideology and doctrines, and later became one of the main communist spokespersons in the jail, and held those dialogues, Arun Chaudhury, ed., Rebati Barman Smaraney (Kolkata: National Book Agency, 2006). 16. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 67. 17. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 77. 18. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Book 1, Chapter 1, Section 6, pp. 29–30. Available online at http://library.beau.org/gutenberg/etext04/ikcpr10.txt (accessed on 27 July 2009). 19. Martha Minow, ed., Breaking the Cycles of Hatred—Memory, Law, and Repair (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 20. On the history of the Rights Revolution in India, I have written elsewhere; see R. Samaddar, Flags and Rights, published as Policies and Practices, 11 (Calcutta Research Group [CRG] Research Paper Series), 2006. 21. Gazette Extraordinary, 19 July 1905, reprinted in Rathin Chakraborty, ed., Bangabhanga Pratirodh Andolan—Satabarsha Smarak Sangraha (Kolkata: Natyachinta, 2006).

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22. Risley’s letter published on 12 December 1903 in India Gazette, reprinted in Chakraborty, Bangabhanga Pratirodh Andolan—Satabarsha Smarak Sangraha (hereafter BPA), pp. 38–53. 23. BPA, p. 58. 24. I have written on their response elsewhere, ‘Leaders and Publics—Stories in the Time of Transition’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 37, no. 4, October–December 2000. 25. BPA, pp. 60–61. 26. BPA, pp. 74–75. 27. Nabanoor, 3(6), Bangla Sal or Bengali calendar or B.S. 1312. 28. Nabanoor, 3(7), B.S. 1312. 29. BPA, pp. 130–32. 30. On this, read Tantia Tope’s last days and last moments in Charles Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny—A Detailed Account of the Sepoy Insurrection in India, and a Concise History of the Great Military Events Which have Tended to Consolidate British Empire in Hindostan, 2 vols, 1858–59 (reprint, Lahore: Sange-Meel Publications, 2007), vol. 2, Chapter 19, pp. 923–29; the famous historian Iqtidar Alam Khan makes a mistake in neglecting the dialogic component of the movement of 1857 when he tries to artificially draw a line between the rebels and theocracy in 1857. He writes, ‘Such being the case, it is strange that comparisons should be drawn between the Delhi rebels of 1857 and the Al-Qaeda as William Dalrymple does in The Last Mughal, committing the double error of closely linking the 1857 Rebels with the Indian “Wahabis” and treating the latter as precursors of Al-Qaeda.’ He also spends words to prove that there is no basis for presuming that Bakht Khan the rebel commander-in-chief at Delhi was a ‘confirmed and fanatical Wahabi’. While this may or may not be true, the entire effort of Iqtidar Alam Khan fails to appreciate the dialogic moment in 1857, because he ignores that the Wahabis rarely attacked Hindus, had contempt for men of substance, and were the most republican in spirit, even though they had their Emirs and Caliphs. See, Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘Theocracy and the Rebels of 1857: Assessing the Role of the Wahabis’, People’s Democracy 31, no. 22 (3 June 2007). 31. Michel Foucault, ‘Polemics, Politics, Problematizations’, in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1977), 114–15; on the idea of the coming community, among others, G. Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 32. Michel Foucault, ‘Afterword: The Subject and Power’, in Michel Foucault—Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 212. 33. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject—Lectures at the College de France, 1981–82, trans. Graham Burchell and ed. Frederic Gros (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 419–20.

2 The Impossibility of Settled Rule

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f in the first chapter we got at least some idea of how the subject emerges, and how death and dialogue as the two options of politics play a crucial role in this emergence, the question now will be, what impact does this process leave on rule, the stability of rule? Hence I want to speak here of the unsettling subject, that is to say the impossibility of settled rule. We can begin by asking of course a rhetorical question, namely: How would it look like, if one were to live for 200 years, after the colonial years ended in India to have lived through it? What would appear as normal and what as exceptional in the life one has just gone through—the memories of daily life, wars, plunder, killings, grand pronouncements, sovereign’s periodic appearances, law-making, the brush with police and intelligence officials, rent crisis, famines, and living in a world marked by the uncertainties of all kinds? In that sense those who lived through the Hundred Years’ War in Europe (for us, that is for Indians, it was a two hundred years’ war) as the characters of Brecht’s Mother Courage, what would appear as normal and what would be exceptional? Reflecting on the theme of stability of rule it seems that not only we must agree to the complementary nature of normalcy and exceptionality, war and politics, law-making and conflict, sovereign power and governance, occupation and freedom, and political rationality and passion (of killing as in many cases), but to the fact that political power can reproduce itself in modern life only on the basis of these complementary relations. Yet to speak of these complementarities is not enough, it is necessary to observe their actual process of happening, and the problems they produce for a regime, or for political theory. We shall see once again the role that political subject plays in unsettling a rule.

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THE WAHABI TRIALS A little more than 150 years ago, between the 1830s and 1880s, the colonial authority in India was busy tracking down the Wahabi rebels particularly after the death of Syed Ahmed Barelvi, the founder of the Wahabi movement, in India in the battlefield at Balakote on the Frontiers on the West on 6 May 1831—exactly as the US administration in Iraq is busy today in hunting down the rebels, searching, smoking out, and destroying them. Town by town, village conglomerate by village conglomerate, and more importantly company garrison by company garrison, the relevant information gathering, apprehending, jailing, convicting, banishing, and if necessary killing the rebels went on. This tracking down had two propelling factors behind it. One was the frontier unrest and wars in the North-West—the ferocious Anglo-Afghan Wars and the frontier wars where the Wahabis threw themselves in wave after wave against the British Indian army, and then as wars on the frontier began, the Wahabis spilled into the mainland of the subcontinent—following the trail, legacy, and links of the earlier Faraizi and Tariqah-i-Muhammadia movements. But these were also the years immediately before or the aftermath of the Great Mutiny of 1857, which had ended with the victory of the colonial power and the imposition of direct rule of the British administration at a huge cost of bloodbath, mass murders, razing of cities and settlements to rubble, brutal pacification, and silencing of the towns and the countryside. The rulers were afraid that the Wahabi revolt had contributed to the Mutiny, and could directly draw further from it, acquire legitimacy, take advantage of the discontent consequent to the bloody pacification, and could easily lose themselves in the Indian countryside in the course of organising their followers leaving little traces behind for the informers of the colonial rule. If some Wahabis had earlier fought the Sikhs who were led by Sher Singh, the fight might soon turn into a war against the British. The second factor was that the Wahabis were not simply peasant rebels, they were more organised in a network (some say, from Dhaka to Peshawar), and had targeted army as their field of infiltration and influence. The administrations of the three presidency divisions (Calcutta now Kolkata, Bombay now Mumbai, and Madras now Chennai)—the backbone of the colonial administration formation

The Impossibility of Settled Rule

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in those days—had to employ detailed governmental methods of inquiry, reporting, comparing, taking actions on findings, and then preparing action taken reports (ATRs) for higher authorities with regard to the Wahabis. As the historian of the Wahabi movement in India Qeyamuddin Ahmad tells us, strangely enough the first recorded instance of Wahabi work among the ranks of the sepoys in the Indian Army however related not to the northern parts of the country but to southern India.1 The investigation by the government into the Hyderabad Conspiracy in 1839 led to the discovery of Wahabi agents in different civil and military stations in Chennai and other important centres in south. The inquiry into their activities led the colonial authorities to a trail that reached down to Vellore, its Mufti of the Court Wali Muhammad, and the Sadr of the Collector’s Office Hubullah, who were receiving a Persian newspaper from Rajab Ali in Kolkata, the Caliph of Muhammad Ali Rampuri, earlier expelled from Chennai on account of treasonable activities in the Carnatic area, today’s Karnataka. The said Persian newspaper Suttarah Akhbar spoke of the impending war between Dost Muhammad and the British, and prophesied that the British (actual word used, ‘English’) would be soon driven out of the country. Emboldened, it was told, Maulavi Rampuri would assemble the believers inside the mosque near the Chennai Fort; would speak of jihad, and Rampuri’s speeches at the fort mosque would be copied at other mosques—particularly in Piran Sahib’s mosque where the imam was a discharged sepoy.2 We have in this way, thanks to historians such as Qeyamuddin Ahmad, some sketchy accounts of the Wahabis; but there is not much information on the key figures of the Wahabi activities in the Deccan including Mumbai,3 or in Patna, Meerut, or Ambala; and it is difficult to imagine today the impact of these activities on the mode of governing at that time. This is particularly because the politico-religious activities of the Wahabis were baffling to the colonial administration to no end. Contemporary chronicles report of their network, combination of centralised and decentralised functioning (that is having a principal leader while allowing free-moving preachers and recruiters, grassroots planners and activists, etc.), honesty, moral preaching, systematic raising of resources including money, use of code words and ciphers in message transmission, publication of newspapers, non-cooperation with British instituted law and court system, the consequent stress

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on adjudication of disputes within the community or the village, and finally, complete dedication—all that made the Wahabis the first professional revolutionaries in modern India.4 Like Lenin’s ideal professional revolutionaries, the Wahabi organisers were shadowy figures, and even though the colonial authorities built up piles of files on Syed Ahmed Barelvi and the two Sadiqpur brothers of Patna, Wilayat Ali and Enayat Ali, who succeeded Syed Ahmed in leading the Wahabis, yet because of the style of work, the modernist organisational technique of combining secret work with mass preaching, and politico-religious framework in which the Wahabis operated, the Wahabis remained the classic spectre haunting British India, spread over a large region from Patna (at times reaching Kolkata) in the east to Peshawar in the west.5 Caliphs like Syed Muhammad Hussain, the two brothers—Wilayat Ali and Enayat Ali—Farhat Hussain, Ahmadullah, Mubarak Ali, and Abdul Rahim (who went to the Anadaman prisons and on return on amnesty 12 years later again became a key figure in the Wahabi network) are names that featured in government reports, accounts of Hunter, Malleson, and Kaye. They are reported as writing letters, preaching in the mosques, discussing with strange interlocutors; yet there is not much direct evidence, only repeated assertions from officials that they are engaged in conspiracy. Therefore the colonial administration decided to increase surveillance, make preventive detentions, confiscate money, houses, and other forms of property, banish suspected figures from their towns, and most importantly began strict watch over companies of soldiers suspected of being in contact with the Wahabis and harbouring seditious ideas. Now of course, after nearly 150 years, we can only have some glimpses of that atmosphere of panic and frenzy that lasted for more than half a century and whose features—at least some of them—can be narrated only in brief. Here is one such glimpse. The Acting Collector of Kurnool sent this note on the local Wahabis to the Secretary to the Board of Revenue, Fort Saint George (Madras), on 26 April 1866 in reply to an inquiry from the board, dated 19 October 1865, Information of this nature can as a rule only be obtained through native agency, and Mr. Minchin, whose experience in the district of Kurnool extends over several years, selected Omardaraz Khan, Tehsildar of


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Ramallakotta Taluq and Kale Khan, pensioned Ressaldar of the late Kurnool House, as agents on whom he could rely, to supply him with intelligence regarding this sect. Translations of their reports are enclosed, and you will observe that they both concur with the Honourable Shurf-ool-Omrah Bahadoor in regarding the Wahabees as a fanatical, dangerous sect, daily increasing in numbers and power, having for their object the overthrow of the existing Government, and for their creed the double assurance that the slaughter of an infidel, or death received at his hands, is a certain passport to happiness in a future life. The statements of the Mahommedan gentlemen referred to may perhaps be slightly tinged with that bitter hatred which distinguishes the members of all religious sects, and especially the partisans of the different schools of doctrine amongst the Mussulmen; and having the recent events in Ireland in view, I think that, if the organisation of this class of fanatics has extended in other districts in the same proportion that it has in Kurnool, the time has come when active measures should be taken to check its further progress. The question as to what these measures should be is one of considerable difficulty, because at the present there is really nothing to lay hold of, (and) if we waited till there was, the evil might then have assumed unpleasantly large proportions. So long as no offence against the State can be proved against them, the Civil Authority is powerless to act. That seditious meetings are held by these Wahabees, and the seeds of disaffection sowed by their emissaries is highly probable; but the difficulties of procuring legal evidence of the same are great, and except through informers, I do not know how it is to be obtained. The ordinary local Police would, I consider, be quite incapable of dealing with a matter of this nature, which should in my opinion be entrusted to a special agency, if the reports from the various districts show that Shurf-ool Omrah Bahadoor’s statements as to the increasing power and influence of this sect are correct.6

Who were the people flocking to these Wahabi preachings? We have this list based on the information supplied by Omardaraz Khan, the Tehsildar of Ramallakotta Taluq, who said that while formerly there were not many Wahabis in the taluq, ‘then there came a very clever Wahabee during captain Russell’s time, many of the Mussulmen of the place and of Ulpoor were converted by him, and Captain Russell thought his stay was likely to cause a disturbance and sent the Moulvie away from Kurnool’. But by that time the following had joined the ‘Moulvie’.

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‘Abjee Ashum is a Wahabee, and has about one hundred followers. Kilchavalla Shalee Sab has about one hundred followers.’ And then this is what we know of others: Abbasally, the Imam of talor Massom’s mosque… Abjee Saib, a bricklayer… Massom Saib son of Sabas Saib, a native doctor Lookmanee Saib, vender of condiments. Massoom Sab, lives near the three bazaars. Hussain Sab, a carpet maker Ghauty Biram Sab Kader Sab, a weaver. Nadeem Mullay, one of Hajee Ashum’s men. Oomerdaraz, and Goolam Hoossain, his brother, vender of sweetmeats Anver saib, the Hatheb of the Jamal (Jama?) Musjid Ismael Saib, a vender of greens. Mohideen Saib, a vender of gold lace. Booran sab, an electro-plater. Sooltan Mohideen, a faker. Goolam Hoossain, a bricklayer… Darzee Kathral Sab Oosman Sab and his brothers Sheik Hyder, a butler to some Khandans Sooltan Saib, an ex-military man, has about one hundred followers. Booradeena bricklayer. Abbas Saib. Jaffer Saib and Ismail Saib carpet makers. Sooltan Hossain, a vender of fireworks. Miskeen Sab, a carpet maker Nadeem Moolla, a vendor of sweetmeats. Abjee Rahiman, a merassie. Boorandeen, a do (sic) Ahmed Sab a do (sic) Syed Khajoodeen Massoom sab, son of mamoomeah, a Khandan butler Mamoo Sab, a carpenter Ameen Sab, a bricklayer. Cassem Sab Moolla Davood Sab Mahomed Sab, a cultivator. Paupa Sab, a vendor of medicines.


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Massoom sab, a tailor Allymeya, a bricklayer Fakeer Sab, a vendor of sweetmeats Mirza Hussen Beig. Mahomed Sab, a vendor of rice. Peerah Saib, a tailor. Panncha Sab, brother of Esoof Saib. Rahim Sab, a tailor. (Ibid.)

The report went on to say, ‘All these people profess the Wahabee religion; but your servant has named only a few of them.’ The report spoke of the books that the leaders, such as ‘Abjee Ashum Sooltan Saib, the ex-military man’, read out to their followers. And then, The Moulavie who came here when Captain Russell was commissioner had converted a great number of the Kurnool people, and was a seditious character; his disposition being known to Captain Russell, he was sent away from Kurnool; at present there is no Wahabee Moulavie at Kurnool, but should a seditious person of this bad religion come, the above-named persons will at once join him and cause disturbance. Some of these people openly profess this bad religion, and some privately. In the district all the Mahommedan population of the village of Davanoor, in the Nundikotkoor Taluq, are Wahabees. The followers of this bad religion are generally very ill disposed people; they convert good Mussulmen by deceiving them, and are destined for hell; they are always inimical to the Government. It would be well if those people can be watched, punished, and turned out of Kurnool. (Ibid.)

But this report of the Tehsildar was not enough. It was reinforced by another report—this time by Kale Khan, if we remember the retired Ressaldar of the late Kurnool House. He wrote, The number of Wahabees was not above ten to fifteen so far back as three or four years in the whole district. Since of late I find to my astonishment that their number has augmented to about five hundred or six hundred men in the whole district. The number is still increasing. The respectable and religious class of Mahhedans think that ‘Paigambar’ is the next to the Lord or Ruler of the World. On the contrary, the Wahabees argue that the paigambar is so common as any human being. There are two Moktasers of Wahabees in Kurnool, named

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Abjee Ashum and Kilchavalla Shallee Sab. There are also some Moktasers in the district. They instigate such Mahommedans as are mean in religion and obstinate in principles, and convert them into Wahabees. The principles of the conduct of Wahabees are to get enlisted in Her Majesty’s regiments, and (they range) from conspiracy (to) murder Europeans and show disaffection towards the British Government… They are under the misapprehension that their souls will reach heaven if they take the life of a European or die in battle with the Europeans, and that God will forgive them for all their sins if they commit these actions. I entirely agree with Shurf-ool-Omrah Bahadoor in the opinion expressed by him regarding the Wahabees. I think it would be for the safety of the Government to make necessary restrictions regarding the Wahabees. These Wahabees have no resident priest or priests in this district. Priests used to come occasionally about nine years ago, either from Madras or from Bengal, to meet these Wahabees; but they are coming now secretly to this district, because, when they came here once nine years ago, the respectable Mahommedans of Kurnool treated them very badly, and annoyed them to a vast extent. Captain Russell, the then Agent of this district, got the priests turned out of the district, as the Mahommedans never liked their preaching in this district. I think I have said enough about the Wahabees from my experience, and so close this report. (Wahabi Trials, pp. 134–39)

But we have not seen enough of what the Acting Collector, Tehsildar, and the retired Ressaldar wrote of the Wahabis in this Entry No 48 (in the records) in terms of our present concerns. We can note the following: Rural and small town artisans and small traders were gathering round the Wahabis. The Wahabis were relying on itinerant preachers. They were mobile. The rich and cultivated Muslims loathed the Wahabis, in exactly the same way the latter hated the rich, corrupt, wealthy, and established Muslims. The Wahabis had organised themselves in secret societies, and had a huge network from Bengal to the south of the country. The common members paid regular donations. The Wahabi preaching meant in the main strict reliance on manners faithful to the ways prescribed by the Almighty, and hence ethical virtues, reading and propagation of certain select texts, refusal to admit any intermediary in the relation between the God and the pupil, and hatred of wealth, easy manners, pomp, and corruption. It also meant readiness to die at the service of the Almighty, and take life, if duty called for that step, of


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the infidel, who could be a corrupt Muslim, or an oppressive Sikh, or a local tyrant in the service of the colonial administration, or a British, or a European. Thus, it was a race war, the war between the two races, the faithful and the sinners—in it were congealed all the attritions of the time, namely colonial rule, subjection, racial differences, clash of moral virtues, contrasting organisational styles (of the administration and the Wahabis), and finally, the new organisational techniques of the government for rule. What were these techniques? To name a few, building an espionage network, combining police and military procedures, utilising the social basis of the British rule to build up the comprador basis of administration, procedures of inquiry, annexing subsidiary material to reinforce the main findings, taking note of the social profile of the suspects, cross-checking, and if as expectedly normal methods failed in tackling the Wahabis, then the institution of special methods to apprehend, expel, and punish these dangerous people. The government was building up in this way by combining the routine, detailed, the sudden, and the special. It was happening in an occupation zone. The entire country was under the armed occupation of a foreign power. Governance meant the physical tasks of watching, disciplining, deploying, annihilating, besides the paltry task of the welfare of the bodies and the minds of the colonised. It was not only a scenario of bio-politics, but also one that witnessed a particular form of bio-power. Colonialism sat at the heart of the development of modern rule. After all we have to note that these inquiries were part of a broad plan by the colonial administration to haul up and try all the Wahabis in the country, of which the Ambala Trial and the Patna Trial of 1864– 65 were the most significant. The plan was to give the Wahabis exemplary punishment. The British were skilled in the use of approvers and miscreants who could turn official evidence against their fellow conspirators or partners in return for pardon, and this was a standard weapon in the colonial judicial armoury. The manhunt for the Wahabis became intense and acute in Delhi and Ambala, the scene of the Great Mutiny and intense bloodbath after the British army had entered Delhi and had attempted to cleanse the walled city off the Muslims by killing all male members (at least by any conservative estimate, about 1,00,000, that is half of civilian population of the city of 2,00,000, died in the genocide), blasting to ruins the entire city, while allowing women and children to go out. Even though we do not know till this day the exact details of the Wahabi involvement in the Mutiny in Delhi,

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Ambala, and Patna, we know at least this much: The great Bakht Khan, the battle-hardened leader of the troops that arrived from Bareilly to reinforce the uprising in Delhi, was inclined to Wahabi views and disliked feudal pomp and etiquettes that were in vogue inside the Red Fort. Maulavi Sarfaraz Ali, a Wahabi preacher, had influenced Bakht Khan’s views considerably. Maulavi Sarfaraz was the imam of the mujahedin (preacher of the rebels), he had spent a long time in Delhi and was one of the first clerics to preach jihad against the British. One of the few who escaped from Delhi after its capture by the British in September 1857, Sarvar-ul-Mulk in his memoirs testified to the Wahabi influence over some of the major figures of revolt in Delhi.7 Historians also tell us of the presence a coalition of militant preachers such as the Wahabi maulavis, militant Naqshbandi faqirs, pious civilians, weavers, artisans, cart pullers, loaders, who remained a constant feature of the crowds and the jihadis in Delhi in those days.8 Wahabi revolutionary pamphlets called for killing the infidels, yet talked at the same time of the need of unity between din and dharma [din or deen, in a very local context means religion (a sum total of all the practices within Islam in a way); we can also say that Islam is equal to din. It is a common argument whether a particular thing is part of din or not. There is also a common saying to guide the misguided to ‘follow din’; dharma means virtue, religion, etc.] and to stop all fights over ‘cows and pigs’. Jihadis regularly poured into Delhi in those months, and Muslim clerics took particular pain to assure the Hindus with these magnificent words, whose import has to be understood still today. Dalrymple quotes Maulavi Muhammad Baqar as appealing to the Hindus, If God brings all magnificent kingdoms to an end after a short period, why do you not comprehend that God has sent his hidden help (to defeat) this hundred year old kingdom (of the British), so that this community (of the Christians) who regarded the children of God with contempt, and addressed your brothers and sisters as ‘black men’, have now been insulted and humiliated? Realise this, and you will lose your fear and apprehension. To run away and turn your back now would be akin to denying divine help and favour…9

Not only that, the colonial army officials noted that the Wahabis fought more heroically than the ordinary company (mutineer) soldiers, and that they fought ‘without any apparently defined object’, they were gazis.


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Yet, when Delhi was finally falling to pounding cannons, rifles, and bayonets of the British army, these gazis united with the soldiers, and fell first in the battle, or advanced recklessly out of the city on horseback with open swords to attack the enemy positions and die in numbers. Yet their extreme ‘republican’ or egalitarian views upset the delicate unity of the population of the besieged city, while their contempt for the parasites of the still existing durbar in Red Fort only increased the animosity of the remnants of the Mughal aristocracy.10 It is said that Bakht Khan after reaching Delhi commanding the rebels from Awadh had walked straight into the emperor’s private chamber with his shoes and said, ‘Old Man, we have made you the king.’11 Charles Ball in the immediate aftermath of the Mutiny writing of the events tells us of the contempt with which the soldiers treated the bankers, moneylenders, and the bania traders in Delhi.12 Ball’s account in fact vindicates what many Wahabis had thought, that the colonial army had faced the Mutiny as a religious war, the appellation ‘Christian’ abounds in this massive book (in God’s name, Christian virtues, Christian courage, Christian inhabitants, etc.). Other accounts including Ball’s tell us how when Hodson while killing the imprisoned Emperor’s sons had cried, God was great, and the naked dead bodies of the two princes bearing bullet marks and dangling on poles had only reaffirmed divine justice.13 Many Wahabis of course escaped the captors who on entering Delhi were bent upon hanging or shooting or bayoneting every living male person in the city and none knew it more than the British. The later also knew that its own racist exclamations and attitudes were taken most seriously by the Wahabis, and therefore it was to be a fight till death; and thus if the British empire was to receive any further mortal attack from the Indians, the Wahabis were to be the most likely source. No other section than the Wahabis had realised as deeply that at the bottom of the colonial occupation lay blood, venom against (fictive) blood ties, recognition of blood as a critical factor of politics, and finally an evangelical religion.

REVENGE

OF THE

RULERS

The fact is of course that Wahabi influence did not end with the defeat of 1857. Exactly as was the case in the Revolt of 1857, in its aftermath

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too the Wahabi remained a shadowy figure almost everywhere. If not organisationally, bits and pieces of Wahabi worldview entered into the long drawn battle for sovereignty by the colonised. Thus, while the papers recovered from the raid on the Wahabi headquarters in Patna in the 1864 never gave a direct evidence of any conspiracy, but typically as the excerpts from the proceedings show, they spoke of donations, meetings, and opinions of Wahabi preachers regarding the infidels, along with the hope that the time of the Kingdom of God had arrived now that a hundred years of conquest and domination had passed. In the Ambala Trial the government pressed charges against the accused of supplying ‘men, money, arms’ to the North-West, the complaint that the Indian government pressed against some revolutionary sects too exactly 100 years later (Sixth Conspiracy Case in the 1960s and 1970s). Punjab was the trail through which these passed under the leadership of Elahi Bux of Patna, the government claimed. Delhi was the place of procuring shoes meant for fighting in the rugged terrain and hills of the Frontier. Yahya Ali and Abdul Rahim of Sadiqpur, Patna, Abdul Gaffar, Rahim’s servant, Muhammad Shafi, a meat contractor to military cantonments in North India, Muhammad Jafar of Thaneswar, Qazi Mia Jan of Comecolly, district of Patna, and five others (altogether eleven) were put on trial. The accused remained quiet, only one crossexamined the witnesses, Muhammad Shafi and Muhammad Jafar were sentenced to death, rest transported for life with all their properties confiscated. Yahya Ali muttered all through the proceedings, no one should care how one died, for one always returned to God. All of them said on hearing the verdict, Allah was merciful, and when God decides to take one’s life, nobody would be able to stop that, and if Allah so decided, the life of Sir Herbert Edwardes, the British Judge, could also end, in fact earlier than the life of the faithful sentenced to death, if He were to decide so. It so happened that Sir Herbert died of pneumonia within months of return to London immediately after the trial was over, and Muhammad Jafar saw it as God’s punishment, while the administration decided in fear of backlash that instead of executing the three, they be sent to the Andaman Isles across the sea. God’s punishment possibly should have been more, as William Taylor, another colonial official and apparently the saviour of Patna, who had led the manhunt for the Wahabis there, had amassed during


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this time 667 jewels and curios, now in British Museum in its South Asia collection, among which there is one seal ring in the form of an octagonal engraved carnelian set in silver with the motto from the Quran, ‘Verily He is the certain Truth, 1278 AH’ (roughly corresponding to 1861–62).14 In the Patna Trial the Sessions Court sentenced Ahmadullah to death, a verdict that the High Court changed into transportation for life and confiscation of all property. Qeyamuddin, based on the records left by the convicted after they were released from the Andamans, details the extreme physical torture of them by colonial police and intelligence officials in the mainland and in the ships.15 The chronicler Hunter appreciated the qualities of the conspirators, such as, ‘admirable sagacity … capacity for complicated operations … genuine and bonafide work … cunningly mixed with anti-government activity … fidelity of the great majority of the workers to the Movement’.16 The institution of the great Sadiqpur family was over. The lieutenant governor directed the commissioner under Section 7 of the Regulation XIX of 1810 to report that ‘the premises of Sadiqpur be made over the Municipality with a view to (buildings) being razed to the ground and an open market be built on this site and to devote a portion of the sale proceeds of the escheated property of the traitors to the Municipality’.17 The trial of the Wahabis for waging war against the Queen and for sedition was of course based on a legal myth, as Wahabis were never subjects of the Queen. And this is precisely what some of the Wahabis brought to trial in the Sessions Court at Ambala in the month of June 1864 maintained. This is what Syed Nazir Hussain, the authority on exegesis and Islamic jurisprudence, and the legendary leader of Delhi, who had organised the inhabitants of the walled city during the British assault in 1857, had maintained; and after he returned from his escape to Waziristan following the defeat of the Mutiny and attracted hundreds of students from as far as Kashgar, Hijaz, to his seminary till he died in 1902 at the age of 97 he kept on preaching the coming of God’s Kingdom, though denying any link with the Wahabis. One chronicle authored within few years of the Mutiny in Delhi speaks of the Maulavi of Faizabad distributing chapattis (flat unleavened bread)—rumoured to have been the sign of the Mutiny or of the time to commence the Mutiny—being carried from village to village in 1857, and visiting

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the North-West, Patna, and Kolkata after the annexation of Oudh.18 Meanwhile the investigations continued to incur huge cost. The first was the stabbing to death in Kolkata on 20 September 1871 of the acting Chief Justice Norman by Abdullah while the former was entering the court to preside over a Wahabi trial. Abdullah went to the gallows without providing any coherent account of his motive. Even greater casualty was Lord Mayo, who on assuming the post of governor-general and the viceroy had expressed his determination to ‘put down Wahabeeism in India as (he) had put down Fenianism in Ireland’, and had engaged Hunter to conduct the inquiry into whether Muslims were bound by their religion to rebel against the Queen. Mayo’s brief to Hunter was clearly around the ‘vexed question of loyalty’19 in those transitional times. Mayo’s words echoed another such dream—of the former Governor-General Ellenborough ‘to emasculate all the mutineers and to call Delhi Eunachabad’.20 Mayo began a tour of the Andaman Isles Prisons in 1872, and on 8 February in the twilight hours he died almost instantly of axe attacks and stabbings by Shere Ali, an Afridi prisoner and a Wahabi, who suddenly jumped on him breaking his security cordon and struck him to death. Again, Shere Ali went to gallows without leaving any explanation. Did he know Abdullah? Colonial reports do not have anything to say on this score. Was there a conspiracy throughout India, reaching the Isles? Again, papers give no answer. All we know is the wild manhunt and the determination of the British to wipe out the Wahabis and Wahabism in the aftermath of the Mutiny through staging the trials at Ambala and Patna.21 Seven were transported for life in connection with the Mutiny of 1857, they were suspected of Wahabi connection, and five more were transported later, again for the same reason. If we know now how the colonial authority worked to suppress the Wahabis, and why the Wahabis finally failed in their nearly a century long effort to overthrow the colonial rule due to their single-minded strategy to establish a Wahabistan in the North-West and start war from there, thereby neglecting possibilities of mutiny and insurgency in the mainland of the subcontinent, it is equally significant to take note of the fact that the Wahabis left an enormous impact on subsequent thoughts on freedom and independence—the core of anti-colonialism. Not only the North-West remained unsubordinated, and Syed Nazir Hussain continued to preach, but people took Deoband to be a direct


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result of the Wahabi influence, though the Deobandis never admitted that. Hanafi to the core, Deoband of course admitted that al-Wahab was a good person and his followers were of good moral character. Dar-ul-Ulum, the Abode of Islamic Learning, Deoband’s other name, did not denounce the Wahabis, and accepted their anti-colonial role, and admitted that the believer at one point had the right to interpret God’s command, as he was truly the God’s servant. As in West Asia imperialism and colonialism sparked dialogues and rethinking among the colonised from the middle part of the 19th century in a major way, similarly in India too from around that time both Hindus and Muslims started rethinking their ways forward, the likely and desirable shape of their future inter-relations, and God’s role in a struggle to end the alien rule. In defining this role, certain principles remained almost constant, and which today seems to be the reason why the Wahabis left such an enduring legacy: (a) reliance on one Supreme Being; (b) repudiation of all forms and ceremonies and reliance instead on the scripture; (c) the duty of jihad, or holy war against the evils or infidels; and (d) the expectation that some imam or spiritual leader will lead the faithful in the war against alien rule. Novels were written in colonial India, and thinkers tried to articulate one version or another of these four principles in order to chart out the path of freedom. Pursuing these principles, which should have looked innocent on paper (which is why some of the ground functionaries of the colonial rule were indecisive in their judgement of the Wahabis), evoked enormous suspicion among colonial rulers, simply because they indicated a separate set of norms for living, a distinctly separate goal of life, a separate behavioural code than what the colonial rule understood or was ready to accept. It was not in guns and swords displayed by the Wahabis in the battlefields that the fear of the rulers for the former lay but it lay in their speech, in the ‘fearless speech’, that indicated their (that is Wahabis’) determination to mark the subjects as a race apart from the rulers. It was the raw arrogance of counter-racism, inevitable under colonial conditions that struck at the root of the legitimacy of colonial occupation. The price to be paid was of course enormous. Not only Delhi was slaughtered, and the most violent of the British officers (for instance Lytton) led the attacks on the Wahabis, and the most war-like measures were adopted by a civilian administration against a section of subject population but town after town on the frontier on the North-West province was

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razed to the ground. In the Black Mountain Expedition (1880–89), reminding the readers of today of US bombings on Torah Borah, and the adjacent area featuring towns of Peshawar, Swat, Chakdara, Malakand, Tirah—the frontier was ablaze in the closing years of the 19th century, and all these places with burning house and destroyed crops could only reap for the alien rulers enduring hatred and a mood of revenge all round. Of the colonial officials, Sir William Hunter was one of the first to realise this when he wrote of the ‘chronic conspiracy within our territory’.22

MAPPING THE COUNTRY AND LEARNING TO WATCH Before we return to the Wahabi Trials to discuss a different series of entries there, it is necessary to point out even if briefly that in terms of the emerging technologies of rule, this mapping of dissent locality by locality was accompanied by, or one can say made possible by, the other mappings taking place at that time. Immediately on the conquest of the Punjab, the colonial administration began the revenue surveys of Punjab, Oudh, and Sind, and although in the North-West provinces where the first surveys had been made ‘at galloping rate each season’, but whose papers were destroyed in the Mutiny save those of 12 districts, the second survey and settlement operation began in the 1861 once again creating great consternation in the countryside. Apart from serving revenue needs, these survey and settlement operations brought the government to the hitherto un-reached and unreachable villages. In 1873 in the North-West provinces 1,269,882 fields were surveyed; in this work native village officers and the patwaris became crucial for village administration. The native survey conducted by the patwaris side by side with the professional survey brought into administrative and fiscal dragnet local tenures and modes of dividing land. The surveyors under the leadership of Colonel Johnstone won over the ‘frontier Afridis’ in 1870,23 but others were discontented, and exactly as it was to happen in the Lower Provinces later, the survey settlement operation while angering local rural population in many ways firmed up the administration also at the ground level. We can thus see, economy (that is management of the house), growth of punitive power, and war-making went on hand in hand.


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Land survey was complemented soon by the statistical survey of India. W.W. Hunter, the director general of Statistics, also made possible the first publication of the Imperial Gazetteer in 1877, and as I demonstrate in Memory, Power, Identity (1998), the combination of statistical survey and land survey was not only a key factor in provoking unrest in the country, but this combination also ensured that the colonial law, order, and pacification system would remain intact through the agrarian disturbances.24 In fact the early statistical surveys set an instance in colonial India for the great statistical surveys and many other surveys in the later half of the 19th century. In Bengal the first such attempt was made in 1769, in Madras a series of 200 manuscript folios known as the Orme Collection was completed between the 1740s and 1770s; and the Bombay government around that time established a distinct department with Colonel Sykes as the Statistical Reporter drawing up with the help of a mass of existing papers a continuous picture of the presidency since the establishment of the British rule. Even more careful investigations spread to minor provinces such as Mysor(e), Travancor(e), and Cochin. In these exercises the military officials were more directly engaged. Thus, land, animal, vegetable, flora and fauna, minerals, and then people with their disease pattern, housing pattern, festivities—all became matters of survey and investigation. In 1828 came out the East India Gazetteer; other gazetteers followed. The goal was clear: to bring each district under statistical account, and then to compile all these into one, the Imperial Gazetteer of India. The ambition was: ‘“The Imperial Gazetteer of India” will represent a series of local inquiries and comparative statistics spread over an area but little less than that of all Europe excepting Russia…’25 It was this combination of the organisation of the army, detailed surveys, establishment of a ground-level command and control system, and regular flow of news and information about any matter held significant by the authorities from the bottom to the top that made espionage arrangements possible. With revenue and other developed fiscal functions, and several other products of mapping, the focused watch over the Wahabis throughout the country was now considered feasible by the administration. In this exercise, two things proved crucial: First was the armed mode— the army, its organisational model, and the generals directly made an entirely civilian function such as the revenue survey practical in a vast country. Second, surveys and the instituting of officers of the state at

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the level of villages imparted in the function of government a network quality, whereby all the elements of administration and rule functioned as elements of a huge network spread like a dragnet over a colonised but discontented and rebellious society. Management of economy, conquest and warfare, and administration were thus the three pillars of the modern state, which could be only in the form of a colonial state in the beginning and in its essentials.

IDENTITY OF THE REBEL: WHO IS A WAHABI? Let us now go back to the issue of the Wahabis. We must remember in this context that even though for the administration the function of security remained paramount, with the government increasingly finding difficulty in the task of containing its subjects in governmental relations (that is primarily non-security relations), the task of governing assumed an increasing urgency. For this reason the government took upon itself the agenda of getting firm ideas about the identity of the subjects—particularly rebellious subjects such as the Wahabis. This became an equally significant work. By identity the government meant both physical identity (including bio-marks) and identity built upon character. One can recall in this context the pattern of extensive notes maintained in the ‘Village Crime Note Books’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which showed that one of the primary tasks of the law and order head at the village level (the police daroga) was to record both these identities (physical and social) of persons he thought as suspects in his crime notebook. I had described and analysed these notebooks and had termed the exercise of maintaining these notebooks as the building block of ‘administrative memory’.26 If we keep this in mind, we shall realise the significance of the following report on the Wahabis from the ‘Officer Commanding Nagpore Force, to the Military Secretary to His Excellency the Commander-in-Chief, dated Kamptee, 10 October 1865’: I have the honour, in reply to your confidential letter of the 20th September, with its enclosure, on the subject of Wahabees, to state, for the information of His Excellency the Commander-in-Chief, that the sect of Mahommedans does prevail, more or less to my knowledge, in


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all parts of the Madras Presidency, and doubtless elsewhere, wherever Mahommedan populations exists. It does not, however, call itself by the name of Wahabee— repudiating that designation, as a reflection a true follower of Mahomet—but is so called, so spoken of, and so named in ordinary conversation by all Mahommedans of the old schools resident in Southern India, and particularly by Mahommedans, who from long association with Hindoos, have to some extent become Hindooized in their views and practices, and oblivious to the teachings of the Koran… They consider themselves as alone true Mahommedans, and in consequence disallow either that they are Wahabees, or that there is such a sect as the Wahabee… It is, therefore, at all times difficult to ascertain in any station, or, in any regiment, the exact number of this class. Mahommedans of the old school, while clinging to their own opinions, and quasi-Hindoo observances or rites, do not like to inform against them, do not like to oppose them unnecessarily and from a feeling or consciousness that the Wahabees may after all be in the right, and really better instructed than themselves in the doctrines of the Koran, do not care to intrude the subject on Europeans. There is, in fact, a line of demarcation between classes of Mahommedans, which they tacitly observe, and never willingly cross. But if discussions arise, as they will sometimes do, between them each will revile and curse the other, the one, deeming the other as not Mahommedans, but merely a fanatical sect, rightly called Wahabee; the other considering the former as worse than Christians, and but little removed from Hindoos. Having promised thus far, I beg leave to call the sect, Wahabees, in contradistinction to ordinary Mahommedans of Southern Indian. The testimony of all British Officers to the character of the Wahabees whom they have met or known is invariably the same. It is always favourable to their intelligence, their higher regard to duty; to truthspeaking in civil and criminal cases connected with social duties; to their reverence of the Almighty, and to the inculcation of a charity in deed and in thought large and a bounding towards all men; meaning thereby both Mahommedans and Christians, but not any caste of Hindoos. For these latter, with their idol-worship, countless gods, and endless ceremonies, they have an unconquerable and avowed aversion. On the other hand, I have never met with an Officer, Civil or Military, who, after making these declarations of the Wahabees as a class, would allow that he would trust a Wahabee with his personal security, or would value his life at a straw, if dependent on the mercy or common

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humanity of a Wahabee for it. On the contrary, one and all have said that the Wahabee is to be relied on, only so long as his power is not in the ascendant. That the man of smooth speeches, of fair character, and some virtue, would become a friend, if opportunity were afforded him of practically showing his faith in that article of his religion, which inculcates the indiscriminate slaughter of all who do not believe in Mahomet… In a word, they would be a more dangerous class than they are, because fanatical in the extreme, if their numbers were not few everywhere. Still they are not to be despised, for on an opportunity offering they would be more than mischievous, and by their zeal and self-sacrifice, would influence multitudes to follow them. The 3rd Regiment Light Cavalry, with the exception of about sixty Hindoos, like other Native Cavalry Regiments, is composed exclusively of Mahommedans. Of these it is believed from twenty to thirty may be Wahabees of a most decided character, with a following of, perhaps, as many more, who may or may not eventually join them heart and soul. In regard to rank, Commissioned and Non-Commissioned Officers as well as Troopers are found among them. All the other Mahommedans of this Regiment are of the old school, and will sometimes openly curse and revile them as pestilent meddlers and interferers with longestablished customs, and usages, and modes of belief. Nevertheless, in a general mutiny, such as that of the Bengal Army in 1857, all Mahommedans would merge their differences, and unite as one body under various influences, religious excitement, hope of amelioration, change for the better against the British power. Hence it is that the sect of Wahabees, though so few, are in reality so dangerous, for their zeal and fanaticism on such an occasion would certainly carry headlong all other Mahommedans. I do not think the Wahabees are likely to rise rashly, but given an opportunity, they would do so heartily. Colonel Radcliff, Commanding 3rd Regiment Light Cavalry, considers that the Wahabees in his Regiment came altogether from the 5th Regiment light Cavalry, being drafts to the 3rd Light Cavalry on the disbandment of that Corps. The foregoing remarks apply for the most part equally to the 12th and 36th Regiments Native Infantry, except that in point of numbers, Hindoos in these Corps, as in all Native Infantry, Regiments, predominate vastly over Mahommedans. Colonel Halliday, Commanding 12th Native Infantry, considers that the Wahabees in his Regiment may amount to fifteen or twenty, with a following of as many more. Colonel Galway, Commanding 36th Native Infantry, considers that there may be from


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twenty to thirty in his Regiment and perhaps an equal number who incline towards the sect. In both Regiments there is the same enmity occasionally shown to the sect, and in both Regiments Wahabees are found in all ranks. It is a singular fact that Colonel Halliday considers, the Wahabees in his Regiment came from the disbanded 49th Native Infantry; while Colonel Galway considers his, came from the 50th Regiment Native Infantry on the disbandment of that Crops. All three, Colonels Radcliffe, Galway, and Halliday, independently agree in this that till drafts arrived to their Regiments from disbanded Corps, there was never any dissension or difference of opinion known to exist in matters of belief or practice among the Mahommedans of their Regiments. All three likewise agree in considering the Moonshees attached to Native Regiments as a very designing, disaffected, and intriguing class. But they refer to the young men of the present day, not to the old men of the old school… I beg to apologise for the length of my communication. (Entry 33, Wahabi Trials, pp. 106–10)

We have to only read carefully this report (along with the earlier ones), and we shall realise the significance of a report like this. The army is as anxious as the civilian authority to collect information on the Wahabis. In the eyes of the civilian administration the village or taluq was the unit to be sanitised, for the army it was the company and then the regiment, which was to be sanitised. In both cases, moulavies came and went, and itinerant preachers vanished after ‘corrupting’ Muslim mind. In these portrayals, the Wahabis were represented as men of powerful character and capable of being deadly enemies. And finally in both cases, Muslims of previous generation were good while of the new generation were fanatic. Hatred breeds freshly in the Muslim mind—clearly the colonial rule was radicalising each fresh generation subject to alien rule. Old Munshis could be trusted, new Munshis were wily… Thus, in the Wahabi Trials, the entry that precedes No. 33 tells us of widespread disaffection among new recruits in the army, as recorded by the ‘Officer commanding the Mysore Division in his report to the Military Secretary to His Excellency the Commander-in-Chief, Madras, dated Bangalore, 13 November 1865’: ‘Moulavie Abdool Hi is the most learned lord of all Mahommedans, not only of the Horse Brigade, but the whole army in this place are his property, and he is master of all, and

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no one can disobey his orders, or do anything against his will’ (Wahabi Trials, p. 102). And as these investigations and reports authored by the respective commanding officers continued on units of the Native Infantry and Royal Horse Artillery, 12 Wahabi soldiers (subalterns like ‘Md. Abdoolah, Subadar of the Gun Troop, Md. Cassim, Moonshee of the Hussars, Ebrahim Khan Jemadar of the Gun Troop, Md. Usuf the Havildar, or Abdoor Rehman, Sepoy of the I0th Europeans’) took the unprecedented step of openly writing to their comrades, as reported by Muhammad Qasim (written as Cassim), Moonshee of the 10th Europeans, to whom among others the letter was addressed, Some rascals and blackguards of this place having made some false accusation against him (the Moulavi) caused him to be expelled The monkeys have taken possession of the pulpits, once used by the monks. Moulavie Abdool Hi is the most learned lord of all Mahommedans. Not only the Horse Brigade, but the whole army in his place is this place, moreover the whole country is his property, and he is the master of all, and no one can disobey his orders, nor can do anything against his will… If any rogue or rascal speaks against his character you should not believe him, and should not miss the path of our religion as well as our belief in that learned priest. (Wahabi Trials, pp. 104–05)

The rebels were therefore to be closely guarded against by the civilianarmy administration, which was bent upon knowing their character and figure. Probably this continues till this day—at least this went on in the colonial time. Thus, when I was analysing the six-volume Terrorism in Bengal, a collection of government documents in the colonial time (1900–37) on early terrorism in Bengal, I was struck by similar insistence on the part of the administration on acquiring knowledge of certain particular facts about the physical and mental traits of the suspected. It was as if the work of W.W. Hunter was still going on in other forms.27 With adequate knowledge, proper timely steps based on that knowledge, coordination between different organs of rule, legislation, and as its parallel a strong administration, it seemed to the alien rule that it could continue in settled form. Yet, for the colonial rule, achieving the combination of the factors mentioned in the preceding line was a strategic matter, while exigencies


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of daily government implied considering all options, and ensuring all the detailed requirements in terms of the structure of that combination, that is combination of the requirements for stable rule. The Wahabis therefore presented a dilemma to the rulers, namely how to combine daily rule (that is unthreatening rule) with the strategic task of subordinating the colonial subject forever. Therefore the dilemma was: to be fearsome or to be loved—the eternal question that the Prince had to face in the form of the centaur. If it was better to combine love and fear, how to achieve that and in what measure was that to be achieved? And if to be loved by the subjects was impossible, and therefore it was better to be feared, would that mean terrorising the subject? And then what would remain of the necessity to collect facts towards erecting a judicious administration? And, finally what would remain of the task of securing the consent of the colonial subject, who in this case was a Wahabi? And, to be even more exacting about the dilemma, if at home (that is in Britain) the colonial rule was proclaiming popular sovereignty, how could it drop altogether the notion of consent here, in the colony? The colonial example I believe illustrated the two most enduring features of rule from the ancient age—the rule of the demos and the rule by the prince—at times combined in terms of confederations and empires. In the light of this dilemma, which could be resolved neither in terms of the principle of difference (race, primitiveness, religious fundamentalism or enlightenment, etc.), on which alien rule was based, nor in terms of limited self-rule within an imperial formation, we can see the imperial predicament as evidenced in the following reports: From the Acting Commissioner of Police, to the Chief Secretary to Government, Fort Saint George, (dated Madras, 23rd November 1865) With reference to the order of Government No. 3831 of the 14th ultimo, I have the honour to communicate a few particulars regarding the Wahabee sects, gleaned from very quiet inquiry. I have abstained from any direct investigation in the absence of information as to the views of Government on this point. Wahabees themselves rather object to the term as a distinctive appellation of their sect. They claim to be ‘pure Soonee’. The Soonees, of course, are the so-called orthodox Mussulmen, who, besides differing from the Shias on points of doctrine, hold the descent of the Caliphs from Aboo Bukr, the father-in-Law of Mahommed, whereas the Shias hold

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the descent from Ali, Mahommed’s son-in-law, the death of whose sons, Hassan and Hoosein, the celebrate in the Mohorum. But a large number of Mussulmen, especially amongst the lower classes, are very ignorant of the doctrines and traditions of their own religion, and hence it has come to pass in this country, where the ceremonial observances of any kind posses a great attraction that distinctions … and Soonees mix themselves up with Shias in the celebration of the Muharram. The Wahabee movement is in the nature of revival. They seek to reestablish the pure doctrines of their religion. They reject the intercession or worship of Saints, and all forms and ceremonies. They worship God alone as a Sprit and deny any divine characteristics to Mohamed himself. So far, no exception can be taken to their tenets, and they contrast favourably with their co-religionists. The only danger is that being earnest men they may seek to carry out in full all the precepts of their religion, including that of the jehad, or direct hostility to every other creed. Experience shows that a very dangerous spirit exists amongst the members of this sect… Wahabee meetings are held in Triplicane, Poodoopet, Pursewaulkum, and other places in Madras, generally on Fridays. Sepoys frequently attend. The son-in-law of Khan Ali Khan, Mohommed Oosman and Abdul Aziz go about as Moulvies and preach to sepoy and others. Mayut Hoossain, a private Moonshee, holds meetings at Nursingapooram, many sepoys are said to attend, principally from the Body Guard. Commanding Officers might doubtless ascertain, by direct inquiry, the number of Wahabees in their respective Corps. I have not yet directly inquired into the number of Wahabees in the Madras Police Force, but as far as I can learn, there are none. Constant duty prevents the opportunity of attending religious meetings. The Mussulmen element is not strongly represented in the force. Only twenty-five per cent belong to that religion. Mohideen Shariff, the intelligent Native Apothecary at the Triplicate Dispensary, is believed to be one of the latest converts to Wahabeeism. The total number of Wahabees in Madras is variously estimated from 2000 to 4000. Jun-o-jun Khan himself stated it at 3000. The number is certainly increasing. A Wahabee named Abdul Kadir, son-in-law of Moulvie Ishmail, a Jaghirdar of Vaniembady, is now on a visit to Madras proselytising and collecting money for operations elsewhere. He comes twice or thrice every year for that purpose. (Wahabi Trials, pp. 110–13)

Thus, here the practical issue was—what sense can a ‘secular’ administration make of a theological preaching when it can no longer treat this


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as extraneous to its concerns? As this report said, ‘So far, no exception can be taken to their tenets, and they contrast favourably with their coreligionists. The only danger is that being earnest men they may seek to carry out in full all the precepts of their religion, including that of the “jehad”, or direct hostility to every other creed. Experience shows that a very dangerous spirit exists amongst the members of this sect.’ But of course not every Wahabi follower or group would call himself or itself as Wahabi, which was after all the omnibus term the colonial authority was using to tackle the incomprehensible danger. And above all, beyond the incomprehensibility, was the absolute fact that the Wahabi presence was hurting the colonial polity, economy, and most importantly the military project. Almost everywhere the colonial power would face the same problem, the same dilemma. For instance, around the same time, or just little earlier, the Dutch colonial forces sensed the same danger from the Wahabis in Indonesia, who used the Malacca Straits for their religious, trade, and social activities. Again there too, they elected un-compromising emirs to head the villages, groups, and communities in face of the aggressive Dutch officials, administrators, and troops. There too the frontier war went on for decades, with Wahabi leaders dying on the battlefield. There too the initial spark, it was believed, was provided by some Mecca-returned preachers and holy men of Islam. There also local economy acted as a focal theme of resistance.28 For a modern administration, the problem related to pacifying the resistance was: Since not every Wahabi was engaged in militant activity, and propagating anything that could be termed by the law book as criminal, would the colonial state bar him/her from public employment, particularly in the police and army? This created terse debate within the colonial administration in India (as elsewhere) that had just opened up the army for native recruitment on a wider scale and for mixed garrisons, as we sense from this excerpt: From the Government Agent, Chepauk, to the Chief Secretary to Government,—(dated 4th December 1865) I have the honour to submit the following remarks called for by Government Order, dated 16th October 1865 No. 256 The Bahadoor (Shurf-ool-Oomra Bahadoor) wishes that Wahabees should be prevented from enlisting in the army. I consider, on the contrary, that it is very desirable to have a certain number of them in the

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service. The policy of composing the native army of a mixture of castes had been established during the last ten years beyond dispute—and it is merely an extension of that system to take advantage of sectarian differences as well as of diversities of race—every Madras Battalion is composed of one-third Mahommedan to two-thirds Hindoo. The Mahommedans are again subdivided into the four tribes of Syed, Sheikh, Moghul, and Pathan. If a certain number of these are Wahabees, the rest being orthodox Mahommedans, a further element of disunion is introduced into the body. I should consider such an arrangement positively desirable in itself but I may add that I do not believe the measure suggested by the Bahadoor to be practicable. Mahommedans consider themselves justified in concealing their religious opinions, when their avowal is likely to be injurious to them. If Wahabees desire to enter the service and find themselves refused as Wahabees, they will profess themselves orthodox—and their presence in the army might then be dangerous—for their numbers and power would be unknown, and the attempt to exclude them would naturally have a bad effect on their minds. I do not believe that they could be, or would be inclined to be dangerous, so long as they are known, and so long as they are treated impartially. I beg also to submit that, speaking both from my own experience and from what I have been told by other officers, the Wahabee sepoys are generally good soldiers, superior to the common class... The Bahoddor appears to consider it established that Wahabeeism is synonymous with disaffection to the British Government. I cannot think that this assumption justified…(Wahabi Trials, pp. 114–15)

Clearly, the administration was unwilling to compromise its long-term interests merely in order to assuage the feelings of the comprador class that ‘The Bahadoor’ represented. The debate thus went on between the strategic and tactical necessity, with unceasing watch over every ‘suspicious move’ of every community. Each district collector sent his assessment, and taken together these assessments remind us of the problem that Foucault raised on the great question of conquest and the issues for instance the Norman conquest of England left for the political discourse of succeeding centuries that went up to Hobbes’ time. The issue for instance would be: After having made conquest an established and un-eradicable fact, can the matter of race be struck


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off from the social thinking? Or, is possible to ‘de-securitise’ a state based on conquest?29 What would the duty of governing such a society mean? Precisely such questions seemed to be lurking behind when the collectors were sending their reports as these excerpts (Wahabi Trials, pp. 114–15) show: From the Collector of Vizapatam, to the Acting Secretary to the Board of Revenue, Madras (dated 1st November 1865, No. 899) … I know some Musssulmen who tell me they are Wahabees. I find them much better behaved outwardly (whatever demon lurks within) than the general run of the Mahommedans in the country. The Mahommedans of Madras generally are suspected of habitually drinking waters stronger than those to be found in the holy well Zemzem, and their failings, as a class, certainly do not lean to the side of austerity. The Wahabees insist on the ancient sobriety of morals. ‘Not to tipple, not to whore, to abstain from intoxicating drugs.’ If I am to be a Mahommedan, write me down a Wahabee… No doubt this austere discipline may tend to excite in those who exercise themselves in it certain sourness towards non-professors; but this feeling is very far removed from the spirit, which would kindle a ‘jehad’. Political and social cause of disaffection must be superadded to religious zeal, before you can move the masses belonging to one faith to rise up for the extermination of those of another. For out-and-out bigots you must look amongst priests; the grosser ranks of society do not contain them. If Garnet had been unable to point to the cruel and rigorous disabilities under which Catholics lay in the reign of James I, there would have been no Gunpowder plot, nor would the intensity of Moplah fanaticism have been developed, had there been no habitual oppression on the part of the Nair landowners…

Now from another report: At Madras there are many families living in Black Town, Triplicane, Mylapoor, Royapet, Choolay, and Perambore lines; of these families, those of Khanay Allum Khan and Munadur Jung are influential. Both are related to the Nawab…. Khanay Allum Khan is dead. His son Kyrooddeeen Khan is now at Hyderabad, trying to help himself to some post under Salar Jung, but with very little success. His other son, Janay Jahan Khan, is now one of the Honorary Municipal Commissioners

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at Madras. Moonadur Jung is now at Mecca. He is the brother of Asif Jung, but Asif Jung is no Wahabee. The Native Surgeon Mohedeen Sheriff, attached to the Royapet Dispensary, is also a Wahabee. He has lately married into a family distantly connected, it is said, with Prince Azeem Jah… As you have very properly remarked, these Wahabees are all over India, but mostly in the upper Provinces. With few exceptions this sect is composed of the lower orders of Mussulmen—such as Cotton cleaners, Tailors, Butchers, and Lubbays. Some of our sepoys are also Wahabees.

Now from the Collector of Tinnevelly, to the Secretary to the Board of Revenue, Fort Saint George, (Tinnevelly, 7 February 1866, No. 61): I think it would be unreasonable to look for what we term ‘loyalty’ among large bodies of Mahommedans sincerely attached to their own faith; but their bigotry is generally in proportion to their ignorance, and so long as we conduct ourselves with prudence and consideration to them, do not needlessly interfere with their religious opinions, or entrust our Arsenals or Artillery to their custody, I think there is no cause for apprehension, from any arising among them. There is no doubt that a jehad, or religious war, may at any time be preached up by zealous men, and Wahabee zeal may have had a considerable share in the causes, which led to the late mutiny. Should this country be denuded of European troops, and reports be received of reverses sustained by us, opportunity might be taken of such chance of success. In a similar manner it might be found convenient to the French nation to wipe out the as yet unredressed fact of Waterloo.

And thus went a maze of reports reaching finally the Secretary to the Government, Military Department, Madras Presidency, Major General H. Marshall, who then would forward the same to the Secretary to the Government of India, Military Department (Fort Saint George, 14 March 1866, No. 98): I am also directed to transmit for the information of His Excellency the Governor General in Council, the accompanying reports, as per annexed list, from Revenue and Police Officers, relating to the Wahabee sect generally in this presidency. Further reports will be forwarded to you as received.


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List No.

From whom received

Date

6348

Acting Commissioner 23 November 1865 of Police

6347

Government Agent at Chepauk

4 December 1865

6346

Proceedings of the Board of Revenue, No. 422, four enclosures

13 December 1865

236

Magistrate of Malabar, No. 6

11 January 1866

699

Proceedings of 17 January 1866 Government, Judicial Department, No. 80

524

Acting Collector of the Krishna district, No. 23

19 January 1866

525

Magistrate of North Arcot, No. 4

27 January 1866

792

Collector of Tinnevelly, No. 61

7 February 1866

REBELLION

AND THE

Subject Communicating particulars regarding the Wahabee sect gleaned from quiet inquiry Submitting remarks as to the increase in the Mahommedan sect called Wahabee Forwarding reports from the Collectors of Madras, Vizagapatam, and South Arcot, as to the existence of Wahabees in their respective districts Reporting that there are but few Wahabees in his district, and that, as far as known they have no position or influence Recording reports of the Agent at Ganjam of the steps taken in regard to the Wahabee missionary, Mohommed Ismal Khan Maulvie, recently arrested at Berhampore Reporting that some of the sect called Wahabees reside at Guntoor, Condapilly, and Masulipatam Reporting the result of his inquiries respecting the prevalence of the Wahabee sect in his district Reporting the result of his inquiries as to the existence of Wahabees in his district.

CONCRETE UNIVERSAL

We have still not exhausted the task of examining the unanticipated shafts of lights that these entries relating to Wahabi Trials in India throw. As these reports show, if this was a nationalism, spiritual and divinely inspired, and spread by messengers of God such as Amiruddin of Malda or Muhammad Ameen of Bakergunge or Maulavi Ibrahim30

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of Sahabad of Bihar travelling to Kolkata, Lucknow, Gazipur, and Benaras, and lecturing in these places, and offering a different range of answers to the material problematic of modern politics, while invoking all along the loyalty of the poorer sections of the society—this nationalism was certainly a big question for colonial democratic powers and their administrations. It boiled down in one sense to the critical issue of how to face modernity, which also meant modern imperial powers, whose modernity lay besides colonial conquest in espousing in words democracy, secularism, enlightenment, rationality, and rule of law. In short how to face modern subjugation was the key issue for communities and large chunks of population groups suddenly finding themselves being colonised and being subsumed under modern rule. Consider therefore the conditions. The Ottoman rule was breaking down and was losing fast its legitimacy. The West had come to what is known as modernity only through a long course and it had taken nearly 300 years of disturbing, wrenching process of uprooting, upheaval, and bloodshed to gain those technologies and power with which the West could now control and colonise the world. While Napoleon wanted to have the Egyptian ulema to his side by giving them more powers and thus weaken the Ottomans and the Mamluks, neither the ulema understood the French enthusiasm for liberty, nor the young Albanian officer called Muhammad Ali (1769–1849), instated as Egypt’s Pasha by the Ottoman Sultan on request by the Cairo ulema, could understand as to how these ulema could bring Egypt closer to modern power without the same ruthless process. Pillaging and destruction had taken their toll of Egypt and Arabia. Meanwhile the Wahabis had rebelled against Ottoman hegemony and against the Wahabis Muhammad Ali had to send soldiers. Muhammad Ali wanted to have a modern effective army as the French. Apart from all reforms, reforming the army and deploying it against others was the quickest route to modernity. We all know how this cruelty and ruthlessness in conscripting the peasants and building an army ended. Egypt sank even more in the quagmire. Therefore, it was felt throughout the 19th century in the words of a wise thinker of the Muslim world, ‘While European learned men are busy studying mathematics, sciences, politics, and economics, and the rights of man in the age of socialism and struggle for the improvement of the conditions of the poor, the ulema are discussing problems of cleanliness and the ascension of the Prophet to heaven.’31 Thus, if access to conditions of dignity meant doing away with


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middlemen who prevented the faithful from either reaching God or reaching modern conditions of life, the responses were varied and distinct. Muhammad Ali’s response was one, the Wahabi response was another; still another distinct response came from al-Afghani (1839–97), the itinerant preacher of religious anti-colonialism, who significantly visited India during the stormy years of the Great Mutiny that left permanent bitterness in the subcontinent and in its aftermath the Wahabi revolt. Jamal al-Din had styled as al-Afghani, he was a Shia, he wanted to convince the majority of the Muslim masses under colonialism who were Sunni, and had styled himself as The Afghan. He had specialised in both jurisprudence and mysticism, and held that instead of blindly imitating the West the colonised Muslim masses had to stand on their religion in order to fight colonialism; otherwise the Muslim society was bound to disintegrate. He too understood the critical factor of power; he felt that Muslims too needed science and organisation, which itself showed that Muslim society was weak. Time was short; the West was becoming by each day even more powerful. Therefore Muslim masses must become confident, and for this—as many other anti-colonial thinkers at that time had argued—reform of character was required. Character held the key to independence. Al-Afghani had thereby perceived a real problem. Where Western modernity had succeeded in large part pursuing innovation and originality (this story too is now contested) and had time, Muslims could only modernise their society by imitation. The former had become modern without coming under alien domination; the latter has to become modern under alien domination. Al-Afghani would argue that the latter could become genuinely modern—in tune with society—only by ending modern domination. To al-Afghani thus while the hunger for rationality was completely understandable, the cultural aspect of the awakening could not be ignored at any cost, and that implied strengthening of the religiousmoral fabric of society. No wonder, colonial rule in India (or elsewhere) thus was to never get to terms with the contradictory kernel of anticolonialism, hence in the imperial memos the double voice, the hesitation, the unsure tone, the desire to be both loved and feared… The anti-colonial predicament still remains, creating in the wake the predicament in the policy of colonial powers. Religion has not disappeared at all; in some cases it has become more militant than ever. It is one of the modern responses to widespread disappointment, alienation,

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anxiety, and rage at the worldly conditions that no colonial power or their compradors can safely ignore. Embattled societies attempting to re-sacralise themselves find themselves under the occupation of powers who have little value and respect for conditions and woes of the colonised. In some sense this proves to be what Lenin had termed as the weakest link in the imperialist chain and the focal point of imperial conflagration. We can add that this means, as the foregoing narrative shows, that if occupation is a universal condition, a ‘concrete universal’, the resistance built around certain moral-political virtues has also taken a universal form. More than a century ago, preachers from West Asia would come to the Indian subcontinent to popularise their distinct brand of anti-colonialism; in this vast landmass itinerant propagandists would move from one place to another, for instance from Patna and Kolkata they would visit distant corners of the Madras Presidency, new books would be discussed in secret circles in animation throughout the country, thousands would go to prisons of the British arguing that they had said or done nothing wrong, hundreds would die, and this anti-colonial nationalism had a sense of ummah, a sense of universal brotherhood, a flow across boundaries—a pervasive mood of universality in which Jamal-al Din, a Shia could become al-Afghani, a Sunni, Wahabis could come to India, and all sorts of boundaries would be transgressed—if this was not something alternatively modern, another concrete universal, what else would qualify for that?32

POLITICAL SUBJECT: UNSETTLING THE RULE In this chapter I have pointed out three things: (a) the concrete nature of government and rule under occupation; (b) the impossibility of settled rule; and (c) the trans-national nature of anti-colonial resistance, leading to further instability of conditions of alien rule. And, in the foregoing pages, we get at the same time a faint picture of the emerging political subject—the active agent unsettling the rule. It is the understanding of this trajectory that will enable us to appreciate the development of this trajectory into the question of post-colonial political subjectivity. But what we have to realise now is that the emergence of


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the political subject was one of the crucial factors leading to new political knowledge, formations, and actions, which made any settled rule under conditions of occupation impossible. Here I think we have few larger theoretical issues for deliberation. First, we can see how the moments in anti-colonial resistance developed working as significant landmarks in the career of the modern political subject. From the Wahabi call to the discussions in 1905 in the atmosphere of a typically modern public sphere, as described in the previous chapter, is but a short route, but this route once again meanders to the path of secret societies and armed resistance; and then we realise that these are not exactly phases, but more in the nature of experiential additions to a developing armoury, from which the bowman chooses which arrow to take out and when. Second, in politics since action counts more than discourse (recall the Wahabi actions) it was action or the repertoire of actions that proved critical in making colonial rule unstable. The colonial conditions were conditions of occupation. The colonial moment would appear as an inconceivable moment in a nation’s history—every moment unliveable, every moment marked by official violence and ever-new restriction. The cities would hold no hope. The country, it would be repeated everyday in religious and other forms of spiritual preaching, nationalist newspapers and other publications, on the streets, in the tea stalls, family conversations, friends’ gatherings, songs, dances, and poetry, was unliveable. For many, particularly those suffering harsh conditions, this would appear as no longer physically bearable. Militant anti-colonial politics, that included both courting death and conducting dialogic acts towards new formations for freedom, was a personal solution to many suffering the unbearable conditions of occupation. Dialogue and death alternatively appeared as the way out for the political subject, indeed for the latter to emerge. The Wahabis had set the pattern. From now on, some took part in processions, some threw bombs, some committed suicide, some organised secretly, some raised funds, some simply wrote, some sang, some painted—any activity that would appear as a solution to what was a closed situation. It is this dynamics of the political subject, whose glimpses we find in the pages of the Wahabi Trials, in the links for instance between the earlier Faraizi movement led by Haji Shariatullah (1781–1840),33 in the later Wahabi revolt, the unrest over the Partition of 1905, and in

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other unrests. In what was termed during the colonial rule as the Lower Provinces, under direct colonial administration, the emergence of the political subject was more direct, as the records relating to the trials of the Wahabis testify. Ambala, Lahore, Lucknow, Patna, Murshidabad, Malda, Dhaka, Kolkata—these and many other towns became hotbed of radicalism. When organised mass movements appeared in the early years of the 20th century, both death and dialogue marked the emergence of the modern political subject in India, and the physicality of that politics. Third, probably the lasting contribution of the Wahabis to the resistance against occupation was in kindling the death spirit—the way the Wahabis courted death, conquered death. The Mutiny was a largescale theatre for deaths of the subjects. Close on the heels of the Mutiny, the Wahabi trials only made death wish more resolute, so that poets, dramatists, fable-writers, novelists, and publicists from the later half of the 19th century started praising death in all tones and manners to mark the spiritual end of the world of occupation and domination. From Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Meghnadbadh Kavya (Poem on the Slaughter of Meghnad, an epic character of the Ramayana), to Tagore’s poems courting death, reconciling to death, and the need of death to bring about a new birth under conditions of transformation—all these signified that the 20th-century political subject in India—and it was still a colonial India—had emerged with a consciousness of a truth, namely that politics may mean death even. From this I proceed to my fourth and final point. What made death the vital moment in the emergence of the political subject was the key question of experience. We have to only find out how many times the word ‘experience’ occurred in the reports from ground functionaries of the colonial state cited here. ‘Fanaticism’ was the sign word of the colonial rule in its acknowledgement of the fact that the oppositional subject was ready to die. Experience was thus a scary word. We all know that bourgeois rationality belittles experience, because it smells of sheer physicality, the bio-basis of human life and activity. It values reason, reason that escapes experience. Experience links to body, and in the final analysis, the body is the site where the materiality of politics realises itself or is felt. The body moves for death as we saw that colonial rule ensured the identification and subjectivation in politics in terms of the individual body. Therefore, there could not have been any


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politics without the body undertaking political practices and agreeing to become subject of politics. Thus, if we are not to labour Georgio Agamben’s texts (concerning sovereign power and bare life, and exceptional powers) to death, then while it is important to see his method, and understand where he improves upon Foucault’s, and manages to get a long view of history, we shall have to see also the history of resistance, the history of the political subject—the anti-empire, the anti-colonial, and the antioccupation—which would have in it the history of sovereign power also. This is a point we cannot afford to forget: This sovereignty was built without exception on the basis of a combination of conquest, annexation, law-making, and regularisation of the conditions by an even more wide combination, whose one single purpose was to destroy resistance. Therefore, each achievement of sovereignty was a case of passive revolution, a destruction of popular hopes and aspirations. And therefore precisely the bio-politics that had ushered in governmentality as a different model of exercise of power also necessitated a recall of the sovereign power to cope with the physical aspects of politics. Therefore, unless we are to indulge in sophistry and sterile intellectual debates, our studies of occupation must not judge occupation in its own dynamics, but in the mirror of its other, occupation in the mirror of resistance, exceptionality in the mirror of normalcy (what goes on in the ‘normal zone’, as in the Madras Presidency in the 1860s), colonialism in the mirror of democracy, war in the mirror of non-violence, and politics in its ‘impossible’ conditions. Critical studies of rule show that while law and administration combine more than ever as the daily techniques of rule, it is this combination (rule by law and rule by order and regulation), which makes exceptional powers of the sovereign possible. The question is: Is it a banal point we are making? At one level the probable answer is yes. But the political implications of the point seem worth repeating. We have to recall for one last time the features of colonial occupation: We are used to seeing the emergence of the political subject in form of an individual in Western political thought as a consequence of capitalist economy and the bourgeoisie’s rise to power. The philosophical theory of individuality may have been so. But under the colonial conditions the political subject arose on the basis of a real constitution of the collective out of the contentious engagement between the colonial technologies of power and the resistance

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of the colonised. The colonial rule never reconciled to the juridical existence of the collective political subject. The power of the colonial rule on the subject race was legitimised by the discourse of race, difference, and responsibility; and the power of the subject population (which I term here as the emerging collective political subject) was being demonstrated by the violence of the subject population on symbols and carriers of colonial rule in order to attain dignity, recognition, and equality. The Wahabi Trials suggests also the respective philosophical justifications—on the side of white mythologies the justification provided by English utilitarianism, on the side of the colonised the justification provided by the Wahabi ideology and later by the doctrine of work without attachment (exemplified by the writings of Bankim Chandra on Krishna, ‘Krishnacharitra’), and by the doctrine of nationalism, which produced the ‘early terrorists’ (the works on early nationalists everywhere bear the same truth). Violence alternated with law, mixed with law, and produced at the end ‘rule of law’ besides the already existing ‘rule by orders’ and ‘rule by men’. Attempts were always on to normalise the inherent instability of the situation with permanent exceptional methods such as the colonial methods, which inscribed everything under it including constitution-making with its presence. All these features made politics action oriented, whence identity of action started counting more, and not the identity of self. Once again, the problem was that the British wanted to become ‘the father and mother’ of the subjects in the colony (the mai bap sarkar) training the subjects to become rule-bound and civilised, and thus emphasised ‘rule of law’ at every step, while the transplantation of law at every level of life meant that the colonial subject would have to be reconstituted completely as a legal subject under a colonial order—a situation that would produce only more anarchy, more lawlessness, forcing the colonial ruler to keep aside its own law for a while, and punish the law breakers summarily, thoroughly, exemplarily, violently. Colonial rule was thus constituted around this dichotomy: rule-bound and exceptionality, and therefore it exhibited an abnormality from which it never recovered. Once again, the reason here was that the colonised subjects refused to play the game of law and responded with a parallel game of death and dialogue. The game of bodies, engaged by


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the collective, was too much for the colonial rule to handle. Politics therefore alternated between politics and im-politics, the impossible conditions for politics.34 This is what made settled rule extremely difficult in a colony. Does it mean that the colonial situation was a permanent exception? Or, is this an allegory with other implications, for instance that there was and is no permanent exception, and that the play of normalcy and exception has only one role, which is to hide the extreme physicality of politics, sovereign’s hold over bare life, and the congealed challenges to that hold? That as part of every condition of government there remain conditions of occupation, and the unstable relations of power specifically obtained there make occupation a general feature of governing, yet particular?

NOTES 1. Qeyamuddin Ahmad, The Wahabi Movement in India (Kolkata: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1966), 158. 2. Qeyamuddin Ahmad, The Wahabi Movement in India, p. 159. 3. Reports speak of anticipatory protests of Muslim preachers (including one Ganga Prasad) in Mumbai in August 1857, huge deployment of the army at several points in the city, and finally apprehending Muslim sepoys of the 10th and 11th Regiments who were supposedly planning to rise in mutiny on 15 October. The sepoys’ intention had been to bolt with the loot after killing those who opposed them, and at Poona to unite with the Indian Regiment there and proclaim the sovereignty of the Nana as Peshwa of the Deccan. All we know now of this ‘conspiracy’ is that on 13 October, Drill Havaldar Syed Hussein of the Marine Battalion and Private Mungal Gudrea of the 10th Regiment were court-martialled and sentenced to death by being blown from the muzzle of a cannon. See, Teresa Albuquerque, Urbs Prima in Indis: An Epoch in the History of Bombay 1840–1865, http://www.theyear1857.wordpress. com/2007/05/06/wahhabi-phobia-in-bombay/WahhabiphobiainBombay (accessed on 12 June 2007). 4. Qeyamuddin Ahmad spoke of four features of the Wahabi organisational style— central organisation at Patna, itinerant preachers, district centres, and collection of funds. See, Ahmad, The Wahabi Movement in India, p. 139. 5. William Hunter in Our Indian Mussulmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel against the Queen? (1876, reprint; New Delhi: Rupa, 2002) repeatedly mentions qualities of the Patna Caliphs (the two brothers) and other ‘indefatigable missionaries, blameless in lives, supremely devoted to the overthrow of the English infidels, admirably skilful in organising a permanent system for supplying money and recruits… it had been given to them to stir up thousands of their countrymen to a purer life and truer conception of the Almighty’ (p. 68).

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6. Muin-ud-Din Ahmad Khan, ed., Selections from Bengal Government Records on Wahabi Trials (1863–70) (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Pakistan, 1961); hereafter Wahabi Trials. Muin-ud-Din Ahmad Khan incidentally found these records in the Records of the East Pakistan Secretariat; 179 of them were copied down and got included in this selection. The Asiatic Society publication has also now become rare. These records speak of unusual accounts of Patna, Maldah, Rajshahi, Kolkata, Bereilly, Port Blair, Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Delhi, and other towns in the Bengal Presidency Division, and throw light on the evolving governmental technologies in the aftermath of the defeat of the Wahabis in 1831 and the defeat of the Mutiny. I am grateful to Professor Anisuzzaman of Dhaka for allowing me access to these records. 7. See on this, William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal—The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2007); Dalrymple uses Sarvar-ul-Mulk’s My Life (translated and published from London, 1911) extensively to reconstruct Delhi in 1857. 8. Irfan Habib, ‘The Coming of 1857’, Social Scientist 27, no. 1 (January–April 1998): 11–12. 9. Dalrymple, The Last Mughal—The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, p. 269. 10. Hakim Ahsanullah Khan’s memoirs throw light on the combative involvement of the Wahabis; See, Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, ‘Memoirs’, Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society 6 (1958). 11. Ayesha Jalal cites contemporary sources in reporting this while discussing the Muslim political culture and the Muslim public sphere of that time; see Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty—Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2001), 31. 12. Charles Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny—A Detailed Account of the Sepoy Insurrection in India, and a Concise History of the Great Military Events which have Tended to Consolidate British Empire in Hindostan (2 vols, 1858–59), vol. 1 (reprint, Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2007), 144. 13. Ball wrote of ‘retributive justice’, The History of the Indian Mutiny, vol. 1, p. 728; and the desolateness of Delhi after British occupation as ‘the desolateness of Pompeii’, p. 734. 14. Charles Allen, God’s Terrorists —The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad (London: Abacus, 2007), 195. 15. Ahmad, The Wahabi Movement in India, p. 248. 16. Hunter, Our Indian Mussulmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel against the Queen? p. 95. 17. Cited from Judicial Proceedings, 1865, in Ahmad, The Wahabi Movement in India, p. 260. 18. J. Kaye and G.B. Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58, vol. 5 (London: W.H. Allen and Co, 1888; reprint, Greenwood Press, 1971), 292. 19. Ayesha Jalal formulates the issue in this way; see Jalal, Self and Sovereignty — Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850, pp. 59–61; she also shows the incompatibility of the two attitudes of the colonial government—‘Muslim as rebel’ and ‘Muslim as (a) category’ of subject.


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20. Eric Stokes, The Peasant Armed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 92. 21. A.G. Noorani, Indian Political Trials 1775–1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 93–113. 22. Chapter 2—Hunter, Our Indian Mussulmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel against the Queen?—called upon to investigate the causes of widespread disaffection among Muslims, as reflected in the continued popularity of the Wahabi movement, Hunter produced in this book. His argument in this book that the British deliberately kept the Muslims away from all positions of profit and privilege because of their supposed leadership of the rebellion of 1857 was avidly seized upon by Muslim publicists and elite; and it was remarked when the first edition of the book came out, ‘No prophet of Muslim nationalism could have drawn attention to the economic plight of Muslims in more eloquent terms than the author has in this telling account of the Indian Muslims around the third quarter of the 19th century.’ 23. C.R. Markham, A Memoir on the Indian Surveys (London: HMSO, 1878), 180–87. 24. R. Samaddar, Memory, Power, Identity—Politics in the Junglemahals, 1890–1950 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1998), Chapter 3. 25. Markham, A Memoir on the Indian Surveys, pp. 382–83. 26. Samaddar, Memory, Power, Identity, Chapter 4, pp. 164–93. 27. R. Samaddar, ‘Law, Terror, and the Colonial State’, in The Materiality of Politics (2 vols), vol. 1, Chapter 2, (London: Anthem Press, 2007), 59–106; see also, Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies—Race, Criminality, and Colonialism in South Asia (New York: Berg, 2007). 28. On this, see Christine Dobbin, Islamic Revivalism in a Changing Peasant Economy — Central Sumatra, 1784–1847 (London: Curzon Press, 1983). 29. In this respect some of the celebrated writings on the encounter between colonial power and anti-colonial resistance seem to have given less attention to this dimension. See for instance, J.S. Coleman, ‘Nationalism in Tropical Africa’, The American Political Science Review 47 (1954): 406–10; Coleman, Nigeria— Background to Nationalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1958), 169–72; Eric Stokes, ‘Traditional Resistance Movements and Afro-Asian Nationalism—The Context of the 1857 Mutiny Rebellion Movement in India’, Past and Present 47 (1970): 100–04; T.O. Ranger, ‘Connexions between “Primary Resistance” Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism in East and Central Africa’, published in two parts, Journal of African History 9 (1968). 30. These are only few of the several names that crop up in Kaye’s, Malleson’s, and subsequently in Qeyamiddin’s accounts. 31. Said Kitaba, Letter 37, cited in Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God (London: Harper Perennial, 2000), 152. 32. Benedict Anderson in Under the Three Flags—Anarchism and Anti-colonial Im-agination (London: Verso, 2005) while discussing the development of Filipino nationalism compares this situation to political astronomy; in his words, in this sky militant nationalists were in ‘perpetual frantic motion, impelled hither and yon by the invisible power of the gravitational fields of

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Emergence of the Political Subject which they were active ineluctable parts’. Further,

This book is an experiment in what Melville might have called political astronomy. It attempts to map the gravitational force of anarchism between militant nationalism on opposite sides of the planet … the movement did not disdain peasants and agricultural labourers in an age when serious industrial proletariats were mainly confined to Northern Europe… Just as hostile to imperialism, it had no theoretical prejudices against ‘small’ and ‘ahistorical’ nationalisms, including those in the colonial world (pp. 1–2). 33. On this, interesting is the Petition of Dodoo Meea, ‘Petition of Moohsunnonoddeen Ahmed, otherwise called Dodoo Meea of Bahadoorpore, Fureedpore, Dacca, to His Excellency Director General of India (dated the 14th of March 1859)’, Appendix B of Nurul H. Choudhury, Peasant Radicalism in Nineteenth Century Bengal—The Faraizi, Indigo, and Pabna Movements (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 2001), 163–66. 34. I am grateful to Etienne Balibar for this in course of his comments on formulation earlier draft of this chapter.

3 The Singular Subject

P

olitical subject is formed through political solidarity. And, we have no room to make any mistake, for it is solidarity, which often appears as the subject. How then are we to understand the question of solidarity and singularity? As we know, anthropologists have examined the concept of solidarity in terms of social bond; Indian studies are replete with that. Anthropologists true to their vocation have been realists in judging the nature of the solidarity under inquiry. Solidarity has invited discussion on bonds, affinitive ties, network, gender, caste–clan cohesion, and village and territorial unity; discussions on all these we know are drawn from anthropological insights, though anthropologists have been at times less than warm in appreciating the virtual elements that can contribute to the emergence of a particular solidarity, or from the actual historical details of the contentious and contingent nature of the emergence of solidarity as a process. We need to understand the contentious nature of this process of solidarity—building in order to grasp the phenomenon of the emergence of the subject, or to put it in easier terms, we must make efforts to understand the entire issue of solidarity in the frame of historical sociology, of course marked by philosophical insights. Charles Tilly for instance had shown1 how social solidarities were formed through collective actions giving rise to regimes of repertoires and rules. Tilly said that these were contentious actions, in other words, at the bottom of solidarity remained contentions that helped collectives to form. It sounds bizarre, but the logic is not absurd; solid elements of historical truth are present in such an understanding. We owe our second instance to another rare thinker of our time, Benedict Anderson, who cutting through the jungle of area studies

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of varying significance, in a span of little more than 20 years twice changed our understanding of how solidarity develops. National solidarity, he had argued about 20 years ago (in Imagined Communities), depended on what one can call a virtual element, the reproduction of culture and cultural artefacts in the age of mechanical reproduction; in this case his case was built around the emergence of the print industry. We all know how this thesis built upon Walter Benjamin’s insights (‘Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations) has influenced an entire generation of scholars in wide ranging fields. Then few years ago in a major revision of his earlier thesis Anderson picked up another major element in the making of solidarity—this time through a major study of nationalism in the Philippines. He showed how anarchism played a big role in helping anticolonialism to grow and expand; internationalism was anarchism’s watchword as it never gave respect to the institution of the state; and thus in the world of Spanish empire the anti-colonial constellations were drawing on each other. From the Philippines to Argentina to Cuba to Spain back to the Philippines—the sentiments spread. In Anderson’s words, when you study the trajectory of the expansion of an anticolonial sentiment of an emerging nation, look into its flight paths. The stars may seem stationary, the tropical night sky is humid, hot, and still, but you know that they are perpetually in motion, irresistibly pulling towards each other (Under the Three Flags—Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination).

SINGULARITIES

AND

SOLIDARITY

So, how are we to understand the two major marks of the political subject, namely solidarity and singularity? I aim to show in this chapter as to how we can fruitfully approach this apparent contradiction in our frame of understanding by way of once again reading some parts of our colonial past. We shall see the questions that await us: What lies beneath the process of trust-sharing? What is there at the heart of the emergence of a collective? How do we gain an understanding of the way a bond is formalised, at least to a certain extent, therefore a particular understanding of the two connected phenomena of equality and difference, an equally relevant understanding of singularities and universality, and differentiation and the making of the global? What

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are the connections between collective actions, contentions, trust, and the phenomenon of solidarity? These answers must be drawn from our historical readings of the careers of the associated notions and events (such as solidarity, nation, internationalism, and citizenship). We can begin by approaching the ‘issues of singularity, singularities within singularity, and the making of the concrete universal’. Ayesha Jalal in her majestic work on individual and the community in South Asian Islam since 1850, titled Self and Sovereignty (Lahore, Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2001), ends with a quote from Iqbal (a comment of 1924 addressed towards the Muslims of the subcontinent), which asks the Muslims of India not to compare their nation with nations of the West, ‘for distinctive is the nation of the Prophet of Islam’, and while their, that is in the case of the nations of the West, ‘solidarity depends on territorial nationality, your solidarity rests on the strength of your religion, (and) when faith slips away, where is the solidarity of the community? And, when the community is no more, neither is the nation’. Of course we know today that the contradiction between community of the faithful and the nation was resolved precisely through a territorial partition of the subcontinent. Yet we know at the same time that while the contradiction was temporarily resolved, the principal issues remain, namely the issues of singularities within the singularity called the nation form, the issue of the co-existence of and conflicts between nation, community of the faithful, and the issue of territory in determining the relation between the community and the nation, and consequently the issue of the location of sovereignty. But this is not a new thing in retrieving the history of the anticolonial nation in South Asia. The significant point to note here is that all these were seen, more particularly, the community of Islam was always seen, as the ‘crisis of the nation’. One of our aims in the study of the political subject should be to see how this philosophy of crisis was combated in the course of anti-colonial struggles, and how through a combination of the tactics of contention and dialogue solidarity emerged. In this, we shall see how anti-colonial politics had to pay rather systematic attention to a number of ideological themes propagated by the apologists of colonialism and whose weight lay in describing nationalism as always marked by crisis. This continues even today, as we can find bourgeois ideology everywhere painting the project of the anti-colonial subject as marked by crisis that is supposedly threatening its very existence. In the economic field, it is always ‘the limits of

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growth’, ‘risks’, and ‘harmful effects’. In the political field it is always the ‘crisis of the third world’, at the social level, it is ‘the breakdown of society’, ‘AIDS and other epidemics’. In the colonial time, Islam was a similar symptom of the crisis, the joining of the Muslims in thousands in anti-colonial struggle bore danger signals, and the colonial and the compradors always advocated that nationalists and colonial rulers should join hands to free nationalism of its critical illness. How did the anti-colonial political subject that could only take the form of solidarity respond to this discourse of crisis? How did it combat the discourse of crisis at both practical and ideological level? This was then, as it is now, a philosophical and a political question. My argument is that the anti-colonial subject could not emerge as a collective, that is the ‘solidarity could not emerge as a subject’ in the colonial era, without dealing in thought and actions with the problematic of the singularities with singularity, also the issue of singularity within generality. These two ways of putting the question are not the same, but closely connected. I want to show that the emergence of the Muslim public sphere as a part, a distinct circle or sphere within the anticolonial world, owed substantially to the negotiation of the problematic of the singularities within singularity. And, therefore, what seemed to the colonial and comprador thinkers and rulers as the crisis of nationalism was indeed a way of existence of the collective anti-colonial political subject who by its definition of existence had to negotiate the issue of singularity and universality. In this respect my argument is that in the politics of anti-colonialism the dichotomy between the particular and universal was not the most significant foundational aspect, indeed today the discussion on particularity has reached a stage of banality; the more significant foundational aspect was how the universal of the nation (the anticolonial nation) was being produced out of the negotiation of the singulars. As the histories of the emergence of a distinct Muslim public sphere in the anti-colonial world show, in the emerging universe of the nation and therefore the emerging universe of a language of the nation, the languages of the singulars were, endowed with what one call in today’s style, ‘pre-language or a ‘proto-language’ situations, which carried the imprints of a colonial reality relentlessly impacting on these singulars. It is not that these were not already developed languages, or that they did not have their respective long histories.


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Indeed they were. But with the development of the colonial tools of rule (mostly in the early and middle periods of the 19th century), these languages gradually found themselves in the situation of being ‘bhasas’, more in the sense of pre-or proto-language—a token of an early consciousness moulded by the external world through the physical senses, and one can borrow from Hegels’ Phenomenology here, also an indication of the inherent Paradox in the linguistic structure of colonialism that produced the universal of the nation. Colonial language was one way of starting the world de novo (and this is in spite of whatever the Orientalists were saying and thinking), because prior to its advent according to its own structure everything was by and large dark, yet we have to remember that at the same time it was creating new segments among the subject population, because its impact was differential, as it was bound to be since it was acting upon a society with its given structure, layers, and hierarchies. Besides, the colonial language encountered strong regional languages (bhasas)— products of strong local histories, literatures, administrations, various communities, and cultures, such as Urdu, Bengali, Telegu, Tamil, Oriya or Kannada. In short the interaction of community, nation, and the colonial power was marked, on one hand, with what came to be considered as the ‘pre-language’ of the colonial era, and on the other hand, the language (centralised, all India vehicle of technology, acquisition of knowledge, administration, and rule) that colonialism was bringing into existence.2 The dialogic core of this ‘pre-linguistic’ phenomenon was borne out by the emergence of the political subject of the colonial time. Equally was borne out the contradictory reality of the colonial power and the colonised subjects. One can also put the same historical truth in another way. Singularities in the colonial world were in no way fundamentally separated from one another. As the philosopher would say, we ‘always-already’ exist in relations with one another. There is no singular self that pre-exists our relations with others. We always exist as singular-plural beings. And thus the Muslims in the colonial world could never say even if they had wanted, ‘hell with other people’, because this was not ‘the pious land’ or the ‘land of the believers’ or ‘the virtuous’; there was no escape from that hell. In this singular-plural background the political pursuit by the Muslims of the colonial world for nationalist identity, subject-hood, and agency carried the remarkable evidence of the negotiation of the singularities— a process, out of which and of several such processes, the nation as

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the universal was produced. These singularities had always-already existed in relations with each other; and the ‘pre-language’ of colonial world helped the singularities to negotiate the interrelations in the new language of anti-colonialism. Nation was the concrete universal that emerged out of that engagements and encounters.

COLONIALISM, ‘PRE-LANGUAGE’, AND THE LANGUAGE OF DIALOGUE The previous chapter discussed the related theme of the emergence of the political subject under rules of occupation, of which the colonial era is one instance, and how in the 1857 rebellion what is being called this ‘pre-language’ helped the anti-colonial Muslim rebels to find the common language of anti-colonialism. The colonial army officials noted, we have seen, that the Wahabis fought more heroically than the ordinary company (mutineer) soldiers, and that they fought ‘without any apparently defined object’, they were gazis. Chroniclers say that their extreme ‘republican’ or egalitarian views upset the delicate unity of the population of Delhi, the besieged city, while their contempt for the parasites of the still existing durbar in Red Fort only increased the animosity of the Mughal aristocracy. It is also said that they took the task of anti-colonial war most seriously, for they and they alone knew that it was a ‘war of races, and a war that would end only with the extermination of one’. Yet we have seen on the other hand, notwithstanding this ‘fanaticism’, that there was no acrimony, no hatred shown against other communities, but only the iteration that God had commanded that the alien rule, rule of the infidels, and unholy must end, and therefore irrespective of what others did they would continue with their fight to the last. This determination to die in order to counter the racism of colonial rule struck at the root of the legitimacy of colonial occupation that claimed to be the symbol of universal values. This was a classic example of how imperial universalities were being countered with ideas of collective singularities. The lesson for a theory of solidarity is obvious. Many decades later the French thinker Deleuze would call this mode of thinking and existence as the ‘fold’. The Wahabis failed. But the process of the emergence of a distinct Muslim public sphere did not stop. As the memoir of the Abul Mansur Ahmed the famous public personality in colonial Bengal tells us,3 the


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impact of the Wahabis on the villages of Bengal, Bihar, and Assam remained. A new crop of itinerant preachers and leaders came up, brought out journals and newspapers, organised the Anjumans of the preachers, propagated issues of politics, culture, language, intercommunity relations, and the asset and burden of faith in the collective journey to forge the ‘nation of the Muslims’. Did this nation of the Muslims signify the umma, the universal brotherhood? Yes. But did it mean specifically India? Yes. Did it include other faiths? Yes. And how were all these possible at the same time? Here again we shall have to understand the singularities within the singularity, and the way the concrete universal emerges through debates and dialogues. If these singularities have any lesson for us, it is at least this: The emergence of the political subject has an inherent ambiguity in it, and precisely by retaining in a strategic sense ambiguities within assertions does a political subject come of age. And, therefore no wonder that while a nation wants stable citizenry, large bodies of population can come to salute more than one national flag in their lifetime. But more significantly, it is this ambiguity of identity assertions that allows the political subject to emerge—and I shall show this soon by way of recalling the ways the itinerant preachers of Bengal negotiated the contentions of anti-colonial existence to emerge as the political leaders of a ‘concrete universal’ called Muslim Bengal in the colonial time. These singularities had always already existed in relations with each other; and what I have unsatisfactorily described as the ‘pre-language’ of the colonial world helped the singularities to negotiate the interrelations in the new language of anti-colonialism.

THREE SINGULAR LIVES Let us see how the ideal of solidarity and globality takes shape in actual life, and for that let us again go back to the history of colonial Bengal. In colonial Muslim Bengal the Anjuman Movement at the start of the last century, primarily a pedagogic enterprise, owed above all to the efforts of Maulana Maniruzzaman Islamabadi, a preacher, organiser, and a publicist. He wrote profusely in Bengali on Islam in India, Islam’s contribution to the development of the sciences, the message of freedom in the Quran, and on social reforms. His chronicles on

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the conditions of peasantry, published in the pages of two journals, al-Islam and Mihir O Sudhakar, helped establish his status as a leader of the peasantry. Born in Chittagong in 1875, Islamabadi’s many years of wandering took him to Rangpur, Calcutta, Rangoon, Lahore, and parts of Orissa and Assam. His trail led him also to Kumedpur and Calcutta. He was a maulavi (the one who guides others in following Islamic rites), a moktar (clerk), and sometimes an imam (head functionary or priest of the mosque). He joined madrasas to teach there, founded new ones, gave azans, and began giving thought to the improvement of the quality of madrasa education. In Rangpur he received the Wakil (journal) from Lahore, and Mihir O Sudhakar (journal) from Calcutta. Till then well versed in Persian, Arabic, and Urdu, his grasp of the Bengali language soon became thorough. As his biographer Shamsuzzaman Khan notes, Islamabadi could now discuss ‘the lives of Saiyad Ahmed Khan, Imam Gazzali, Mazzini, Jamaluddin al Afghani, Saiyad Ahmed Beralbhih, and Maulana Ismail Sahid’. He lectured differently from others. ‘Politics, history, religion, ethics, geography mixed easily in (his) sermons. People would be happy at such lectures. They would donate money heartily.’4 With Ismail Hossain Shiraji and Muhammad Shahidullah, both of whom were to become noted figures in shaping Bengali Muslim cultural identity, he founded the Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Samity (later on Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Parishad) in 1911. He was writing on issues such as the Hindu–Muslim problem, discrimination against Muslims, quality of education, colonialism, Islam, the destiny of Islamic civilisation, the nature of imperial power particularly in Turkey, and the state of Bengali language. He became a collaborator of Maulana Akram Khan and the co-editor of al-Islam. His campaign for the Hanafi sect created much bitterness. He himself was to later call this phase as one of ‘idiocy and ignorance’ (aiyame jahaliat). In any case he was now ready for politics—the politics of Khilafat, Swaraj (self-rule) and Islamic Mission (a missionary organisation), the politics of non-communalism and tolerance, of piety, of independence and mass-activism. Both Islamabadi and Shiraji were pracharaks (itinerant campaigners). Shiraji had used the term and had defined the aims of a pracharak’s life: to explain the principles of religion and to counter opposing arguments, to glorify the history of the Muslims, to invoke the past, and ‘to think of the present’. They started campaigning on the falling price of jute and the depressed


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condition of the Muslim peasantry, and the havoc caused to the ryots (cultivating peasants) in Midnapore by Watson & Co. They propagated in their speeches the need for the unity of the Hanafis and the Muhammadis. Islamabadi proposed the establishment of an Arabic university for proper education of the Muslims now sunk in ignorance. To him, the nation, that is Muslim Bangla, was to be redeemed—dharma (virtue, the pious way, and Islamabadi used the word again and again) was the primary path. Islamabadi soon joined the Bangiya Krishak Praja Dal and in 1937 was elected from Chittagong to the Bengal Legislative Assembly. But above all, his activities in setting up the Anjuman-e-olema-e-bangla had the greatest significance in the evolution of a Muslim nationalist leadership in Bengal. The Anjuman movement in Bengal had begun towards the close of the 19th century. The influence of Wahabi ideology was on decline, even though as Abul Mansur Ahmed’s autobiography, Atmakatha, reminiscing on his childhood in Mymensingh testifies, many participants in the Wahabi campaign were still alive in the villages of Bengal. Qazi Abdul Wadud, one of the prominent members of Shikha (a new enlightened group of Muslim intellectuals of Bengal), admitted that pan-Islamism was not a major influence in the Anjuman movement, and that it was more a creation of the newly-educated middleclass Muslims emerging from the small towns and villages of Bengal. The National Mohammedan Association had become defunct and the new middle class Muslim intellectuals were more sympathetic to the problems and attitudes of peasant and semi-proletarian Muslims. Their motto was, as Islamabadi often used to put it, to ‘awaken the society from the lowest strata’. The Muslim League was elitist and the patriotic olema (Bengali version of ulema) had little in common with either what Amir Ali had done in Calcutta or Nawab Salimullah had done in Dhaka. Anisuzzaman has commented in his introduction to the anthology of Muslim periodicals Muslim Bangler Samayikpatra (1969), that the Anjuman movement sometimes echoed Tariq-i-Muhammadia, sometimes Saiyad Ahmed and Amir Ali.5 However, from the point of the growth of nationalism, the Anjuman was unique in significance. Islamabadi became involved in the Anjuman movement. The goal of the Anjumans was reform: of education, of rites and customs, but most importantly, that of the condition of the peasantry. Anjumans were being formed at the thana level also.

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Maniruzzaman Islamabadi’s activities in Rangpur brought him close to the Anjuman spirit. Himself a renowned cleric, he had now also Maulana Akram Khan as his colleague in the initiative. He knew Maulana Phulwari, Maulana Qadir Baksh, Munshi Meherullah and others who were regular visitors to the alem-sammelani or meetings of the ulema. In 1913, the Anjuman-e-olema (to become famous later on as Anjuman-e-olema-e-bangla) was formed in Baniapara of Bagura and in 1919 the alem samiti was formed. Al-Islam was the organ of the Anjuman. This was a different journey from the Wahabi and other revivalist paths. Resisting communalism, organising relief work among the flood affected and other distressed people, pleading the cause of the tenants, spreading Bengali language among the ulema, advocating the need to learn from the modern saga of the entrepreneur, bringing out newspapers and periodicals as organs, formed an agenda of a genre that was different from the call to return to the ‘original’ (‘the golden age’, ‘the past’)—the ‘original purity’ of Islam. These activities led the Anjuman to the Jamait-e-olema-e-hind. The literary conference of the Jamait-e-olema-e-hind in Bengal was held in Chittagong in 1930. Maulana Maniruzzaman presided over the conference. The Praja Movement drew strength from the nationalist ulema, and the leader who represented this phenomenon most authentically was Islamabadi. At the core of this Muslim-nationalist identity there were ideas of anti-landlordism, cultural democracy, and a moral community of pious preachers engaged in invigorating the people with healthy thoughts, ideas, actions, in short the ideal of a community of the alem. Characteristic of this ideal was the combination of utopia and modernity— the link-up of three elements—agrarian democracy, divinity realised through spiritual minds and acts, and new ideas about the claims of a community, which extended beyond the constitutional chamber politics typical of the comprador class of the colonial age. His impassioned submission to the ulema was that the Muslim League had not cared for the peasantry, had not fought against the landlords, and what was most repugnant, it had no religiosity, no piety, the Muslim League people were not ‘true Muslims’. The invocation of the democratic virtue of a ‘true Muslim’ was the critical element in his activism in the Anjuman movement. The Anjuman movement thrived for 20 years more. Nonetheless it was to be caught soon in the paradox of nationalism. After all the Anjuman-e-olema-e-bangla or the Jamaite-olema-e-hind could not be a modern political party claiming


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universality and particular values at the same time. Too innocent of a reality marked by the ‘dissociation of modernity and democracy’, the movement lost its independent space by the mid 1930s, and most of its cadres soon merged with the Muslim League, a development symbolised by none else than Akram Khan. Islamabadi became a lonely voice marked by loss, disappointment, and despair. If Maulana Maniruzzaman Islamabadi was a preacher who wanted to give birth to a new modern identity of the Bengal Muslims by purifying the modern through invoking morality of a universal again and again, his colleague, Maulana Akram Khan, may be said to have created a ‘politics of identity’ by creating a public-political sphere of Muslim Bengal through a strategy of modernising the utopia. As a publicist Akram Khan reached unprecedented heights in the public milieu of colonial Bengal. It began in the form of writing in a magazine called Ahle-Hadis. For some years he worked in several newspapers and journals in editorial and other capacities till 1910 when he could publish his own newspaper, the Saptahik Mohammadi. Then other publications too commenced under his guidance like the Dainik Jamana (1920), Saptahik O Dainik Sebak (1921), Dainik Mohammadi (1922), Masik Mohammadi (1927), Dainik Azad (1936), and the Saptahik Comrade (1946). He was also the first editor of al-Islam, the organ of the Anjumane-olema-e-bangla. Indeed he was soon recognised as the father of Bengali Muslim journalism. In 1905 he became associated with the Congress and was involved in protest against the partition of Bengal. After the revocation of partition in 1911 he gradually associated himself with Muslim politics and particularly the Muslim League and till 1928 was one of the important leaders of both the Congress and the Muslim League, as well as a crucial supporter of the Bengal Pact initiated by C.R. Das between Hindu leaders (in this case represented by the Congress) and Muslim leaders to ensure political unity and communal amity. But by 1928, fed up with the attitude of the Hindu leaders of the Congress who were determined to undo the pact (which was revoked in 1926), he severed his connection with the Congress. In 1936 as the most important leader of the Muslim League in Bengal, Akram Khan became busy in reorganising the League there. As the president of the Bengal Muslim League from 1941 to 1947, he became the most determined and consistent advocate of Pakistan and even after partition he remained a loyal champion of the Muslim League. Till 1962 he was connected with politics and journalism, apparently untouched by the

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surge of Bengali identity and the rise of Awami (popular) politics in East Pakistan. He died in 1968, after 100 years of leading an active and contradictory life. Akram Khan has been often compared to Muhammad Ali Jinnah for his unflinching commitment to the idea of Pakistan. Like Jinnah he was a believer in composite virtues of nationalism in his early phase. Like Jinnah, it is said that he was not a practising believer. In Anjumane-olema-e-bangla he translated some surahs or verses in the Holy Quran into Bengali. In the presidential address to the third conference of the Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Parishad in 1919 he referred to the complexities in the Muslim mind regarding the question of language in these words: There are many strange questions in this world. ‘What is the mother tongue of the Bengali Muslims, Urdu or Bengali?’, is the strangest of them. It is like asking whether coconut should grow on a coconut tree ... if somebody approaches us with that query we shall have to raise money to send that person to Behrampur... Bengali has to be enriched with Arabic and Persian words ... in the current style of written Bengali the idolatry of the Hindus is so apparent and the Musalman loses his way in this. First we need publication of our religious texts and our national history in Bengali. The alem should learn Bengali. It is his holy task to serve the mother tongue. Muslims have their distinct notion of nation or jati. This is the particular feature of Muslim nationalism and the amulet of the Muslim nation. ...Muslim nationalism is completely religious. …to its great peril the Muslims can forget that their national language is Arabic ... Look what Persia did to Arabic ... Urdu is neither our mother tongue nor our national tongue. However, for the protection and nourishment of Muslim nationalism we need Urdu.6

In engaging with modernity and designing a community’s or a nation’s own sense of the modern, he wrote in Masik Mohammadi, There is now a novel awakening in the many layers of Muslim Bengal with the arrival of different thoughts and influenced by the surroundings. On one side the hold of the old, on the other the lure of the modern.... The outlook of the first group is getting narrower increasingly, though it is not extinct.... And here on the other side though there is no dearth of light around the young group enchanted with modernity, they are totally blind today regarding Islam... We have to tell the first group, ‘open the door’, and the second group, ‘open your eyes!’7


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The venture of defining the Muslim nation in Bengal on the basis of a nationalist alliance of Hindus and Muslims that had consumed the preceding 26 years of his life failed finally in 1929. Akram Khan could not but feel betrayed. He severed all his connections with the Congress and the earlier type of nationalist politics based on communal unity. The leader, who was opposed by the clergy, particularly by the ulema of the Ahl-e-Hadis in the 1920s as un-Islamic, now became the pillar of the political aspirations of the clergy. We of course know how the rest of his life evolved in this never-tobe-successful endeavour to solve the paradox of solidarity-building. In fact that too is a lesson for us. His writings became increasingly concerned with the ‘Muslim’ cause and not the cause of ‘Muslim Bengal’. He became in due course the president of the Muslim League in Bengal. He had arrived at the natural(ised) idea of Pakistan. The journey of the intellectual had come to an ironic end. After independence he remained the Muslim League president in East Pakistan. Apart from supporting the language cause he showed no sympathy for the movement for autonomy. Awami politics was anathema to him. Even army rule was welcome. He extended support to Ayub Khan. The idea of Pakistan as the natural homeland of the Muslims of the subcontinent was not an utopia. It had been achieved. Islam as the religion of the intellect (as opposed to the religion of the plough or the bazaar) had been vindicated. By primarily intellectual means Maulana Akram Khan had created a public, aroused his followers, erected the intellectual framework of a nation, almost ‘conjured up a nation’, the Muslim Bengal. He had begun his journey with a policy of an alliance of this Muslim Bengal with Hindu Bengal. He had then given shape to the idea of Pakistan as the natural habitat of this nation. And when linguistic nationalism was breaking this habitat, he was at a loss to understand how any such consideration like claim on behalf of a language could disturb the natural journey of the Muslims on earth. Being a consistent Muslim meant to Akram Khan believing in the idea of Pakistan. But in that garden of identity there was a snake. If Islam allowed in place of universal brotherhood a nation for the Muslims, that is Pakistan, where was the place of democracy in that argument? He had achieved a solution in his own mind. And it was final. In the permanently unstable world of nationalist solutions his intellect and his austere style marked with certitudes had proved unequal to the demands of the nationalist public of Muslim Bengal, a public that he had helped

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to create. His biography on Prophet Muhammad was an event in Bengal’s intellectual history. Such intellectual history is in any case a battleground of legitimation or contestation. But ironically that which legitimates also contests. Akram Khan ‘Mostafacharit, a narration of Muhammad’s life as well as an exercise in argumentation and refutation, was a demonstration of his ‘belief in rationality.’ It was the narration of a life that had to be rescued from myths as also neglected by the Muslims. It was indeed an elaboration of the supreme statement of Akram Khan that to be a believer was to be a rationalist also. Akram Khan had thought that with his intellectual writings on Islam, the Prophet, and on the political culture of the Bengali Muslims, he was achieving a settled disposition of the nation. But little did he realise that the identity of a nationalist public was a self-conscious projection, it involved invocation of memory in various forms and stages and therefore could never be settled. The trajectory of the Anjuman movement in Bengal and the political careers of two of its prominent leaders point towards how utopia is a dream that always combines with reality, is fraught with conflicts and responses with contradictory pulls, and operates in the form of situations, ideologies, and institutions that are instrumental in ‘creating’ the public(s) of the nation. They are utopias because they can be dreamt in these sites (or, rather, in any of them) because utopia is never antithetical to ‘heterotopia’, but the ‘heterotopic’ character of public institutions has allowed utopias to flourish.8 Nothing illustrates this more than the way the Muslim League disintegrated in East Pakistan. In the conflictive politics of assertion, Maniruzzaman Islamabadi could have smiled in satisfaction, were he alive in 1949, to see how the Muslim Awami League was born to give the signal that utopia and modernity were combining again in the political space of Muslim Bengal. Utopia in any kind of nationalist thought, we must remember, is anyway a complex thing, and unfortunately this has remained neglected in readings of Bengali Islamic political thought. In that thought, moral judgement was always crucial. It involved themes of divinity, critique of the present civil society, and a demand that an ethical politics be sovereign—a form, it recognised, present only in the kingdom of the Almighty. Thus, political thought dealt with the contemporaneity of the Quran, the injustices on believers in the reign of the colonial masters and their supporters—mostly ‘the Hindus’—and all that was relevant in explicating the ethical imperative of a homeland.


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Utopia has a recursive legacy. Thinkers and leaders go back to the ‘ideal’ again and again. A thinker like Akram Khan had to rationalise the utopia, whereas another leader of Muslim Bengal, Maulana Bhasani whom we shall discuss later, found it self-evident. One relied on written words, the other on the spoken; one relied on organisation, the other on instinct; one on logic, the other on proselytising and evangelic campaigns. Yet both were tied to the anchor of utopia. In creating a solidarity, political ideas verged on being absolutely moral-utopian. It has been pointed out that utopia makes politics, that is noble politics, self-evident. In other words, contrary to the common idea, politics is not the field where power is contested and arrived at; politics presupposes the power of which it is only a mode. And this power is, above all, justice, and it flows from the capacity to do justice. Power, then, takes the form of justice—justice for the believers, for the common man, for the oppressed, justice against jalims (wrong-doers, evil people). Thus, in Bengali Muslim political history, and more significantly, in its politico-religious discourse, utopia was invoked again and again (from Titu Meer to Maulana Bhasani): Power was presented as a capacity to do noble things and to punish evil acts and thoughts. Consequently, justice and power informed the core of a utopian vision of a Muslim land. In sermons to the faithful, the utopian vision had to be shared; the politico-religious discourse had to be congregational and open. If the political had to be justified by the divine, the political emanated from the divine also. We must appreciate the break, as much as we appreciate the continuity. From 1949, the year of the birth of the Muslim Awami League, politics of Muslim Bengal attained a dreamy quality. The opposition became the mainstream by harping on the self-evident, on the just, on the inevitable. Political contestation was successfully grounded in total moralism. Thus, the national awakening in 1952 did not have to be ‘secular’; it did not have to disconnect itself from a Muslim identity. The past of the Pakistan (movement) was to be rescued from the evil usurpers. If the Medinian golden age was unattainable fully, it was nonetheless there—as the standard, as the just, as the inspiration to overcome the dark period. But here was the ‘miracle of the modern’. For, it may be asked, if the utopian inspiration was the force behind such a dramatic change in leadership in Muslim Bengal in 1949–52, why did such inspiration not follow the celebrated path of utopia, that of the Wahabis? Or,

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as was being enunciated at that time, the path of Maulana Maududi? The creation of Pakistan had occasioned theological reflections on state, religion, polity, and a moral human existence. It is important to note that Maulana Bhasani’s quest in this situation bore little resemblance to that of Maududi. We have to note that in Bengal the pursuit of the ideal took the modern form of open mass politics, democratic activities, and anti-fundamentalism, so that many commentators have been deceived into typifying this period as one of the growth of ‘secular consciousness’. It is difficult to go into the details of that discussion now. However, we may note that the search for the pure, the just, the Medinian, and the divine, never strayed from the path of toleration. Bengal, at once a colonised and a plural land, produced as a resolution of the tormenting conflicts and contradictions its own utopia, which bore little resemblance with the principles of the Wahabite polity, though admittedly Wahabi ideology had had its impact on rural Bengal in the 19th century and contributed to the evolution of the form of the pracharak so crucial in the politics of Muslim Bengal. For this, Abul Mansur Ahmed’s description of his family memory and his childhood is crucial for any scholar of Muslim Bengali activism; we have only to read the available autobiographies such as his to get a glimpse of that world. The emphasis on the application of the Islamic law so characteristic of the Wahabis was singularly absent in the denunciation of contemporary rule by the ‘new’ leaders. They certainly condemned the corruption of the state leaders. But the ideal of a pure life of the divine was irrelevant to them. Clerics were crucial for the ‘new awakening’, but as pracharaks, not as clerics. In this utopia the script (the scripture) was not the absolute, the spoken and the entire language was the principal element. Until Akram Khan, the political was defined with the aid of canonical texts. But in a very dense atmosphere marked by partition, agrarian unrest, national awakening over the language issue, and the sudden loss of legitimacy of the ruling party, canonical texts lost their primacy to a significant extent. The result was Bengal’s ‘own utopia’. The inequities of the exterior were to be redressed not through a redefining of the interior. Redefining the exterior itself in the light of the ‘natural’ soul of Bengal was the way (it is remarkable that the language demand was often raised as the ‘natural right’ of a Bengali, the fight against the government was ‘natural’ for a populace which had fought for the ‘natural’ right of a homeland, that is Pakistan, and that


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the demand against the zamindars [landlords] was a ‘natural’ one of the peasants). Thus, the conceiving of a new nationalist identity was a contentious act, marked by the moral and the ethical—the reinforcing of utopia as an inspiration for public politics. This was in effect an interrogation by the plebeian public of the aspirations of the ruling Muslim bourgeois political class. In this utopia, there was also a conflation of power and morality, of language and the entire range of civic culture, of democracy and the ideal of Pakistan; in short the interpreted past and the desirable future. And as every utopia suffers because the conflation of the two registers becomes impossible after some time, this one too was to meet its nemesis. The decline of Bhasani-style politics in Bangladesh was the most marked instance of this. After the emergence of the comprador, cronycapitalist class, as the ruler of the new nation, as he realised that his version of radical darbesh-style politics had lost out, and he was nearing the end of his life, he would ruefully remark that he was alone in his dreams. The utopian, evangelical, darbesh (the wandering mystic) style of politics was not shared by others; this was a style with which even the organised leftist peasant politics of nationalism could not co-habit comfortably for long. The departure of utopia was in any case marked in the politics of the time as he passed his last year. The army took over power and a helpless and desperate Bhasani could only watch and place his faith in the army’s capacity to deliver promise. The Awami League rule in Bangladesh had ended within four years after it began, in ignominy and disaster. Above all, the events of 1971 had shown how ineffective ‘pious opposition’ was in the time of tanks, cannons, mortars, foreign help, intervention, and the Seventh Fleet. To Bhasani, however, a combination of Islam, piety, Muslim nationalism, and pride in being a Bengali had not been unnatural. In his youth he had come under the influence of the writings of Saiyad Nasiruddin Bogdadi, Maniruzzaman Islamabadi, and Ismail Hussain Shiraji with whom he had campaigned jointly in North Bengal. His spiritual quest had taken him from Assam to Deoband seminary. He joined the anjumane olema in 1915 in the Calcutta session, met Akram Khan and took al-Islam to Assam. He was now to educate and train the ulema. In 1915 he started relief-work among famine, flood, and cyclone victims, this time in Pabna. This became a life-long vocation and symbolised, more than any other act, his politics amongst the peasants of Bengal. He became the president of the Assam Congress in 1916 and wandered

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in those years from one charland to the other charland (land that surfaces from the riverbed due to shift in the river course). Peasants and murids (disciples) addressed him as huzur. His biographer tells us the story of the formation of the Banga-Assam Praja Samity and the Banga-Assam Praja Sammelan in Phulchuri in 1929, both supported by the communists and leftists and the envy that all this roused among the ‘mullahs, maulavis’. The events of 1930 in Chittagong occasioned another outburst of activity. He was now founding schools in places like Shalmara in opposition to the zamindars, mobilising peasants against the Gauripur landlord and the landlord of Santosh, and was ‘enchanting the audience with magic oratory and a bull-dog voice’. In 1937 he had formed the Assam Chashi-Majur Samity (Assam Association for Peasants and Workers) and started agitation against the coolie line system. The same year he was elected from south Dhubri to the Assam Legislative Assembly and was now a recognised political leader besides being an organiser, agitator, pir, and a maulana. Rest of that political history is well known. The radical Left tried to infuse social radicalism into his politics of nationalist-religious identity—a desirable but often an illusory expectation. The moment Mujib came out of jail in 1969, Bhasani-led National Awami Party’s 11-point charter lost its relevance. Federal autonomy, already a subterfuge for Bengali nationalism, became the main issue. Mujib for the first time became the unquestioned supreme leader of the nationalist public. From an activist of a nationalist party and subsequently a nationalist leader, he had become within 22 years the chief tribune of Muslim Bengal and of the opposition to the reality and the idea of Pakistan. In this congealed form where all other elements of opposition politics had been pushed to the margin, no one had anything else to say or offer—not, particularly, Maulana Bhasani, burdened with a half-century long association with the ideology of ‘pious opposition’. In the strange interface of public and nationalism, he quickly became a castaway. From then on, the personal story of Bhasani, now busy in invoking moral politics, is inalienable from what we may call the sociology of mass upsurge. The Left now found him inadequate, the Right found him unnecessary. His Islamic moralism was now arcane, possibly more suitable to the conditions of the early part of the century. One can read his speeches and short testaments after 1970—for example, ‘Amar Parikalpanaye Islami Viswavidyalaya’ (1970), ‘Keno Islami Viswavidyalaya’ (1971),


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‘Islami Viswavidyalayer Rup O Katha’ (1974), ‘Palanbad - Ki O Keno’ (1973), ‘Rabubiyater Bhumika’ (1974), and his last speech to the conference of the Khuda-i-Khidmatgar in Santosh in 1976 three days before his death on 17 November. After 1971 he was a liability to the politics of the land. His ‘return to Islam’ in this period, if one can see this in his turning away from organised party politics to moral activism, was unsung. The public found his programme of achieving a fusion of religious moralism, democracy, and the politics of nationalism too ambiguous a legacy to hold on to. Yet, one can surely say that, with increasing bitterness about the reality of the nationalist state that emerged through 1971—its corruption, and the ruthless private use of public power and wealth—the darbesh-style politics would not be the only thing of memory for the public to preserve; the other passion in Bhasani’s life, character building, would also be an equally abiding legacy. Pedagogy after all has always been one of the necessary conditions for a utopian project. I think by now readers are clear of what I mean by ‘concrete universal’, a term that carries the sense of the ‘fold’—singularity within singularities, and the negotiations, contentions, and dialogues—that is at the heart of my intervention here.

CONTENTIOUS SITUATIONS, MICRO-POLITICS, AND DIALOGIC EXISTENCE In the current time, marked by paroxysm of terrorism and fundamentalism, the immigrants, minorities, and non-state people characteristically find themselves beyond the pale of law, order, rights, and a citizenship based polity. They are denizens of a shadowy world that inspires fear, while democracy, in order to secure itself, must draw for them elaborate and stringent restrictions and controls. Drawbridges are being pulled; and a new type of racism, based on fictive cultural identities bordering on almost biological differences, marks the strangers out. This is the milieu in which new political actors are emerging from several assertive identities. Yet, as the foregoing tales suggest, these assertions exhibit ambiguities. If this was true when the Muslim public sphere was appearing in Bengal 150 years ago, the ambiguity is equally evident in our time, when as I show in detail in my book The Marginal Nation, thousands and thousands of Muslim illegal

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immigrants from Bangladesh taking shelter on the other side of the border flock to mosques, yet their main cry is not to evoke a new ‘brotherhood of the believers’, but to acquire citizenship that can entitle them to life-saving means in a world where states have less and less of will and the means to care for them. New mosques, new charities, new networks, new dispensations, and new orders appear—yet in this growth of a huge amorphous mass of shadowy denizens, religious identity is a contingent product, being constantly predicated by the politics of democratic citizenship, that is, daily negotiations and transactions over rights and means. Declarations of political identities in this sense are contentious acts of singularities within singularities. Declaration of political identity by the subject in this world of contentious politics is ‘micro-politics’; that is to say, it does not follow the principle of the formation of majority-identity (which is often constituted by some fictive majoritarian principle of nation, race, ethnicity, or religion). Surviving always in face of a majoritarian state by becoming ‘minoritarian’, by which I mean constituting itself into a politics that positions itself as a minority, aiming to win the contest, and marking itself out as a separate territory in face of a state, the majority, and a centralising power bent upon erasing the territories of all others. Identity declaration is the act of constituting a subject in contentious politics, ‘which takes as its object the very violence of identities’. Indeed, one can say, politics is taken to its extreme by the logic of identities, which cannot identify themselves without causing violence—the essence of contention. The mission of identity is fulfilled only in a war of annihilation that ironically makes the politics of identity sit on its head, by ending at least one identity. To be true, this violence as we know can at times take extreme forms of cruelty, making human mass ‘disposable’. The word ‘neo-fascism’ can barely describe the phenomenon, because in politics this survives only as epi-phenomenon. Since identities as political subjects are in fact non-realisable, responsible politics today can only strive for historical conditions where such ultra-violence can be dispelled. On the other hand, under conditions of extreme violence, where no macro-politics can make any significant dent on the milieu, micro-politics covers the process of resistance at every level. Study of ‘identification’, which means a study of a process, enjoins us to take ‘identities’ to be always over-determined, which means taking identities as performing several functions at the same time.


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Let me go back to what I began with, namely the negotiation of the singularities in the production of the universal—in this case the concrete universal of the nation. What is critical in this process is the practicality ‘of the negotiation, the practicality of the dialogic existence’.

A PRAGMATIC THEORY

OF

TRUTH

My arguments, the discerning readers will realise by now, form a pragmatic theory about truth. This theory may not have a philosophically interesting theory about truth, but for pragmatists, this truth is only the name of a property, which all other singularities may share. In this case it was the truth of colonialism, the truth of occupation, the truth of an anti-colonial existence, a matter of practical experience. Thus, the Muslims fought in India against the colonial rule in 1857, later they dialogued with the Hindus to build up the nation, or Jamaluddin al Afghani, a Shia who took on a Sunni identity visited India to preach anti-colonialism, or the Sikh women committed suicide in the Punjab during the Great Partition, and so on. These are not unique events that lend to totalising conclusions. They were practical acts, necessary to perform, under the circumstances. There is little anything general and useful to say about what makes these actions all good, or good for all time. Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good from the world of the co-existing singularities are doomed to failure. They make no sense to us. The history of the attempts to do so is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call ‘philosophy’—a genre founded by Plato. Pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as never being of any use, or at least having outlived its usefulness. In the 19th century two things happened: On one hand, there was a groundswell of rebellions, revolts, and protests in Europe and in the colonies around the world paying scant regard to the existing ideologies of the time, including the ‘German Ideology’. On the other hand, the conflict in theory just mentioned briefly crystallised into one between ‘the transcendental philosophy’ and ‘the empirical philosophy’. This opposition did not reflect properly the clashes in the material world. It was a grossly distorted representation. The terms were misleading. Yet, every intellectual knew roughly where s/he stood in relation to

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the two blocs. The transcendental camp thought that natural science was not the last word; the empiricists thought that knowledge of the spatial-temporal things helped to find one’s moorings, in fact find Truth. Yet there was a critical tradition also, which tried to cut through the absolute formulations of these two camps. In the growth of this critical tradition historical consciousness played a big role. The critical tradition felt that historical awareness led to critical consciousness, most importantly consciousness of its own genealogy, from which it could trace ‘the scientific method’. One difficulty the pragmatist had in making his/her position clear, therefore, was that she had to struggle with the positivist also for the position of radical anti-Platonist. His/her critique of Plato would be different from that of the positivist. S/he knew that several hundred years of effort had failed to make interesting sense of the notion of ‘correspondence’ (either of thoughts to things or of words to things). The trick of breaking the aporia of correspondence lay elsewhere. In the anti-colonial world, as I have argued elsewhere, the problem of correspondence was simply absent. In the overwhelming milieu of colonialism the problem was not of correspondence, but of making non-correspondence work towards producing a universal which would make the problematic redundant. This should be evident when one re-reads the accounts presented by me till now in this chapter as a story of the growth of a distinct public sphere as one ‘circle’ in the universe of the nation. What was the secret? My answer is that the world of colonialism and the anti-colonial movements was conducive to the gradual ‘pragmaticisation’ of any kind of positivism, which was after all one variety of fundamentalism and idealism. Metaphysical elements in thought had to be incessantly criticised in order to confront colonialism. The colonial world was most conducive to the growth of dialectical thinking—and of course through a much shorter route. When we re-study the Wahabis, the Faraizis, the Anjuman movement, the Revolt of 1857, the various thoughts about peasant insurrections, or the dialogues over the first partition of Bengal in 1905, the Lucknow Pact, the Bengal Pact, etc. it is impossible to miss the dialogic-pragmatic component in anti-colonial consciousness. The sense of finitude of one’s time and place, of the contingencies and the necessary actions—this is the lasting legacy of the anti-colonial being, which became universal. Thank God, the colonised Muslims did not want to get out of their skin and escape!


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In this sense, Foucault was right when he remarked that we are all now gradually losing our hold on the ‘metaphysical comfort’ which the philosophical tradition had provided. The anti-colonial political subject used reality’s own language rather than merely the received vocabulary of a time and a place to make the ‘universe and the universal of anti-colonialism’. The way the anti-colonial negotiations went on in India offers food for more thought. I have pointed out that the mental world of these negotiations was opposite to the ideology of ‘corresponding’. The microstructure of corresponding is characterised by two things: bivalence, which is the property of being either true or false, and a belief in making absolute claims to the possession of truth. On both counts the anti-colonial political subject proved to be pragmatists. The political subject of the 19th and the early 20th century knew deep inside that there was nothing absolute about the truth of colonialism (it was of course a reality) except what the subject was experiencing, and if any other truth was to be created, it was to be in the course of creating a practice. No standard of rationality could prove to them the absolute truth of colonialism; no rigorous argumentation that was not conforming to the subject’s own practices could hold any water. These histories of the growth of an anti-colonial Muslim public sphere were veritable demonstrations of the passage of the subject from ‘subjection’ to ‘subjectivation’—poor words to describe the manoeuvres of the singularities within the anti-colonial universe to make the nation. These manoeuvres were in the nature of dispersed and discontinuous offensives that left no room for durable peace till the war against colonialism was over. More significantly these offensives, dispersed and discontinuous as they were, seemed to say that if colonialism signified modernity, political modernity also signified that to get rid of the permanent schemata of peace/war we must establish other ways to construct the life of political being. This is where the significance of negotiation between the singularities lay. The nation was to emerge at that historical point of time and space, when (or where) the demand for virtues would be satisfied, when at the same time other subjects of colonialism, which was the rule of the infidels, would co-exist; it was at that point that one could say that yes, politics would be able to live in congruence with ethics. This signified the necessity of a dialogic culture. In fact the investigation into the emergence of the solidarity called the nation, and an accompanying study of the dynamics of the twin

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factors of contention and dialogue, show us how a concrete universal emerges, and how in this emergence the idea of a fold operates in form of a practical operation of the principle of the singularities within singularity. As singularities jostle within themselves, we have the beginning of democracy. That is why in ex-colonies people say with some justification that our learning to become democratic began long before we became independent. In fact it was in the colonial world that we learnt to make ‘always singular adjustments between freedom and equality’.9 Politics became a concrete procedure of truth. But this also means, and I think that the historical material presented in bare sketches here also proves, that thinking of singularity in its pure form (by that I mean the historical form) also signifies at the same time thinking of pure multiplicity, consistent self-dissemination, and therefore limitless multiplicity. That is how the singular and the plural, the concrete and the universal went on negotiating each other in the emerging national or the collective-political life. Shorn of high words, all these not only mean that we must look at political life as practical life, but also as a practical way of negotiating the paradox of equality and difference in our collective life. Such practical wisdom tells us the possibility a ‘post-philosophical culture’.10 Is there still such a possibility of pragmatic politics, which can conduct dialogues in order to widen resistance to power? Or is it only a story of the colonial past and anti-colonial resistance, and therefore can survive today mostly in a mythological form? In other words, is there no more possibility of building the national-popular? I shall request the readers in answer to that likely question to study the resistance in Lebanon to neo-colonial rule. Readers will only have to study the statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrullah, the leader of nationalist resistance in Lebanon.11 The statements outline the situations and positions in Lebanon in circumstances of repeated Israeli aggression, the massacre of the Palestinians in Lebanon in the 1980s, or the earlier landing of the US marines in Beirut. The subject positions of resistance chronicled there, and reviled countless times in Hollywood movies, bear out many things I have discussed in this chapter. The legacy of anti-colonial politics demonstrates such possibility, in which men and women felt themselves as people with agency, even though with precious links to something beyond, and therefore a sense of limit, something finite. One can say, using the words of Richard Rorty


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(from whose insights I draw heavily here) in a slightly different way, in the colonial world the political subject was already halfway towards the creation of such a position. S/he was a believer, yet s/he was, as Sartre put it, doing without a singular absolute God.

NOTES 1. Once again readers are advised to G.N. Devy’s writings on this theme. See The G.N. Devy Reader (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009). 2. Of Charles Tilly’s many accounts of contentious politics, one of the recent ones is Social Movements, 1768–2004 (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2004). 3. Abul Mansur Ahmed, Amar Dekha Rajnitir Panchas Bachar (Dhaka: Sahityaprakash, 1978). 4. Shamsuzzaman Khan, Maniruzzaman Islamabadi, 1875–1950 (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1988), 18–19. 5. Anisuzzaman, ed., Muslim Bangler Samayikpatra, 1831–1930 (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1969); hereafter Samayikpatra. 6. Samayikpatra, introduction. 7. Samayikpatra, p. 504. 8. The notion of ‘heterotopia’ made famous by Michel Foucault indicates a site of many meanings, many uses, and many transformations. The distinction from ‘utopia’ is evident as behind utopia there is a sense of one meaning, one vision, and one dream—a singularity that would mark the new city. Heterotopia indicates a new architecture, and a new ethos of the place. For this and many other meanings, see Michel Foucault in Robert Hurley, trans., ‘Different Spaces’, in Michel Foucault—Essential Works, ed. James Faubion, vol. 2 (London: Allen Lane, 1994). However, while Foucault makes the distinction between the two, I suggest the connection between utopia and heterotopia that political action creates. 9. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005), 151; also Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004), Chapter 6. 10. On this explanation, it is best to read Richard Rorty, whose argument I am following here; See Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (University of Minnesota Press, 1982), ‘Introduction’; also available in the The Marxists Internet Archive: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/index.htm (accessed on 13 February 2008). 11. Nicholas Noe, ed., Voice of the Hezbollah—The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrullah (London: Verso, 2007).

4 Terror, Politics, and the Subject

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n the preceding three chapters I explained what can be considered as the fundamental gradient in the emergence of the political subject, namely an emphasis on actions, hence the evolution of a commensurate theory of action, and consequently a unique ability of the subject to combine death and dialogue as the twin components of politics. I have also tried to bring out some of the striking features of such a situation, namely a sense of practicality, practical negotiation of truths, and a sense of singularity within a singular, the sense of a ‘fold’. In this situation-centric exposition there was an attempt also to show how actions were conceived in varying forms. But the exposition remains insufficient till we address in the light of the preceding narratives the all important question: action, yes, but what kind of action, what is this action, what guides the subject in determining the form in which the subject will act upon? In this chapter I aim to throw some light on a possible answer to this great question.

INTENSITY OF POLITICS AND A DOCTRINE OF ACTION Ullaskar Dutta, who along with Hem Chandra Kanungo became household names in Bengal in the time of overwhelming anticolonial imagination, had become insane after he was released from the Andaman Isles prisons in 1912. His biographer Ashoke Kumar Mukhopadhyay tells us of the accounts of Ullaskar becoming mad as a result of torture by the prison staff in the Andaman prisons1 besides there being other factors like years-long intense mental concentration,

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pressure, dedication, anxieties, and the mental and physical flight. He was sentenced to be hanged till death, but on appeal the punishment was changed to serving life imprisonment in the penal colony of the Andaman Isles. The biographer also tells us how Ullaskar in recurrent state of hallucination would continuously recount his thoughts and anxieties about his comrades and the country. He and Hem Chandra were the ‘philosophers of the bomb’, as Gandhi was to describe the early anarchist nationalist revolutionaries, as well as makers and users of these bombs. Ullaskar had said at one time, physical exercise, and learning how to use guns and make bombs, were the two paths to serve the ‘mother goddess’—a religion as great as the Hindu one.2 In this he was only emulating from the annals of Bengal’s past, a long tradition of cultivating strength and power and invoking them when time required. The (spiritual) pursuit of strength, intense mental dedication, courting of physical hardships, and insanity, that is sadhana (spiritual pursuit) and unmadana (madness), went together in Bengal’s emancipative history. Unmadana was not a psychic novelty or trait, but a consequence of the intense physicality of existence. In that biography we get an account of the conversations of those early terrorists, who as I have remarked elsewhere were ‘early nationalists’ also,3 in their intimate moments when they were being taken to the jails, in lock ups and prisons, in moments when they were closed together to argue whether they were to make confessions to the police and in the court, or as to what would happen in the event comrades betrayed. These are conversations of anxieties, of practicalities, of organisational details, of analyses of persons and their traits, and of the non-performance of leaders, who had assured them of the success of the ‘path’, of comrades gone astray, and new possibilities, which seemed uncertain. In those intimate moments they were activists, practical human beings, anxious to save whatever remained after the disaster, and admitting that they already knew in their minds that the path had to change. In those intimate moments they were not ‘terrorists’, not even ‘anarchists’, they were practical people, once having decided what the religion and path were. They discussed their guidebooks also in a practical tone—the Gita, the Mahabharata, and the novels of Bankim Chandra, writings of Kropotkin, and others. Ullaskar for instance had read significantly besides Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero Worship and Mazzini’s Faith and Future (one can say standard works of

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nationalist imagination), Bankim Chandra’s anushilan in Dharmatattva (practice in The Theory of Religion),4 which tried to lay down a path of practice as a path of virtue. We can ask, were these early terrorists and early nationalists embodiments of a certain sense of practicality and physicality in politics that was often beyond the comprehension of the observers, spies, analysts, intelligence community, and the host of paid writers on politics? Or, we can ask the same question in a different way, namely, was this a philosophy of action that these political subjects had grasped, and precisely because of this that they changed their course repeatedly when they saw obstacles on their paths, that they behaved in an immediate manner, so much so that we cannot write a universal history of terror, or even a history of something universal known as ‘terror’, or we cannot write the history of a universal ideology called ‘terrorism’, but only of acts of terror at different times and moments? The background in which I am raising this question is the period of the first 30 years of the last century in Bengal, known as the period of revolutionary terrorism and the age of the Bengal terrorists.5 I think the question invites speculation on the philosophy’s fate in the light of the dense political actions that marked that period—actions so dense as to be known as acts of political terror—acts cannot be philosophised. At least we can note as an introduction to what we are going to discuss here that terror has had in history different philosophies, as it has been of many kinds, and many forms of interface with other kinds of actions. However, before we proceed with our discussion on actions that came to be known as acts of terror we have to recall in this context: (a) the terror of the colonial rule on the subject race was legitimised by the discourse of race, difference, and responsibility; (b) the terror of the subject population of symbols and carriers of colonial rule was often in order to attain dignity, recognition, and equality; and (c) the respective philosophical justifications—on the side of white mythologies the justification provided by English utilitarianism, on the side of the colonised the justification provided for instance by the preaching of the Wahabis among others, or later the doctrine of works without attachments (exemplified in the writings of Bankim Chandra on Krishna, ‘Krishnacharitra’, 1886), and finally the doctrine of nationalism, which produced the ‘early terrorists’. The works on


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early nationalists everywhere bear the same truth. However, if we leave aside this particular slice of history, there is enough ground to show that terror acts always needed philosophical explanations— because terror was in the form of a singular attack, in need of impact, and therefore requiring eternal legitimacy. I have here of course a broader purpose. My aim here is to show that the Indian instance of early terrorism had broader significance because it conveyed not only these complexities and paradoxes in their widest possible range, but its links with the possible forms of action. We can see that terror here was a historical event, yet immediately through the writings of colonial officials—writings marked with realities of race and difference—terror became part of a generalised discourse of ideology. The Indian instance also shows the almost inevitable oppositional relation, historically formed, between rule of law (and liberalism) as a form of coercion and rule of direct political action as another form of coercion. Terror always appeared in the continuum of violence, yet it always became a feature of ‘exceptional violence’ or ‘extreme violence’ reinforced by other factors, today for instance by factors such as insecurities caused by immigration or ‘ethnic mixing’. Terror has been then as now not only a method of politics, but also the sign of physicality of our political existence, of politics around our ‘bare bodies’. In Bengal, Bankim Chandra’s discourse on the Gita, Krishna, and a philosophy of action needed some time to form as a distinct cult of politics, separate from and opposed to the utilitarian philosophy of rule of law. We have seen that the Wahabis similarly needed time. What is most critical in this context, and we are speaking here of the modern context, is that everywhere the issue of terror was posed in the context of the Enlightenment. Edmund Burke was everywhere in societies transforming under the impact of (revolutionary) terror, and everywhere Burkes were shouting that terror was the curse of madness and frenzy on society, from which education, morality, and most important law could save the latter. We can recall the repeated use of the word ‘fanatic’ by the colonial officials with respect to the Wahabis. As I shall show, not surprisingly therefore the early nationalists-terrorists had to engage with the political question of ‘rule of law’, which has occupied a central place in any deliberation on terror. Many languages probably do not have a similar phrase like ‘rule of law’. In any case, it

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was and could be only the classic English utilitarian philosophy that produced the phrase now lapped up in the international discourse of civility. Rule of law meant rule by law as against rule by men (and few women) and rule by order. Rule of law as Eric Stokes showed by his detailed research came against the background of violent protests by the peasantry and the expropriated masses, in some cases extreme violence, but certainly by disarming population groups, so that citizenship came through three routes—first, introduction of the rule of law (thus introduction of constitutions, penal code, etc.); second, disarming population groups to be subjected to rule now; and third, legal guarantee of certain select rights.6 Terror as a form of politics appeared against such background. Walter Benjamin in his essay, ‘Critique of Violence’ pointed out long back that the evaluation of violence was traditionally approached through its use or application, leaving the discussion of what is violence and what is in violence unexplained. If terror, the other name of congealed violence or extreme violence, has belonged to the symbolic order of force, politics, and law, the issue is not merely a matter of understanding the particularities of ‘law-making force’ (the founding moment of the legal system) and ‘law-conserving force’ (enforceability of law), but of pointing out the impossibility of treating terror as a matter of ‘unauthorised violence’—unauthorised by law or philosophy. One can see therefore why philosophers, social scientists, jurists, and historians have to labour again and again to probe the nature of terror in the context of current history.7

THE

WHITHER FREEDOM? UNCERTAIN FLIGHT PATHS

Let us now return to the time of Ullaskar Dutta. In March 1906, the revolutionaries in Bengal started a journal, called Jugantar (The End of an Age or The Transformation of an Age). The colonial administration initiated measures against the journal within a year under the Incitement to Offences Act, and the journal had to close down in mid1908. Only few issues thus came out. Yet the name survived. One of the strongest revolutionary-terrorist groups carried on their work for about next 25 years under the name, Jugantar. The influence of the


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journal was so strong in those days that few years later in 1913 some members of the Jugantar staff brought out a compilation of some of the articles and entries in the journal under the title Mukti Kon Pothe (Whither Freedom?), the title under which a series of polemical entries for discussion had been previously published in the journal. This was actually the second edition of the compilation. These entries—some long and some short tight comments—aimed at charting out alternative path to independence, different from the liberal-constitutionalist path of the Indian National Congress, the mainstream organisation of middle-class Indians at that time. Secret societies were the base of these writers and organisers; and Jugantar carried the imprint of the ideas of new thinkers and activists like Arabindo Ghosh, Pramatha Nath Chaudhury, Chittaranjan Das, and Bhupendra Nath Dutta, and the cultivation of martial arts and physical exercise in those secret clubs and societies. Along with these experiments in ideas and physical training went the reading of anarchist texts. Jugantar was to be in the words of Bhupendra Nath a ‘catalytic agent’. By 1905 mass movements in discontent against alien rule started. Secret societies, ineffective till 1904, now started reorganising and regrouping in that changed milieu. Jugantar declared that capitalism was the basis of colonialism and alien rule; therefore the path to freedom had to be against capitalism also. Writers like Arabindo, Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar, Bhupendra Nath Dutta, Upendra Nath Bandopadhyay, and others started speaking of a socialist manifesto necessary for attaining freedom. Would they need to revive cottage industry, how would they help the peasantry, how would they acquire arms, what was to be the nature of the future rule, would they have to change the organisational style of resistance and rebellion, can someone wait for the entire masses to become aware of the evils of alien rule to begin ‘actions’ or were ‘actions’ to be the ‘catalytic’ or the ‘galvanising’ agents? These classic questions of politics and material life surfaced again and again in the essays in Jugantar. The journal began with a 1000 copy print run, and when it closed down its print run was 20,000. When the journal became too hot for the alien administration, and the organisers knew that the time of the journal was up, they took the step of compiling some of the essays and publishing them in a volume titled Mukti Kon Pathe (first edition, 1908), and started selling it so that even if the journal were to be banned, the writings would survive. Police report translated the compilation as Which Way Lies

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Salvation, got hold of the copies and proscribed the publication soon after, saying that this was a treatise of collecting ‘men, money, and arms’, but by that time the publication had become well known, in fact a compulsory text for the secret revolutionaries of that age.8 Even though a kind of practicality of thinking, as I have indicated, marked the discussion among the early terrorists in jail, yet in the mind of the colonial administration, particularly its intelligence community the ‘terrorists’ were mysterious people whose identity had to be known at any cost, including how they thought, ate, slept, who they were, their beliefs, and how they dressed. Still in spite of its best efforts it seemed to the administration that somehow the identity of those they considered as terrorists had remained beyond full comprehension. When we see what were discussed on the pages of Jugantar, we can of course get an idea of the reason of this incomprehension of the government. The animated discussion on the fundamentals of politics—the mark of the journal—was hard to be identified with the captive activists. In the first edition of Jugantar, the editor had declared that without connecting its present, past, and future, no society could establish itself, and for ‘transformation’ society needed new ideal, theory, education, and above all ‘new practice’. ‘Practice’ implied sadhana (spiritual pursuit).9 Sadhana means doing away with indiscipline in thought and lifestyle, and lack of dedication in the pursuit of goal; it means further the realisation that individual benefit and collective benefit were dependent on each other. The editor pointed out that under alien rule none of these two was possible, and that only with collective good, individual good could be assured. But what was collective life? It was above all national life. And what was the fundamental requisite to make national life possible? Again above all, it was ‘appropriate work’, which meant ‘goal-oriented performance’ (upajukta karma ba lakshyabhimukhin anusthan). Jugantar in the subsequent issues went on to illustrate what the group meant by goal-oriented work. Of course it could rarely say that full independence through forcible eviction of alien rule was the goal, therefore the goal was always explained through what Lenin had called the compulsion of ‘Aesopian language’. The goal was end of poverty, slavery, bad traits in ‘national character’, of the infantile attitude in disclaiming responsibility for one’s own action, of racist marks in the society, quarrels, pettiness, cowardice, laziness, and finally and significantly, bad literature. Why bad literature? Because, as the writer surmised, ‘without a country and without liberty we cannot produce vital art’.


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In this diagnosis of the ills in the body of the country—and Jugantar rarely used the word jati (nation), it almost always used the word desh (country)—there was little of the invocation of the past glory of the country. If the disease had been recognised, Jugantar argued, redress too had started, first with character (charitra) reformation. Character reform was possible through suitable readings and actions—both individual and collective exercises—which would drill the body and mind into appropriate agencies for actions. It assured the readers that Bengal did not lack in capacity or ability, it lacked only in determination and contact. Therefore practice meant finding out ‘right’ people, formation of ‘societies’ at both local and district levels, widen these societies by increasing their membership, organising local movements against ill effects of alien rule with the aim of inculcating collective spirit, pursuing right style of work, and finally ‘appropriate work’, which meant ‘goal-oriented performance’ (upajukta karma ba lakshyabhimukhin anusthan). Was this insane thinking? In a letter to the editor published in Jugantar (3 Bhadra, 1313 B.S.), an ‘insane’ reader (insane through meditation—jogakhyapa) admitted that currents of new thinking had the ability to trigger wild ideas in a reader’s mind; but then were not these ideas clear symptoms of the end of an age? ‘And was it not now Bengal’s turn to serve the country with glory?’10 Indeed the suggestion came in the next issue that insanity was perhaps understandable given the ‘hypnotic state of the country’ in which some felt that the country belonged to the English. In the epic Mahabharata Arjun the warrior was advised not to behave like a coward; he was further advised to clean his mind of the agony at the prospect of killing men who were foes. This was goal-oriented thinking, though this was seemingly an insane state of mind occupied with only one thing. In appealing to country, Jugantar took recourse to the modern language of justice, rights, and equality, and the prognosis of modern political economy of industrialisation. Yet where it strayed from the language of liberal democracy and refashioned the language of democracy in the fire of anti-colonialism was in two respects. First, it had to weigh the possibility of achieving an end to alien rule through forcible means. And since that possibility by all rational accounts seemed dim at least in near future, it discussed a lot about the dynamics of power, for instance, what were the constituents of a country’s power, what was durable or lasting in power and what was

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transient, and what contributed to a country’s power. Therefore, ideals of equality and justice were not enough; power was the omnipresent reality marking the world of equality and justice. But even this was not the most significant aspect of the argumentation; that aspect was that it would be always a pagal (mad) or a jogakhyapa (insane mendicant) who would bring the harsh reality of power to reader’s notice. Normalcy or normal vision does not allow you to see things; you need to be insane to see things through.11 Second, practice meant also biplabtattva, which also had concrete meaning. It implied five things: relying on newspapers and other media of publication, popularising right kind of music, creating right literature, creating right kind of performing arts, such as theatre and kathakata, and forming secret societies. Yet these five avenues would not be enough in making the revolutionary path, if as a reader pointed out in a following contribution to the journal, the following aspects were not taken care of, namely that biplabtattva must be combined with jugadharmatattva (theory of the religion of today), which in turn implied attending to social divisions and hierarchies, knowledge of how to rule (once the British left), knowing the utility and limits of passive resistance, understanding the true meaning of the word ‘religion’ (which should cover the whole country), and finally knowing how to collect men, money, and arms. Jugantar went on to describe these tasks, which jugadharmatattva entailed in the context of the difficulties and realities it had outlined in the past. The journal increasingly articulated the details and its enterprise, its inquiry (and the mission of the early terrorists and the early nationalists), was cast in a complex of three theories—dharmatattva, anushilantattva, and jugadharmatattva (theory of religion or virtue, theory of practice, and theory of the religion of the current age). Together they constituted the politics of action—an intense materiality, which could not take form without terror as a component. In other words, sovereignty then could not be formed without a sense of achieving some sort of material power, and terror signified the clash of sovereignty. Clash of sovereignty meant that different powers had taken forms, come into contact with one another, and were now making claim over the same people and same country to seek rule and guide people’s lives. After all the country had obeyed wise kings in the past, because the king was wise, which meant that he had paid due


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attention to his obligations to the subjects, and now since the new ruler had strayed from that path of virtue, clash of sovereignty was bound to occur. If obligation to subjects was a part of dharma, this clash too was part of the same dharma, the ‘practical duty to order’.12 Therefore clash was inevitable. Clash of sovereignty meant further that contacts must now explode into contentions, rule must be disturbed severely, and uninterrupted and undisturbed rule must now crumble down and give way to collective violence. Clearly this scenario of an ever-recurring disturbance of the continuity of rule is marked by an activity of thinking, which one cannot put to God or ‘professional thinkers’,13 but to an unusual conjunction of circumstances; when rival historical forces and sovereignties clash, popular groups start making claim, thinking proceeds in unusually new ways, borders of different kinds melt, and thinking carries all the features of taking violent turn, when sadhana would involve issues other than God, safety, security, and immortality. This is precisely what the anarchists of Bengal had pointed out, namely that sadhana, unmadana, and anushilan were integrally linked.14 Thinking (indicated by sadhana) meant a part of practice (anushilan). Consciousness of predicaments arose from anushilan, one needed sadhana to cope with predicaments that were posed by the historically determined task of ejecting alien rule from India. Terror as a part of political practice appeared in this context; there was nothing mysterious to it; there was no ‘inner life’ from which it sprang; it was a product of the combination of body, soul, and mind. In the congealed combination of body, soul, and mind, you have if you wish a demonstration of practical reason, though the early terrorists of Bengal would have preferred to say that exceptionality (insanity, abnormality, beyond reason) allowed you to achieve that combination. The question is, can we locate here a new theorising of subjectivity? We can only say in this context that in the rise of the political subject the militant has played a remarkable role, the militant who at times was an anarchist, a terrorist. The way the militant-terrorists organised secret societies in Bengal and subsequently elsewhere, and made new contacts, raised new concerns, exhibited signs of de-territorial resistance, new flows, and an ‘internal nomadism’,15 by which I mean wilful disconnection from the roots, and a desire to connect with new experiences, and take to new directions spoke of this ‘nomadism’.

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Thus, in India these anarchists-terrorists sought to merge with mass disobedience movements whenever a surge in the mood of disobedience manifested, formed of all kinds of societies, reached new places, struck new roots, and it will be not an exaggeration to say that militant nationalism as it has been called in India thrived as long as its other, the politics of mass movements thrived, both roughly for 45 years before independence arrived, and indeed if any thing, this formlessness of terrorism led to new militant initiatives, added new features to the organised militant anti-colonialism in the country including the organised Left and communist movement in the subcontinent—a heritage that today’s constitutional Left can neither renounce nor courageously embrace. What I would like to emphasise here is that this ‘nomadism’ gave birth to a kind of micro-politics that neither the colonial rule nor the centralised leadership of the nationalist movement had guessed. Organisations and political initiatives grew throughout Bengal, connected with new places including London, Mexico, Paris, Japan, and Berlin, and even though two three major organisations led the clandestine movement, yet the sheer multiplicities of the initiatives leading up to the Indian National Army revolt, Royal Indian Mutiny (RIN) mutiny, and the Dum Dum Barasat uprising in the 1940s spoke of the micro-politics of the terrorist initiatives. What explains this multiplicity? Was it the cellular nature of the initiative (semi-autonomous cell-structure of the organisation of the militants) that allowed the actions to grow? Was it sadhana, finally an individual vocation, that allowed the fire of resistance to continue when mass movements would almost die down, and pessimism would envelop the country? Perhaps we cannot offer a definite answer, but only some tentative ones. Clearly colonial control measures failed at one level disastrously. The will to resistance came from the desire to resist, and the history of that desire was integrally linked with the three sadhanas I mention—dharma, jugadharma, and anushilan. The deeper implication of this observation is that the desire to resist did not flow from any will to power, indeed the anarchist revolutionaries rarely gave attention to that aspect, they wanted to resist power, but it came from passion, and a deep-seated desire to escape colonial conditions and gain freedom. Here freedom is not linked to power, but a desire to be with oneself.16 That explains at least to some extent the fleet-footedness of


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the early nationalists or early terrorists and the flight lines, and also helps us to understand how a different landscape of resistance emerged gradually, and reached a point where India stood in 1946. That this landscape of resistance was dotted with minute points of actions implies more. One, that it was not a case of one single event making this landscape, though certainly events like Khudiram’s hanging or Jatindranath’s martyrdom after a gun battle on the riverbank, or Bhagat Singh’s hanging inspired many initiatives, but more importantly, those events were like let us say splitting off from the cause, and deviating to many unknown and unanticipated directions. Thus, under the impact of these events, many became communists, many organised mutiny in the armed forces, many started to prepare themselves for the day, and many simply picked up their foes for themselves and planned to settle accounts with the enemy—in short colonial conditions became unstable creating possibilities of resistance and freedom through proliferation and diversification, and not homogenisation. Shillong, Chittagong, Calcutta, Chandannagar, Balasore, Darjeeling, Patna, Benaras, Meerut, Lahore, Kanpur, Amritsar, Andamans, Karachi, Bombay, Rangoon, Mandalay, Singapore, London, Berlin, Paris, Mexico— these random places associated with initiatives by the Indian early militants mark the flight paths and conjure up before our eyes a hitherto unknown cartography of resistance. The militant grew up in this way. Our theories of the political subject call for enormous rethinking in the light of these experiences. Given the frequently changing yet interlocked flight paths of the early terrorists and their cosmopolitanism, we can still surmise in our minds as to what propelled those diverse and yet interlocked paths? Benedict Anderson in a new book, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination, casts a fresh search into the origins of nationalism and in this superb inquiry that takes him from the Philippines in South China Sea to the Caribbean and to pre-World War imperial Europe that included the Catalan anarchists, Anderson finds the prominent role of anarchism as a revolutionary ideology in the making of the global anti-colonial imagination in its early stages. Anderson describes this mapping of the origins and spread of nationalism or anti-colonial imagination as an experiment. In his words:

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This book is an experiment in what Melville might have called political astronomy. It attempts to map the gravitational force of anarchism between militant nationalism on opposite sides of the planet. Following the collapse of the First International, and Marx’s death in 1883, anarchism in its characteristically variegated forms, was the dominant element in the self-consciously internationalist radical Left. It was not merely that in Kropotkin (born twenty-two years after Marx) and in Malatesta (born thirty-three years after Engels) anarchism produced a persuasive philosopher and a colourful, charismatic, activist-leader from a younger generation, not matched by mainstream Marxism. Notwithstanding the towering edifice of Marx’s thought, from which Anarchism often borrowed, the movement did not disdain peasants and agricultural labourers in an age when serious industrial proletariats were mainly confined to Northern Europe. It was open to ‘bourgeois’ writers and artists—in the name of individual freedom—in a way that in those days institutional Marxism was not. Just as hostile to imperialism, it had no theoretical prejudices against ‘small’ and ‘ahistorical’ nationalisms, including those in the colonial world. Anarchists were also quicker to capitalise on the vast transoceanic migrations of the era. Malatesta spent four years in Buenos Aires—something inconceivable for Marx or Engels, who never left Western Europe. Mayday celebrates the memory of immigrant anarchists—not Marxists—executed in the United States in 1886. …The near simultaneity of the last nationalist insurrection in the New World (Cuba, 1895) and the first in Asia (the Philippines, 1896) was no serendipidity. Natives of the last important remnants of the fabled Spanish global empire, Cubans (as well as Puerto Ricans and Dominicans) and Filpinos did not merely read about each other, but had crucial personal connections, and up to a point, coordinated their actions—the first time in world history that such transglobal coordination became possible. Both were eventually crushed, within a few years of each other, by the same brutish would be world hegemon. But the coordination did not take place directly between the broken hill-country of Oriente and Cavite, but was mediated through ‘representatives’ above all in Paris and secondarily in Hong Kong, London, and New York. Newspaper-reading Chinese nationalists eagerly followed events in Cuba and the Philippines—as well as the Boer nationalist struggle against Ukanian imperialism, which Filipnos also studied—to learn how to ‘do’ revolution, anti-colonialism, and antiimperialism… These coordinations were made possible because the last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the onset of what one could call


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‘early globalisation’. The invention of telegraph was rapidly followed by many improvements, and the laying of transoceanic submarine cables. The ‘wire’ was soon taken for granted by city people all over the planet… The inauguration of the Universal Postal Union in 1876 vastly accelerated the reliable movement of letters, magazines, newspapers, photographs, and books around the world. The steamship—safe, speedy and cheap—made possible unprecedentedly massive migrations from state to state, empire to empire, and continent to continent. A thickening latticework of railways as moving millions of people and commodities within national and colonial borders, linking remote interiors to each other and to ports and capitals. …Europe had such vast superiority in industrial, financial, scientific, and financial resources that imperialism in Asia, Africa, and Oceania forged ahead without much effective armed resistance, except in the case of the Mutiny in India. And capital itself moved quickly and pretty freely across existing national and imperial boundaries. But the beginning of the early 1880s the preliminary tremors were being felt of the earthquake that we remember variously as the Great war or the First World War. Tsar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 by bomb throwing radicals calling themselves The People’s Will was followed over the next twenty five years by the killing of a French President, an Italian monarch, an Austrian empress, and an heir apparent, a Portuguese king and his heir, a Spanish Prime Minister, two American Presidents, a king of Greece, a king of Serbia, and powerful conservative politicians in Russia, Ireland, and Japan… The earliest and the most spectacular of these assassinations were carried out by the anarchisits, but nationalism soon followed in their wake. In most cases the immediate aftermath was a mass of draconian ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation, summary executions, and a sharp rise in torture by police forces, public and secret, as well as militaries. But the assassins, some of whom could well be described as early suicide bombers, understood themselves as acting for a world-audience of news agencies, newspapers, religious progressives, working-class and peasant organisations, and so on… Such is the general proscenium on which the main actors in this book (that is militant anarchist anti-colonialists) played their various nomadic parts. One could put this point more vividly, perhaps by saying that the reader will encounter Italians in Argentina, New Jersey, France, and the Basque homeland; Puerto Ricans and Cubans in Haiti, the United States, France, and the Philippines; Spaniards in Cuba, France, Belgium, and the Philippines; Russians in Paris; Filipinos in Belgium; Japanese in Mexico, San Francisco, and Manila; Germans in London

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and Oceania; Chinese in the Philippines and Japan; Frenchmen in Argentina, Spain, and Ethiopia, and so on.17

In this map (Anderson calls it the sky) militant nationalists were in ‘perpetual frantic motion, impelled hither and yon by the invisible power of the gravitational fields of which they were active ineluctable parts’. So, is the answer to the question posed above then the ideology of anarchism? Or, shall we say, the global anti-colonial imagination? Or, was it the world of early globalisation when linguistic communities had not been so rigidified as to shun each other completely, or simply that those technological innovations had opened up the imagination making the world smaller? Or, probably as was the case, all these worked together? In India, we know that the early terrorists went to all places, to all directions, with all kinds of ideas—anarchism, certainly one of them—and many leapt to death with the newspapers, radio, and the patriotic crowd in mind. Yet there was something more to the making of this political astronomy than simply the gravitational pulls. It is possible that anarchism in India meant to the anti-colonial militants something more than the pure doctrine of anarchism. But in these as I tried to point out there were also some specific local gradients, which in this case meant in the first place a suitable notion of practice and action, that was distinct to and opposed from all that the ideology of utilitarianism, rule of law, and the colonialism implied in terms of a theory of virtue, reason, and existence. Similar to the factors that Anderson points out, a theory of practice was also required to open up horizons, new possibilities, and imaginations about new connections and networks. And, this was possible because a local, specific, and appropriate theory of practice always brought a split in the existing method of understanding the world, and the existing structure of reason. Indeed, Anderson too shows in his account how the Filipino anti-colonial imagination worked out its own theory of knowledge (through novels and anthropological writings about folktales). In working out a theory of knowledge that perched on a theory of practice, the Bengal terrorists were motivated by their confrontation with an exceptional state that, on one hand, more and more established rule of law and legality as the basis of coercion, and on the other hand, retained exceptional powers to deal with any emergency. In the colonial world the issue remained: If law was rational, why did the


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state, and by that virtue law, need exceptional powers and why was the admission then that rule of law was insufficient as the basis of rule? If the colonial state itself was an exceptional state and the colonial rule was an exceptional experience for the people colonised, then it was certain that the colonised needed exceptional theory, actions, and outlook to successfully confront this exceptional phenomenon. Even though the colonial rule claimed that it was responsible and was based increasingly on representation, in each of the proclamation of exceptional powers and measures, vice-regal decrees were the source and not parliamentary enactments, though these measures were nevertheless always approved by the parliament or the legislative assembly, as other emergency decrees meant to reinforce an exceptional rule. Whether these measures were strictly legal or not, the argument of the colonial state was always that the measures had been adopted under public necessity. Therefore, even the fundamentals of liberal rule could be violated if the very existence of the sovereign and the juridical order were at stake. Did that mean that the colonial rule itself was a juridical lacuna, which the exceptional provisions must fill?18 As Jugantar repeatedly asked its readers, if the rule as a whole became an exceptional instrument for normative production of alien law and existence, then force and force alone was the only basis of colonial order, and bereft of consent it could only carry on by constant use of decrees, other forcible methods, and cheating and hoodwinking the public. Government would not survive if it worked within delegated powers, and (or because) the whole situation was extraordinary.19 The ‘exceptionality’ of the colonial rule, or at least the understanding that this was an ‘exceptional’ rule, brought an understanding of what an empire was, what living under an empire meant, and why writing and enacting revenge were therefore the requirement of the time. Living under an empire implied that anti-colonial politics had to begin from a certain sense of avant-gardism. Empire meant that there could not be any citizen under the empire, and that the imperial topos was being determined constantly from outside the country and not from inside; it also meant that the condition of the avant-guard, its sense of isolation, dejection, rejection, activism, persecution, and the courting of death, would be the condition of the people soon; and therefore the avantguard had to reject the alternative of waiting till everyone was awake

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of the colonial reality. Life in the colony was always bare because, as Jugantar made the point, as opposed to earlier life that of the colonised was ‘bare life’ reduced to its utmost physical existence, far distant from the earlier versions of life such as heavenly, or as incarnation, or a happy and a contented one, or one of a mystic. Political consciousness meant in the first place to refuse that life (by flight, by meditation, by new outlook on practice, by disobedience, and by courting death thereby ending the bare state of life). In this world of anti-colonial consciousness empire also meant connections with other colonies and other places, further connections with Singapore, Rangoon, or Hong Kong in the east, and to the west, Kabul, Constantinople, Cairo, and then to Berlin, London, Dublin, and Paris. With anarchist-socialist texts, knowledge of bomb-making, and with the possibility of the supply of arms and ammunitions coming from abroad, flight paths were now global, what Anderson calls in his book ‘crucial nodes in the infinitely complex networks that characterise the Age of Early Globalisation’.20 Writing, escaping, repeated home-coming, waiting for the inevitable death to come, avenging, and a compassion born out of a feeling of sacredness of the ‘duty’ for people all around and soon to leave behind … these traits of the Filipino rebel Jose Rizal that Anderson portrays with care and poignancy were the marks of practice present in India too, possibly elsewhere also, wherever anti-colonial imagination was active. In Bengal the early terrorists’ language of politics revolved around three words: 1. prakriti (nature, way, self, as it exists...), the notion of which allowed them to critically analyse life and existence; 2. sadhana (pursuit with dedication, discipline, control, and concentration of self), which enabled them to refuse to reconcile with the existence of the colonised; and finally, 3. karma (activity, action, practice, activism, duty, destiny), which allowed them to author their flight paths ranging from killing, courting death, to connecting with the globe. In the anti-colonial imagination we find then the specific components of the materiality of politics besides the universal.


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POLITICAL PRACTICE AND A PHILOSOPHY OF CHARACTER To understand this point it may be necessary to see though briefly how these words had been received from the past by the Bengal revolutionaries, and the words—prakriti, sadhana, karma—appeared to them as signifiers of a material strand of politics, independent thinking running from the past, memory, and faithfulness to people and the country. Responsibility for actions, which the militants’ theory of practice preached, came from these evocations. Such actions aimed particularly at terrorising the enemy depended on ‘performative success’, which also implied ‘internationalising’ the actions. Karma depended on prakriti, which again meant looking at the colonial order in the background of past virtues and evils; past legal systems and systems of obligations, coercion, rule, and institutions (prakriti, nature); karma also required sadhana, that is dedication, which would nullify the constraints, and keep the karma goal oriented. In this way political thinking achieved an inversion in idealist thought—it made political thinking practice oriented, goal oriented, historical, and conscious of the realities of power. This was the beginning of early terrorism—born out of conjunction of circumstances and a particular combination of certain elements in thinking. Ullaskar, with whose name this chapter begins, his biographer tells us, began his day with the reading of the Gita only to discuss politics as the day would progress,21 and would read aloud Kropotkin to Lila, the woman he loved and got to marry only towards the end of his life.22 Hem Chandra, his elder in the movement and adviser, would read all the time how societies could be formed and would collect constitutions of societies,23 and Satyananda, one of the finest and tireless organisers of militant anticolonial activities in Bengal, would quote Mazzini, ‘Terrorism is the last weapon of disarmed population.’24 How was this displacement possible? How could detachment combine with involvement to give birth to criticality in anti-colonial thinking and action? How could the body, the physicality of existence, be taken to the finest balance and the fragile state where hardship, desire, dedication, and death could be combined in a new philosophy

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of action? Of course the displacement began in the great book itself— the Mahabharata. In the Mahabharata Lord Krishna has to discuss practicalities of political affairs of the state with the pious and holy men such as Vyasa, Narada, Shukracharya, when he meets them on his way to the Kaurava court for one last try to avoid the civil war. In a kind of political conference the debates take place, and the possibilities of war and its effects are discussed. Similarly, when the epic civil war is over with hundreds lying dead on the battlefield, and thousands losing their fathers, husbands, and sons wailing continuously with ‘the wind blowing their cry and anguish miles away’, Yudhisthira the virtuous is a broken man in sadness, remorse, and self-flagellation, and thinks now of the possibilities of renunciation and salvation (moksha), Arjuna, his younger brother and the warrior, reminds him that moksha is not for those who are in the business of ruling and politics, and tells him that wealth, material possessions, and power come at great, superhuman effort, and why should that be renounced? Arjuna reminds him of the long years of deprivation and dispossession that the brothers had to pass, and then comes the most remarkable part of the political account in the epic. Yudhisthira along with his brothers is taken to Bhisma the elder who is lying on his deathbed, the mattress of arrows, for the last advice on politics. And Bhisma the elder cannot die without imparting the political advice to the conqueror as to how to rule and what the intricacies of the rule are. Death comes only when politics has been understood, instructed, laboured, and avenged. Therefore, not surprisingly the Gita could never make the militant nationalists, who read it everyday, passive, for the Gita comes in the Mahabharata, only in the wake of politics, just before the great war is to begin, and is preceded by doctrines and political deliberations around the desirability of the war, similarly followed by political discussions on ethical dilemmas. Therefore, with its idealist doctrines, the Gita cannot prevent the reader-militant from developing a theory of action.25 Virtue demands, Arjuna counsels Yudhisthira, that robbers must be punished; and robbers of great wealth must be punished severely. Interest is important, because from interest grows desire, and from desire involvement. From material affairs (artha) come dharma (principles of conduct), kama (desire), and heaven. The presence of all things on earth is assured by material organisation that is artha. And, artha, the scholars remind us repeatedly, is not merely money or even


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management of monetary affairs, but the science of management as a whole. Yet, does it do away with ethicality? No; in the sense that ethicality provides goal, and if the goal is commensurate with the task of removing obstacles to proposed life then action becomes virtuous. In this way, the militant nationalists made their own sense of politics and associated terms such as sovereignty, power, self-rule, authority, paramount rule, and kingship. If the kingdom is ruled in an unkingly manner then there is no king in that kingdom. In this way, anushilantattva included a theory of obligation, legislation, and change. In this practical doctrine of politics forming association was a great task. The ruler or one aspiring to rule must have a strong group of counsellors, and as Arthshastra (1.15) advised, no one alone could achieve goal in his work. One needed a society, an association, a team— the ruler needed even more.26 Politics in short appeared to the early terrorists as calculation, organisation, deliberation, goal orientation, renunciation, and action. Activities of mind and the body highly synchronised, the terrorist could now become the bomb or the grenade to explode on the face of the enemy. The terrorists as I have mentioned read Bankim Chandra well. Bankim’s theory of practice (anushilan) and of the perfect man (Lord Krishna because only he could perfectly balance the virtues of the body and the soul in the Mahabharata history) became the critical ingredient in anti-colonial imagination. Bankim wrote, almost envisaging the process of displacement (in the idea of the political) about to occur in the anti-colonial imagination, Krishna is Lord himself…. But how do Bengalis think of the Lord? They think this man is used to committing theft since childhood—he ate cheese and drank milk without leave; in teenage he womanised and seduced hundreds of women belonging to milkmen’s families and leading them away from virtue; and in mature age he was a hypocrite and double speak, and that is how he destroyed Drona and other famous generals in the war. Can God’s character be like this? …We have to understand Krishna’s character, and realise how this man contained all the virtues on earth, all the qualities, could absolve all the evil traits in human nature…

So the purpose in writing ‘Krishnacharitra’ (Krishna’s character), Bankim wrote, was to demonstrate the historical possibility and

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evidence of such character and indicate the way the countrymen should follow. He said further, that ‘character’ builds on four principles: 1. Certain human faculties… 2. Pursuit of them, achieving their development, and fulfilment is human duty. 3. (However) that practice (anushilan) has limits, therefore there must be balance and coordination. 4. This is the other name of happiness.27 In the historical demonstration of the existence of the figure called the Krishna and to assure the readers that the Lord’s was not a mythical story, Bankim not only crosses sword with Western commentators, corrects them, and sifts evidences to mark aside the latter ‘mythical’ additions to the ‘real’ Krishna story, but argues at length also as to why the great war and the conflict called for its resolution an epic mind, which would say to the disciple in a mentor’s voice: Men renounce desires, practise work, and reach salvation. Hence you can follow that path; holy men have done that. You can follow them. Ordinary men follow great men. They do whatever the great men do. So go forward and act to protect the religion of common men. Look at me. I lack nothing in this world; nothing is beyond my ability to possess. Hence I have no obligation. Yet I work, follow the path of action.28

Karmanusthana is the pursuit of karma, the culture of action, the institution of action, which we call activity, the doctrine of practice. To do so, Krishna argues in the voice of Bankim: Cultivation, that is incessant practice, is the key, and for that you have to bring the body to that state. Only right body produces the right soul. Right body needs right desires, right practices, and to the pleasure in maintaining the physical existence other rites must submit, such as men and women dancing together and women surrendering to men and uniting with them (a reference to so-called orgies of Krishna in his teenage), though Bankim admits that certain rites may not have social sanction. Through practice Krishna had attained the highest position among the princes, chiefs, and kings


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of his time. Hence he could stop war by counsel and diplomacy, as he did when war was about to break out against the Pandavas over the marriage of Draupadi.29 Again when he counselled Yudhisthira to go to war against Jarasandha, he argued the issue in a way in which Yudhisthira’s personal stake in becoming the emperor matched with country’s need to get rid of Jarasandha the despot. Krishna overwhelms the Mahabharata with this sense of practicality. Bankim elsewhere speaks of the necessity of physical vocation(s) (shaririki britti), which is one of the four major human pursuits, the other three being, ‘pursuit of knowledge’, ‘performance of work’, and ‘pleasing or satisfying the soul’.30 Physical vocation includes all types of action, keeping one’s body healthy, arms training, training to ride horses, protecting and caring for the family and the near and dear ones, defending the country, freedom, ready to war or support war efforts, regular physical education and training, eating meat and other nutritious food, and at times wine and hard drinking, and above all tolerance. Yet Bankim here too does not forget to mention that in all these will be required anushilan, practice, and anushilan as part of virtue (dharma).31 Thus, when the great war was about to begin and Sanjay the ambassador of the Kaurava chief Dhritarashtra came to the Pandavas with a final plea to the latter to renounce claims to territory and wealth, because ‘war was destructive’ and killings would decimate the Pandavas, Krishna replied that peace was possible if the Kauravas were not ‘avaricious’, if they had a sense of fairness, and if they saw reason. Otherwise, quarrel would develop into conflict and war, and by the way the entire universe was readying for the battle to begin, it would be a great war. Kauravas were irreligious, they could be of sacred descent but their pursuit of selfish ends ran contrary to religion, which is virtue. Bankim here again speaks in the voice of Krishna—Bankim’s Krishna is like Plato’s Socrates—and he reminds Sanjay of what is virtue: O Sanjay, One will be clean (suchi) and will look after the near ones— even if there is the scripture-ordained rule about virtue, Brahmins at times harbour other ideas. Some due to habit of past actions or renouncing actions think that virtue (moksha) can be attained with the knowledge of the Vedas only. But just as without eating you cannot have satisfaction, likewise Brahmins cannot attain salvation or virtue with only knowing the Vedas, but without practice (of worldly duties, karmanusthana). That knowledge which helps work (karma) is

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productive; that which tells nothing about work in life is useless. Hence just as the thirsty person is satiated only after drinking, likewise the actions through which the results are seen are to be done. O Sanjay, this rule is ordained by the virtue of work. Hence work is fundamental. One who thinks that anything else is superior to action or work can have only futile actions in life.32

Krishna, who was the charioteer of Arjuna the warrior in the battles, thus guided his dear disciple Arjuna and the entire clan of the Pandavas through the great war and left for the nationalists in the early period of militant anti-colonialism a theory of physical existence, action, and a sense of mission and fulfilment of life. Thus, we have to remember that this action could mean under certain circumstances killing also. Krishna, who had to plot the murders of Jarasandha, Shishupala, Bhisma, Drona, Karna, Aswathama, and others, used in his advice repeatedly the word, karmanusthana, which implied ‘performance’ (or the institution of action).33 Character he seemed to be saying called for this resolve, a sense of fairness, and then based on that, ruthless demonstration of ability and power. To work for a political mission needed ‘character’, and possessing that was not a heavenly possibility only, but a human possibility. And with fulfilment of mission life could then end; courting death without a murmur would be a part of character. Thus, while Krishna’s life is discussed everywhere as Bankim discussed in great details in 1886 for his countrymen, death in this long chronicle is almost a non-event with no one being even sure as to how death came to the great man.34 As Bankim said in a later defence of his interpretation of Krishna, ‘I did not aim to prove that Krishna was God (though I believe so), but to discuss his human character.’35 This stress on character allowed Bankim Chandra and following him the early militant nationalists to pose the question of the ‘self’ in a different manner whereby they could escape the closed nature of the opposition between philosophy and action. ‘Political spirituality’ was important because it grew out of the emphasis on the significance of character in sustaining action (in this case political action, and the most difficult of political actions, the killings of the British rulers towards emancipation from colonial rule). The emphasis on character, as we know, was the factor that led to the debate on confessions in the courts. I have already indicated in the beginning, how Ullaskar, Hem Chandra, Barindra Ghosh, Satyendra Nath, Kanai Lal, Bhupendra Nath Dutta,


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Upendra Nath, and others on being arrested and in jail had disputed among themselves on the value of confessions before the police and the court. While Barindra and some others defended their decision to confess before the police, magistrate, and the court—that they had indeed organised clubs and groups towards evicting the British from India, had prepared bombs and also trained others to make the bombs—because their confession would become public through newspapers and would embolden the countrymen and women to rise up against alien rule, and in the process of confession made public many details, others like Hem Chandra Kanungo thought that this was an evidence of weak character, lack of resolve, and simply bad training.36 We can see how in real-life situation the problematic of confession worked. Truth telling was not a parlour game; it was built as an exercise in a situation marked with asymmetries of power. The problem of truth telling was part of a larger problematic of ‘character’ and ‘chaacter building’, and that again was something you could involve in if you had an idea of the larger truth—in this case the truth of colonialism and the truth of the need for physically killing if needed the alien rulers. And how would you know this larger truth? Once again the answer was that the path was through anushilan, sadhana, and dharma (practice, pursuit, and spirituality). Truth and truth telling were therefore not a problem for self, but a problem for action. In this transformation of an ethico-political issue (of truth) to a politico-ethical issue, we have larger displacement, that of the ‘problem of self to the problem of subject’; and if we take a few more steps here as the early terrorists did—it was the issue of being the political subject. The critical attitude that anti-colonialism encouraged thus succeeded in changing a great problem in philosophy. Truth speaking and truth realising were no more an ideal venture that was part of the practices of the self and care of the self; they were, as the anti-colonial history showed, parts of the history of the emergence of the political subject in a colony. We have to realise the material root of this displacement. Torture was a key factor in confession. Only ‘character’ could defy torture. Therefore confession was not a matter of an elaborate ‘work of experimentation of self on self’, but of how one responded to torture, terror, and the psychic power that colonial law and administration held over the common Indian, exemplified by the conduct of many militant

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nationalists, when they would break down due to interrogations by Charles Teggart (the colonial police official—a fearsome name, a mythical power to awe and shock). The history and practice of confession is therefore integral to that of torture. The problem was more because in this case it meant assessing the impact of the news of torture on the mind of the defenceless population. Would the news of torture make the people even more passive and fearful? Or, would all these confessions and publicity make them fearless? If one were not to gamble on this outcome and resist torture through resolve, it meant grit, a matter of character. Resistance therefore meant not an emphasis on soul or self, but on character and character building—a term that signified practice and an appropriate theory of practice. To sum up: The story of philosophies and actions of the anarchist, or the early terrorist, is one more story of the emergence of the political subject—an actor who authored politics in the world of colonialism. The emergence of this political actor as I have argued elsewhere too was a matter of conjunction of circumstances. Philosophical writings are ‘never independent of specific conjunctures’,37 and here if I may add, if the philosophy of any age is a reflection of any period’s non-identity to itself, then the practice also of that age is marked with unrealised possibilities in an ever-changing present. The rhetoric of that age as both the science and art of persuasion about those possibilities was evident in the writings of the early terrorists. Bengal from 1880 to 1930 (one can stretch it to 1935) reflected these specific characters of both philosophy and actions. There was no ‘ruse of reason’ here, for Bengal terrorists had found a doctrine of practice that avoided the trap by emphasising in their outlook and actions the virtue of constant practice, goal orientation, and a theory of existence that perched on a critical synergy of the body and the soul. I have tried to demonstrate in this chapter how the political subject is constituted in a particular age, and how the discourses and possibilities at the disposal of this subject in return constitute and reconstitute the actor or the subject. In this case as I show the problem was how to use these discourses and possibilities in a way so that the political subject could author the true discourse of the time. Ullaskar may not have known—though in the most tender moments in his madness he would keep on inquiring as to how his countrymen were looking back at the past, the past when they had exploded bombs, killed colonial


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officials and their native agents, distributed seditious literature, and had promoted insubordination—that this past would be known as the age of terror. ‘Terror’ would be the mark of that age, the word that the colonial rulers used most in characterising the Bengal militant nationalists, the word that the militants thought was unavoidable even though they were not happy with the appellation, but the word that gave them the equipment of life.38 Yet this raises one more problem for our understanding of terror as politics. Terror that marked an age as the age of terrorism shows then the duality in the notion of the political itself, for here is a case which showed the political taking the form of the ‘impolitical’ (the impossibility of the political, of politics)—the other of politics within politics itself.39 Is it the ‘other face’ or the ‘other scene’ of politics that the philosopher Etienne Balibar speaks of at times? Is it war? Is it the mark of the end of civility, parliamentary confabulations, and chamber politics? Is it the limit of politics, which signals the equivocal nature of politics itself, the dangerous collision between the political and the ‘impolitical’? Probably it is all these. These terror acts as singular actions of war indicated the split nature of the politics itself; they also indicated a situation where the impossible was being attempted, and politics carried the residue of impossibility. The war–politics continuum (in India this demonstrated itself in the continuum of mass actions and terrorist acts)40 in this way demonstrated its heterogeneous nature from time to time. But still we must ask the question, why is this particular nature of politics? Why does politics carry the residue of impossibility? Part of the answer lies in its character of posing alternatives—alternative to current state of politics, its current forms. Terror as the combination of war–politics marks itself out therefore as an exception to conventional politics—terror thus is a state of exception, indicating ‘another sovereign existence, a challenge to current sovereignty’. But in the context of all these, one problem will still demand our attention before we arrive at a clearer formulation, namely: What do you do with the appellation, the identity that an action creates, that is neither your creation nor your desire, but that sticks to you like your ever-present companion, the shadow? I am talking here of the situation of resistance, with which more than any other, the history of the political subject is associated. To get a grasp over the theme of resistance I believe

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we shall have to go deeper into the problematic of the identity of action, and I repeat, identity of action, and not identity of self. In the next two chapters therefore I propose to discuss what constitutes a situation of resistance that marks the identity of certain actions, and how within this situation of resistance the acts of dialogue form themselves.

NOTES 1. Ashoke Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Agnipurush (Calcutta: Ananda, 2004), 136–51. 2. Mukhopadhyay, Agnipurush, pp. 45–51. 3. Ranabir Samaddar, ‘Terror, Law, and the Colonial State’, in The Materiality of Politics, vol. 2 (London: Anthem Press, 2007), Chapter 2. 4. Mukhopadhyay, Agnipurush, p. 62. 5. They are the ‘early terrorists’ as I termed in the essay, ‘Terror, Law, and the Colonial State’ following a suggestion by Benedict Anderson in a personal conversation in December 2003—see, Ranabir Samaddar, The Materiality of Politics, vol. 2, Chapter 2, pp. 59–106. 6. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982). 7. I have in mind here two philosophers of recent years attempting such a wideranging response—one alive and one recently died—Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, a response that is documented in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 8. Ashoke Kumar Mukhopadhyay, ed., Mukti Kon Pathe, 3rd edn. (Calcutta: Punascha, 2006); all the citations are from the editorial introduction. 9. Mukhopadhyay, Mukti Kon Pathe, p. 54. 10. Mukhopadhyay, Mukti Kon Pathe, p. 96. 11. Mukhopadhyay, Mukti Kon Pathe, pp. 138–48. 12. Apart from the Mahabharata, one can also see U.N. Ghosal, A History of Indian Political Ideas (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1959); Vilho Harle, Ideas of Social Order in the Ancient World (London: Greenwood Press, 1998), 52–64; see also, R.K. Mookerji, Nationalism in Hindu Culture (Delhi: S. Chand and Co., 1957). 13. Hannah Arendt terms philosophers as ‘professional thinkers’ in her The Life of The Mind, Volume 1 ((New York: Harcourt Inc, 1977), p. 13. 14. One of the principal ways this action-centric philosophy of the early terrorists of the country would develop was to begin a dialogue with the early communists in the prison camps. There are some accounts of these dialogues to the effect that most of the terrorists merged with the communists; but the accounts of the real dialogues are sketchy, and certainly historians have not given due importance to the ways in which the dialogues proceeded, and how the theory of action of the terrorists led them to accept communist philosophy as the creed. The life of Rebati Barman is instructive in this respect. Politically initiated as an active and


15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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a significant leader of the terrorist movement in Bengal, he dialogued with the communist prisoners in Deuli camp in Rajasthan for eight years (1930–37), led other comrades in welcoming communist philosophy, and became one of the early publicists of communist movement in Bengal. He contracted leprosy in Deuli camp, and died in complete isolation in Agartala, Tripura in 1952 at an early age of 48. See for this the reminiscences on Rebati Barman, Arun Chaudhury, ed., Rebati Barman Smaraney (Kolkata: National Book Agency, 2006). Gilles Deleuze’s word, but I use it here in my own sense. See Deleuze, ‘Two Regimes of Madness’, in Two Regimes of Madness—Texts and Interviews, 1975–1995, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext[e], 2006). I try to make this point clear in ‘The Futures of the Colonised’, Futures 36, 2004, where I try to locate in the history of anti-colonial thought the distinction between freedom and independence. Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005), 1–4. I raise this question in details in ‘Terror, Law, and the Colonial State’. For a European perspective on state of exception, see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004), in particular pp. 11–22; in writing this history however it is strange that the colonial state does not occur at all in Agamben’s account. Anderson,Under Three Flags, p. 233. Mukhopadhyay, Agnipurush, p. 87. Mukhopadhyay, Agnipurush, p. 63. Mukhopadhyay, Agnipurush, p. 42. Mukhopadhyay, Agnipurush, p. 62. For insights regarding the Mahabharata as a fundamental source of materialist political thinking, I am indebted to Nrisinghaprasad Bhaduri, Dandaniti (Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1998). On this, Bhaduri, Dandaniti, pp. 128–35. Introduction to ‘Krishnacharitra’, in Bankimrachanasangraha - Prabandhakhanda, Shesh Angsha (hereafter BRS—Collected Works of Bankim Chandra, Part on Essays, last volume), eds. Satyendra Sen, Gopal Haldar, and Ashoke Ghosh (Calcutta, Sakkharata Prakashan, 1973), 555–56. ‘Krishnacharitra’, BRS, p. 591; Bankim here is citing the Gita (Chapter 3 A, lines 19–24). ‘Krishnacharitra’, BRS, p. 672. ‘Dharmatattva’, BRS, p. 827. ‘Dharmatattva’, BRS, p. 827–35. ‘Krishnacharitra’, BRS, p. 723. How does one ethically justify these plotting of murders? Bankim takes up this task in ‘Krishnacharitra’, BRS, pp. 707–09, as elsewhere in that book, Krishnacharitra. ‘Krishnacharitra’, BRS, p. 789. ‘Krishnacharitra’, BRS, p. 796; I leave out for lack of scope, Bankim’s discussion of ‘Anushilan’, the first part of Dharmatattva (1888), but in basics it follows the same line of thinking.

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36. Mukhopadhyay, Agnipurush, pp. 115–28; Jugantar also repeatedly spoke of the need to build up ‘charater’; for instance, Mukti Kon Pothe, pp. 114, 141–44. 37. Etienne Balibar, ‘The Infinite Contradiction’, trans. Jean-Marc Poisson with Jacques Lezra in Jacques Lezra, Depositions — Althusser, Balibar, Macherey, and the Labor of Reading, Yale French Studies, No. 88 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 142–64. 38. It may be interesting to know that Ullaskar and Hem Chandra, two of the most agonised early terrorists of Bengal who had immersed themselves in discussions over philosophy and bomb-making, remained beyond the dreaded confession exercises arranged by the Calcutta Deputy Police Commissioner of those days Charles Teggart—one was by that time in a state of laughter, delirium, and frequent attacks of epilepsy, and the other remaining completely silent through the staged ceremony of extracting confession. In fact Teggart could not meet Ullaskar; by the time he met the terrorists in confinement, a seriously ill Ullaskar had been transported to Madras for treatment. Ullaskar (born 1885) died in 1965. After few years of release from jail and with care and treatment, he recovered to some extent, and wrote down his memoirs. 39. Etienne Balibar in a comment on this essay in a conference on Societies, States, ‘Terror’ and ‘Terrorism’, Paris, 2–4 November 2006. 40. See ‘Terror, Law and the Colonial State’ in R. Samaddar, The Materiality of Politics, volume 2.

5 What is Resistance?

R

esistance is the hallmark of the political subject. Therefore we have to ask, what is resistance? A psychological or behavioural attribute or is it something else? What is a situation of resistance? The question also draws the final distinction between Kant, his followers of various types, and Marx—one linking the subjectivation process with the formation of self, the other linking it to historical contradictions and conjunctions, power, and force. The question also draws the distinction between those who see in the said process the rise of the human as the individual, the emergence of individuality, and those who see in it a collective process of experience-sharing, communication, will formation, and agency. Clearly, the question then has today a specific significance.

RESISTANCE: A BEHAVIOURAL TRAIT? In the banality of the invocation of the word ‘resistance’ in our literature we have actually a behavioural description only, a description that displaces the political core of the expression, and therefore a description that lends itself to all kinds of psychic and phobic interpretations. But if we think rigorously on this question, the first thing striking us is that resistance as an expression indicates blockage in the flow of power, the existence of a counter power, or if we choose to say the same thing in a different way (and this difference in way of expression is significant) we can say, desire acts as resistance to power, indicates a void in power, a void of power acting as resistance. Resistance to the Nazis,

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people’s resistance forces, resistance of the peasant, resistance of the patient to the doctor, child’s resistance to dictation, body’s resistance to drugs, resistance army, resistance to death, endless resistances, endless invocation—the question therefore is, what is resistance, more particularly, what is the political core of resistance, and thus, what is political resistance? We therefore perhaps require a suitable technique of analysing resistances. A wrong technique will mistake or wrongly cognise the phenomenon. Yet it cannot be just a matter of technique only, because the banality of the use of the word suggests that the phenomenon is immanent in everything. Over usage of the word, as the enormous popularity of the indefinite transitive will suggest, for instance that ‘the subject resists’. But we can ask, what does the subject resist? Does the subject resist herself? Her own inclinations, her ‘other’, or as we say, the subject resists her common sense? Or we can ask: Do we go on the offensive when we resist, or are we on the defensive when we resist? Or, is it resistance, to repeat, to the ‘other’, who is linked with me, connected and united by thousand and one threads—and therefore in the act of resistance there is neither offence nor defence, but only a response? We can already see that in order to analyse resistance we have to be ready to go down to the lowest or the deepest point of analysis where analysis disintegrates, and ask, what is being resisted? Resistance at that point replaces/displaces repression, creates a new topography through its direction. Resistance brings into discussion what negates a discourse, and this negation may even invite death, which ironically is not negation simply, but affirmation too. Resistance thus affirms something. We can already sense the difficulties and complexities while trying to make sense of the word, and the resistance that the word can put up against its own theology. The subject resists probably for the first time when the signs of the other are appearing. The significance of this act must be grasped, for we have to ask, why does the subject resist the early signs of its opposite, namely its own self, or its own experiences, its enemy, and therefore something that is known? We resist what we know, and therefore experience is crucial in order to understand the dynamics of resistance. The Meso-Americans did not resist the first European colonists, in fact welcomed them in many places, because they did not know colonialism. Many Europeans welcomed fascist parties in mid and late

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1930s, again because they did not know what fascism would entail, namely war, mass murders, and destruction. Thus, experience is a key word. But experience can tell you not to resist also, for various reasons. Experience in working upon the dynamics of resistance is a two-dimensional text, whose richness of signification is immense, inexhaustible. In the constituted discourse of resistance experience is a critical word. Now at this point if we allow our analysis to run a little we shall see that experience is a form of historical criticism, or a mode of historical criticism. What, therefore, appears as common sense may be undiluted, unanalysed, and irrationally conceived experience, yet its critical core remains unimpaired. Therefore all materialists—we can immediately recall the figures of Mao and Gramsci—stress the role that experience plays in the discourse of resistance. The same is with Marx and Lenin who pointed out how the experiences of the French and Russian working people dictated the ways in which resistance was built against the French monarchy and the Russian Tsar in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries respectively.1 We have the same lesson from the way experience was theorised as the core of resistance discourse of the peasant sects in the late middle and the modern ages. How did experience become the critical core of the resistance dynamics? The bodily and the discursive forms of experience reach the subject often in the first stage as myths, which play a great part in laying the foundations of resistance. Millenarian resistances are classic examples. In short resistance is conceived only in particular registers. What is at stake here is nothing less than the challenge for the analyst of resistance, namely, whether s/he is equal to the level of that which s/he is analysing, but which has now in turn taken hold of him/her, and in the encounter between the analyst and the analysed the analyst must assume responsibility of an indeterminate phenomenon. In plain words it means that while the historian may not agree with others (for instance the sociologist, the behaviouralist, or the psychoanalyst) as to how resistance builds up, but s/he must now acknowledge what is at stake in the encounter now termed as resistance. This is at once rare (in elite discourse circles) and common (in low discourses and annals). And though the best historians can take us through the high paths in order to reach a valley of understanding, yet we cannot forget the fact that resistance resist its historicisation, precisely because resistance is

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at its core so much experiential that much of it is left out of history that the historian will be crafting. Resistance thus at times becomes a self-referential term, because it contains in it the relation between the subject and the being. This relation is peculiar, because the being is an object, yet as we see, resistance refuses to become an object of analysis. What shines through discourses of resistance hence is its intelligibility yet its indeterminacy. How do we explain this intersection of the symbolic and the real? In resistance this intersection is immediate; it means this intersection is without an imaginary intermediary; but it also means that its first forms are direct; the first forms are almost near to the symbolisation of death. Refusing mediation means the subject goes back to it—it resists—and in this autonomy of consciousness the first structure of resistance is found. This structure is characterised by the elementary actions of recoiling and then advancing directly, resisting mediation, taking at times often the extreme form of death. The casting of resistance into structural form is the beginning of the reconstitution of the subject, who strictly speaking so long had eluded subjectivation (in history, in politics, in society), and now advancing beyond recoiling assumes consciousness of agency, the first sign that the subject is now aware of an object. This is the inaugural affirmation of resistance. It has held unto itself, then it has gone on the offensive, and this assumption of agency by the subject (of agency) then allows it to draw on experiences, which function as the fuel of advance. In this movement of resistance there is displacement but also recollection of subjectivity. The periodic, or if you allow, the frequent appearance of intersection of the symbolic and the real constitutes the materiality of the entire process, because only in the appearance of the symbolic the resistance finds an object and becomes real. There is no doubt that the analyst when analysing the phantom world of resistance has to take into account the transferences that take place in the possible encounters we are referring to here in order to show how resistance as a process emerges, the grammar that structures it, and how the subject’s world becomes aware of the presence of the other that constitutes the object, namely a phenomenon that the subject resists, that is a part of the subject’s world, that wants to overwhelm the subject, that can survive by only making the subject’s world a Manichean one. That is how the worker resists the capitalist world wherein s/he lives. The subject’s resistance is thus at the end of the day not only resistant of the other, but also of the self, which was

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constituted in the first place partly by the other. All these can be re-told in another way, namely that by approaching the question of resistance we are trying to understand the meaning of negation. Now negation always bothers us, because while resistance (because it is an action) can be possibly aesthetically represented, negation (because it is a principle) cannot. Negation is eternal, by which we also mean, eternally refusing to reconcile. Regimes of power think the truth to be on their side, while truth is always negated by other truths conditioned, moderated, and produced in other circumstances. Regimes of truth thus consider negation as ‘particles of evil’, which according to these regimes wants truth to die by championing death as the final affirmation of the principle of negation. Because of this organic link between resistance and death, resistance is always interpreted by the establishment as ‘death drive’, ‘madness’, ‘anarchism’, and finally ‘destructive’—at the end ‘self-destructive’. Again we can see here how the principle of negation works—as reason’s other, as the hoodlum out to destroy Immanuel Kant, or at least spelling trouble for him. Resistance as the embodiment of the principle of negation is thus the first principle of freedom; and we shall not be exaggerating when say that it was the first thought when social commotion declared freedom in the name of freeing thought. What happens to law then, law as Law and law as law? Utilitarianism we should remember used Law as lever to weigh pleasure, pain, poverty, crime, love, and even happiness. And law can bring guillotine, the firing squad, the electric chair, and the gallows to declare the final judgement on the extent of the admissibility of these things. Even though a modern democracy in the name of freedom allows ‘resistance’ according to prescribed limits to some unpopular or undemocratic measures, it can never allow resistance to democracy. In fact in no regime resistance is legal, unless we are saying that there can be legal resistance to changes. But when we analyse that, we shall see that it means that resistance has to overcome law. Taking all these into consideration, what is announced here is thus a drive, a drive of desire, will, death, and experience against power, calculation, and reason. It is a call for utopia conceived as a ‘different time and site’. The structure of resistance thus cannot be same as the structure of the regime, or order. This point can be understood when we consider the question of ‘resistance’ against the background of ‘insistence’. Insistence is affirmation, repetition, and finally the production

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of sameness. Insistence is the act of the regime—insistence on obedience to rule of law, on conforming to the standards set by the regime, on paying tax, respect to social norms and mores, on the way life should be led, a life that the state will then protect (the hidden message of Article 21 of the Indian Constitution)—that is to say the final insistence on observing the bio-political rules of the regime. Insistence is the sign of power; resistance is the sign of desire, in another way we can say that it is the absence of power, the absence produced from the blockage in the flow of power. We can borrow here the words used by a great author of modernity, Louis Althusser, in respect of Machiavelli, namely that resistance is not the principle of power or even the constituting principle of modern politics. It is the absence of all conditions of the principle of power, and it is from this absence or void that the subject wrenches away the desire to reconstitute into a programme. This desire awakens in us a strange familiarity, and therefore in desiring and experiencing resistance, we feel a sense of ‘return’.2 We return to our own agency, our own subjectivity. If we have in resistance (to power) a refusal of the power principle, how shall we account for the potency of resistance? Wherefrom does this potency (as distinct from power) arise? We need to distinguish here between strength and power, because resistance is linked to strength— of the body and mind at first—which resists any imposition, any insistence. Resistance of the subject therefore begins many a time with recognition (which comes from experience) of the order of the signs (of power). Hence, the order or the signs themselves can be displaced, or their operation can be foreclosed, or silence may meet the signs. Yet these are only the beginning, and they qualify for resistance when they evolve into negation of what the signs stand for, in other words, the subject starts resisting. Clearly a dialectic is here in operation, it is the dialectic of the constitution of the subject. The signs occasion resistance, which in turn determines the formation of the subject, even though there is a lot of indeterminacy in the process. Only when resistance reaches a high level and the discourse of resistance combines as if in a high-voltage drama, desire and the negation of power and insistence, that we can see the emergence of the subject in the sense of the consciousness of agency. It is in this sense that we describe resistance as the signifier of potency—potency of the negation of the power principle, potency of the subject. On one hand, it affirms

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the adage of the psychoanalytical theory that the ‘unconscious is the other’—therefore in resistance we see the display of the principles of strength, desire, experience, and negation vis-à-vis power, regime, law, rationality, and insistence (and therefore the potency of resistance)— also as I have explained an event of over-determination. We can understand now why Althusser refers to Freud when he says that the void and the consequent desire to fill it with a programme thereby reconstituting the political subject is a familiar process, because this is what as political beings we have become; yet as we remain oblivious of the process, ‘this strange familiarity’ occasions a return to the subject. But besides the psychoanalytical theory, there are other aspects also, which belong to a more material history of the process of resistance and its relation with the constitution of the subject. Here we are speaking of the political subject in particular. We have already seen, void in the state of power, or more correctly speaking, void of any principle of power, occasions the formulation of a constituent programme that will embody resistance. At the basis of it there can be desire, only desire, which fills up the radical nature of the constituent programme. Here is then the paradox: resistance is negation and springs from desire; yet resistance occasions the birth of the constituent programme and the constituent subject/force, which will turn potency and strength into power. In this mutation, the question is, does the resistance principle survive? Does desire survive? Is potency exhausted? There is no general answer to these questions. Possibilities of outcome are various. But only in the second mutation (the first mutation is from desire to potency and constituent strength), that is mutation of constituent power into constituted power, we can glean the evidence how much desire has survived. The process is more for an analyst of a physical/chemical process to analyse and find out, than for a psychoanalyst.

RESISTANCE QUESTION

AND THE OF

GREAT

MUTATION

But it is not enough that we remain aware of our usual metaphysical way of looking at mutations. In fact, in coming to grips with the social reality of resistance as the absolute procedure of generating constituent

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power that the metaphysical explanations need to be challenged. The relation between the subject and the procedure of resistance is a material relation and historically constituted. Thus, in the background of 19th-century rebellions Marx (and later Lenin) connected resistance to the rupture in the organic form of society and particularly political economy. In Grundrisse, Marx laboured to explain the point that the crisis (rupture) reactivates subjectivity and makes it appear in all its revolutionary potentiality at a level determined not only by the development of the productive forces, but also by the quality of the rupture. We can say the forecast and the deluge as the crisis, resistance, and the dynamics of subjectivity. Therefore while writing Grundrisse, he wrote to Engels again and again, how much was there to learn from Hegel in the interest of the politico-practical task of revolutionary resistance and insurrection. The imminence of crisis is followed by the imminence of resistance. Marx develops the science of resistance, the ‘science of antagonism’, which always requires a politico-practical articulation. But as we know the fate of resistance, linked always with the historical nature of antagonisms, became subject to not only psychoanalysis but also to liberal ideas of difference. In the last quarter of the last century resistance was submerged in a discourse of difference, and then culturalism took over. By culturalism we mean here—almost as Nancy Fraser says in her dispute with Axel Honneth—an attitude or a discourse in which status takes the place of class, difference takes the place of contradiction and antagonism, deliberation takes the place of conflict, and the signs of the rupture in political economy are reduced to culture and its symbols.3 Yet, in recent times as resistance again shows its immanence in fierce ways, we can see the corresponding fact of social peace getting quickly over, and antagonism re-capturing the spirit of the time. In this respect we can focus our attention to one particular feature of the periodic re-emergence of the discourse of resistance. Carl Schmitt writing in 1929 of ‘The Age’ and ‘The Stage of Neutralisations and Depoliticisations’, commented, ‘The Russians have taken the European 19th century as its word, understood its core ideas and drawn the ultimate conclusions from its cultural premises. We always live in the eye of the most radical brother, who compels us to draw the most practical conclusion and pursue it to the end.’4 Schmitt was referring to two things in the context of which this comment appears. First of

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course as the theorist of constituent power he was asking his readers to learn the lessons of resistance and revolutions in the 19th century and draw the fiercest conclusion, namely a process whereby the force of resistance becomes the constituent power and reconstitutes the society and the state. The second perspective was more striking. He said that political history shows successive stages of changing central domains—‘from the theological, over the metaphysical and moral to the economic’—a ‘succession’ that ‘simultaneously signifies a series of progressive neutralisations of domains whose centres have shifted’.5 Schmitt had noted how the central political field was neutralised, intellectual neutrality became meaningless after a point, and a renewed contest became inevitable. Thus, a century after Marx we are again experiencing the reemergence of the issue of resistance and subjectivity, and the link between the two. As Foucault indicated through several of his writings, resistance makes openings in unpredictable ways. He has given us a concept of power in a way in which human history appears as a set of resistances that releases a capacity for liberation, which means life liberated from anything that encloses or imprisons it. Thus life would be liberated from life-control (bio-power and bio-politics) and only in that sense we would be able to say that humanity was experiencing liberation. In other words it is not enough to demonstrate how power can subjugate humanity to the point of making the latter a function of a cog in a machine, it is also necessary to see in the context of the organic relation between the subject and the procedure that the constitutive processes of life (producing bio-power and bio-politics) also produce desires, resistances, and a physicality that remain an internal part of biopolitics and not something outside it. I am of course combining here the two Foucaults—the early and the late, the historian of disciplines and the historian of the subject—though we must be aware at the same time of Foucault’s difficulties and closures on the issue of resistance. The theoretician of power had to admit, I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another

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metaphor, it consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and find out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analysing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analysing power relations through the antagonism of strategies… In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment, give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power. The consequence of this instability is the ability to decipher the same events and the same transformations either from inside the history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power relationships. The interpretations which result will not consist of the same elements of meaning or the same links or the same types of intelligibility, although they refer to the same historical fabric, and each of the two analyses must have reference to the other. In fact, it is precisely the disparities between the two readings, which make visible those fundamental phenomena of ‘domination’ which are present in a large number of human societies.6

Historians of labour movement have shown how technologies have been introduced in factories and plants as the combined mode of increasing productivity of labour and supervision and control of labour, and the history of each technology is one of resistance of labour and the efforts of the bosses to overcome the resistance and imprint their stamp of power. Thus, as I showed in my survey of the introduction of micro-electronics in the graphics industry, this was no simple stage of productivity increase, but doing away with the resistance of labour in the industry and concretely in a plant by doing away with several forms of labour and stages of labour in the workflow in the industry.7 The antagonism between living labour and dead labour is thus a primary antagonism; it is the symbol of the relationship between power and resistance. It is important therefore to analyse forms of resistance as strategies and not reduce the issue to psychoanalysis. Forms of resistance tell us who resists, why there is resistance, and what is being resisted. In short we are pleading once again to focus on the concrete practice of resistance, which will show in such analysis the structural characteristics of each concrete form. Thus, the individual resists in particular ways the totalising nature of modern power; groups

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escape the controls by charting out new flight paths; workers resist the control system in the plants in small measures mainly by behavioural ways at the beginning, but quickly develop many alternative and extremely skilled strategies, which include resisting the core of the managerial strategies of accumulation. Thus, resistance from living labour can turn money from being the medium of exchange to being the ‘crisis of the law of value’. Labour resistance and the crisis around money can over-determine social crisis, which indicates the collapse of power system and the controls. Categories of power can in this way become categories of resistance, or vice versa. ‘The subject becomes object, activity becomes being.’8 We can now see why ‘everyday forms of resistance’ cannot be enough, for we have to see how these pieces of resistance transform into pieces of reinforcement of controls, and alternatively how resistance transforms into a strategy towards extreme antagonism.

MUTATIONS IN THE PROCESS OF RESISTANCE: DHAKA, 1969 Hence the apparently simple questions to be asked: Who resists, why there is resistance, and what is being resisted? In this ontologicalphenomenological exercise, first of course, who resists? As an answer, also as an instance, let us go back nearly 40 years to revisit the chronicles of resistance that marked the city of Dhaka for two years 1968–69. We are specifically recalling here the anti-Ayub upsurge in Dhaka in 1969. Let us first recall the features of that epic resistance. Resistance built up gradually through the decade in what was East Pakistan then (now Bangladesh) against Ayub Khan’s military dictatorship based in West Pakistan. In 1960 in Coomilla five died in police firing, in Dhaka nine, in Chittagong two; next year two died in Rangpur; in 1962 in Dhaka alone five died, in Karachi one; in 1963 in the country 24 were shot dead by the army and the police—the resistance spreading in many districts such as Sylhet, Noakhali, Jessore, Kusthia, Coomilla, Rajshahi, Karachi, and in Lahore. In 1965 Khulna joined the list of places of agitation, in 1966 the number of deaths was 12 in East Pakistan, and in the year before the year of the upsurge the number of deaths was 15.9 In 1968 Rawalpindi saw direct clashes between

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students and the police throughout the year, and on 6 December the National Awami Party leader Maulana Bhasani gave call for direct resistance in the name of the clash between jalem means tyrant and majlum means evil. Gherao started after that from 29 December—that is surrounding and cordoning government offices. Instructions were given to take out huge processions paralysing cities and towns. Leaflets were issued. And then came the declaration of charter of demands, which later became famous as the Eleven Points Demand. The charter ranged from great political issues like cancellation of military pacts with the USA or return of democracy in the country, to issues of economic reforms such as bank or tax reforms, to the creation of a federal Pakistan that would accord dignity to all nationalities, to social demands of public education, public health, just wages, trade union rights, etc. Finally the peasantry was to be freed from the burden of rent and taxes. Charter led to coalition and network-building, styled as the Democratic Action Committee. Resistance now both spread and deepened. On 20 January 1969 the police opened fire in the heart of the city of Dhaka on agitating mass of students marching in proclamation of the charter. Student leader Asaduzzaman died. Asad’s death transformed the resistance into political upsurge. Potency became strength. Strength acquired power. This was constituent force, which in one year was to transform into constituent power changing the face of East Pakistan. And when the constituent power born of resistance evolved into constituted power in the next one year, the world had changed. A new country had been born. It was now a new regime, the moment of resistance of early 1969 seemed long over. This is a sketch, yet this is the history of the birth of today’s Bangladesh.10 In this, as indicated earlier, time was compressed; similarly space was redefined. Resistance impacted on both. Yet the more interesting question remains for this discussion: Who was Asaduzzaman? Asad, the student leader who faced the first bullet, or Asad, the son of a petty middle class family (his father was a school headmaster in Shibpur in Dhaka and a religious man), or Asad, a political worker, the agency of resistance, and the spirit of the time, or Asad who with no history behind suddenly decided to resist until death and then died and through it defined resistance for the time to come? And, who were the other companions in that death drive—schoolboys Motiur and Rustam Ali, Maimansingh college student Alamgir Mansur,

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Noakhali worker Hasanuzzaman, Chittagong jute mill worker Manu Mia, baby feeding housewife of a shopkeeper’s family Anwara Begum, worker of Siddhirgunje Anwar Ali, Sergeant Zahirul Haque one of the co-accused in the Chittagong Conspiracy Case, a press worker Isphak, tailor of Nawabgunje Azahar Khan, boatman of Faridpur Abdul Jabbar, polytechnic student Abdul Latif, and to make death equal the Proctor of Rajshahi University Professor Shamsujjoha, and several others who died that day or in the immediately following days.11 The news of the death of Asaduzzaman around 2 P.M. on 20 January 1969 and the brutal injury of five others spread quickly. Around 3 P.M. women in unprecedented number came out in a massive procession. For next three days Dhaka stood standstill. General strike erupted on 21 January. The blood-stained shirt of Asad became the flag in the hands of the crowd on the street. Asad’s radical past now quickly came to public notice and cognition—the politics Asad espoused, how he travelled through villages to organise the peasants, how he passed post-graduation in history through hard work, his still unknown writings, manifestos, and the life he led till he died. His death did not have to wait for long to become part of folklore—it of course became subsequently—to widen resistance. The news of Asad’s death reached the Adamjee Jute Mill in no time. According to newspaper reports about 20,000 workers joined the unrest immediately after walking out of the mill. Resistance weapons were made in the mills. When it reached the Tongee, workers now numbered 1,00,000. By the evening of 24 January evening Dhaka went out of the control of Governor Monayem Khan; the army was called in. Curfew and martial law were imposed. In the next two days the army killed another 23 protesters. Firing, arson, looting, torching, stabbing, barricading, demolishing cars and shops, gherao, strike—all continued for the next few days in cities and towns across the entire country of Pakistan, in Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Dhaka, Chittagong, Rajshahi, Sylhet, Mymensingh. By the time it stopped, the fate of politics in South Asia had changed forever. Not only the famous landmark of Dhaka, the Ayub Gate, had become Asad Gate, with resistance now becoming a strategy, political power in Pakistan took not even a year to collapse. Who was Asaduzzaman then? To this question I shall produce in the following this list of deaths (see Table 5.1). And we can only ask our readers at this point to imagine the time, nearly 40 years ago, when they had all died of police bullets—exactly 61 deaths in a span of 106 days.

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Emergence of the Political Subject Table 5.1: List of Persons Who Resisted and Died in the 1969 Uprising

Sl. no. Date

Firing place

Name of the demised

Occupation

1 2

8 December 1968 Nilkhet -doGulistan

Abdul Majid Aabu

Employee Cycle mechanic

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

29 December -do-do-do13 December 18 December 20 January(1969)

Mia Chan Hasan Ali Cherag Ali Siddikur Rehman Musa Mia Hafiz Ahmad Asadujjaman

Peasant -do-doTeacher Worker Student Student and peasant organiser

Matiur Rahman

Student

Rustam Ali Alamgir Mansur Hasanuzzaman Jamu Mia Anwara Begum Rahimdad Abdul Latif Saral Khan Anwar Ali Julhas Sikdar Harun Abdul Aziz Alauddin Abdul Jabbar Majhi Mahanand Sarkar Abdul Ali Majibar Rahman Kamaluddin Akhand Mazhar Ahmad Sergeant Zahrul Haq

-do-doWorker -doHousewife Servicemen Student Worker -do-doStudent -doBoatman Student Worker Student -do-doMember of the air force Press worker Educationist Employee Tailor Ice cream vendor Carpenter Worker Student

10

-do-

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

-do-do-do-do25 January -do-do26 January -do-do27 January 30 January -do1 February 5 February 6 February -do15 February -do-

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

17 February 18 February -do19 February -do-do-do-do-

Hatirdiya -do-do-doFaujdar Haat Rupganj Near Dhaka Municipal Corporation Near the Secretariat -doMymensingh Chittagong -doNakhal Para Dhanmandi Tejgaon Dhaka Simuliya Rly St. Sidhhiganj Gouripur Jajira -doJaler Par Dhaka Rajargaon -doNear Narayanganj Dhaka Cantonment Area Nazirabazar Rajshahi Najirabazaar Malibag -do-doSenbag, Noakhali -do-

Ishak Dr Shamsujjoha Rahmatullah Athar Khan Abdul Ali Abul Hasem Hafizur Rahman Abul Kalam

(Table 5.1 continued)

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(Table 5.1 continued) Sl. no. 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Date -do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Firing place -do-doCoomilla Dhaka -doKushtia Dhaka -doMalibag Senbag

Occupation -doWorker -do-doShop employee Employee Worker -doHotel boy Student

20 February 21 February

Name of the demised Shamsul Haq Abdul Rahman Ishaq Rejaul Karim Shahid Abdur Rajjak Lokman Majibur Rahman Shamsur Khursed Alam (demised on 25 February) Dhaka Cantonment Md. Delwar Hossain Daulatpur, Khulna Mehtab Ali

-do-do-do-do-do-do-do28 February -do7 March 8 March 23 March

-do-do-do-do-do-doDhaka Barisal Dhaka Tangail Sherpur Manikgunje

n.a. Night school and worker Worker Student Worker -do-do-doStudent -doWorker Student -don.a.

Israfil Bando Abdus Sattar Altaf Habibur Rahman Nasir Loknath Maniruzzaman Alauddin Abus Sawar Biswanath Saha Daroga Ali Abdul Qadir

Source: Ittefaq, 20 January 1970, appended at the end of Mesbah Kamal, Unoshottorer Ganaabhyutthyan, 2nd edn (Dhaka: Sraban Prakashana, 2006), 153–55.

We are of course not writing here a political account of that fateful year of 1969 in the history of resistance in Pakistan, particularly East Pakistan. As a study of resistance the event(s) stands out. Events are crucial, big or small. Only in event-form the concatenation of circumstances stands out. As event therefore it can tell us the lessons as to who resists, why there is resistance, and what is being resisted. Here are some of the lessons: 1. However ‘abstract’ or ‘grand political’ the charter of the movement is, those who resist leave their signature on the register of resistance.

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2. Resistance begins and is marked by physical resistance; this is the beginning of bio-power—a phenomenon less noticed by social theorists of power, who think that life is the clue to bio-power and maintenance of life (thus governing life) in particular ways constitutes bio-politics. The history of resistance shows that biopower begins with physical resistance, which means a process whereby life agrees to meet death in order to achieve its end. It is death, which constitutes the core of bio-politics, and not life, precisely because politics in its impossible stage resembles death and not life. Therefore life must transfer to death its belongings in order to attain political form. 3. It is important therefore to find out who resists not in an abstract sense, but concretely, and how it resists, again not in an abstract sense, but concretely. 4. Resistance can take the form of charters, which indicate coalitions, networks, trust chains, collective politics, and readiness for collective violence—all giving birth to resistance at newer points, newer levels, and in newer forms like rapidly shifting points of attack, new ways of attacking the targets, forging new tools in a real sense, and combating in innovative ways that can range from issuing charters, staging night vigil, newer forms of communicating, to assassination, mob violence, guerrilla attacks, partisan warfare, to of course as repeatedly emphasised here, courting death often in unusual ways. 5. Though resistance is negative dialectic, and power is positive, the inter-relation of the two is one of mutuality. Resistance contributes to the formation of constituent power which must (re)constitute society and must thus one day give way to constituted power. All revolutions are thus passive revolutions also in this sense; yet how much of the constituent force remains after power had been reconstituted and the reconstituted power has become the de jure sovereign depends on how much resistance has remained at the heart of the constituent power even after power has been reconstituted. Resistance is thus negative dialectic only in a qualified sense. It is always a ‘state of injury’. 6. What is very significant is that resistance attacks economics— howsoever rational it may seem from the top—and aims at its heart straightaway, at rupturing the rational core.

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7. Finally, and most important, resistance links to the formation of the political subject. In every historical period the political subject is identified often vaguely but urgently around a common living form of labour. In the case of 1969, very briefly touched upon earlier, the form of labour was of course that of the petty producers and a primeval form of industrial labour (in jute and cotton mills) along with other forms of primeval labour (rickshaw puller, boatman, rickshaw cyclist, doorman, peon, bus driver, etc.) in alliance; yet this partial and localised figure of labour soon achieved a transcendental form pushing resistance ahead.12

RESISTANCE

AND THE

POLITICAL SUBJECT

We can in fact draw from these seven lessons of resistance a larger truth. The truth is that resistance reinforces the dialectic of life. First, there is transference of life to death.13 Second, it recalls antagonism. Third, resistance releases revolutionary impulses that help the subject in acquiring an ethical goal, leading the political subject to say that the motto is to ‘create and re-create us and our world’. Ethics and antagonism—both act as properties of resistance. This is the dialectic of life. Till now whatever we have discussed and noted can be summarised as follows: We were not aiming here to write a history of resistance, we wanted to see resistance as activity, as a role particularly in subjectformation. Therefore we are not dealing primarily with what will qualify as resistance, or the evolution in forms of resistance, but rather resistance as a phenomenon—a subject in its own right, yet an object. Therefore we have linked the two questions—who resists and how it resists—to analyse resistance. Resistance has therefore an organic composition similar to the one present in a manifesto. We are in this way able to consider issues like: Who can resist? What happens to the world when resistance as a protracted activity affects it? What happens to others, those who have not resisted as yet? Say, the rulers or individuals? The problematisation of resistance is thus in its specific nature. Therefore, it is not enough to know the sociological dimension of the inquiry, it is also important to take account of the methodological dimension also, namely what method should we follow in

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order to understand the phenomenon of resistance? The method will have to respond to our query, namely how does resistance become a problem for power, how does it transform into power, and thus become a problem for itself? A problematisation is thus essentially a study of mutation. The task therefore is to study the way resistance transforms the world, the subject, its own composition—a constant struggle between the given realities and the ever-present possibilities of reflection, and finally mutation. Now we are in a position to discuss the point raised a minute ago, namely that resistance has the nature of manifesto. This means resistance cannot be viewed as accident, it has to be seen as the subject’s agenda. In order to appreciate this point, we shall have to give at least some answer to the kind of reason or rationality that such manifesto offers us. Let us see the implications of this formulation—first, resistance as manifesto (anti-reason) and second, its relation with the particular reason, specifically political reason. First is the issue of manifesto, resistance as manifesto. Manifesto is a specific form of political text that announces not only an aim, but also admits and announces the specific relation between the object of the manifesto (the goal) and the subject (the author). In this specific form politics also obliterates the distinction between the object and the subject. Manifesto to use a current phrase is a kind of specific apparatus (Althusser and Foucault called it ‘dispositif’), which underscores its materiality by imprinting in the text the author’s subjectivity, which can be comprehended only by pursuing the object of the text. We of course know how the Manifesto of the Communist Party classically demonstrates this. I have shown with regard to Fanon how his writings can be understood in their historical light only when we treat them as manifestos. A manifesto is a part of the self-constituting collective action/subject aimed at pursuing the objective. In this collective action and exposition of the subject-hood there is no analysis of government, or of other forms of politics, or of the science of management, but only a concentrated self-constitution of the collective through pursuing its own object. The goal in short is the self-production of the subject through action. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call this a ‘materialist teleology’.14 Resistance carries this feature of the manifesto. It aims at reconstituting the subject who is resisting. It blurs the distinction between the subject and the object. Therefore resistance has

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no self-exhibiting quality. Only by throwing light on the action of resistance (who resists, what is resisted, and how is resisted), the goal, we come to know the phenomenon of resistance. In the repertoire of anti-colonial experience in India and elsewhere we have several instances of resistance to colonial order acting as a manifesto. Gandhi’s exhortations towards non-cooperation were aimed at the strategy of reconstituting the anti-colonial subject, hence the person engaging in non-cooperation was a satyagrahi also, a truth seeker, who reconstituted him/herself through truthful action. In several actions such as the Temple Entry Movement in Vaikkam, Kerala, the Vaikkam Satyagraha, we could see how manifestos and actions of resistance carried the same characteristics.15 ‘The working class by freeing others frees itself” … ‘Workers have nothing to lose but their chains, they have a world to win…’ These and other instances of transcendence are instances of stepping into a void, that is a plane, which will offer the scope for reconstitution of the subject. In this field of immanence, where resistance becomes a manifesto, we have the uninterrupted cycle of life, production, and politics, and death. This brings us to the second issue—of political reason, specifically the issue, what kind of reason is demonstrated in resistance, or what type of critique of reason is demonstrated. Here again we are surprised to see how inadequately philosophers and theorists have engaged with the issue of resistance—whether in analysing the process of subjectformation or other kinds of ontology. Even Foucault who had done so much to demonstrate the close link between power and reason is guilty of historical idealism on this score, and he admits this obliquely in the concluding pages of ‘Fearless Speech’, but we cannot say that he comes out clean. In his opening lines towards the construction of criticism of political reason, Foucault said, One of the Enlightenment’s tasks was to multiply reason’s political powers. But the men of the 19th century soon started wondering whether reason was not getting too powerful in our societies. They began to worry about a relationship they confusedly suspected between a rationalisation-prone society and certain threats to the individual and his liberties, to the species and its survival.

And then, let us follow him closely, … In other words, since Kant, the role of philosophy has been to prevent reason going beyond the limits of what is given in experience; but from the same moment—that is, from the development of modern states and

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political management of society—the role of philosophy has also been to keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality—which is rather a promising life expectancy… The relationship between rationalisation and the excesses of political power is evident. And we should not need to wait for bureaucracy or concentration camps to recognize the existence of such relations. But the problem is: what to do with such an evident fact? Shall we ‘try’ reason? To my mind, nothing would be more sterile. First, because the field has nothing to do with guilt or innocence, second, because it’s senseless to refer to ‘reason’ as the contrary entity to nonreason, last, because such a trial would trap us into playing the arbitrary and boring part of either the rationalist or the irrationalist… It may be wise not to take as a whole the rationalisation of society or of culture, but to analyse this process in several fields, each of them grounded in a fundamental experience: madness, illness, death, crime, sexuality, etc… Everyone knows that in European societies political power has evolved towards more and more centralised forms. Historians have been studying this organisation of the state, with its administration and bureaucracy, for dozens of years. I’d like to suggest … the possibility of analysing another kind of transformation in such power relationships. This transformation is, perhaps, less celebrated. But I think that it is also important, mainly for modern societies. Apparently this evolution seems antagonistic to the evolution towards a centralised state. What I mean in fact is the development of power techniques oriented towards individuals and intended to rule them in a continuous and permanent way. If the state is the political form of a centralised and centralising power, let us call pastorship the individualising power… The shepherd’s role is to ensure the salvation of his flock. The Greeks said also that the deity saved the city; they never stopped declaring that the competent leader is a helmsman warding his ship away from the rocks. But the way the shepherd saves his flock is quite different. It’s not only a matter of saving them all, all together, when danger comes nigh. It’s a matter of constant, individualised, and final kindness. Constant kindness, for the shepherd ensures his flock’s food; every day he attends to their thirst and hunger. The Greek god was asked to provide a fruitful land and abundant crops. He wasn’t asked to foster a flock day by day. And individualised kindness, too, for the shepherd sees that all the sheep, each and every one of them, is fed and saved… Yet another difference lies in the idea that wielding power is a ‘duty’…

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Plato’s analysis is well known. To solve this question he uses the division method. A distinction is drawn between the man who conveys orders to inanimate things (e.g., the architect), and the man who gives orders to animals; between the man who gives orders to isolated animals (like a yoke of oxen) and he who gives orders to flocks; and he who gives orders to animal flocks, and he who commands human flocks. And there we have the political leader: a shepherd of men… But this first division remains unsatisfactory. It has to be pushed further… And the dialogue wanders astray with these never-ending subdivisions. So, what do the initial development of the dialogue and its subsequent failure show? That the division method can prove nothing at all when it isn’t managed correctly… And what’s the king’s task in regard to all this? Like the shepherd, he is alone at the head of the city. But, for the rest, who provides mankind with food? The king? No. The farmer, the baker do. Who looks after men when they are sick? The king? No. The physician. And who guides them with music? The gymnast—not the king. And so, many citizens could quite legitimately claim the title ‘shepherd of men’. Just as the human flock’s shepherd has many rivals, so has the politician. Consequently, if we want to find out what the politician really and essentially is, we must sift it out from ‘the surrounding flood’, thereby demonstrating in what ways he isn’t a shepherd. I raise all of this in a very allusive manner in order to emphasise that if the pastorate was not instituted as an effective, practical government of men during the Middle Ages, it has been a permanent concern and a stake in constant struggles. There was across the entire period of the Middle Ages a yearning to arrange pastoral relations among men and this aspiration affected both the mystical tide and the great millenarian dreams. Of course, I don’t intend to treat here the problem of how states are formed. Nor do I intend to go into the different economic, social, and political processes from which they stem. Neither do I want to analyse the different institutions or mechanisms with which states equipped themselves in order to ensure their survival. I’d just like to give some fragmentary indications as to something midway between the state as a type of political organisation and its mechanisms, viz., the type of rationality implemented in the exercise of state power. From where does this specific art of government draw its rationale? The answer to this question provokes the scandal of nascent political thought. And yet it’s very simple: the art of governing is rational, if reflection causes it to observe the nature of what is governed—here, the state. …Reason of state is also opposed to another tradition. In The Prince, Machiavelli’s problem is to decide how a province or territory

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acquired through inheritance or by conquest can be held against its internal or external rivals. Machiavelli’s entire analysis is aimed at defining what keeps up or reinforces the link between prince and state, whereas the problem posed by reason of state is that of the very existence and nature of the state itself. This is why the theoreticians of reason of state tried to stay aloof from Machiavelli; he had a bad reputation and they couldn’t recognize their own problem in his. Conversely, those opposed to reason of state tried to impair this new art of governing, denouncing it as Machiavelli’s legacy. However, despite these confused quarrels a century after The Prince had been written, reason of state marks the emergence of an extremely—albeit only partly—different type of rationality from Machiavelli’s. The aim of such an art of governing is precisely not to reinforce the power a prince can wield over his domain. Its aim is to reinforce the state itself. This is one of the most characteristic features of all the definitions that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries put forward… This study rests upon several basic assumptions. I’d sum them up like this: Power is not a substance. Neither is it a mysterious property whose origin must be delved into. Power is only a certain type of relation between individuals. Such relations are specific, that is, they have nothing to do with exchange, production, communication, even though they combine with them. The characteristic feature of power is that some men can more or less entirely determine other men’s conduct—but never exhaustively or coercively. A man who is chained up and beaten is subject to force being exerted over him. Not power. But if he can be induced to speak, when his ultimate recourse could have been to hold his tongue, preferring death, then he has been caused to behave in a certain way. His freedom has been subjected to power. He has been submitted to government. If an individual can remain free, however little his freedom may be, power can subject him to government. There is no power without potential refusal or revolt. As for all relations among men, many factors determine power. Yet rationalisation is also constantly working away at it. There are specific forms to such rationalisation. It differs from the rationalisation peculiar to economic processes, or to production and communication techniques; it differs from that of scientific discourse. The government of men by men—whether they form small or large groups, whether it is power exerted by men over women, or by adults over children, or by one class over another, or by a bureaucracy over a population—involves a certain type of rationality. It doesn’t involve instrumental violence. Consequently, those who resist or rebel against a form of power

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cannot merely be content to denounce violence or criticise an institution. Nor is it enough to cast the blame on reason in general. What has to be questioned is the form of rationality at stake… For several centuries, the state has been one of the most remarkable, one of the most redoubtable, forms of human government. Very significantly, political criticism has reproached the state with being simultaneously a factor for individualisation and a totalitarian principle… Just to look at nascent state rationality, just to see what its first policing project was, makes it clear that, right from the start, the state is both individualising and totalitarian. Opposing the individual and his interests to it is just as hazardous as opposing it with the community and its requirements. Political rationality has grown and imposed itself all throughout the history of Western societies. It first took its stand on the idea of pastoral power, then on that of reason of state. Its inevitable effects are both individualisation and totalisation. Liberation can only come from attacking, not just one of these two effects, but political rationality’s very roots.16

What is the idealist element in this survey of the development of political reason? For Foucault political rationality lies in developing the science of governing people, whose aim is to reinforce the state, and thus state becomes the mode of governing. This science develops from the early profession and ethic of pastoral duty, which meant looking after the flock, also the individual sheep. The science of governing grew as protecting people developed into a duty, to rule was a king’s duty, thus grew monarchy as form of government, and then came the state, and finally the latest method of governing, that is policing, which would hereafter signify governing the conditions of production and reproduction of life itself. With this latest method the aim of political reason became complete, namely men governing men, and human relations becoming governmental relations requiring to be administered. Thus grew authority, both individuated as well as totalising. Now, if this is the seamless history of political reason, then how do we account for resistance? Where is resistance in this topography of political rationality? What explains the change for forms of government? Historical researches have not only shown us how ‘in European societies political power has evolved towards more and more centralised forms … this organisation of the state, with its administration and bureaucracy, for dozens of years’, they have shown also how

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resistance has repeatedly occasioned change in the form of rule and government. Histories of state formation, for instance we can recall Tilly’s researches, have brought out how popular defeats in social struggles have contributed to the development of the state machinery. Marx in Capital shows at length as to how labour struggles over wages and working hours contributed to Factory Acts and changes in the mode of governing and control of labour and society. The problem is that Foucault, in spite of his several instructive insights did not investigate the two most important categories of modernity, namely capital and the state, in any serious way; also his dislike of dialectic and Marx led him to neglect some of Marx’s most prescient writings on power and resistance. Today with the knowledge of how in the last 15 years in particular the seemingly relentless march of capitalist globalisation and globality has been halted by resistance even though in an extremely dispersed manner, and has therefore continuously adjusted to ward off these challenges, it is no longer possible to draw the roadmap of power without considering resistance as an inbuilt factor. Now, if that is so, how can we say that only the science of government represents political reason and not resistance? How are to we account for the fact we noted earlier, namely that, resistance leads to the formation of a constituent force, which reconstitutes subsequently society and the self? It is this reconstitutive role of resistance and its political significance that Foucault overlooked in his survey of the history of political reason. Such a reason is not only ideally constructed, but such a view of politics is also idealist—more suited for moralists and sages, or perhaps for a neo-Kantian, certainly not for those who resist, say, Asaduzzaman and other myriad known and unknown characters in history. We can recall another history in this context. Ayesha Jalal’s magisterial work, Self and Sovereignty, traces the contentious development of the Muslims in the Indian subcontinent in the colonial era as a collective political subject, of course ridden with tensions and fault lines, through the encounter between resistance and continuous governmental interventions and practices.17 One can interpret the outcome in any way. One can say that Pakistan was the outcome, with similar logic we can also say that what happens in India today is a result of that, particularly , riots, the Sree Krishna Commission Report, the Gujarat massacre, Bombay blasts, and the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (TADA) Court judgements—the

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post-colonial legacy of minority persecution, hatred, revenge, and a deficit of democracy. But what we cannot deny is that governmentality is not a seamless world of political and administrative negotiations. It is inscribed deeply with resistances. The emerging world of autonomy defies the iron logic of bio-politics and governmentality. People resist, because resistance gives them autonomy; resistance is often the form in which people declare autonomy.18 Hence, it is important to know the character of resistance as manifesto, its double profile as the subject and the object, and its role in selfconstitution of the political subject. It is not enough thus to say, The characteristic feature of power is that some men can more or less entirely determine other men’s conduct—but never exhaustively or coercively. A man who is chained up and beaten is subject to force being exerted over him. Not power. But if he can be induced to speak, when his ultimate recourse could have been to hold his tongue, preferring death, then he has been caused to behave in a certain way. His freedom has been subjected to power. He has been submitted to government. If an individual can remain free, however little his freedom may be, power can subject him to government. There is no power without potential refusal or revolt.19

These subtleties of democratic politics and administration will not work, because whether to hold back tongue and die, or to speak out and live, or as in many cases to speak out and die will depend on how much strength the resistance can acquire, how potent it is becoming towards reconstituting politics altogether, that is conditions of life… ‘Conditions of life’—this is the great question affecting the ontology of resistance. We cannot neglect either capital or the state, because no other factor affects so overwhelmingly the conditions of our life as these. Ignorance of these leads to ignoring a number of axes along which domination/resistance runs—gender (patriarchy), race (colonialism), and private property (liberal bourgeois rule) being some of them. Like the antagonistic other (domination), resistance on all these also affects the conditions of our life. Social, sexual, economic, political, cultural—all aspects of our lives are reconstituted by periodic resistance to patterns of domination in the form of gender, race, and private property. Neglect of state and capital or subterfuges in the name of mimicry, etc. causes further deficiency in understanding resistance,

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because without these being taken into account, resistance becomes a matter of individual conduct only—to speak or not to speak. Recall the illusion cited just few paragraphs before: Power is only a certain type of relation between individuals. Such relations are specific, that is, they have nothing to do with exchange, production, communication, even though they combine with them… Consequently, those who resist or rebel against a form of power cannot merely be content to denounce violence or criticise an institution. Nor is it enough to cast the blame on reason in general. What has to be questioned is the form of rationality at stake…

What is at stake here is precisely the conditions that determine the dominant form of rationality, and the rescuing and retrieving the subjugated political rationalities, periodically redefined and marked on the social register through resistance. Typical are the forms through which clandestine and subterranean sects have carried out their resistance. Once again recall the conditions in which the paradigmatic Manifesto was written. To conclude: Even though the philosophical and psychoanalytical literature provides us with some insight on the great question in this age of globalisation, universal hegemony, and capitalist domination, namely what is resistance, in order to answer that question properly, we must go beyond philosophical insights and psychoanalysis, and look at the material terrain of antagonism, and appreciate its specific characteristics. These specific characteristics to recall the earlier arguments are: 1. Resistance combines in a paradoxical manner the subject and the object of resistance—in other words resistance self-clarifies only by pursuing the object; we can say the same thing in another way, namely that, subject position materialises without subject, that is without necessarily a centralised subject. 2. Resistance reads like a manifesto, because it is self-constitutive as agency. 3. Resistance springs from desire as distinct from power, and therefore to understand resistance we must appreciate desire, whence comes potency and strength—all of which are quite distinct from power and do not at all form an uninterrupted chain. 4. Resistance points to void, from which the constituent power will grow, and even though in history the constituent power has

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resolved into constituted power—in unequal measures of course—and the constituent strength in society may evaporate for some time, yet how much the constitutive strength of society remains depends on how much resistance remains, as un-exhausted, as the supplement. 5. Resistance redefines bio-power and bio-politics by inserting its absolute limit, that is death, into the cycle of life, knowledge, and power, but not in a simple way; indeed this insertion makes bio-politics always contingent upon death. Thus, resistances will be always seen in society at least in the coming days as spectre, spectre of crimes, travelling diseases and terror, all of which represent death—the final defeat of bio-politics. 6. And finally, resistance is the material form in which an event is determined as ‘political’; and as political the event produces multiplicities; we can say therefore that an event is political, if its content is collective (not numerically but ontologically, that is the event summons the collective), and resists the given political truth. In short, resistance establishes politics as truth procedure. It is crucial to subject-formation, whose other name is the fractured journey from body to truth, and an equally fractured combination of will and power. It also means that politics will always strive to break the bonds that society makes in order to continue in its present state; in fact by breaking those bonds politics will indicate that procedure, which we call by the term, ‘political consciousness’. Politics will become thereby mass procedure, and it is not strange, that all singularities call for it?

NOTES 1.

Louis Althusser on this writes, ‘What is the essence of this practical experience and the reflections it inspired in Lenin? It should be pointed out immediately that this was not Lenin’s sole illuminating experience. Before 1917 there was 1905, before 1905 the great historical deceptions of England and Germany, before that the Commune, even earlier the German failure of 1848–49. These experiences had been reflected en route (Engels, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany; Marx, The Class Struggles in France, The Civil War in France, The Eighteenth Brumaire, The Critique of the Gotha Programme; Engels, The Critique of the Erfurt Programme, and so on), directly or indirectly, and

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had been related to even earlier revolutionary experience: to the bourgeois revolutions of England and France.’

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

See, Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ in ‘Notes for an Investigation’, Part III of For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962); available online at http://www.marx.org/reference/archive/althusser/1965/index. htm (accessed on 22 February 2008). Louis Althusser, ‘Machiavelli’s Solitude’, Economy and Society 17, no. 4 (1988): 468–79. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Recognition or Redistribution? A PhilosophicalPolitical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003), Chapter 1. This particular piece written by Carl Schmitt in 1929 (trans. Matthias Konzen and John P. McCormick) appears as part of the expanded edition of Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 81. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 89. Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 208. Ranabir Samaddar, Workers and Automation—The Impact of New Technology in the Newspaper Industry (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1994). I am taking this line from Antonio Negri, Marx beyond Marx—Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano, ed. Jim Fleming (London: Pluto Press, 1991), 77. Figures taken from Mesbah Kamal, Unoshottorer Ganaabhyuthyan—Shahid Asad O Sreni rajniti Prasanga (Dhaka: Sraban, 2006), 39. I have written elsewhere in details on this conundrum; see, Ranabir Samaddar, Paradoxes of the Nationalist Time—Political Essays on Bangladesh (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 2002). Cited from Ittefaq (20 January 1970) in Kamal, Unoshottorer Ganaabhyuthyan, p. 59. The role of the rickshaw pullers, boatmen, and others like rickshaw cyclists is well recorded in contemporary chronicles, newspaper reports, and best portrayed in the famous novel by Akhtaruzzaman Elias, Chilekothar Sepai. In this novel, Khijir, a rickshaw puller, dies in street battle; Khijir wanted to escape his class shackles and limits, he had agonised for long in his life, and finally he goes forward and dies—a death that arouses the petty bourgeois dreamer, the ‘soldier of the attic’ from his Don Quixote-like dreams and slumber. Resistance remakes self, takes care of the self, and thus transforms the world. In this connection we can recall also the list of the Wahabi followers given in Chapter 2 of this book. On this, the histories of anti-colonial resistance have much to offer us as lesson. The literature in anti-colonial time in Bengal for instance (immediately coming to mind are the writings of Tagore or before him of Michael Madhusudan Dutt) was engrossed in an inquiry into the transference of life to death, its dynamics and quality. It also inquired as Tagore’s later poems showed into the nature of the autonomy of death, and the way in which a realisation of the power of death can

What is Resistance?

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

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impact on the life one leads. Long studied as an anthropological issue, the culture of death recreates itself when connected with politics and resistance. Once again, the readers can recall in this context Chapters 2–3 of this book. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 63. On this, T.K. Ravindra, Vaikkam Satyagraha and Gandhi (Trichur: Sri Narayana Institute of Social and Cultural Development, 1975). Michel Foucault, ‘Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason’, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (delivered at Stanford University, 10 and 16 October 1979). Also available online at http://foucault.info/documents/foucault. omnesEtSingulatim.en.html (accessed on 10 January 2008). Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty—Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2001); Jalal calls the process at one place, ‘Muslims as a Legal and Political Category—Subjecthood in Theory and Practice’; see Chapter 4. I describe the process at length in recently published, Ranabir Samaddar, The Materiality of Politics; vol. 2, Subject Positions in Politics (London: Anthem Press, 2007), Chapters 3–4. Michel Foucault, ‘Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason’, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (delivered at Stanford University, 10 and 16 October 1979). Also available online at http://foucault.info/documents/foucault. omnesEtSingulatim.en.html (accessed on 16 November 2007).

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o sum up what we have discussed so far: the political subject emerges in situation of resistance; and actions of both courting death and dialoguing mark this emergence. The interesting question at this point will be: How does dialogue and a situation of resistance relate to each other? I have already broached this question in the first few chapters. It is necessary now to return to this question and investigate in little more details the actual way(s) in which these two relate to each other and the implications of such relation. In the introductory remarks I had said that the political subject arises in modern history as the ‘other, the counter figure of sovereignty’. This figure of the subject that has run counter to the sovereign norms of authority and power has found its expression in many ways—as I try to show, the Wahabi, the mutinous soldier, the terrorist-revolutionary, the figure that tries to cut the bonds of memory to rise in action, the figure that courts death as well as practices dialogue, the figure that the regime of rule of law tries to subordinate and yet the figure that exceeds the conditions of subjection and assumes the agency of the subject. The process of subject-formation (called subjectivation) runs therefore differently, though related to, from the process of formation of modern sovereignty. We can say that subjectivation has thus within it subjection yet overcomes the latter in its own process. We saw that the early terrorists in order to counter the sovereign norms attempted to develop an alternative ethos of action. In course, we have seen that this attempt developed into various articulations of a different idea of sovereignty, articulations that have posed the problematic of war/politics in a different way. Politics here sits at the heart of any such alternative idea of sovereignty, any resultant act of displacement. It is time to examine

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the idea of the political subject from this angle. This angle runs counter to the idea of sovereignty, hence is able to problematise the issue of war in politics in a new way.

POLITICAL SUBJECT: THE COUNTER FIGURE OF SOVEREIGNTY The Naga rebel leader, Thuingaleng Muivah’s interview with the BBC World’s ‘Hard Talk India’ (taken by Karan Thapar) programme was aired on 29 April 2005, and the text was made available on the BBC site. In it Muivah spoke of the long Naga struggle for independence, the need for reconciliation and peace today, and a possible framework in which the modalities of reconciliation, peace, and political freedom for the Nagas could be worked out without any more bloodshed and any loss of dignity of the Indian state. In fact he spoke of the need today for prudence on both sides, meaning the Nagas and the Indian state, and spoke of the ‘peace of the brave’ (that reminds us of Arafat), and the requirement to be a visionary in order to sketch out the pathway to peace and political solution. This vision as he explained in the interview meant essentially thinking in terms of sharing of sovereignty as the mode of solution, and the need to be wise to think of a state without absolute sovereignty, a political and governing structure without the essentials of absolute power. Again almost a year later in another interview, this time with a correspondent with The Telegraph (an Indian newspaper published from Kolkata, 9 April 2006, ‘Centre’s Turn to take next Step, says Muivah’, p. 4), he said, We rejected the Indian Constitution way back in 1950. Despite an invitation, the Nagas did not attend the Constituent Assembly, stating clearly that they were not a part of India… (Yet) India must realise that since 1950 we have taken several steps forward to come closer to it. … If the Indian political leadership does not appreciate them then how can we say that it wants a solution through negotiations… It will be a federation of India and Nagaland to be bound together by an agreement which elaborate the interdependence between the two… We say ‘interdependence’ because we realise that we cannot be totally on our own… (We) prefer to use the term ‘federation’ in

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preference to the ‘Union of India’ as the latter describes the relation between the centre and states of India. The background and history of these states are different from ours. Once the terms of the negotiated settlement are incorporated in the Indian Constitution as well as in the Constitution that the Nagas will give themselves, we will recognise the Indian Constitution and India will recognise our Constitution. No unilateral change would be permitted in the terms of the settlement either through Ordinances or Constitutional amendments… We think that this is reasonable approach. Both sides would end up recognising each other’s constitution as well as the close links binding the two documents. Indians and Nagas would become inseparable. What more could India want?

Muivah was of course speaking at length on both these occasions from the Naga angle, and therefore his views in that talk were immersed in current anxieties and specific formulations. Yet, there is something deep in his formulations as implication for political theory and political history. I am not going to discuss here the particularities of the peace process and the peace question in this respect, or the prospects of reconciliation, or even the question as to whether Muivah had in this vision anything for the Naga state similar to the sort of shared sovereignty that he proposed for the Indian state, or if this was only a tactical ploy in bargaining, and that while he wanted the Indian state to be respectful of the ‘sovereignty’ of the constituents, he would not want to think of a Naga state at least for now that would be similarly respectful of the autonomy and ‘sovereignty’ of its constituents. These are issues of political morality and expediency, which we can discuss on other occasions, or can leave for our security specialists policing our thoughts to handle. My discussion is on that essential vision of proposing a state of shared sovereignty, and I think this is a historically justified and defensible vision. Muivah in this talk proposed an Indian state that much of its time in history was like that, and whatever political commentators may think, his proposal conforms to a historical pattern along which the Indian state had developed in the past, except for the 200 years when the colonial centralised model of military despotism based on continuous physical conquests and annexations developed and subsequently became the sole possessor of the political imagination of the ones colonised. The interesting point here is of course the fact that the practice of dialogue is producing in this case a thinker or generating a thought

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whose enthusiasm in legal and political matters does not seem to wane. Also, let there be no misunderstanding that it is not dream or political morality that is producing the vision of shared sovereignty, but the ‘wisdom of politico-juridical practice’ that is allowing the dialogist to cut through the infinite mass of documents and texts, the immense details of histories, chronicles, and miscellanies, and grasp their logic in order to disengage these details from their particular grounds and locate them in current history. This of course is the peculiar quality of dialogue that allows one to proceed through centuries and certainly decades-long entanglements, and present an agenda that by means of encapsulating ‘political wisdom’ has the power to win over the majority of factions in politics, and snatch politics away from the fate of being mere mechanics of force. I hope to show how ‘minute observations of political facts’ can lead to political understanding and wisdom, and not miracle but political understanding and wisdom allow the practitioners of politics to successfully set up new agencies of politics that no theory or philosophy can hope to attain—at least in the time in which political practice attains that feat. If we remember that politics is the object of calculations, deliberations, dialogue, negotiations at times by force and at times by words, and relations, then Muivah’s interview must stand out as an extraordinary piece of political analysis and political action (yes action, if we remember that in this interview the interlocution had a definite political purpose) towards redefining politics. Even though human relations cannot be treated completely as physical relations, yet relations are always being redefined in politics as reorganised relations between objects. And, once again the wonder—it is not some political theory that drives this trend towards redefining political relations as reconstituted physical relations, but political actions, which must treat the constituents of politics as objects. Therefore one has to know here ‘the cast of mind’, the way in which Muivah looks at the past of sovereignty, the present called the Indian state, the relation between the Indian state and the Naga politics, and the possibilities of reconstituting the relation between the Indian state and the Naga independence movement and a possible Naga state. The cast of mind in this case depends on the capacity to observe facts and minute details and the dynamics of change in the relation on which the reality and the myth of sovereignty stands. This is the basis of the new dialogue that he proposes—the basis, which is but an echo of this world in crisis. The suggestion to share sovereignty certainly looks like a piece from the old world of political exoticism—the ‘other world’ in which

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the present world seeks its own image, a search that has dominated political thought in India since the last 250 years. It has been a search for a new type of political society, which will not produce and will not base itself upon colonial relations. The cast of mind as it exhibits itself is not only inquiring but dialogic also; therefore Muivah does not propose the significant suggestion to restructure politics in a theoretical article, but in an interview, as if in a manifesto, in a message, in a text whose value lies in the fact that it will be transmitted immediately or soon—an act in an unfolding drama of politics. By proposing the sharing of sovereignty through this interview, is Muivah proposing a new contract, a sort of new social contract that will be the basis of reorganised relations between particular political constituents? Does this proposal ‘contain and illustrate in advance the ideal of a political society to be created’? I do not think that it has any such theoretical and philosophical ambition. It seems to be a particular idea and suggestion, with no polemical and ideological posture. Therein lies its value. Muivah is here a political actor, a legislator, and a political subject. Therefore he speaks at the same time of the compulsive ambiguity of constraints and the ideal of political theory of self-determination. It was a long time before the idea that laws and new political concepts needed visionaries, theoreticians, and philosophers could rid itself of this heritage. Muivah has no such luggage of political theory and philosophy to carry. He is a practitioner and laws are not therefore metaphorical to him. They are meant to reorganise relations, rid the notion of sovereignty of any metaphysical implication, ‘secularise’ the concept, and make sovereignty a norm and necessity both—thus making this concept a practical tool of organising relations, and not abolishing relations that theological precepts do. As if Muivah is saying here, ‘Don’t invoke God here, let us be practical, and let us see how we can co-live.’ Dialogue in this way is becoming an art—an art of the practice of talking.

EXPERIENCE, PRAGMATISM, AND THE POLITICAL SUBJECT We can also think along another line. Why has it been possible for Muivah to propose a radical solution so ordinarily, as a matter of fact? One has to admit if one takes the case of India as is with other countries

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with developed governmental system that the last 60 years have witnessed an ever-closer association between the political community and the state. The reasons have been several. But the resultant fact is a greater integration of the political community with a centralised state and a centralising governmental structure. There have been several attempts to abolish this reality—by overthrow of existing regimes, by revolutions, by espousing anarchism, or by introducing reforms. But all these attempts have failed, as if what Hegel had said has come back as the heavenly truth, namely that, the predestined goal of political evolution is that nation should absorb in the state, though Marx had retaliated with the argument that the destined goal of political society was that it would abolish the state. Clearly when Muivah was proposing his solution it was not in the nature of the liberal-pluralist argument revolving decentralisation, but more in the nature of the alternative vision of communes being the basis of a reorganised political community, in this case the future Naga state being based on plural community formations, and the present Indian state being reorganised along line of reconstituted union of different independent political formations. We can recall Rousseau, one of the major theoreticians of sovereignty, calling for a new Europe on the basis of a division into a multitude of city-states. Thus though Muivah places the issue as one of India’s ‘foreign’ policy concerns (a sovereign state entering in a relation with a semi-sovereign state), the formulation has an ‘internal’ implication for India, because it affects the issue of the relation between the state and the political community, as if it is suggesting that wherever the political community has developed, it will try to distance itself from the centralised state to a varying degree, and thus we must in a juridicopolitical way also redefine the issue of law and sovereignty. The Indian Constitution, the interview tells us as its underlying consequence, may have defined India as a sovereign state and defined the nature of this sovereignty also, but the political community will ask once it gains confidence—is India sovereign because law (Constitution) defines it as such? Or, was there some ultimate authority or source that had the sovereign power to declare the law—the obligatory command? Austin’s belief that law is sovereign’s command is therefore at once an ‘external’ and ‘internal’ problematic, the dual nature of which is brought out by Muivah as a weapon in debate and deliberation to turn the table on the sovereignty preachers and the constitutionalists. Muivah shows

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the breaches in the juridical world where sovereignty and the right to wage war have remained organically linked. By linking the proposal to share sovereignty with the issue of peace and with the demand on the Indian state to outlaw war on the Nagas as a method to determine relation with Nagaland, Muivah is striking at the heart of the old theory of the origin of political power which had always relied on a mythical tale of contract, and arguing instead that today the political society is a reality distinct from the state with distinct claims to legitimacy, and if the original tale seems no longer congruent with politics, it is the tale that has to change, and not politics. Muivah effects another change in the theory. In this interview his logic is not that he is claiming freedom of the Nagas by his claim of establishing a sovereign Naga state independent of the Indian state, but by way of seeking acknowledgement of the legitimacy of Naga political society from the Indian rulers he is thus turning the theory of sovereignty on its head. Sovereignty is indivisible, but what will politics do when it finds that the concept is being used to buttress older forms of legitimation on which the dominant power has sought to convert itself into authority? Here by asking for a share of it, Muivah is de-linking sovereignty from legitimacy—sovereignty he seems to be saying is strictly a juridical question, let us not mystify it; legitimacy on the other hand is a political problem. Let us agree that the Naga problem is political, let us not mix the juridical issue with politics; let us now after having acknowledged the legitimacy of the Naga demand for independence deal with the juridical issues and details in a practical manner. Sovereignty by this stroke of argument becomes what it was in the beginning—namely that it was the solution of an existing problem, in those days a new way of thinking about power and rule, and not a claim of legitimacy. Today with the emergence of vibrant political societies all around the globe, sovereignty is ineffective as a weapon to merge the political society with the state. Who would have anticipated 60 years ago that the theory of popular sovereignty propounded by Rousseau among others would fall on its face in the entire post-colonial world in the wake of the multiple definitions and existences of the ‘people and popular groups’? Rousseau had ignored, or as some say, ‘tried to destroy the in-eradicable distinction between the political community and the state’,1 by ascribing the source of sovereignty to the ‘people’. If people were sovereign, what

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would happen to the state? Muivah does not resort to the old dualism of the ‘ruler’ and the ‘people’ to argue that Indian rule has to be overthrown. He proposes a constitutionalist answer by widening the fissure within the concept of sovereignty through linking sovereignty with responsibility and accountability. He is suggesting thereby that only by sharing sovereignty can become responsible to the political community and thus legitimate. What happens further when the distinction between the state and the political society is widened further? The immediate consequence is a redefining of the notion and laws of citizenship. Factors such as political actions, economic developments, or social changes, or the standard-setting decisions elsewhere (for instance on human rights issues) impact on sovereignty even internally. Thus, while sharing of sovereignty earlier implied that sovereignty was shared among several states facing common problems (for instance climate change or water sharing among riparian states), now it means that internally also it has to be shared to the extent that citizenship may have to be redefined. In fact the redefinition of citizenship means that the boundaries of the ‘external’ and the ‘internal’ are getting blurred. Thus, questions may arise from the process, which has given rise to Muivah’s proposals regarding sharing of sovereignty, namely: Can citizens demand a share of the sovereignty and refuse to be satisfied with formulations emanating from the mystical general will on which all constitutions are based? Can they demand changes of structures that are not simply constitutional amendments, but what are called at times ‘basic structures’? Muivah’s interview suggests that we have to take a contextual view here. Muivah does not claim that he is an Indian citizen; scores of his followers carry Indian passports while loyally following his path of independence; and that all in all the condition of sovereignty is like a state of equilibrium between the conflicting pulls of a centralising apparatus and a political society, producing a Pareto-like optimum condition in which the response to a specific challenge to sovereignty restricts injury to the holder and produces the least disturbance in the system. The rights of the state and the rights of the people are mutually defined in the system of sovereignty, and therefore Muivah’s vision suggests that sovereignty is a system, which necessarily involves pulls and bargaining, and a duality (or multiplicity) for which political actors must forge patient and complex responses.

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The historical justification of sovereignty as a moral claim has rested on the need for a stable order that supports co-existence among independent states, and given the ascendancy of imperial politics personified by the United States the doctrine of sovereignty still retains that historical relevance. Yet, there too the rights of the people and the global demand that the US state submit to the universal right to achieve clean climate, or sufficient balanced development, or universal nuclear disarmament prove that the doctrine of sovereignty is a conditional one. Muivah is therefore suggesting that the doctrine of sovereignty is too diverse and too conditional to be viewed as a uniform concept commanding a dimension of statehood. But let us not fool ourselves that he wants to reject the concept. He knows as a political founder of a future state that he needs power, his future Naga state will need juridical power; yet he also knows that if Nagas must achieve juridical legitimacy, then he must think along the line of the sharing of sovereignty, including provisions like dual citizenship (of the Nagas and possibly others), which will impact on issues of control of ‘national’ territory, definition of ‘national’ population, and ‘national’ institutions2—problems that intermittently raise their heads in the Hard Talk. What will happen to Nagas who for various reasons have dual loyalties (to Nagaland or Nagalim) or multiple loyalties (to Nagaland, India, a particular community say Angami community, or Manipur)? How will their fates be shaped by the concept of sovereignty that the Naga state will inhere through the Muivah route? Will there be a sharing also? Clearly our political practice is inadequate on this and more work is required on the theme of federalisation of sovereignty. But equally clear is the fact that in face of the rise of the political society as the modern collective political subject, the theory of sovereignty as the essential attribute of the union of the state and the political community will face continuous challenge from the former. And, to repeat, that challenge will come as a ‘practical question of politics’. It is here that another dimension opens up before us. If only practical engagements with politics open up the fissures in political theory, and the practical signals towards the displacements that are occurring are the only available things with us, it means that theoretically the implication of the displacement can only be half-clear at this stage. Therefore we cannot say at this stage whether the concept of sovereignty will have to be abandoned, all we can notice is the displacement occurring.

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As practical steps therefore Muivah’s ideas can be only half-clear, in the nature of tactic in politics, whose theoretical implications have to remain for now unsettled. Once we know them, we shall be able to put the issues that were supposed to be addressed by the concept of sovereignty as simple organisational problems of our political life, and not some imaginary treatment of real problems. We shall be able to address them by their scientific names denoting ‘concrete issues of relations’. Let us remember Lenin who in The State and Revolution described state functions of a future socialist state as purely post office functions, meaning thereby that all ideological pretensions of those functions must be taken away. If this is still a matter of ‘beyond’, the interview at least shows that uncertain and confused steps in form of internally unbalanced concepts are being taken towards the frontiers of political practice, and the displacement is a signal towards the journey. And once again the form in which this is occurring is significant. In the dialogue, by which I mean in the structure of the dialogue, you can see that there is no solution. There are two kinds of temporality present in the conversation—the time of the Naga versus the Indian state conflict, that is the sixty years of conflict, and the time of conversation, that is the present time when Muivah has come to India from exile to seek peace, justice, and honour. These two times never meet; they interact occasionally, but never join fully. The result is the autonomy of both these times, one remains the outsider to the other, and therefore always the clue to the reality of the other—precisely because none of these two is self-sufficient to explain itself, its journey, its career. Sovereignty in this case is thus subject to a ‘radical discovery of other than itself’. In this absence of solution, which one can ascertain from newspaper reports and personal knowledge, there is clearly disappointment for many; the interlocutor has not only deferred the solution, but seems to say to a wide audience, ‘I have done my best, and now it is really up to you.’ In this deferral war has been deferred, negotiation has been deferred, peace has been deferred, solution has been deferred—the inquest of sovereignty continues. The structure of the dialogue thus does not represent a morality play, the distance between the thematic (of peace and independence) and the problematic (of sovereignty) ensures the structure of the conversation—no fresco statement or dialogue in a play, no grand declaration, no fruitless reiteration, no special effects, no psychological ploy, but a series of hint that

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the inquest will continue, that practical steps will continue to be taken, and that arguments must renew because that will show that no myth (in this case of sovereignty) is beyond conversation. You are invited too to participate. And as a reader when you look back to the transcript and re-read, you also become a political practitioner involved in that incomplete conversation, with incomplete arguments, searching for a solution in your mind in a silent discourse on sharing of sovereignty after the Naga leader has long left Delhi without getting the peace and freedom that he wanted, perhaps disappointed but still strong enough to warn us that he would come back again to search for the deferred solution.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SHARING SOVEREIGNTY Did Muivah have the historical nature of the Indian state in mind when he proposed his ingenious solution? Except on few occasions in the transcript of the interview there is no reference to any historical factor in favour of the proposed solution. However, considering his strong belief that the solution is a possible one and his iteration that he is not asking for moon, there is ground for thinking that political practice as in this case is marked by strong common sense developed over time. In any case the question is a reasonable one, which we can attempt to answer. It is important to remember in this context that except the last 100 years of the Indian history, the Indian state was never the centralised one with which we are familiar today. There were always regional kingdoms, cumulative indigenous changes at local levels reflecting a wide variety of commercialisation, formation of social groups, and political transformations, and different rates of expansion, in cases slow and piecemeal penetration, of organised state power in the country. And, whenever powerful and determined kingdoms threatened to overwhelm the entire country and turn into an empire, the stakes became high and led to formation of alliances to protect regional autonomies. Imperial power in the pre-British times depended on many subsidiary alliances, and the decline of empire meant in the first place the instability of those alliances. Social groups in many places became classic classes, as

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happened with the Jats in the vast sprawling countryside of northern India, the gentry in the villages almost everywhere, and commercialisation, group formation, and political identity of major local groups went ahead hand in hand. Besides the sovereign power thus there were varieties of power. In times of the decline of the sovereign power, the confederal nature of state politics would be clearer; but even in the high times of imperial power and glory, it was evident that beyond some designated matters power devolved in a variety of ways and alliances played a big role. Regional viceroys were crucial in maintaining the subahs or the provinces, which would have to be given relative autonomy sooner or later else the imperial army would spend year after year in the area to control rebellions and lawlessness. So, if conquest was essential for an imperial power to form and take definite shape, state power became a combination of imperial administration and rule on one hand, alliances and grant of autonomy on the other. Local kingdoms evolved in a variety of ways, many evolved from the warrior orders, and there was almost always some flux and emptiness waiting to be filled up by some soon-to-emerge local powers.3 Alongside the transformed remains of old royal systems whether in the North or in the South, a range of local powers existed still largely outside the imperial and royal systems, which had been built on the rich produce of the valleys and the plains. Only lightly touched by the ‘mainstream of imperial and royal political culture’, there were petty kingdoms (for instance of the Santhals) based on community solidarities of the pastoral, hunting, slash and burn occupations and skill. These and many other petty kingdoms continued to exist for a long time with their own political organisations. In many cases as now people groaned under the burden of taxes imposed by revenue authorities at multiple levels. Yet, agriculture remained on the whole stable, trade routes remained open and trade flourished, and about 15 per cent of the population in the country at the higher side of the estimate (lower side 10 per cent) were townsmen.4 Of course there is a strong line of thinking that what we describe as the modern state, in the Indian case the modern colonial state, changed all this. The state became centralising, the relative autonomy of the regional kingdoms and the subahs were gone forever, the petty kingdoms of the indigenous people were done away with, taxation system was streamlined, and with a huge bureaucratic-industrial-financialeconomic-military organisation the state became the new modern

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state with welfare and economic functions as important as military and punitive functions. The justice and legal system backed by a basic law governing all conceivable relations in the country became another characteristic of this modern state. With independence came democracy, votes, political parties, press, and ‘a democratic public’ that changed the face of the state altogether. Therefore, the argument goes that the modern imperial-republican-centralising state basing itself on the politics of democracy and covering the entire country has no similarity with the confederal nature of political power which existed earlier. This is the sovereign state, the form of power is popular sovereignty, and the nation of India is the site of this power; and hence the question, how much of Muivah’s vision is realistic? Yet, the counter question can be: Is not this ‘modern’ state system and the form of state power described here in bare essentials also facing a crisis, and is not the post-colonial situation today exhibiting symptoms of the reappearance of the earlier patterns of power, best described as a combination or a co-existence of the centralised and capillary forms? And is the crisis so modern? As then, now too we can see palace coteries as if the coterie of the Wellesley Court still operates; as then now too the state seeks to extend its dominance by restructuring the cities and establishing new ones; as then now too community divisions were used in the interest of power and often reorganised at the service of power; as then now too the rituals of power suffer breakdown around incidents of crises in the leadership circles and thus usher in newer crises in power structures; as then now too the absorption of the ‘fringe’ economies and polities in the ‘mainstream’ cause enormous discontent and rebellions, and now too the administration has to be periodically renovated; and as then there were certain preconditions of (colonial) imperial rule to strike roots now too the imperial form of nation requires the preconditions to become stable—only the signals are different. What were and are those preconditions? To state briefly some of the preconditions are: destroying the legitimacy of other forms of rule, controlling the main levers of power including the routes to build subsidiary alliances, ever-increasing professionalism of the army coupled with a policy of recruitment of soldiers from all races, colours, stocks, and lands, and above all the ever-continuing policy to erect and establish ‘standards’ throughout the country—now of course

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called the national standards but then called the royal or the imperial standards—imposed by the necessity of the market and rule of law. Alliances then had helped annexations (recall the East India Company rule); they help still now whoever rules Delhi to bring to submission the recalcitrant political forces in the provinces and the peripheries. And above all, the task of ‘consolidating the traditional society’ was then crucial for the rule to consolidate, and the key was placing the peasant in a caste-structured society in a way so that peasant did not rebel yet caste dominance could remain as one of the main pillars of the rule. That strategy remains and is probably more crucial after the technological changes in the agrarian milieu in the 1970s and the 1980s of the last century. Imperial subordination on the basis of imperial economic leadership (and once again let us recall the World Trade Organization rules that reinforce this economic leadership in the countryside exactly as rules of trade determined the fate earlier) remains the permanent feature of rule. And, most significantly the popular basis of anti-colonialism is still being reproduced today, and once again, local democracy, peasant unrest, urban uprisings, caste stirrings, and the revolt of the peripheries signify the crisis of the present state system. Therefore, considering all these the suggestion to federalise sovereignty in view of the permanent characteristics of the Indian state system may not be all that strange.5 Indeed, Muivah’s suggestion on sovereignty and his use of the phrase ‘special federal relationship’ carry a great similarity with the pattern of the state power that existed in India for a long time and are relevant in the perspective of the crisis faced by an ever-centralising state power in India today. The ‘uniqueness of the Naga situation’, which Muivah repeatedly refers to in course of the interview, is inbuilt in the relevant historical material available with us. Muivah’s following response may seem strange in the context of the immediate history of 60 years of the country, but will seem familiar once we keep the long history of the Indian state in mind. Muivah responds to some questions in the following way: Karan Thapar (the interviewer): (And) the talks are actually making progress? Thuingaleng Muivah: It is making progress in the sense that when Mr. Vajpayee’s government recognised the uniqueness of Naga history,

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we also accepted his invitation to come to India. Actually, you know, so far as the venue of the talk is concerned, it had to be somewhere out of India, but since they have recognised positively the uniqueness of Naga history, we should also honour them and reciprocate. So we did that. So we accepted his invitation to come to India. KT: Let me try and understand your present position. I believe that over the last eight years from 1997, you no longer stress your traditional demand for sovereignty; instead you are now asking for, to use your words, a special federal relationship with India. Is that right? TM: But here the question is—sovereignty of Naga people belongs to the Naga people and to the Naga people alone. That cannot be otherwise. So, Nagas have the right to decide their future, determine their fate also, so long as that is there, of course adjustments can be made. KT: But you are, in your negotiations with the Indian government, at the moment talking about a special federal relationship with India? TM: The problem is this—so long as the identity of Nagas are recognised and honoured, that’s possible. KT: So as long as the uniqueness of Naga identity is recognised and honoured, a special federal relationship is possible. TM: When we say special federal relationship, it has to be on the terms of the agreement that can be arrived at. KT: Quite right, on terms of the agreement that can be arrived at. TM: Ya! KT: Let’s explore in a sense what sort of agreement can be arrived at. When you talk about a special federal relationship with India, are you in fact talking of a special federal position within the Indian Constitution? TM: It should be a federation of India and Nagaland. KT: A federation of India and Nagaland? TM: Ya! KT: But not a special federal position within the Indian Constitution? TM: No, within the Indian Constitution, that is not possible. KT: But a special federal relationship between the two is possible? TM: Yes.6

Muivah arrives in this way at another aspect of the rule, namely that the basic law on which a rule thrives never facilitates dialogue—at least a dialogue with one whose existence is beyond the rule, the regime. Dialogue has to be therefore based on a combination of dialogues on the street and chamber conversations. We shall see soon the implication of this insight.

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THE STRUCTURE OF DIALOGUE: FEARLESS SPEECH AND OTHER THINGS We have to first go back to the issue of the structure of the dialogue. The interviewer begins by admitting the legitimacy of the Naga revolt to concede the ground for dialogue, and remarks as if in an opening gambit, ‘In 1997, after decades of bitter fighting, the two sides declared a cease-fire and over the last 8 years they have had 41 rounds of talks. So where do things stand today?’ And then he repeats Muivah’s comradein-arms Isak Swu’s statement, as if reminding Muivah the ground rule of this dialogue, namely that this talk will not be on the misdeeds of the Indian state but on the negotiations, ‘There is a time when fighting for a good cause is a must and there is also a time when negotiation is unavoidable… Now we have come to the stage of political negotiation. The Naga people should be wise to seize this finest opportunity for finding an amicable solution’, and follow this reminder by asking, ‘Does this mean that the time is right for settlement of the Naga issue with India?’ It means really, Tell us Muivah, how far you will concede, because you know that you have to negotiate with the mighty state of India, and you really have no option of going back to hills and killing again… Muivah of course takes up the peace gambit and shows he is ready for the game and therefore he reinforces the need for conversation and dialogue precisely because this is ‘a unique situation’, because the Indian Constitution cannot provide the ground of solution and hence there must be some special agreement—a federation between India and Nagaland. In this federation everything is unique. Thus, under the Muivah’s proposed solution, in the joint defence agreement, India will defend the Nagas if the latter are attacked from outside, but Nagas will have the right to remain neutral in case of a military conflict between India and another country. Similarly India will be in charge of external affairs, but if a matter there under concerns the Nagas, Nagaland will have the right to be represented in such a discussion and arrangement. So it will be not merely a situation like the pre-1950 situation, but more, in the sense that this will not be a return to the old India that inherited the British mantle and started exercising sovereignty over anything that it defined as Indian. The new agreement will have to be guaranteed by both the Indian Constitution and the Naga Constitution. Guarantee against any breach of trust and agreement was important because India

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could change the constitution, hence a purely constitutional provision such as Articles 370 or 371 would not do. This is how the conversation proceeds at this point: KT: Could you accept some form of guarantee that as far as Nagaland and its involvement with India was concerned, the constitution would never be amended. Could you accept that? TM: Here you know, we are coming to the point. The agreement, according to the terms of the agreement, the relationship will have to be worked out. The agreement, which is going to be arrived at should be incorporated in the Indian Constitution, equally it should also be incorporated in the Naga constitution. KT: But if the agreement were incorporated in the Indian Constitution in such a way that it can never be amended and you have that guarantee, then could you accept a special position within the Indian Constitution? TM: No. KT: Not even then? TM: That cannot be, Karan, the certainty or the surety cannot be guaranteed. KT: And because it can’t be guaranteed you can’t accept a position within the constitution. TM: That is the point. We cannot accept it. KT: And yet the anomaly is that at the moment Mr. Muivah, you travel on an Indian passport? TM: You are right but you know, in filling up the forms I specifically mentioned that loyalty or allegiance to the Indian Constitution is not applicable; it is not acceptable. KT: In other words you made a point of excluding that? TM: Ya!

The fugitive’s search for justice is on, he is ready to talk, he knows the minefield on the way; and as the reader can see from his reply on issue of constitutional guarantees, but more important on the passport issue he knows the battle that is ahead. He is leading a national struggle, therefore he is aware of the mechanisms of securing justice, he is also aware of the institutional games, he cannot trust a boundary commission to assure the unification of the Naga areas in a Naga national state, and while he is ready to bide time and discuss, he is insistent that the three pillars of Naga nationhood must be principally recognised, respected, and addressed: (a) the fact of injustice, and the restoration

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of justice; (b) assumption of political power even though in the form of sharing sovereignty with India; and (c) consolidation of the nation through the unification of Naga territories, which the state of India had dismembered and partitioned 40 years back. But what about trust without which all will fail, everything—talk, time, guarantee, patience, and goodwill—will fail? The rebel leader has to leave the matter partly to fate, for that is the indeterminate outcome of such a battle of words… And thus the uncertain, part-pensive part-resigned words based on a hard recognition of truth: KT: You’ve been talking to the Indian government for four months. You’ve had eight rounds since you came to India in December. Do you have a deadline in mind or can the talks continue indefinitely? TM: I think it is too early to talk about it. Anyway, but in a way, here if progress cannot be made, naturally it will be a waste of time. KT: But at the moment you have said progress is being made. TM: Slowly, but not on big issues. KT: Not on big issues; are you satisfied with the progress or are you beginning to feel frustrated? TM: Well, what to do? If we cannot foresee any progress, positive steps to be taken from the Indian side then there is no point to be confident also. KT: But at this moment you haven’t reached that point. At this moment you are prepared to give the Indians more time. Is that right? TM: Yes, but you know we should not be too presumptuous. KT: Things could go wrong? TM: Things can go wrong any time. KT: So that the audience can understand I want to ask you a blunt question. Are you an optimist or are you becoming pessimist? TM: So, I mean to say that if the uniqueness of Naga history is recognised… KT: And it has been. TM: And if the solution is to be sought on the basis of reason, naturally one has to be hopeful. KT: That means that Thuingaleng Muivah is hopeful? TM: Is hopeful so long as that acceptance of the uniqueness of the Naga history is respected by the present government. KT: So on that basis given time and given sincerity we could have a political solution. TM: Sure.

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KT: Mr. Muivah, a pleasure talking to you. TM: Thank you.

So dialogue ends with the recognition of truth—the truth of an uncertain outcome, of success and failure hanging in balance, of the fear of one who knows that the system did not give him and his people justice, and therefore the anxiety, will it agree to conceding justice now in form of an accord? And, then the burden of circumstances, again called as truth—which the dialogist knows will compel him to return to dialogue once more. In Fearless Speech Michel Foucault speaks of the rules of dialogue as the basis of the hermeneutics of the subject7—in this case the subject who politically engages, or engages in politics. Who can speak fearlessly? What are the conditions under which the speaker is tempted to speak unafraid—unafraid of consequences, because either s/he knows that it does not matter if his/her head is cut off as a consequence of fearless speech, or s/he has been assured that the head will remain? What is the degree to which the speaker will venture in speaking the truth? How can the degree be determined? Is it determined beforehand so that the speaker knows of the limit that cannot be transgressed and therefore s/he respects the degree, or is it decided in course of the exchange of words, in situ, so that the speaker has to take the risk—the risk of truth—and the speaker has to accept the truth of the risk? Or, has there to be a prologue before fearless speech can begin, like extracting assurance from the powerful on whose face the unpalatable truth will be spoken to the effect that no harm will be done to the truth teller, or a prologue that establishes the mutuality of interests in the dialogue and hence the conversation can continue? In all these considerations two processes are in operation: first, a process of power that involves contests over positions, wealth, control, possessions, social situations, protocols, and rules; second, a process of subject-formation on the basis of the politics of the dialogue. Was Muivah taking here a maximal position or a minimal one? We have no way to know the answer till history tells us the outcome of this long battle of war and words. Was his suggestion of ‘a special federal relation’ by which the sovereignty will be shared in a way to forge new political identity superseding the given division between the powerful Indian state and the small Naga nation a step towards a new subject position? There is no certain answer here, none of these posers can

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be definitely answered—all we can say is that politics is being created here, and dialogue is the site on which the war–peace continuum or if you like the interregnum is being played out. Do we know the effect of this exchange of words or the plan in Muivah’s mind when he gave the interview? Again we can know the answers only to a small extent,8 because it was a process where the position was being created step by step with risks evident on all sides, and the most important thing was that he had to converse with, and he was indeed addressing the unseen interlocutor, the absent partner in this conversation—the Indian state, which was listening to each word, each gesture from behind the curtain—as if to prepare for the next round of the battle of words. The question is: Is the progression from war to conversation, to which Muivah refers to repeatedly and at times with hope, a fundamental one to the extent that this can be seen as a progression from sovereignty to dialogue? We can only hope that the conversationalists—one present here in the script and the other absent—will be able to work out in time the structure and the necessary details of co-existence, which humanity had thought till this day war was the best means to clarify and settle.

THE LEGACY OF POLITICS IS IN THE UNEASY INTERSTICE BETWEEN CRITICISM AND POSITION Recognition of truth thus means recognition also of the fact that truth is produced through a contentious process, that the dialogic process is conflictive. Muivah seems to be aware of the fact. Thus, a few months later in another interview in Bangkok with Subir Bhaumik, a BBC correspondent, Muivah admitted that he was ‘a tired man, very tired’ after eight years’ of protracted negotiations with the Government of India with no end in sight: ‘We Nagas have taken the positive steps, we have come down from our demand of absolute sovereignty but the Indian government seems to be playing for time.’ He further said, We climbed down from our position of absolute sovereignty. We agreed to have joint responsibility for the defence of Nagaland, we decided to leave the responsibility of external affairs to India unless some issue

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affected our interests directly, in which case we suggested Delhi should consult us, we also decided to accept Indian currency. We argued that Nagaland could not be defended by the Indians alone, Nagas must be responsible for that as well in some form... We understand and appreciate India’s security concerns, and so we will accept the presence of Indian army on Naga soil. We will also wish to be consulted on any external issue that affects the interests of the Nagas.9

On being pressed, Muivah said two important things. First, the basic minimum was the reunification of the Naga territory. In this second interview he said, We will never compromise on our demand for the reunification of the Naga homeland. We were divided first by the British and then India perpetuated the divisions. The NSCN wants a unified Naga homeland and we will either have it or we will fight for it… We were not responsible for that violence. We do not want the territories of the Meiteis or the Assamese or anybody else. We only want that all Naga territories, where Nagas have lived for generations, should be merged with Nagaland to form a unified Naga homeland. If you were in my place, you will also never compromise with this demand. This is crucial for the future of the Nagas.

Here Muivah was pointing out one of the basic conditions of the success of any formula of sharing sovereignty, accepting ‘territory as the kernel of the nation’. Give the national group first its own territorial site, and then talk of sharing power. There can be subsequent territorial reorganisation, as Indian state did to itself, but reorganisation of territory must be high as priority in the dialogic agenda. Therefore, when the interviewer asked, Bhaumik: But what happens when India says it cannot accept this demand? Muivah: If India thinks it will deprive the Nagas to keep the Meiteis and the Assamese happy, it can go ahead. It may find some traitors amongst the Nagas, someone like Khaplang, accept a settlement on those lines. But we will never accept a settlement without reunification of the Naga territories. This is the bottom line. (See fn. 9)

Second, the renewal of ceasefire would be henceforth contingent on a meaningful move by India in response to the Naga demand of

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sharing sovereignty. As he said, ‘India will either have to come up with an acceptable settlement within 31 January 2006 when the ceasefire expires. Otherwise, there will be no further talks. This is our last ceasefire with India unless we have a settlement.’ Clearly here again Muivah was pursuing the strategy of speaking to the Indian government through the interlocutor. No peace without territory, as the soldier had always said everywhere, at all ages. The soldier is tired, but he must fight on, as he had done, always. In this war of words, and the threatened war of arms, the two registers are apparent—Muivah the soldier and the nationalist leader who must unify his land, because this land contains his people; and Muivah the visionary, who must work out the form of a post-nationalist existence, which means co-existence with other peoples, countries, through finding an appropriate mode of sharing sovereignty. Yet, we must not lose sight of the fact that the soldier had found out the second path. The connection between the two registers is also therefore apparent. It is in this way that politics in its materiality is playing itself out and demonstrating its material existence. Politics is the sociological arena where different registers are always hovering—different registers and different significances. Because politics coveys a sense of making, it is like a critic always aspiring ‘to make a point’. Demonstrative of this elective affinity with criticism, politics never allows anything to settle, never stops short of attempting to be fully content. Always eager to move on, politics wants to transform the ideal into real, or more correctly saying, to use the words of Walter Benjamin, ‘transforming the appearance of the ideal into the existence of the ideal’.10Politics, like criticism, in this way shows the virtual possibility of transforming the truth of a particular position as the highest philosophical problem. This possibility of turning a position into an issue of philosophy, demonstrated through means of criticism, can arise only in a political world. It is this political world of dialogue that is now subjecting everything to critique—including sovereignty, territoriality, the truth of arms, and the convenience of talking. That is because in this world of dialogue, you do not compare, but configure. Sites, positions, actions, discourses, and institutions are configured into a political milieu, where the context is this configuration. And therefore to politics an ever-vexing question is, how much do you concede to the context? The legacy of politics persists in the uneasy interstice between criticism and position. Muivah’s words thus carry these two registers—soldier

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and the visionary, nationalist and the post-nationalist, criticism and position, comparison and configuration.

NOTES 1. F.H. Hinsley, Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 155. 2. Nathan Glazer, ‘Dual Citizenship as a Challenge to Sovereignty’, in How Governments Respond—Sovereignty under Challenge, ed. John D. Montgomery and Nathan Glazer (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 33–54. 3. On the discrete and the plural nature of sovereignty in India before the colonial time, see Margaret Frenz, ‘Concept of Rule in Malabar’, in From Contact to Conquest—Transition to British Rule in Malabar, 1790–1805 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), Chapter 5, pp. 141–69. 4. C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 36. 5. I describe at length the structural revisions in the Indian system of rule in the post-colonial period in A Biography of the Indian Nation, 1947–1997 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001). 6. Talk held on 29 April 2005. Available online at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=D4k0PgL1Kok (accessed on 6 December 2007). 7. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001); see also his The Hermeneutics of the Subject (Lectures at the College de France, 1981–82), ed. Frederic Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2003). 8. Sanjib Baruah for instance noted the interview favourably in his comments in The Telegraph, ‘Think Out of the Box’, 14 May 2005. 9. Interview with Muivah taken by Subir Bhaumik on 17 January 2006; available online at http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=5373 (accessed on 12 January 2008). See also http://www.hvk.org/articles/0505/10.html (accessed on 25 May 2005). 10 . Walter Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ now published in Walter Benjamin—Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), vol. 1, p. 334.

Section Two

Positions

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7 The Labour of Memory

T

he earlier section discussed situations that mark the emergence of the political subject. The present section will aim to discuss several positions reflecting on this phenomenon. Here I shall discuss issues, such as memory in the making of the political subject, the role of the political subject in being the constituent power of the society, the possibilities of transnational citizenship in terms of freeing the subject from national limits, and finally, the possibility of the subject in reconstituting itself in an age of empire. In the following pages I discuss these themes not in abstract, but I try to see how certain crucial positions have evolved in current political thinking on these questions. Reflections on those positions will help us understand better what I tried to present in the earlier section in form of certain historical expositions. I take up here first the question of memory. Memory also plays a part in the making of the nation, when nation appears as the political subject, which it has done for long parts in our modern history. From Ernst Renan to Benedict Anderson, scholars have variously shown, of course from different points, the crucial part that memory plays in the origin and spread of nationalism. If Renan thought, nation like a human being had memory, Benedict Anderson shows, how the capitalist era through the means of print-industry and other modes of reproduction has made the mass-scale production of cultural artefacts possible, thereby making ‘national memory’ a reality. Yet again other scholars such as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger have shown that as with several other things, memory is also invented.

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In my own work I have shown through detailed examination of what can be called the ‘archives of memory’ of the peasants and semi-bonded rural labour in the closing years of the 19th and the early years of the 20th century how popular memory too had a structure to it—how memory played a role in the recall of place, event, rebellion, revolt, natural calamity, and deposing before a magistrate and a judge when dragged to the court to give evidence of which plot of land he or his father used to work decades ago in order to for the court to ascertain which land belonged to whom in deciding disputed issues in a survey settlement operation. We can broadly say that both phenomenological and structural approaches mark the discussion. The relation of memory and political activism is an extremely contentious one. A complementary relation exists between history, within which politics occurs, and the demands and desires of memory. Yet memory sometimes appears as the obverse of history making. Human action, by which I mean political action here, sometimes overcomes the bounds of passivity imposed by memory, and what is important here is that, this is also what determines history. In context of the discussion on the emergence of the political subject, we have to recall Paul Ricouer’s warning: ‘The main point … consists … in denouncing the illusory attribution of memories to ourselves, when we claim to be their original owners.’1 In this chapter I intend to discuss this question of the relation between the historical emergence of the political subject and memory through a detailed examination of an article, which deals with this theme and gained wide circulation a decade ago. The text I am referring to here is an article by a cultural historian of our time, Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Memories of Displacement: The Poetry and Prejudice of Dwelling’. In the context of the discussion on the political subject we can put the problematic in the following way: Can a historical event be seen only as a happening that is brought into continuous being by the play of subject memories, or be understood as an ‘action’ resulting from complex and contentious circumstances and forces? How do we appreciate the complementary relation between the problems internal to history and the demands and desires of memory, so much so that together they form parts of a single operation—the historiographical operation—to act eventually as the background of the emergence of the political subject? Even though memory appears as the opposite of history making, political action overcomes the bounds of passivity imposed by memory and this is also what determines history.

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THE VICTIMS OF PARTITION AND REMEMBERED VILLAGES Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay first appeared in 1996 in the journal Economic & Political Weekly under the title, ‘Remembered Villages’; it was later republished under the title, ‘Memories of Displacement: The Poetry and Prejudice of Dwelling’ as part of his book, Habitations of Modernity—Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, where Chakrabarty took pains to locate the theme of this essay along with some other related themes in the context of his broader argument about modernity, subjects of modernity, etc. ‘Remembered Villages’ occupies a critical position in the history of cultural studies and post-colonial studies—I am speaking here of the genre of cultural studies, which developed in this country and elsewhere (particularly in US academic campuses) in an atmosphere when large groups of social scientists in the name of leaving a dogmatic version of Marxism left the materialist view of history and politics in the wake of the defeat of socialism in 1989. ‘Remembered Villages’ became a sort of cult writing in such milieu, and a compulsory item to be cited in the literature on the Indian partition, in particular the partition in the east. Some social scientists eulogised this ‘culturalist’ turn, and claimed that path-breaking research in combining the theoretical apparatus of the social sciences with critical methods of the literary and humanist disciplines had become possible with this turn.2 Chakrabarty tried to elaborate this point in course of his several essays published in the book. He said that he wanted a dialogue on the questions raised, and appealed that history should be seen as ‘a democratic dialogue with the subaltern’.3 In course of our discussion on the phenomenon of labour of memory in the emergence of the political subject, we shall of course reflect all these associated points. Chakrabarty’s essay tells us of the way some Hindu refugees after coming over to West Bengal remembered their villages, lives, communities, professions, also remembered the ‘others’, the Muslims, who did not have to leave their lands. The essay notes what it describes as the poetry and the pathos of this remembrance, and tells us that the way memory works as in these instances is beyond modern historical scrutiny. Chakrabarty says that his ‘aim is to understand the relation between memory and identity’, the ‘shared structure of a sentiment’, ‘the sense of trauma (after a great calamity such as partition) and its

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contradictory relation to the question of the past’. Trauma is memory. In this context, one of Chakrabarty’s principal arguments seems to be that ‘the narrative structure of the memory of trauma works on a principle opposite to that of any historical narrative’. According to him, ‘a historical narrative leads up to the event in question, explaining why it happened, and why it happened when it did, and this is possible only when the event is open to explanation. What cannot be explained belongs to the marginalia of history.’4 Conceived within a sense of trauma and tragedy, these remembrances do not lead up to partition. Their recall is of a particular type; they recall the life suddenly terminated there, on the other side, without notice, the communities abruptly fractured, the villages or the desh (country) abandoned in an inexplicable hurry—all that the history of partition cannot explain, and cannot convince the readers who the sufferers or the victims of trauma were. The trauma in short is overwhelming, the event in this case meaningless. Chakrabarty therefore talks of the language of homelessness, which we should presume from his argument is beyond historical understanding. This language is made of a mixture of the sacred and aesthetics, which he claims is a ‘modern value’, whose elements are patriliny, the idea of antiquity, village connections with nationalist history, and modern secular literary narratives of the beauty of the landscape of rural Bengal. In short romanticism (a modern phenomenon) leads to trauma and recall. It builds the sacred, reconnects in a particular way with history and nationalism, yet builds in a particular romantic way a pastoral view of life—all of which determine the relation between memory and ethnicity, which will then situate the ‘other’ in an ambiguously opposite pole to this remembering animal, who is the pastoral, romantic, revivalist, modern, forsaken, uprooted, refugee Hindu. We may ask, historically who is this figure? What does this figure politically signify? Chakrabarty of course does not ask that. His culturalist explanation stops identifying this figure. Our inquiry in this chapter— and for the purpose of this chapter (this is important because we cannot burden Chakrabarty and the essay with our expectations)—can of course begin, as if it were a game, from there. We can then observe this figure’s particular history, that is the history this figure has created and played a part in, this figure’s limits and potency, the historical trajectory of this figure from a struggling, at times melancholic, bhadralok, one


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drawn to Leftist politics in the beginning and then reaching out to the revivalist right wing politics of the Hindutva in the later days. One can also see the class structure of the particular ways in which different people negotiate the present—some had to go to the distant islands used by the colonial authorities as penal colony to rebuild lives, some had to go to a completely alien land, dry and un-arable, to sustain; and some wrote poetry and fictions and non-fiction in course of salaried lives.5 We can also see the total metamorphosis of this figure from the romantic-pastoral-idyllic to a consumerist, upwardly mobile, quarrelsome urban inhabitant. This figure of the ‘pessoptimist’,6 the wailing Hindu Bengali, may be good for literature and sentimental evocations, but without much worth in politics, except as the foot soldiers of certain urban and semi-urban formations. Also, one can argue that Chakrabarty’s notion that these remembrances stop short of reaching the event does not tell us much, because we can point out the obvious and say that these recalls indeed tell us what the Great Partition was. In fact similar to the structure of historical explanation, memory too shows a structure to it—lending to explanation, more importantly amenable to being a part of history. Just as earlier memories fed into history, similarly these memories born of the event will feed into the subsequent history that this event would create. This is precisely what critical studies on partition are showing.7 In brief, one can say, the attempt to separate beyond a point history and memory is a failed one; the sign of infantilism that seems to have just discovered with joy humanities as a field of studies or literature as human pursuits. In fact, more than any other event in recent Indian history the Great Partition shows the materiality of politics—in the way people killed each other, left places, sought to go back, rebuilt their lives, made their political choices (in Delhi many became the core strength of the Jan Sangh, in West Bengal many joined the Left8), remembered the past in particular ways, and as I showed in The Marginal Nation, made strategic use of their memory, states used their geopolitical imaginations, people demanded their homelands, and many, many other things—it was politics working in a material way all through. Chakrabarty’s views on memory however would have none of these. History for him would not explain why they chose to recall in their own ways, the time of recall, and their strategic location in nationalist politics in the region in the wake of decolonisation, where without the

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respective fictive ethnic cores nations would not have come into being. Of course to be fair, we cannot expect the genre known as cultural studies to provide us with the tools of understanding the dynamics of a region, geopolitics, or the politics of decolonisation. Its concern is culture in the modern age, and we should therefore stick to the ground to deliberate on the way this ‘culture’ is conceptualised, and therefore the way Chakrabarty has chosen to locate his subjects of modernity, and its implications for a theory of the political subject. In that case of course we have to begin from the beginning, and ask, if we are to locate its subjects, what is modernity, at least modern politics? If history is a sign of modernity, as Chakrabarty seems to suggest, then we must locate the historiographical operation in reality, shorn of all metaphors. Chakrabarty for all his efforts in the introduction to the book has not been able to give us a working definition of modernity, his words I quote: ‘Modernity is easy to inhabit, but difficult to define.’9 That is because it is considered to be an attitude, a regime of outlook and attitude; and because you de-link it from capitalism you can see in this only an attitude, often inexplicable in terms of the co-existence of ‘modern’ and the ‘pre-modern’. And, second, because modernity in this cultural repertoire is primarily an attitude, and has less to do with the politics of our times (let us grant, these are modern times) whose material forms are all before our eyes, it is a regime under which we all live—not out of choice, but because it is a regime … therefore ‘easy to inhabit’.10 Chakrabarty adds that the debates on modernity/premodernity, or secularism/communalism, in which he along with his colleagues of subaltern historians’ group had participated has now reached a closure; ‘self-reflexivity about the political and the modern is itself something political’. It now needs ‘dialogic narratives’ (p. 114), ‘humanist critique, which can create the ethical moment in our narratives and offer, not a guarantee against the prejudice that kills, but an antidote with which to fight it. History must, like literature and philosophy, imbibe this spirit of critique’ (p. 148). So finally with the culturalist turn, the difference is obliterated, and we can now happily forget the quarrels of the past. On two counts this intellectual move is an act in bad faith. First, it confines the debates as if they were a matter between two groups of intellectual adversaries, and had nothing to do with politics, and the fault lines in politics. Confining the debates to intellectual polemics


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means avoiding politics, by which I mean avoiding the insistence on praxis, on taking a political stand of combating communalism, pointing out much of the sterility of the intellectual debates, and indicating the critical path forward.11 Second, throughout the essay Chakrabarty never mentions, as he does not in the introduction, that only politics makes sense of the binaries, and dialectics though a dirty word these days helps us to see the closure and makes an opening. It is from this political sense that we must revisit the memory–history question, and examine their relationship anew. Historiographical operation is a political process. I intend to speak of that here to put the matter in that perspective.

MEMORY, HISTORY,

AND THE

ARCHIVES

Historiographical operation of course begins with the archive. In archives, for instance on the Great Partition, we shall find hundreds and thousands of letters, memos, reports, notes, diaries, parts of books, pamphlets, manifestos, drafts of resolutions, texts of actual legislative enactments—all or most of all that would be constituting the archives, we must remember at this point, were oral in origin, contemporary in nature, and therefore present in sentiment. The professional historian is a reader there, inasmuch as our professional cultural chronicler is. Chakrabarty is a reader of certain literary texts. That is to say, if this history writing is a modern activity, the authors of cultural studies are equally modern, and we do not want to quarrel; but on many a count, they are more modern. More than remembering, theorising the remembrance in defence of the apolitical is the most modern of our intellectual pursuits. However, before we can consult the archive, there has to be archiving of material. Even though hypothetically everything can be archived, only some get through the gates to classify as ‘archival material’. For the historian if that is a grand deposit, for the cultural studies theorist or the cultural chronicler again only some select texts constitute the chronicler’s archive. Thus, one may ask, why pick up these texts that speak of the abandoned villages, and why not other available ones that remember other things, separate activities—of politics, of families, of dreams, etc., for instance, the remembrances of Mani Singh, or

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Manikuntala, or Ila Mitra, or indeed of scores of other memorial accounts of those who stayed back with equally potent dreams of a united land?12 In short, what our cultural studies chronicler or the theorist does is analogous to the work of the historian. Only the style is different, and at times the claim. In any case, we have to remember that to relate a product to a place—and this is what Chakrabarty does—is to envisage history as operation, that is to say as a process, which has these three elements: place (location, profession, or milieu), procedure (analytical way, history writing, or chronicle composing), and the construction of a text (an act of literature).13 If we consider the operation as a procedure, a process, we are insured against positivism—precisely this was the intention when we said that archiving has to be seen as a part of a critical social activity and process. Archives produce documentary proof; in the same way the literary texts become the evidence of the cultural theorist. We must be aware of this gesture involved. This gesture of setting things aside, and then drawing them to this side, that is to the writer’s table, of treating them as a composite material, and then working on them is the way in which the break with oral techniques had been accomplished long back in the past, and progress was made from oral testimony. Archives break with the provisional nature of oral testimony. The act of doing history thus begins. The point is: Does the cultural studies theorist or chronicler do anything significantly different as an operation? The answer is no. Both want to exhibit proof, both are gestures, both use oral testimonies of what was the ‘present’ to say what was the past. Yet, the exercise of making analogy is of minor importance, for we are not in the business of scoring points here. The point is that in studying the victims and actors of the Great Partition, their politics in enacting, selectively remembering, forgetting again selectively, and politically acting on the consequences of the event, we are actually studying an operation—at whose core lie the relationships between testimony, documentary proof, the exercise of writing on that passage (transition or transformation), and more significantly effecting through the exercise the passage from memory to history—an operation which always suffers from the crisis produced by the dual existence of traces and discontinuities. Paul Ricoeur writes, ‘A crisis of testimony: this is the harsh way documentary history contributes to the healing of memory.’14 Can we think of then a general crisis of testimony and


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our ‘declarative’ memory? I think this is precisely what has happened today, and this is what a group of scholars writing on the history that the Great Partition in the east has created has described at length.15 To be truthful, politics as action is most responsible for paving the way for a general crisis of memory to emerge. For, this is now the time of the overwhelming present. Partition historiography indeed has a notable lesson for us in this respect, particularly for those of us who are occupied above all with ‘our modernity’, and following that ‘our time’, ‘our epoch’, and ‘our present’. It once again proves that the main task of critical philosophy as related to history is to reflect upon the limits that the knowledge of history while considering itself to be an absolute would attempt to transgress. Therefore we reflect upon our modernity, and this reflection is typical of our modern engagements. Dislodged from the shaky state of having to constantly reflect on our modern time, historical criticism moves towards the transgression by way of producing or helping to produce political knowledge. This is important to note, for while the concept of modernity bases essentially on a history of representations, and therefore eternally repeatable in some variable forms (thus our modernity/their modernity, current modernity/past modernity, global modernity/particular modernity, etc.), historical criticism supersedes the banality, and produces actions, which transgresses limits produced by memory and creates new present times and conditions.16 Historical criticism offers us new insights into what Pierre Nora calls the strange places of memory. Is this a locality? An archive built in mind? A nation? Any other place between history and memory, or a family, or any other collective—are these strange places? In any case we have a rupture, a loss, but also the emergence of a new phenomenon, called memory– history.17 But there is the loss of memory–history also along with the emergence of a history of histories, in other words, the historiographical consciousness. Historicised memory kills ‘pure’ memory, and becomes another history. The horizontal view of social bond breaks down. Divisions set in as more and more commemoration takes place of memory. In the era of commemoration, an undiluted political act, the meaning of patrimony changes from one of inherited property to the possessions of who we are. The significance is profound, for that is how the historical nation emerges—the lament of the partitioned people becomes one of the elements of the ethnic core of the nation.

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Will these places of memory disappear? Judging from the trajectory of the activities of the partitioned people, politics will be largely responsible for contesting the domination of commemorative memory. Of course traces will remain—the archival trace, the psychic trace, and the political trace. But the domination of memory over politics has gone through the operation of history. Declarative memory and procedural memory both point to the lived body, and as Ricoeur says, the lived body finally is an active body that not only commemorates or remembers, but acts and refuses to remain solely an object.18 This body not only recalls, it also forgets, and then forgives too. The age of religious wars in Europe (1559–1714) produced in course the modern European state system. Looking back at ‘our religious wars’ (after all the analogy is not very stretched, though national and princely armies were not deployed in our case, thus killings were more haphazard and stopped quickly), we can say that at the end of the countless killings and displacements, the states in South Asia found their shape and location, the borders were more or less durably drawn, religious–ethnic identities of the political formations were clarified, and even though large numbers of people died, populations that started growing at the end of the wars assured of better times, people commemorated independence with some silently living with their memories, and most important, every single participant in these wars, whether Hindu or Muslim or Dalit, gentleman or uncivilised, baboo or peasant, had this idea that the female sex was inferior—it was a responsibility or burden to be protected, sacrificed, or conquered in those hard times fallen upon the country. And like the witch hunters in the times of the European religious wars the witch hunters in the Great Partition saw no way out of the poverty, disease, crime, war-time famine, deaths, subordination, etc. except by killing the witches, devils, satans, and infidels, and claiming to cleanse the earth. There the balance stood as far as politics was concerned in 1947. In case of Europe it took a 100 years only for the renewal of wars now in national forms. Memory of past wars was extremely short lived. In our case, ‘national memory’ into which all these individual memories had been inserted was even shorter in life. War flared up in 1948, and then again and again through the subsequent 60 years. Clearly the imprint of ambiguity that had marked the genesis of the Great Partition as an event was there on the relation between history and memory also, both of which were to be essential ingredients of future politics.


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HISTORY, MEMORY, AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE POLITICAL SUBJECT Once again here it is important to understand the respective roles that archive and memory play. If we remember that knowledge, power, and subjectivity are three great components that Foucault for instance identified as elements of modern time and history, memory we shall realise is an apparatus of not so much knowledge and power, as of subjectivity. But if memory helps the process of ‘subjectivation’ or ‘self-formation’, knowledge has a more intimate relation with power. Knowledge of the archive (in the broad sense of deposits) questions the assumed story of the formation of the self that now wants to become an agency of power. One can cite here the fascinating work of Romila Thapar, Somnatha—The Many Voices of a History, where she traces the origins of several memories of the plunder of the Somnatha Temple by the Mahmud of Ghazni, and shows through a historiographical analysis by means of documentary evidence, how the modern Hindu self has formed where the plunder of Somnatha is an important component.19 Analysis of archive is important, because as Foucault once pointed out in Archaeology of Knowledge (II.5), it is both close to us and different from our current time. Partition archive will tell us of all the possibilities; also it will tell us the disruptions in history. What happens to the self in the light of the archive? The philosopher reminds us that the diagnosis in this sense would not establish the recognition of our identity through the play of distinctions. It would only establish that we are different, that our reason is the difference between discourses, our history is the difference between times, and our self the differences between the masks. Memory is one such mask. In some sense in all these references we are speaking of the conditions of modernity. By conditions in this case I am indicating mainly the modern political conditions, that is the relation between war and state making and the way popular collectives have played their roles in this exercise and have viewed their own roles. Broadly speaking and in a general form, we can then say that while the ensemble of the conditions of modernity bolstered by the bourgeois revolution has not been just a consequence of conquest by a new class of state apparatuses, or the organisation of a new institutional system, it is also a result of two classes of technologies: first, a group of technology

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that has made possible mechanical reproduction of everything human (in this case, reproduction of memory through print publication, or as Walter Benjamin reminded us of mechanical reproduction of art and its impact on time and space), therefore expanding the conditions of human action; and second, a group of technologies—of power—that make human action less possible, and whose essential element is discipline, and hence, imposing passive conduct. The conditions that led to the Great Partition and the conditions produced as consequence, both demonstrated these two eventualities. This dialectic of modernity generates a new set of questions that indeed should have been addressed or at least anticipated by this field of cultural studies. Henceforth this dialectic would allow the conditions of modernity to question the claims of modernity. As I have indicated in the previous pages, we can see a remarkable complementary relation between the problems internal to history and demands and desires of memory, so much so that they become the integral parts of a single operation, the historiographical operation. On one hand, the burden of memory cripples human action and reinforces commemorative gestures—an absolute embarrassment for politics—on the other hand, the historical indications of new activism brought out precisely by these ‘conditions of modernity’ make a break with memory, and become the coveted moment of politics. This is precisely what happened during the growth of leftist politics on both sides of Bengal in the decade following the year of partition. Human actions must be therefore considered deeply, in details, which take hold of the passion of the bodies and thereby demonstrate their critical power, by which I mean the power to transgress the limits set by the conditions existing, in this case limits set by memory. Politics too criticises modernity, by proposing (of course not all forms of politics propose that) a critique of modern rule, by mounting attacks, by taking up themes of representation, participation, rights, and justice at their face value and challenging the internal deficit of these essential components of modern politics, and organising resistance. Critical politics therefore operates not on the principle of remaining ‘outside the modern’, but on the principle of threshold. On the threshold of thought and action, straddling the original world of action and the interminable world of decay, failure, and death, politics is the parenthesis of history and sentimentality. It is in this way that politics envelops society, generates obstacles to overwhelming power,


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producing not only macro, but also, and more important, microresistances, and encourages in the process an ethics of dialogism. Politics produces the political subject, who acts in the plural, whose self is always concerned with relations. The individual overwhelmed by the labour of memory, reduced to historical passivity, finally subjecting himself/herself to ruthless power (as in the case of Nazism, or Zionism) forms the large, ill defined, and confused figure of the ‘average man’, the subject of politics. It is this same psychologised figure, which appears in bourgeois political treatises as the ‘political being’ or the ‘political man’. But as I have tried to indicate, this figure marks only an uncertain phase in politics, though the phase is crucial because it helps us to understand many later traces and ambiguities. I have tried to show that this seemingly tragic figure has historical parallels and historical genealogy. I would like to show further that the problem of memory as a social defence against change begins with modernity’s hatred against anarchy, disorders, and what Foucault called in a different context ‘the psychiatry of order’.20 Dipesh Chakrabarty asks at the end of the essay, ‘Subject of Law and Subject of Narratives’, which is published in the same book and just precedes the one we had been discussing so far, ‘Can we imaginatively bring into being modern civil-political spheres founded on the techniques of the dialogic narrative even as we live and work through those built on the universalist abstractions of political philosophy?’21 It is a literary ploy we are familiar with. We know that dialogues are contested conversations, that discourses on cruelty and tenderness are marked by power configurations, that discourses do not bring change in an essential sense, and that for instance laws for the abolition of widow self-immolation and validation of widow marriage were as much part of the evolving discourse of rights, dignity, citizenship, and dialogues of modernity and the 19th century as the so-called literary narratives were. Literary narratives never displaced law in politics, just as law cannot displace literary narratives. But to think of politics, which would be in the nature of literary narrative, would eschew the obligation and force of law is not to think of politics, but of literature and culture. Imagining a civil-political sphere that would rest on a dialogue on virtues, cruelties, and tenderness, and the discriminate or judicious use of law in order to reinforce these virtues is like imagining a sphere without the dynamics of power, without the presence of those who

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live on cruelties, without the mechanisms of force, that is to say a sphere which should not have in the first place any cruelty at all, any self-immolation by the widows at all and full restitution of widows. This is the secret desire for harmony, the psychiatry of order, whose mission is to wish away all asymmetries in life, may be finally by the pathos of abandonment and death. On that we can wait for another occasion. But clearly there is a problem, somehow and somewhere in these habitations, not clearly definable, but clear enough to be pursued. Habitations of modernity—the problem possibly is in the way we try to comprehend the conditions of modernity, or its habitations. What is a habitation? Can modernity at all inhabit anywhere without any trace, any connection, and any transgression? Given that there will remain traces, connections, and transgressions, the attempt to understand modernity through its habitations is like locating memory through locating its locations. In this reflexive exercise, which typically is a modernist exercise, we are actually reflecting on reflections—a progressive disappearance of substance in reflections occurring as if a sequential series. Thus, a cultural theorist reflects on people reflecting on the Great Partition, on people reflecting on widowhood, on chroniclers reflecting on cruelty or kindness, or an ethno-sociologist reflecting on the reflections of the townsfolk of Benaras on the dirt and squalor of the city,22 etcetera etcetera. Reflection in this endless series results in a compact, reconstituted universality, which becomes the world, the substance, absorbing even the reflexivity that constituted it.23 Therefore it will not be surprising if we find ourselves telling that modernity is primarily an attitude; it is not an ensemble of distinct forms, and you have to locate the attitude; and how best can you locate it save in its habitations, that is to say, by reflecting on how people reflect in these modern times? Did not Kant reflect on ‘enlightenment’ as an attitude? Did not Foucault reflect on Kant? And do our theorists not reflect on our modernity following those illustrious footsteps? In all the ‘cases’ of reflection (attractive for cultural studies) since the ‘content’ is not pure, a selfenclosed entity, the content is all the time giving way to ‘void’—the void of partition, the void of loss and pathos, void of ruminating, the void created by the lack of enlightened citizenship, and other voids— and this void transforms into the most appropriate matter of cultural


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studies. The pursuit of cultural studies thus becomes an art different and distinct from politics, whose only one aspect can be concerned with representations. In cultural studies you are studying attitude, reflecting on reflections; in politics you are studying forms and actions; and in politics as vocation you are acting out. Yet, we must remember that the urge to study forms to come to terms with modernity (modern forms of exploitation, of commodity production, theft, killing, love, administration, government, law, arts, language use, communication, etc., wherever you cast glance, you see the grid of modern forms typical of bourgeois rule) does not mean that we have done away with signs. Politics too deals with signs, market too conveys its graph through certain signs, popular unrest has signs, emergence of a certain form has some early signs, and so has its decay. Signs displace, they create meanings that may have less to do with their original sources, and more to the process of signification, and therefore to themselves. They may thus become forms unto themselves. Studies of partition thus become studies of signs; they have the value, namely they indicate how sterile, void, empty, or full politics has become. Like language determining action, signs influence politics. We must all the more therefore study the historiographical operation. Michel Foucault wrote in Death and the Labyrinth, Eighteenth-century grammarians well understood this marvellous property of language to extract wealth from its own property. In their purely empirical concept of signs, they admired the way a word was capable of separating itself from the visible form to which it was tied by its ‘signification’ in order to settle on another form, designating it with an ambiguity, which is both its resource and limitation. At that point language indicates the source of an internal movement; its ties to its meaning can undergo a metamorphosis without its having to change its form, as if it had turned on itself, tracing around a fixed point (the ‘meaning’ of the word, as they used to say) a circle of possibilities, which allows for chance, coincidence, effects, and all the rules of the game.24

Such a situation creates what we call ‘tropes’, when the word has been turned away from its original meaning to take on a new one, which is more or less removed, but which still maintains a connection. This new meaning is tropological, this conversion or turning away produces

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the trope, and in this space created by the displacement, all forms of rhetoric come to life, the twists and turns, metaphors, and the repeated invocation of the same word, same sentiment… Readers can see now, I hope, what I am suggesting in terms of our understanding of the partition narratives, or narratives of other great conflicts, and the way in which these narratives appear in the representation glass, at times start influencing our actions. The original event is far removed, the need to understand it is no longer pressing, or the realisation is now that the original can be understood only through the tropes. Modernity is thus in language and its tricks. Events in the modern glass appear only as displaced meanings. In that labyrinth, intoxicated by the pleasure of the search for meanings, one may well say as the poet Faiz found of the verses and the imagery of Ghalib, ‘the wine of love, fatal to men’. The political subject, I submit, becomes aware of these tropes, cuts through many representational cobwebs, clears the knots to pave the way for actions much in the way in which our early revolutionaries had removed to one side the narratives of the benefits of the colonial rule and the despair of the rebels of earlier generations, and critiqued its way through to action. It is a historiographical-political process, the process of the emergence of the political subject.

NOTES 1. Paul Ricouer, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 122. 2. Chakrabarty’s own claim on this is to be found in this book; see, D. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity—Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002), 16. 3. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity—Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, p. 33. 4. Chakrabarty, ‘Memories of Displacement: The Poetry and Prejudice of Dwelling’, in Habitation of Modernity, pp. 116–17. 5. See in particular two essays by Alok Ghosh, ‘Bengali Refugees at Dandakaranya—A Tragedy of Rehabilitation’ and Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury, ‘Exiled to the Andamans—The Refugees from East Pakistan’ in Pradip Kumar Bose, ed., Refugees in West Bengal—Institutional Practices and Contested Identities (Kolkata: Calcutta Research Group, 2000), 106–41. 6. Taking the word over from Emile Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed, the IllFated Pessopitimist—A Palestinian Who Became a Citizen of Israel (paperback edition; Northampton, MA: 2001), Edward Said uses the word in The Politics


7.

8.

9. 10

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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of Dispossession—The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969–1994 (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), n. 23, p. 422, to describe a situation where memory overwhelms the historical position of an actor and reduces him/her to remembrance and passivity only. See the essays in Ranabir Samaddar, Reflections on Partition in the East (Delhi: Vikas Pub., 1997); see also Stefano Bianchini, R. Ivekovic, S. Chaturvedi, and R. Samaddar, Partitions: Reshaping States and Minds (New York: Frank Cass, 2005); also Samaddar, ‘In the Time of the Partitioned Nations’, in The Politics of Dialogue—Living under the Geopolitical Histories of War and Peace in South Asia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004b), Chapter 3, pp. 54–76. On the political trajectory of a large section of the refugees in northern India, see for instance Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics—1925 to the 1990s (Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999); for the experiences in the east, see for instance, Arun Deb, ‘The UCRC—Its Role in Establishing the Rights of the Refugee Squatters in Calcutta’, in Refugees in West Bengal, pp. 65–79. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, p. xv. Therefore, while our cultural chroniclers are busy to explain why the ‘pre-modern’ survives with zest in a modern regime, they do not understand why the pre-modern is enthusiastic about the modern. Think of the Nagas, accused of head hunting even in the 1950s of the last century, appearing in London around the same time in modern suits and costumes in order to present a petition to the British government. I commented on this intellectual closure in details in ‘Nation Jeopardised’, in A Biography of the Indian Nation, 1947–97 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001), Chapter 4, pp. 119–55. I have written at length on these accounts in Paradoxes of the Nationalist Time— Political Essays on Bangladesh (Dhaka: University Press Ltd., 2002). Michel de Certeau, ‘The Historiographical Operation’, in The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 54–57. Ricouer, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 180. R. Samaddar, ed., Reflections on Partition in the East (Delhi: Vikas Pub., 1997). One appropriate example of such painstaking historical work is Gargi Chakravarty, Coming out of Partition—Refugee Women of Bengal (Delhi: Bluejay Books, 2005), even though she also mentions Chere Asha Gram by Dakshinaranjan Basu (Kolkata: Jugantar, 1975). In English translation places become ‘realms’. Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory, 3 vols (vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions, vol. 2, Traditions, and vol. 3 Symbols), ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–98). Ricouer, Memory, History, Forgetting, pp. 419–20. Romila Thapar, Somnatha—The Many Voices of a History (Delhi: Viking, 2004). Michel Foucault, Abnormal, Lectures at the College de France, 1974–1975, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003a), 318. Chakrabarty, Habitation of Modernity, p. 114. In this case Chakrabarty is at the high point of generalisation, because villages of indigenous people in India—outside and inside—are generally clean, cleaning the

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objects to them is like cleaning the body, and if the gaze on dirt is a question of citizenship, they are as much citizens of the country as the townsmen are; and they too want to prolong life as other subjects of ‘modernity’ want. One is at a loss as to how to treat such generalisations arrived with fragmentary sights; the puzzle is more as to why do products of fragmentary sights lead always to generalisations? 23. Louis Althusser made this point in The Spectre of Hegel, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 1997), 82–83. 24. M. Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, trans. Charles Ruas (London: Continuum, 2004), 17.

8 Towards a Theory of the Constituent Power

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question should be raised at this point: In the narrative of the emergence of the political subject does all this emphasis on actions, practical things, tactical considerations, experiential wisdom, empiricism, and a pragmatic attitude to life, war, and peace mean that the subject was never theorised, or the subject never requires a generalised theory about its own goal? Once again, we do not have any interest in a pure answer to this question, except in conditions where such theorising becomes a part of action, practice, experiential wisdom, etc., and therefore if we are to study this undoubtedly important question, we have to study the issue in terms of ‘how the subject was theorised as part of the political practice of the subject’. Perhaps this is what Althusser meant when he spoke of ‘theoretical practice’ (of the subject). In any case at this point we have to note explicitly what we knew all along, namely that every theorising of power had within it a theory of the subject as the unspoken other; and every theorising of sovereignty had within it its opposite, a theory of the subject… None could realise this more deeply than probably Frantz Fanon, the theoretician of the Algerian Revolution, who theorised almost every aspect of colonial power, namely race, violence, cultural domination, national narrowness, and a subsuming universalism, and courted death, by any account an untimely death, at a most intense period of his life. And yet in his crisp and terse theorisation of colonial and imperial power, we get an illuminating theory of the subject. We need to understand at the outset that the way he theorised was a part of the colonial reality and anti-colonial activity. We can begin from that understanding in order to discover that what Fanon did in his entire life was the task

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of theorising the anti-colonial political subject. It is for that reason—to lodge anti-colonial political consciousness at the heart of a theory of the political subject—I want to discuss in this chapter the position that Frantz Fanon took.

GLOBALISATION, RE-COLONISATION, AND THE RETURN OF FRANTZ FANON Frantz Fanon was a figure of the 1950s and early 1960s of the last century. Though his writings on decolonisation were initially read mostly in the French-speaking world, anti-colonial political activists in other countries soon began to study him along with studying other figures like Mao or Che. Of his various writings The Wretched of the Earth became widely known in quick time. Appearing to his readers like a ‘manifesto’, and as all manifestos are, it was argumentative yet decisive and clear, it employed rhetoric with skill to persuade the reader, it was dialogic yet categorical. Above all, as a manifesto should be, it was unapologetic. In radical and communist politics in anti-colonial settings, groups of youth and student activists read Fanon in closed rooms or at the numerous reading clubs in various countries in those days. Then with turbulent years of decolonisation over, Fanon became another name of a bygone era. Theorists of subjectivity particularly in the West would rarely mention him, because and that is my point, subject positions, drawn from the ancient speculative heritage of Greece and Rome, began to be drawn in purely speculative terms. Anti-colonial subject position was not a reality to be considered in high circles of philosophy. However, there is a return of Fanon studies of late. In the last decade and thanks to post-colonial studies, cultural studies, race studies, post-structural studies, and other post-studies, particularly the efforts of language and literature professors, the name of Fanon is now heard again in the universities; he is discussed, and his books can be found with new editions coming out. Yet in this return, something has been missing—the ‘political’, by which I mean relevance, context, strategy, and the concentrated madness about revolts and the possibilities of revolution. Algeria meanwhile was again involved in bloodbath, globalisation ushered in neo-colonialism or as some say re-colonisation, people began dying in the same way Fanon had

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described, racist politics emerged in the name of controlling terror and preventing the migrant carriers of terror from entering the homes of democracy, national chauvinism was again on the rise, and the desire for a new type of internationalism that Fanon symbolised also emerged roughly around the same time. All this is very recent history. In short, we have a remarkable similarity of the two situations—the 1950s of the last century and our time now, the process of decolonisation then and its need now, the emergence of the political subject in the colonies that Fanon reflected in his writings and the ever more loud reverberations today of the emergence of the post-colonial political subject. Characteristically, this decline and re-appearance of Fanon coincide with the weakening of socialist and communist politics worldwide and the eventual collapse of official socialism and the resurge of anti-imperialism in the last few years. We may not be living under conditions of Antonio Negri’s diffused empire, or we may not be exactly the multitude Negri speaks of, but certainly the anti-empire is taking shape in front of our eyes, enveloping all the phenomena in this material world.1 Yet, the claim of this observation does not lie purely in the context. We can as matter of fact see that the recommencement of Fanon studies (for various reasons, which I shall touch upon in course of this chapter) has little taken note of him as a theorist of the political subject of the modern world, particularly the colonial and the post-colonial world. But as I intend to show, Fanon simply is an exceptional figure from this point, his ideas go straight into the heart of the matter; and Mao and Che are the only two other figures whose works come to mind whenever we speak of theorising the post-colonial political subject. Experience, the term associated with the physicality of life and sneered and hated by the thinkers, was the key word of Fanon’s writings. His life, always appearing before our eyes as a succession of passing shots from one experience that must end and break into another, is the story of the emergence of the political subject in the most material or physical sense of the term. The colonised experience colonialism, the blacks suffer racism, the oppressed are victims of oppression, an entire continent remains the victim of domination and occupation—as if Frantz Fanon wanted to say, all these consist of the other side of ‘bleaching’. The mask, face, torture, killings, veil, occupation, liberation, ecstasy—all these are matters of the body;

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they constitute the physicality of political life. Either you bleach them white by refusing to believe, covering, secluding, excluding, expelling, exterminating, and covering your life of the nasty things (that is how you bleach them), or you must face up, and do the reverse, that is to say, bring out in the open what is being bleached, and try to remake the world on the basis of this experience—the experience of division, and more important, this perpetual act of bleaching as the strategy of racist and colonial domination. In this fantastic act of transference, Fanon was suggesting, we are becoming political. In Black Skin, White Masks we thus read that being colonised by a language has larger implications for one’s consciousness; ‘To speak … means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization’,2 take the burden of another collective consciousness. Fanon, I suggest, did not teach us: What is colonialism? Or, what is occupation? But, rather, how do we de-colonise? How do we cleanse ourselves of centuries of occupation of our homes, bodies, and selves? This was the mark of an agenda of the political subject. Fanon compels this return even today, more than ever, when neo-colonialism combined with globalisation and neo-liberalism persuades us to forget politics altogether—either in the name of cultural studies, or post-colonial studies, or in the name of commerce, economy, and intellectual rights. But of course Frantz Fanon is the best help against all such attempts to break him into early Fanon and late Fanon, and play the cultural game, for the character of the ‘manifesto’ remains from the first to last. Black Skin, White Masks begin with these words, The explosion will not happen today. It is too soon … or too late. I do not come with timeless truths. My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances. Nevertheless, in complete composure, I think it would be good if certain things were said.3

And years later on the verge of death he ends his writings with these words, Come, then, comrades; it would be as well to decide at once to change our ways.... We must leave our dreams and abandon our old beliefs and friendships of the time before life began. Let us waste no time in sterile


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litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration…. She has only shown herself parsimonious and niggardly where men are concerned; it is only men that she has killed and devoured. So, my brothers, how is it that we do not understand that we have better things to do than to follow that same Europe? That same Europe where they were never done talking of Man, and where they never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of Man: today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind.... Comrades, have we not other work to do than to create a third Europe? … A permanent dialogue with oneself and an increasingly obscene narcissism never ceased to prepare the way for a half delirious state, where intellectual work became suffering and the reality was not at all that of a living man, working and creating himself, but rather words, different combinations of words, and the tensions springing from the meanings contained in words. Yet some Europeans were found to urge the European workers to shatter this narcissism and to break with this un-reality. But in general the workers of Europe have not replied to these calls; for the workers believe, too, that they are part of the prodigious adventure of the European spirit… Today, we are present at the stasis of Europe. Comrades, let us flee from this motionless movement where gradually dialectic is changing into the logic of equilibrium. Let us reconsider the question of mankind.... The Third World today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers…

And then he casts a glance at the possible destiny of the political subject. No, there is no question of a return to Nature. It is simply a very concrete question of not dragging men towards mutilation, of not imposing

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upon the brain rhythms, which very quickly obliterate it and wreck it. The pretext of catching up must not be used to push man around, to tear him away from himself or from his privacy, to break and kill him. No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want to do is to go forward all the time, night and day, in the company of Man, in the company of all men. The caravan should not be stretched out, for in that case each line will hardly see those who precede it; and men who no longer recognize each other meet less and less together, and talk to each other less and less... If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe, and America into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most gifted among us. But if we want humanity to advance a step farther, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries. If we wish to live up to our peoples’ expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe... For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.4

But taking Fanon’s works as manifestos for the political subject, for a programme of action, is not of course what a passive or a depoliticised reading of Fanon such as by Stuart Hall and others would agree to. Stuart Hall in fact comments that all these words of revolutionary politics were ‘incendiary Third Worldism’, and that we should better recognise Fanon as a major figure in psychoanalytic theory, than a revolutionist.5 The ‘fact of blackness’ can be erased not by anti-colonial revolutions and social-political revolutions in both the colonial and the colonised countries, but by cultural analysis, campus Marxism, and an ever-increasing academic refinement of psychoanalysis. And of course whom is Hall defending here? Homi Bhabha, his way of ‘locating culture’, his invention of the method by which the poststructural and the post-colonial can be merged, and placing Frantz Fanon in a psychoanalytical frame, and claiming this framing as an instance of the ‘post-colonial prerogative’.6 We shall have occasion to interrogate Bhabha as to why he chose not to address the fact that Fanon


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wanted in a particular sense to ‘end identity, which stands as a mark of inequalities and oppression’; but let us take note of the fact here that Bhabha’s reading of Fanon in the mid-1990s of the last century was the high water mark of the culturalist turn and was influential for some time, though Bhabha changed his position somewhat a decade later when he wrote a new preface to The Wretched of the Earth. After all the word ‘colonial’ must mean something…

A MANIFESTO FOR THE ANTI-COLONIAL POLITICAL SUBJECT How we want to look up to the figure of Fanon is of critical importance in our discussion on Fanon as a theorist of the political subject. We shall appreciate the critical nature of our choice as we go further along the line of learning from the political Fanon, whose words from his first treatise to the last are bound by one thread, namely the ‘discovery of the anti-colonial political subject, and the manifesto for action’. The question for the political subject in the aftermath of the Second World War as decolonisation began was this, how to turn an understanding of colonialism, which the colonised had gathered through long years and centuries of experience—therefore a specific understanding—into a strategy to decolonise? And further, how can the colonial subjects turn this specific experience into something universal, namely freedom and emancipation, and thus turn the experience of colonialism into a ‘concrete universal’? We find Fanon repeatedly gesturing this transference—by turning Senegal into Martinique, Martinique into coloured immigrants of Paris or Lyons, the coloured immigrants of Paris or Lyons into Algeria, black skin into white mask, white mask into black skin, Algeria into Africa, death into emancipation, and the concrete into universal. This is the sign of the emergence of the political subject, whose destiny is to effect concrete actions into something transcendental. Politics of course does it by two means—(a) by discovering its foundations that make politics possible; and (b) by destroying or transforming those foundations as a result of which

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politics itself becomes impossible, whence ‘im-politics’ must give way to the search for new foundations. In Fanon we have this interplay of metaphysics and physicality, enunciation of politics and its limits, and the effort to transgress those limits. Fanon represents the strength of the constituent power of the anti-colonial revolution. He also represents this power at its clearest, most awesome, and fearful moment, after which the denouement must come. This constituent power rests, as it has always been in the history of revolutions and great changes, on the realisation, and hence the despair, of the fundamental disjuncture between the colonised person’s consciousness and his/her body—a fundamental condition of alienation, which modernity has brought about. The insistence that Fanon carried was that the ‘white’ depended for its stability on its negation, the ‘black’. And, since neither existed without the other, and both came into being at the moment of imperial conquest, therefore the task was to create a rupture in the historically bound politico-cultural systems that perpetuated in the form of colonial domination and age. Therefore violence purifies, destroying not only the category of white, but that of black too. This is the insurgent moment when the fury of the constituent power must destroy the foundations of the system that had in the first place given birth to the constituent power. Yet why was not Fanon considered a theorist of the revolution, of constituent power? The fact is that as there are bourgeois and proletarian versions of social change; and as all phenomena can have their ‘white’ and ‘black’ versions, similarly the received histories of revolutions too have their white and black versions. Accordingly, the English, the French, the American, the Italian, the Russian, all had their revolutions, but the blacks and browns did not have. The white had great ideologies of revolution, the rest did not have. Thus, the anticolonial or the third world did not have great changes, they had only political independence. The white’s revolutions were successful, thus the white democracies are all results of those revolutions, they are not the deficits or negations of those revolutions, while the process of decolonisation did not usher great changes. It is in this background of enormous arrogance that we have to understand Euro-Marxism’s or Euro-Communism’s—and Stuart Hall’s essay is a perfect illustration—


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dismissive attitude towards political writings and manifestos originating from the third world. Thus, according to this ‘white mythology’, anticolonial changes do not need their constituent power, that power need not accelerate, mutate, all that the discourses of these changes can do is to lament over failed revolutions, for after all they are the precursors of ‘failed states’. We are confronted here with not only the issue of imperial foundations,7 but that of the foundations of anti-colonial revolutions too, which mark Fanon’s writings, and which we are now being desperately told to forget. What I would like to tell here is that there are some gross methodological problems that result in these reifications (of Fanon, of revolutions), which may appear somewhat enigmatic. You may think they are so obvious, they should not have happened. The first problem is ‘historical’. We may ask, how could the subject of the anti-colonial revolutions become objects of knowledge in the West, in the academic campuses, and for a wide variety of scholarly journals? We can say that certain academic practices, which Fanon too had hinted at in his lifetime, have engendered domains of knowledge that not only bring new objects, new concepts, and new techniques to light, but also give rise to totally new forms of subjects and subjects of knowledge, which have relation to history but only in a ‘surreal’ way. The object of knowledge itself as we can see has a history; and this history is now overwhelmed with another history—the history of an academic discipline. Thus, certain knowledge of racism, colonialism, culture, etc. was formed in the last quarter of the last century; certain knowledge that now erases the knowledge of (making) revolutions. The second problem springs from the excess of what might be called ‘discourse analysis’. A few decades ago this was fine. Language held the key to poetry, literature, philosophy, and discourse in general. Now we must understand that discourse is a game, a strategic game in action, steps of evading, counter-attacking, etc., as parts of a strategy. Fanon’s writings are moves in a struggle, they are polemical tracts, and they are manifestos. At the same time the cultural studies too form a discourse that is a part of a wider game. The final methodological problem lies in the way the theory of the subject is now being studied and modified. It is mainly through

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‘cultural practices’ (whatever that means) that we assume that the subject is profoundly renewed. Yet in these studies that carry the baggage of confusion in Western philosophy between the subject and the self, we have only theories of knowledge (of self and other) and not actions and practices. In the process the materiality of process of the emergence of the political subject is lost—the subject that emerges not through thoughts but contentious actions. The theory of the subject has remained very philosophical, and with its influence, the only history that this theory can do is to do a history of representations— ‘representation as the point of origin’, whence knowledge became possible and truth appeared. What is lost out in this epistemology is the way in which a subject constitutes itself within history, and acts on that history. That is the clue to the journey Frantz Fanon made from Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth. That journey is a radical critique of the theory of the self. The critique is based on the notion of autonomy that the political subject claims through taking up politics against identity, the autonomy that the subject gains through revolutionary practices. The knowledge of practice and actions tells us who did what, under what conditions, and at what moment, what were the impediments, the enemies, etc. This knowledge has of course helped through centuries the political, juridical, and penal ways to curb the space of the subject. But the foundations of politics intransigently veer towards autonomy notwithstanding the severe defeats politics at times suffers. Therefore we would do well to remember that the theory of the self does not lead us to a theory of the revolution, but a theory of the political subject can. Now this is a significant point, because this can lead us to explore politico-social realities closely, as Fanon would have said, namely, how masses live, how they change themselves once they enter revolutionary practices, how the occupying power’s practices change, the new techniques that are adopted; and then while activists keep on reading Fanon they have unknowingly left the world of metaphysics and philosophy, and have entered the world of reportages of actions, a kind of ‘militant journalism’. There we hear Fanon discuss how radio can be used by the militants (Brecht and Walter Benjamin had discussed similarly the same thing nearly two and half decades ago), how


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modern medicine can be disentangled from its present attachments to power, how literacy can be spread, also how you carry bombs, throw stones, refuse to talk or talk, change your culture to claim your own self through an awareness of your subject position. Not surprisingly thus, Studies in a Dying Colonialism was originally titled more aptly as The Algerian Revolution Year 5, because as Adolfo Gilly the militant Argentinean journalist has remarked, Studies in a Dying Colonialism is not ‘a book by Fanon (that) testifies to the death of colonialism, as the life of the masses in this age of revolution’.8 The details of this book will still engage you, grip you, well if the reader is a post-colonial subject, with the same question: How do we decolonise? How do people decolonise? Fanon remarks in course of his writings that violence is cleansing, but not the main spiritual tool to cleanse the society. Violence is not the foundation of anti-colonial revolution. Yet, we can see from our own knowledge of bourgeois discourses that this assertion that violence is the basis of anti-colonial revolution is a myth that revolutionaries have to constantly fight against, inasmuch as the occupiers want to sustain another foundational myth, namely that colonialism was an accident and violence was not the chief weapon of occupation. Fanon indeed comments on foundation myths integral to colonialism, myths that give clean chit to the occupying power and malign the occupied. Both The Algerian Revolution Year 5 and The Wretched of the Earth open with the issue of violence (in the ‘Preface’ of the former and in the first chapter of latter), where Fanon speaks out against indiscriminate violence, but also discusses violence as a weapon and a problem of revolution, extreme violence that makes the Algerian war ‘the most hallucinatory’, fought by the revolution. Sartre as we know defends the violence engaged by the Algerian revolution saying that there is no other way. This is true. But when Fanon says that the war is hallucinatory—as we know one million people finally die—he locates the problem at a deeper, almost at an intractable level, whose features are: the occupying power would listen to none, colonial violence would kill people before they actually die, and the terror of the occupying power would leave you with no option but to violently take on the entire world of establishment at one go, which means often defeat.

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But without beginning small acts of resistance, how does the political subject gain autonomy and increase its area of operation? Plus how do you break the old world of dependency? Yet extreme violence destroys politics, its foundations are rendered impossible. Revolution soon exhausts. In Fanon you have the first uncertain awareness of a deeper problematic of the mutuality of war and politics. In politics then foundation must be studied in terms of the process.

FANON AS THE THEORIST OF CONSTITUENT POWER In short, we can say that the characteristic of the constituent power, the form in which the political subject emerges in utmost clarity, is the focus of social criticism, which it brings to bear on its actions, and therefore its unbounded nature. Thus, as I show in my essay on Tagore (‘Dreams of the Colonised’, Futures, 36, 2004), anti-colonial consciousness crosses in its most critical moment the boundaries of national consciousness, or as Fanon termed, ‘the pitfalls of national consciousness’. No cultural explanation helps us to understand this transcendence. It is an issue of political choice made in the milieu of expanding experience that tells us why Fanon went to Algeria or Che Guevara left Cuba for Bolivia. In this moment of anti-colonial cosmopolitanism we find Fanon telling us in The Wretched of the Earth that nationalism fails at achieving emancipation cutting across the class boundaries because nationalist aspirations are primarily those of the colonised elite—a privileged class that seeks to defeat the prevailing colonial rule in order to usurp its place of dominance and control over the working classes. Thus, while the opposition of the specifics is in operation, colonialism as a system runs because it is more than a binary opposition of the coloniser and colonised, but instead, a complicated network of links, complicities, internal power asymmetries, and operations. The national middle class that takes over power at the end of the colonial regime is an underdeveloped middle class. It has practically no economic power, and in any case it is in no way commensurate with the bourgeoisie of the mother country, which it hopes to replace. In its


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narcissism, the national middle class is easily convinced that it can advantageously replace the middle class of the mother country. But that same independence, which literally drives it into a corner will give rise within its ranks to catastrophic reactions, and will oblige it to send out frenzied appeals for help to the former mother country.9

This is the programme of the Black Jacobins—the programme of the constituent power at its moment of arrival. The programme is unique because it helps us to understand what can be called as a ‘concrete universal’, whose form in this segmented and power-configured world only a political manifesto (a programme) can perceive and give shape to. Therefore, almost apprehending Michel Foucault’s coupling of knowledge and power Fanon thinks of the world of language and its capacity to confer subjectivity and agency of power to a section of people to dominate the rest, and he says famously, ‘We are trying to understand why the Antilles Negro is so fond of speaking French.’10 We must understand the microphysics of power in order to act, and to act appropriately. Thus, the programme must judge carefully the ruling strategies of assimilation, valourisation, and the cultural traps associated with these strategies. In trying to emancipate the colonised discovers its collective self, that is to say, only through emancipating the colonised becomes a collective—it is the moment for the colonised to constitute itself as a political subject. And thus this collective must constitute itself in the following way, ‘National identity only carries meaning insofar as it reflects the combined revolutionary efforts of an oppressed people aiming at collective liberation.’ And then, To fight for national culture means in the first place to fight for the liberation of the nation, that material keystone, which makes the building of a culture possible. There is no other fight for culture, which can develop apart from the popular struggle… A national culture is not folklore, not also an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people’s true nature. It is not made up of the inert dregs of gratuitous actions, that is to say actions, which are less and less attached to the ever-present reality of the people. A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.11

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Political actions will thus cause displacements. But contrary to what the sophistry most evident in the field of cultural studies would have us believe, this displacement is not a continuously deferred problem. This displacement is not towards in-determination. We must understand the displacements, which Fanon effects in his manifesto—the tightest expression, thus the rhetorical form of certain historico-social programme—as attempts towards grasping the mobility of the concrete universal, the mobility of the experiences of the fragmented world of colonialism. Where does Frantz Fanon want us to arrive through the displacements—at times through death? Certainly not towards a completely uncharted future, his gesture is towards a ‘reconstituted present, the criticism of colonial reality towards a future that can be constituted only through a critical present’. What matters most then is not only an analysis of the past or a narration of a sociological present, but a re-introduction of historicity by locating the constituting moments of our lives. How can the colonised do so? In order to do so, the colonised must move beyond the representations that colonialism has brought in this world, and must imagine a world whose glimpses its own constitution as the political subject has brought about. The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous… This world is divided into compartments; this world cut into two is inhabited by two separate species… Everything up and including the very nature of pre-capitalist society, so well explained by Marx must here be thought out again. The serf is in essence different from the knight, but a reference to divine right is necessary to legitimise this statutory difference. In the colonies the foreigner coming from another country imposed his rule by means of guns and machines. In defiance of his successful transplantation, in spite of his appropriation, the settler still remains a foreigner. It is neither the act of owing factories, nor estates, nor a bank balance, which distinguishes the governing classes. The governing race is first and foremost those who come from elsewhere; those who are unlike the original inhabitants, ‘the others’… To break up the colonial world does not mean that after the frontiers have been abolished lines of communication will be set up between the two zones. The destruction of the colonial world is no more and no less than the abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country.12


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Decolonisation is the abolition of the colonial world, which means also the disappearance of the colonised.13 What happens then to the imperial foundations? Impure as these foundations are, and resting on physical and discursive groundings, the liberation of the bodies under the imperial order becomes a requirement of first importance. But the body can be liberated only when it is freed from all other imagined identities—of the black, the Negro, the colonised, the incapable, and the weak. The totalising power of the institution of hierarchy must go away—with that must go away the body of the coloniser (‘the invisible feet of the White’), of the colonised land, and the bisected body of the city (‘the bright streets and the overflowing garbage cans’). The myths of the imperial foundations are destroyed by the politico-cultural criticisms of this dual world. The constituent power is historical, it invokes historicity; it is a historical power that responds to the call to transform the colonial world, with that abolishing all imperial foundations. With this abolition all other identities that the imperial had created are lost, only the identity of the political action remains. This is of course pure politics, the moment of the constituent power achieving its victory. But how does this constituent power prevent its absorption in the constituted power that will inevitably seek compromises, as it becomes the legally constituted power? Fanon does not seem to be excessively worried on that, he would have argued that decolonisation is a process of pure transformation— the weeding out of the comprador and the destruction of the linkages of the two worlds that bring about the compromises. His argument can be better understood when we follow closely his speech to the Congress of Black African Writers in 1959, subsequently incorporated in The Wretched of the Earth, Colonial domination, because it is total and tends to over-simplify, very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people. This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women… Vis-à-vis this state of affairs, the native’s reactions are not unanimous. While the mass of the people maintain intact traditions which are completely different from those of the colonial situation, and the artisan style solidifies into a formalism which is more and more stereotyped,

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the intellectual throws himself in frenzied fashion into the frantic acquisition of the culture of the occupying power and takes every opportunity of unfavourably criticising his own national culture, or else takes refuge in setting out and substantiating the claims of that culture in a way that is passionate but rapidly becomes unproductive. A national culture under colonial domination is a contested culture whose destruction is sought in systematic fashion. It very quickly becomes a culture condemned to secrecy. This idea of clandestine culture is immediately seen in the reactions of the occupying power, which interprets attachment to traditions as faithfulness to the spirit of the nation and as a refusal to submit. This persistence in following forms of culture, which are already condemned to extinction, is already a demonstration of nationality; but it is a demonstration, which is a throwback to the laws of inertia. There is no taking of the offensive and no redefining of relationships. There is simply a concentration on a hard core of culture, which more and more shrivels up, inert and empty. By the time a century or two of exploitation has passed there comes about a veritable emaciation of the stock of national culture. It becomes a set of automatic habits, some traditions of dress and a few brokendown institutions. Little movement can be discerned in such remnants of culture; there is no real creativity and no overflowing life. The poverty of the people, national oppression and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing. After a century of colonial domination we find a culture, which is rigid in the extreme, or rather what we find are the dregs of culture, its mineral strata. The withering away of the reality of the nation and the death-pangs of the national culture are linked to each other in mutual dependences. This is why it is of capital importance to follow the evolution of these relations during the struggle for national freedom. The negation of the native’s culture, the contempt for any manifestation of culture whether active or emotional and the placing outside the pale of all specialised branches of organisation contribute to breed aggressive patterns of conduct in the native. But these patterns of conduct are of the reflexive type; they are poorly differentiated, anarchic and ineffective. Colonial exploitation, poverty and endemic famine drive the native more and more to open, organised revolt. The necessity for an open and decisive breach is formed progressively and imperceptibly, and comes to be felt by the great majority of the people. Those tensions, which hitherto were non-existent, come into being. International events, the collapse of whole sections of colonial empires and the contradictions inherent in the colonial system strengthen and uphold the native’s combativity while promoting and giving support to national consciousness...


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If we study the repercussions of the awakening of national consciousness in the domains of ceramics and pottery-making, the same observations may be drawn. Formalism is abandoned in the craftsman’s work. Jugs, jars and trays are modified, at first imperceptibly, then almost savagely. The colours, of which formerly there were but few and which obeyed the traditional rules of harmony, increase in number and are influenced by the repercussion of the rising revolution. Certain ochres and blues, which seemed forbidden to all eternity in a given cultural area, now assert themselves without giving rise to scandal. In the same way the stylisation of the human face, which according to sociologists is typical of very clearly defined regions, becomes suddenly completely relative. The specialist coming from the home country and the ethnologist are quick to note these changes. On the whole such changes are condemned in the name of a rigid code of artistic style and of a cultural life, which grows up at the heart of the colonial system. The colonialist specialists do not recognise these new forms and rush to the help of the traditions of the indigenous society. It is the colonialists who become the defenders of the native style. We remember perfectly, and the example took on a certain measure of importance since the real nature of colonialism was not involved, the reactions of the white jazz specialists when after the Second World War new styles such as the be-bop took definite shape. The fact is that in their eyes jazz should only be the despairing, broken-down nostalgia of an old Negro who is trapped between five glasses of whisky, the curse of his race, and the racial hatred of the white men. As soon as the Negro comes to an understanding of himself, and understands the rest of the world differently, when he gives birth to hope and forces back the racist universe, it is clear that his trumpet sounds more clearly and his voice less hoarsely. The new fashions in jazz are not simply born of economic competition. We must without any doubt see in them one of the consequences of the defeat, slow but sure, of the southern world of the United States. And it is not utopian to suppose that in fifty years’ time the type of jazz howl hiccupped by a poor misfortunate Negro will be upheld only by the whites who believe in it as an expression of nigger-hood, and who are faithful to this arrested image of a type of relationship… And now it is time to denounce certain pharisees. National claims, it is here and there stated, are a phase that humanity has left behind. It is the day of great concerted actions, and retarded nationalists ought in consequence to set their mistakes aright. We, however, consider that the mistake, which may have very serious consequences, lies in wishing to skip the national period. If culture is the expression of national consciousness, I will not hesitate to affirm that in the case with which we

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are dealing it is the national consciousness, which is the most elaborate form of culture. The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension... If man is known by his acts, then we will say that the most urgent thing today for the intellectual is to build up his nation. If this building up is true, that is to say if it interprets the manifest will of the people and reveals the eager African peoples, then the building of a nation is of necessity accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universalising values. Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national liberation, which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the source of all culture.14

Fanon thus resolves the ‘fact of blackness’ (‘that crushing object-hood’) that he had set as the great problematic of racism and colonial domination in Black Skin, White Masks—the problematic of a feeling of ‘straddling nothingness and infinity’. Anti-colonial freedom goes through the purifying process of violence and revolt, as it realises that it must challenge and end the diverse areas of domination and violence such as law, gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationalism. What emerges as a consequence of all these is a powerful idea of the political subject in the colonial world—the political subject that can emerge only as the constituent power. How powerful is the idea? It will remain as long as colonial relations keep re-surfacing, and therefore Fanon will be recounted in the once colonised lands again and again. In constructing Fanon as a theorist of the constituent power I am aware of the petty bourgeois remarks and interrogations that tell us that Fanon’s journey from Martinique to Algeria (or from the pre-Martinique Senegal to Martinique) was deeply flawed, that it was a psychic journey all through, or that finally Fanon had to take recourse to the Hegelian idea of the universal through a dialectic play. But experience transcends all flaws and as Fanon showed, experience with strategy and skill enables the political subject to become the power capable of constituting a society, in fact thus reconstituting the society—in juridical term what we would call the ‘constituent power,


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the basis of all constitutions’. The fundamental point to appreciate here is not about dealing with the problem of colonialism as a cultural issue, but with the problem of anti-colonialism as a revolutionary activity. In other words, it is not a question of analysing the internal or external criteria of a particular discourse that would enable, let us say, race or nationalism to become a subject matter of cultural studies, rather the attempt for the subject is how to consider anti-colonialism as a specific activity, or as a role. This is what Frantz Fanon meant when he wrote ‘Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ and ‘On National Culture’—two extensive sections in The Wretched of the Earth—pregnant with enormous significance, and singularly ignored by cultural theorists.

HOMI BHABHA’S FANON We are now in a position to see how cultural readings tend to be conservative and are resistant to transformational approaches. We can take for instance some of Homi Bhabha’s writings on Fanon. I do not intend to post here a comprehensive review of all his writings on Fanon. Bhabha of course is not Stuart Hall, he claims to speak for the colonial and ex-colonial peoples, cultures and experiences, and he marries the post-structural insights with the post-colonial. The result? An assortment of certain insights—mimicry, sly civility, colonial nonsense, hybridity—as possible strategies of resistance, but in effect restrictive in understanding resistance, by which I mean restrictive of the politics that informs resistance. Thus say mimicry of one of these strategies, Bhabha will tell us, helps resistance develop within the interstices of a structure in which power should have erased the possibility of resistance. Bhabha cites Fanon in explanation of what he says, though Fanon, looking at his works, particularly the two sections I have referred to earlier can never be thought of advocating hybridity as a permanent subversion—an indeterminate area of spillage and proliferation. This is a strange understanding of Fanon15 who in fact ends The Wretched of the Earth as I showed earlier with a programmatic call not to copy or mimic Europe, but to chart out a new path. Who mimics? The weak, whereas Fanon suggests that Algerians are becoming strong through revolution, which is transforming them, ‘The Revolution in depth, the true one, precisely because it changes man and renews society,

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has reached an advanced stage. This oxygen, which creates and shapes a new humanity—this too is the Algerian Revolution’16 (emphasis mine). Yet Bhabha locates indeterminacy in agency, makes it the latter’s chief mark. Or, we can take Bhabha’s project of ‘Interrogating Identity—Frantz Fanon and the Post-colonial Prerogative’. He does not for a moment grasp the main argument of this chapter, namely that to Fanon revolution interrogates identity, and only revolution can totally interrogate the identities ascribed to ‘Man’ in this hierarchical, exploitative, racist, and colonial world. For Fanon thus there is no privileging of ‘the postcolonial’, no recourse to short-cut cultural (by which all we get is ‘behavioural’) strategies, no road other than that of transformation and revolution. Take what I think to be the best passage from ‘Interrogating Identity—Frantz Fanon and the Post-colonial Prerogative’ and see the magic words can create. Bhabha writes, ‘Remembering Fanon is a process of intense discovery and disorientation. Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful remembering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present. It is such a memory of the history of race and racism, colonialism and the question of cultural identity that Fanon reveals with great profundity and poetry than any other writer. What he achieves, I believe, is something far greater: for in seeing the phobic image of the Negro, the native, the colonised, deeply woven into the psychic pattern of the West, he offers the master and slave a deeper reflection of their interpositions, as well as the hope of a difficult, even dangerous, freedom.’ And then he cites Fanon to conclude the paragraph, ‘It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinise the self, it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world’17 (emphasis mine). We shall have to stretch our imagination to the farthest to argue that this citation from Fanon confirms in any way a post-colonial prerogative—prerogative of unknowingly writing poetry when writing politics or offering the master and the slave a common salvation. Is this then what is post-colonial?18 What remains then of values of liberation, freedom, independence, decolonisation, and social transformation—all these ideas and hopes congealed in the word, Revolution? Bhabha has no doubt as to its answer. We find him replying,


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What must be left an open question is how we are to rethink ourselves once we have undermined the immediacy and autonomy of selfconsciousness… What remains to be thought of is the repetitious desire to recognise ourselves doubly, as at once, decentred in the solidary process of the political group, and yet, ourself as a consciously committed, even individuated, agent of change—bearer of belief.19

So, this is psychic process, and if not the avowal of a fully psychic process, at least a sly invocation of Kantianism here in the form of invoking the individual capacity to be a rational being. This is certainly not a question of historically committed or achieved identity of being political and social at the same time. It is as if a psychic process, which ignores the moments of compulsion when to be social is to be political at first, or when to cope with the self-annihilating nature of politics the agent of change must make social liberation an integral part of politics. What does Fanon say of this task of transformation? Let us now listen to him. On every hill the government in miniature is formed and takes over power. Everywhere—in the valleys and in the forests, in the jungle and the villages—we find a national authority. Each man or woman brings the nation to life by his or her action, and is pledged to ensure its triumph in their locality. We are dealing with a strategy of immediacy, which is both radical and totalitarian: the aim and the programme of each spontaneously constituted group is local liberation. If the nation is everywhere, then she is here. One step further, and only here is she to be found. Tactics are mistaken for strategy. The art of politics is simply transformed into the art of war; the political militant is the fighter. To fight the war and to take part in politics: the two things become one and the same. This people that has lost its birthright, that is used to live in the narrow circle of feuds and rivalries, will now proceed in atmosphere of solemnity to cleanse and purify the face of the nation as it appears in the various localities. In a veritable collective ecstasy, families, which have always been traditional enemies, decide to rub out old scores and to forgive and forget. There are numerous reconciliations. Long-buried but unforgettable hatreds are brought to light once more so that they may more surely be rooted out. The taking on of nationhood involves a growth of consciousness. National unity is first the unity of a group, the disappearance of old quarrels, and the final liquidation of unspoken

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grievances. At the same time forgiveness and purification include those natives who by their activities and by their complicity with the occupier have dishonoured their country. On the other hand, traitors and all those who have sold out to the enemy will be judged and punished. In undertaking this onward march, the people legislates, finds itself and wills itself to sovereignty. In every corner that is thus awakened from the colonial slumber, life is lived at an impossibly high temperature. There is a permanent outpouring of all the villages of spectacular generosity, of disarming kindness, and willingness, which can never be doubted, to die for the ‘cause’. All this is evocative of a confraternity… Messengers are dispatched to neighbouring tribes. They constitute the first system of intercommunication in the rebellion, and bring movement and cadence to districts, which are still motionless… The circle of the nation widens and fresh ambushes top entrap the enemy hail the entry of new tribes upon the scene. Each village finds that it is itself both an absolute agent of revolution, also a link in the chain of action…20 (italics mine)

Yes, this too is, as you can see from the italicised sections in the preceding fragment, imagining a nation, though this is far from the cultural theories on nationalism’s beginning and the emergence of the nation form, though Fanon never (possibly deliberately) wrote a full-fledged theory of the nation—the European nation and the anti-colonial nation, the imperial nation and the enslaved nation, the dominant form and the dominated form. Yet, not only the lines cited earlier, but coupled with his caution about the ‘national’ yet his invocation of the nation (the famous exhortation that there is no escape from experiencing the national feeling and achieving the national form) Fanon’s writings tell in unmistakable terms his ideas on the nation—unprecedented because no one else combined in the way he did the two problematic of race and power in the theme of the nation. Even if there were nothing else in his writings, this and this alone would have made him one of the most rigorous thinkers of nationalism and the nation form.21 But what makes Fanon a unique theorist of the nation? It is here where the proposition of the insurgent political subject—the constituent power—briefly discussed earlier in this chapter becomes relevant in a fundamental way. From Machiavelli to Marx, and from Marx to Lenin and Mao—all resorted to rhetoric to employ the most binding and persuasive arguments to push the fellow citizens along the path of radical transformation. And, the more the mutation of the


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form of collective life gathered speed the more the deployment of rhetoric became absolute for writing, by which I mean writing ‘manifestos, programmes’. That is how The Manifesto of the Communist Party originated, before that The Prince, and after that Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan. The more the tempo increases, the phobic decreases; we discover the physicality of the entire process of transformation in its blinding clarity. In the accelerated process of the emergent political subject, which faces the emergency of occupation, the subject takes on the role of the constituent power determined to constitute a new society. That is the secret to Fanon’s astonishing journey, and though this journey can be seen in personal biographical terms as Ato Sekyi-Out presents us with a beautiful and a poignant account of Fanon’s biography and pitches the chronicle on an experiential plane,22 yet it is perhaps preferable to see it as a process of the emergence of the political subject, which as it realises more and more the emergency of the situation of occupation, increases its resources, and begins the display of its determination to reconstitute the society. Nation is a part of the constituent process, therefore is its liminal presence in a revolutionist account. Nation not by its own virtue, but as part of the emergence of a consciousness, a strategy, a collective, a form at once in micro form (‘On every hill the nation is present’) and in its totalising configuration (‘national culture’). Nation as part of revolution, as part of the international (‘National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension’23), as an instance of the concrete universal... We can further see that Fanon’s search for a revolutionary space reflects the dynamics of the constituent power in the milieu of colonial over-determination. The constituent power has to reject the imperial centre in all its manifestations and disrupt the neat schema of colonialism and initiate a steady movement to the social, cultural, and political margins of the empire and then proceed to constitute society beyond the empire. The constituent power cannot afford to stop in this process, and must reject ‘identification, itself an imperial process of violent appropriation’, till society has reconstituted in a way that it will have no need for such identification.24 The colonised subject, whose intimacy with the coloniser, Fanon recognises repeatedly, is a problem for the revolution, must become the emancipative subject. Anti-colonial struggle thus becomes part and parcel of the self-negation

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of the colonial status and position of the political subject. Constituent power in this way becomes a founding activity and an extremely radical terrain. ‘Time and space has to be produced’, indeed ‘Time and space must be produced’—the constituent power takes this upon itself as its primary task; indeed by producing its own time and place, the constituent power becomes constituent, that is to say, will now constitute a new society. Therefore is the urgency of the manifesto towards African revolution, the urgency of appeal to the wretched of the earth not to delay but seize the anti-imperial moment. Only in the mirror of the dynamics of the emergence of a constituent power that we shall understand as to how Fanon or Che produced their own time, or their own geography of revolution—every hilltop or village, or the trans-Atlantic black world, or Year 5 of the Revolution…

THE ARMED VIRTUE Why speak of the Negro and Hegel here? Frankly there is no reason except for the fact that politics is still not free of metaphysics. Thus, even when Bhabha tries to correct the imbalance of his earlier writings he cannot come out of the metaphysical trap. In his ‘Foreword—Framing Fanon’25 Bhabha proceeds to raise and answer questions like, Is Fanon still relevant? Is his ethical vision of new humanism a vain plea? Or, can something be salvaged from his ethics and politics in this age of globalisation? In his replies, which are all sympathetic to Fanon, he again falls victim to what is called as ‘critical Fanonism’; therefore he has to explain the role of violence in Fanon’s writings, and has to admit that notwithstanding complex historical realities, Fanon remains the intimate, if intimidating, poet of the vicissitudes of violence and the phantom of terror. Fanon appears deluded as he confuses the means with ends of anti-colonial violence. Yet we know that for Fanon violence was not a mediating agency between means and the ends; whosoever says so must have been ignorant of A Dying Colonialism’s or Toward the African Revolution’s magnificent chapters on what is revolution and wherefrom the dangers to revolution can come—something borne true by later events—or have read Fanon mainly through the introduction by Sartre to The Wretched of the Earth.26 Fanon in fact argued that the dependence of the slave and the master featured the economy of the


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colonial space, and he searched all his life as to how this dependence could be cut off. Further, Bhabha says that globalisation has brought in neo-colonial domination; therefore Fanon still remains relevant. But this sets a question for post-colonial studies itself as a field of inquiry. For instance, what insights do we get from these cultural studies on postcolonial domination, continuing hunger, bloodbath, and an insidious neo-colonialism? Bhabha has no answer, he can only hope for ‘suggestive perspectives on the state of the decompartmentalised world after the dismemberment of the Berlin Wall in 1989’.27 So the annus mirabilis of 1989 does not bring in for post-colonial studies the victory of capitalism, but the end of ‘Manichaeism of the Cold War’. He does not notice any defeat of the struggle, any advance of the bourgeois imperial world, all he notices is the impact of 1989 on interdependence of the slave and the master.28 We may in fact raise the question, even if bit recklessly (in the interest of a rigorous understanding of the specific way this field of post-colonial studies has grown as an academic discipline): Is not the way Bhabha defines the problematic of the coloniser–colonised relation—for brevity’s sake let us say, ‘hybridity’ a key word in that definition—reminiscent of Albert Camus’ attitude to French colonisation and occupation of Algeria and the Algerian liberation war? Camus, as we know, was so much pre-occupied with the issue of violence that he could never bring himself to support the national war of liberation, and throughout his life supported all sorts of unrealistic proposals of a France–Algeria union, even while conceding that France was an occupying power.29 To get to the root of the issue—if hybridity is all about negotiating borders—borders set about by colonialism and various colonial practices, one of the fundamental forms of which was racist practice, then, surely we must see how the various inclusions and interdependencies were brought about and the final limits they had in them. Fanon shows them with extraordinary clarity how borders were set in colonial relations, marked by what Etienne Balibar has called the ‘internal exclusion’—a colonial strategy that would encourage the colonised to emulate the coloniser, create a colonial home/world of commonness and interdependence, but a home marked by exclusive limits to inclusion, that is, a home with enormous hierarchies, inequities, distancing, and exploitation. So speak the French, yet remain a slave, a Negro, and an Algerian … Bhabha in Location of Culture has not even a single word

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on that. At least the culture of resistance does not generate primarily from that field of master–slave interdependent sociality, but from a refusal to play the game. Fanon would have said, you have set borders; well then, remain on that side, we take care of our own world. Balibar wrote, We must however observe that the exteriority of the ‘native’ population in colonisation, or rather the representation of that state as racial exteriority … is no means a given state of affairs. It was in fact produced and reproduced within the very space constituted by conquest and colonisation … and therefore on the basis of a certain interiority. Otherwise one could not explain the ambivalence of the dual movement of assimilation and exclusion of the ‘natives’ nor the way, in which the subhuman nature attributed to the colonised comes to determine the self-image developed within the colonised nations in the period when the world was being divided up. The heritage of colonialism is, in reality, a fluctuating combination of continued exteriorisation and ‘internal exclusion’.30

In short, the point remains that metaphysics has little to offer to discussion on the dynamics of the evolution of the political subject into a constituent power. Writing his last tract, Fanon knew it more than anybody else. He knew that the war was on two fronts: against colonialism in Algeria and elsewhere, and against capitalism globally, particularly in the post-independence period. Therefore, he said, Decolonisation, which sets out to change the world is, obviously, a programme of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonisation, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say that it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements, which give its historical form and content. Decolonisation is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature… The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial system. Decolonisation never takes place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s floodlight upon them…31 (italics mine)


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Read as part of his entire writings, we can clearly see here Fanon’s working on the two factors of time and space—acceleration of time and reworking of space—to make history intelligible, in other words making ourselves capable of knowing that we are part of history. We can also see how Fanon was reworking his theory of the subject—in fact reworking from the first day when he opened his eyes to this world to find the Negro in a particular subject-position, which he expressed in his inimitable language, ‘the crushing object-hood’. As Alexandre Kojeve, while pointing out that knowing history and the formation of the subject through actions were interlinked, remarked of Hegel, we too can say that Fanon did not need a God who would reveal the truth to him. And to find the truth, he did not need to hold dialogues with ‘the men in the city’, or even to have a ‘discussion’ with himself or to ‘meditate’… He knew the actions that had preceded him.32 All we can say here is that Fanon went beyond Hegel and philosophy when he refused to say—even after going tantalisingly close to a Hegelian reading of the lord and bondsman situation—what Hegel had said, namely, The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the consciousness of the bondsman. This doubtless appears in the first instance outside itself, and not as the truth of self-consciousness. But just as lordship showed its essential nature to be the reverse of what it wants to be, so, too, bondage will, when completed, pass into the opposite of what it immediately is: being a consciousness repressed within itself, it will enter into itself, and change round into real and true independence. (Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Section B, ‘Self-consciousness’, Paragraph 193)

The fact is that we need less of the ‘Hegelian shade’ to stand under and read Fanon, but more readings of insurgent situations and the biographies of constituent power to appreciate what Frantz Fanon wanted to do. To conclude then on the lessons that we get here on the history of the political subject: Fanon gives us a magisterial account of the relation between power and mutation, strength and the fact of transformation, and the over-determination of mutation. Revolution is the principle of power; it is strength in action. It exhibits as well as resolves the play

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between the power of the imperial political-economic means and the powerlessness of the colonised. In this mutation we have not only Fanon’s personal dislocation, relocation, and death, we have also one of the most radical and astounding feats to found power on certain constitutive principles, such as achieving national consciousness, the way to resolve the question of blackness, garnering spontaneity, and creating time and space in a framework beyond the imperial configuration— which political readers will discover again and again while reading his tracts. There will be repeated efforts to push these constitutive principles under the carpet in the post-transformation era. It will be also argued that independent Algeria belied his hope and thus belies his thinking. We have three answers to that apology: first, the state (condition) of today does not necessarily tell us that what we did yesterday was wrong (How many in the West today will say that most of France’s woes today owe their origin to the French Revolution?); second, the moment of transformation, as Fanon repeatedly cautioned, was a moment of contest and uncertainty, and the results could be upturned even decades later if corrective measures were not adequate in measure or time; third, and this is most important, and on this there is not simply enough scope here to elaborate, namely the dialectic of the constituent power and the constituted power, when the constituted power precisely because it is the ‘constituted’ power that overshadows all other phenomena of the revolution, and manages to create a society which will only partially retain the virtues of the constituent power. Fanon for instance wrote, Before independence, the leader generally embodies the aspirations of the people for independence, political liberty, and national dignity. But as soon as independence is declared, far from embodying in concrete form the needs of the people in what touches bread, land, and the restoration of the country to the sacred hands of the people, the leader will reveal his inner purpose: to become the general president of that company of profiteers impatient for their returns which constitutes the national bourgeoisie.33

Because Fanon was aware of this dialectic and the tragic possibility, at the same time aware of the need to work out the mechanisms to bring out resolutions other than the ones which we usually see in the long history of contentious politics, that Fanon’s notions of the nation,


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violence, power, the fact of blackness, internationalism, African revolution, all assume liminal positions. Each time he approaches one of these great themes, each time he seems to work on the theme ‘little more’, stretch the possibility of the concept ‘little more’, but that much that is enough to make the boundaries of that concept more elastic, capable of showing us new possibilities. At least this much we can say: Once we remember the key words and key themes of those tracts, which we can summarise in one phrase ‘armed virtue’,34 the image of a constitutive power will resurface. In the exertions of power by Fanon, the impending doom is the backdrop, and therefore the urgency of his tone. The colonial world has left no means to transform the colonised societies in any virtuous way. The people are destroyed. Even though arms and virtue can combine in an equation with infinite variables, yet Fanon remains decisive in his thrust: Can armed power close the historical crisis and make mutation positive? Arms and violence—to what extent, in what way, and how— can virtue be combined with them? It is not only the theme of invoking a revolutionary nation form, but more than ever the invocation of a constituent power, which will reconstitute society by combining arms and virtue. And here is Frantz Fanon’s uniqueness, for on the basis of this combination Fanon literally wrenches away the desire for a political subject, ‘a new subject’—and we must understand here that the foundations of this new subject are not the foundations of the preceding, that is the colonial world, nor even its ruins, but their complete absence, ‘its void’—and constitutes it into a programme. In Fanon therefore the constituent power of the anti-colonial revolution finds its absolute definition. To understand this we need little more of Fanon’s light on Fanon himself, little less of Hegel’s shade in reading Fanon, and if we can allow ourselves little indulgence, more of Fanon’s light to read Hegel…35

NOTES 1. Azzedine Haddour makes roughly the same point in his editorial foreword ‘PostColonial Fanonism’ to his edited, The Fanon Reader (London: Pluto Press, 2006), xiv–xv. 2. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (hereafter BSWM) trans. Charles Lamm Markmann, p. 17, revised edition (New York: Grove Press, 2008). 3. Fanon, BSWM, opening lines, p. 7.

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4. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (hereafter WE), trans. Constance Harrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), ‘Conclusion’, pp. 311–16. 5. Stuart Hall, ‘The After-life of Frantz Fanon—Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?’ in The Fact of Blackness—Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (London: ICA, Seattle: Bay Press, 1996), 15. With unbridled erudition Hall informs us, ‘Let us put it simplistically ... For, if this text is “where Lacan makes his interruption into colonial discourse theory”, as Gates asserts, it is also where Fanon “reads” Lacan in the light of his own preoccupations. In the long footnote on the “mirror phase”, it is Fanon’s appropriation of Lacan, which strikes us most vividly. First, the “Other” in this transaction in raced: (“...the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man; and conversely”). It is difficult not to agree that he writes here as if “the real Other” is indeed “a fixed phenomenological point”’ (p. 26). Thus, you can read Fanon without knowing a single line about the Algerian War where one million people died; you do not have to know anything about racist torture, discrimination, slavery, etc.; all you need is ‘othering’. See in this connection the review of The Fact of Blackness—Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation by Julian S. Samuel in India Star Book Review, http://www.indiastar.com/samuel.htm 6. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Interrogating Identity—Frantz Fanon and the Post-colonial Prerogative’, in Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 40–65. 7. On imperial foundations see Charles S. Maier, Among Empires, Part I, ‘Recurring Structures’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 8. Frantz Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965), ‘Introduction’ by Adolfo Gilly, p. 18. 9. Fanon, WE, p. 149. 10. Fanon, BSWM, p. 27. 11. Fanon, WE, p. 233. 12. Fanon, WE, pp. 39–41. 13. The exact words of Fanon, ‘After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism, but also of the disappearance of the colonised man’ (WE, p. 246). 14. Fanon, WE, pp. 236–48. 15. ‘Of Mimicry and Man’ in Location of Culture, p. 91. 16. Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, p. 181. 17. Fanon, Location of Culture, p. 63; similarly pp. 236–39. 18. See also Bhabha’s ‘Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition’, in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 112–23. 19. Fanon, Location of Culture, p. 65. 20. Fanon, WE, pp. 131–33. 21. Once again, the only two other thinkers who thought of the nation in a liberationist sense marked by internationalist ideas were Mao and Che—both obviously ignored by historians (for instance by Eric Hobsbawm, who listed ten major works on nationalism oblivious of the huge variety of the nation form and hence nationalism’s bewildering variety, and consequential uniqueness of each form and its theorisation) and cultural chroniclers working on nations and nationalism. Both of these groups were spawned off by metropolitan history.


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22. Ato Sekyi-Out, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 23. Fanon, WE, p. 247. 24. On this see Charles F. Peterson, Dubois, Fanon, Cabral—The Margins of Elite Anticolonial Leadership (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books), 96–97. 25. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Foreword—Framing Fanon’ in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), ix–xl. 26. Alice Cherki in her preface to the 2002 edition of Fanon’s text says that Sartre in his introduction exaggerates the analysis of Fanon on violence. Sartre’s introduction to WE influences the reader, particularly the European reader, even before s/he has approached Fanon’s text (p. 11). 27. ‘Framing Fanon’, p. xiv. 28. For an elaborate reading of Bhabha, see the introduction by Azzedine Haddour in Azzedine Haddour, The Fanon Reader (London: Pluto Press, 2006), ‘Foreword— Postcolonial Fanonism’, pp. vii–xxv. 29. Edward Said in ‘Camus and the French Imperial Experience’ in his Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), ‘What I want to do is to see Camus’ fiction as an element in France’s methodically constructed political geography of Algeria … the better to see it as an arresting account of the political and interpretative contest to represent, inhabit, and possess the territory itself… Camus’ writing is informed by an extra-ordinarily belated, in some ways incapacitated colonial sensibility, which enacts an imperial gesture within and by reasons of form, the realistic novel, well past its greatest achievement in Europe’ (p. 176). For a more sympathetic account of Camus’ attitude, David Carroll, Albert Camus the Algerian—Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 30. Etienne Balibar, ‘Racism and Nationalism’ in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, nation, Class—Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), 42–43. 31. Fanon, WE, p. 36. 32. See Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1934; New York: Basic Books, 1969), Chapter 1. 33. Fanon, WE, p. 166. 34. Antonio Negri uses this phrase in his description of Machiavelli in Insurgencies, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 49–56. 35. Obviously I am taking the cue here from Louis Althusser (Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays).

9 Possibilities of Our Trans-national Citizenship

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eaders of this book will notice that in this account of the political subject there has been hardly any mention of the citizen. We had of course explained in the introduction why this book takes up as its principal theme of investigation the figure of the political subject, and why the legal-political concept of citizenship remains an inadequate expression of this phenomenon. The reason is not simply that we had to go back to our colonial past to trace the origins of the passage from subjection under alien rule to autonomous subject position in politics, whose one expression is citizenship, and therefore we had to grasp the position of the political subject, the reason is deeper. By going back to colonial past when this passage was taking place, we are in fact acknowledging two fundamental things that should alter our fundamental vision of politics: 1. Political autonomy, whose congealed figure is citizenship, began to be realised even under colonial rule, as soon as resistance began and the effort to counter sovereignty began to take political shape. 2. The political world is more than, and fundamentally more than, the liberal construction of the sovereign-state-governmentcitizen complex, in which the juridical resolution of claims, rights, governmental responsibilities, and functions take place. Taken together these two factors effect a displacement—from an inquiry into citizenship to an inquiry into the phenomenon of the political subject, the congealed figure of the material world of politics, whose ‘other’, the seen, juridical, and the linguistic appearances can be

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be in this bourgeois world only in the institutional form of the citizen. As Marx taught us to go to the roots of money, price, wage, profit, and other elements of the capitalist economic world by examining the process of production of value (and thus surplus value, etc.) and labour power, similarly we have to go to the hidden material roots of politics in this world. Yet it does not mean that an investigation of the political subject will eschew an investigation of citizenship and its institutional world. In this book this examination is partly necessary in order to examine its future promises and current predicaments—an examination that will help us to understand to a greater extent the phenomenon of the political subject. Popular politics in its contentious form brought in democracy as well as the nation. Citizen as the representative figure of the political subject emerged in the context of these two realities—the democratic reality and the national reality. What will happen to the citizen when pressures begin to mount on both the forms of politics— the nation form and the democracy form? Will this figure survive? Will it transform? What cracks are appearing? What impact is the citizen undergoing in our time, when borders and the national form are changing, and new global assemblages of territory, authority, and rights are taking shape?1 In this chapter and the following one we shall reflect on some of the ways in which both the nation form and the democracy form are changing, with these fluctuations impacting on the citizen as the central figure of modern institutional politics. After all, the great promise of democracy is the unlimited horizon of citizenship, an unending expansion of political society not necessarily in area but in the scale of social quality. In other words, if we rework the democratic theory of citizenship, we can say that the historical mission of citizenship is on the whole complete with the coming of democracy. After that citizenship remains as an institution to make democracy work. Democratic theory may admit with a bit of twist and humility that since the promise of democracy is never completely exhausted, citizenship makes democracy’s promise always fulfilling, always towards fulfilment. Even if this is taken as true, what happens to the post-colonial political subject in this fantastic democratic destiny? Will s/he get a share, a seat? An expansion of democracy, yes—what does it hold for the political subject of our time and place, the subject who is not ‘unfortunately’ yet the citizen, yet who sits at the heart of

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the problem of democracy? In an age when experts are thinking that a democratic expansion of polity by overcoming national confines is possible, what happens to ‘our’ possibilities of trans-national citizenship? In this chapter I intend to take up a text by a major philosopher of our time reflecting on the question of position and some of the issues associated with it. Etienne Balibar’s We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship is a profound yet ambivalent work.2 Precisely for these two characteristics it has to be studied closely—in this case of course in light of our inquiry.

CITIZEN

AND THE

WORKSITE

OF

DEMOCRACY

Etienne Balibar’s reflections on the possibilities of trans-national citizenship arise in the wake of the attempts to create a common European political home. We can say that these reflections mark a double bind. These reflections are ambivalent because while they deliberate on the question as to whether such a common European political home exists, they are perched also on the possible existence of such a common home, at least in some form and through some route, that makes it possible for Balibar to reflect on European citizenship. We the People of Europe? is therefore an enigmatic site of thinking on citizenship; the interrogation mark at the end of the title questions the assumption of a common European people-hood, but accepts its reality and proceeds to examine the claims and possibilities of European citizenship on the basis of that reality, which the reflections in the first place seek to interrogate. There is thus a circularity in the discussion on citizenship, particularly its future possibilities, for such a discussion assumes much in the present reality of citizenship, while debating its future based on the supposed reality of today. Perhaps this is inevitable for we can see here an attempt to work out two simultaneous problematic—first, the European-ness of a given people or the European-ness of a combination of given national population groups and second, the norms of citizenship. These two inquiries proceed as parallel to each other throughout the book, its immense richness, at the same time the labour of the problematic to an unreachable darkness. Citizenship was anchored in the nation. Uprooting citizenship from nation and nationality, and proceeding to anchor citizenship in democracy is


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apparently the clue to the European-ness of the ‘we’ or the Europeanness that this ‘we’ seeks to create. In this game of three blocks, people (we), Europe, and citizenship, these three actors create each other yet leave each other incomplete, because in this conceptual topography of politics they exist as mutually dependent concepts. The picture of democracy that emerges is therefore of a worksite, though it is not sure if Etienne Balibar had that sense in mind also when he used the term ‘democracy as worksite’ and explained what he meant by it. So what happens to the ‘national people’ or ‘nation-people’ that Antonio Gramsci spoke of? Do they still exist in today’s Europe? Do they exist as constituent units of ‘we’? Balibar of course does not give us the answer in the book. The liminality of the problematic casts its long shadow on the theme. Because this profound book is an exercise in liminality, and let us remember in this context Balibar’s description of race, nation, and class as ‘ambiguous categories’,3 the idea of democracy as a worksite, and identifying the ‘worksites of democracy’ will attract the notice of his readers. Balibar explains what he signifies by this, [In fact] I do not believe it is possible to think of transformations, social movements, and intellectual developments on the model of what Gramsci calls ‘war of position’ or direct confrontation, but rather on that of ‘war of manoeuvre’ or gradual construction of a new historical hegemony, that is both a new way of thinking, a new collective ‘common sense’, and interactions between multiple interventions stemming from both civil society and the public sphere. It is only as a function of the goal of these interventions that specific ‘forces’ can come together. (pp. 172–73)

What are the features of this situation—marked by the gradual construction of a new historical hegemony—which prompts Etienne Balibar to think of democracy’s worksites? He mentions four worksites. The first worksite of democracy according to Balibar concerns the question of justice. The experiment is and will be, namely, can the system of justice be widened and deepened to the extent whereby individuals and groups of citizens in Europe opposing the state will have access to justice, and this universal access to justice will be featured by ‘equity of decisions’ ‘sanctioned in the last resort by the European Courts’? (p. 173). This task is significant because today the administrative state

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now dominates the ‘state of justice’, corruption overwhelms the system of justice, common law and Roman law are often at variance with each other, and finally various national restrictions limit access to justice. European citizenship will imply a universal access to justice. The second worksite of democracy concerns the convergence of tradeunion struggle and the associative movements occasioned by the projects to reorganise labour time on the European scale. This necessity emerges from the crisis of the national social state, which means that it is extremely difficult for the nation form to reproduce itself while it codifies and sanctions a certain definition of work, labour, and the labourer. The problem is at the heart of the ‘European social model and its crisis’. While unrest over unemployment shows the persistence of the centrality of the older definition of labour, the new ‘affective forms’ of labour emphasised by feminists, environmentalists, and scientists, make possible for everyone to become a ‘social worker’. This opens for the citizens of Europe the possibility of renovating the forms of collective struggle and the institutions of social conflict. Militant citizenship (Balibar points out that ‘the militant has been one of the great modern figures of active citizenship’, p. 176) and a kind of social solidarity that cannot be reduced to the exigencies of historical compromises between capital and labour will be the main instruments of expanding the notion of socially necessary work at a continental scale, also redefining the notion of social satisfaction. The third worksite is the democratisation of borders. It does not mean the absolute opening or suppression of borders, it rather means ‘a negotiation of the crossing of borders on the level of the movements of circulation and migration of populations on the planet, one of whose poles is Europe, rather than allowing the border to be the object of unilateral political decisions backed up by the development of reinforced security practices and ideologies or what has been called the “fortress Europe”’ (p. 176). A ‘right to circulation and residency’ will be the beginning of citizenship in Europe. It will also indicate a shared construction of citizenship by the diverse inhabitants of Europe, constituting an effective progress in the history of the rights of man. The fourth worksite concerns culture, the language of Europe, which will be the condition of a European public sphere, that is a sphere of the Europeans. That language cannot be a language of integration, or a language of work only aimed at creating a community, but a language


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of translation, that is to say a system of continuous translations involving the common migrant worker even, which will be truly a gigantic cultural revolution, involving many generations of artists, writers, performers, and poets (p. 178). These major experiments can make the emergence of a European civic space possible, thus making possible at the same time the emergence of the citizen of Europe. Certainly for a European, for a non-European too, this is breathtaking vision. Law, border, a narrow definition of labour, and a narrow idea of language—the four obstacles to the democratisation of European relations ‘within’, as Balibar says—will have to be worked upon in order to facilitate the emergence of the citizen of Europe. And the fact that it is now possible to think of these programmatic tasks indicates that the possibility of surmounting these obstacles exists. The European citizen now stands there in a faint profile to encourage the militants to take to that direction from where s/he beckons. What will be the figure of the citizen-militant like? Against private property, assuming continental monopoly forms, cartelisation of states, and increasing restrictions on labour in form of severe controls on state expenditure to reduce state deficits, so that the Euro—the symbol of a single European financial and currency regime—can hold aloft Europe, the Europe of the European citizens—in that milieu what can be the forms of militancy on a continental scale? Here, if we take certain forms of collective actions as indicative of the emergence and persistence of the citizen-militant, we are still at the stage of national-political, and not continental, even if we remember the collective continental protests around the crime in Genoa (the armed police shot a demonstrator against a G8 summit there to death) and the punishment. But more importantly, these collective claim-making forms that demonstrate the emergence of new techniques of mobilisation in the last 200 years, namely petition, peaceful and violent assemblies, signature collection, small informal meetings, shaming, public hearings, engaging the target of attack in forced conversation with the movement, humiliation, mass boycott of votes, night vigil, barricade struggle, sit-ins, occupation of public places, and above all forms characterised by mixture of legality, semi-legality, and illegalities, are still against ‘national’ targets; and they indicate the possibility of a ‘war of position’ always hovering over the agenda of ‘war of manoeuvre’, another scenario besides the one

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Balibar suggests. There is an equal possibility that the emergence of the European citizen will occur not through a gradual dissolution of the national citizen into a continental citizen, but through a ‘break’ (for instance, a massive breakdown of the state system or the European cartels), a term once popular and now almost forgotten. The citizenmilitant may reappear on the four worksites in the form of new groups of political leaders, organisers, and innovators from classes and strata hitherto un-reached by politics, namely mothers, teachers, good Samaritans, backward urban and rural poor, scientists, striking workers, and other layers. These political actors, deeply local yet firmly cosmopolitan, have the power to create movements that are based on highly valuable and flexible networks and rapidly shifting targets of attack. They are successful therefore in advancing mass coalitions. They facilitate the democratic spirit. They also strengthen the encounter by reinforcing trust in select relations that constitute the core of any democratic assembly. And as we have noted, these mobilisations are deeply local yet cosmopolitan, because they enhance the dialogic capacity of popular politics by being coalitional, conversational, and flexible. In this local and yet trans-national figure we have a convergence of the two forms of war, positional and mobile or manoeuvring. Four things which constitute the break are indicated here: Break would mean (a) break with the old patterns of hegemony and the old division of the forms of war between strategic (positional) and mobile (manoeuvrable); (b) the emergence and gradual ascendancy of dialogic politics; (c) the reconstituted inter-relation between the local and the continental (in some case global), which makes the authenticity of the continental contingent on the resolution of the ‘question local’ (Basque, Bosnia, Kosovo, southern Italy, Ireland—the local is everywhere strewn across the ‘trans-national’); and (d) the new notion of the political subject displacing the citizen as the political actor, because the citizen qua citizen is not active in the way political activism is taking shape, the actor is assuming more directly the role of the political subject. Indeed it is through the last three aspects that the fundamental aspect, that is to say the break with old patterns of hegemony and the old division of the forms of war between strategic (positional) and mobile (manoeuvrable), demonstrates itself. Dialogic politics emerged almost everywhere in the wake of the breakdown of old socialist states and camp, when the political victory


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of historical liberalism appeared permanent. The three pillars of liberal political order historically validated till date seemed beyond challenge in that year of miracle, 1989, namely sovereignty, disciplinary powers visà-vis the citizen, and the overwhelming presence of the government in making the state viable. Arms, laws, ideology, avenues of information, dissemination, and communication, trade channels—everything conceivably relevant to power was under monopoly possessions and controls. In this situation, where no other form of politics seemed possible, dialogic politics opened a way out of the closure. It was contentious, it was a renewed form of contested conversation, and it was once again a politics of confrontation, but this time by through conversation means that the most salient feature is that this new form of politics, dialogic politics, started making its claims on the basis of justice. Historically defined, enumerated, and catalogued, the idea of justice took the shape of an agenda of minimal justice, on the basis of which dialogic politics made its claims. Setting right the wrongs, that is compensation, guarantee against future repetition of those wrongs, custodianship of the political society, federalisation of relations, and innovation, appeared as the five principles of minimal justice, on the basis of which the new mobilisations began happening. But this would have been impossible without the ascendancy of the local. Along with that came a displacement of the meaning of local also. Local does not mean only a figure of territoriality; it can mean anything that is not subsumed by a greater authority (nation, nationstate, empire, global, continental, etc.), it can signify a refusal to tolerate outside mediation (like the mediation by the nation-state in the relation between the continental and the local), and it can mean specifics. Local signifies daily negotiations, the body, the physicality of politics, renewed plebiscite, and the management of differences due to distance, form, quantity, and wealth. Local also signifies practices, and finally the demystification of politics and its escape from philosophy and social theory. Balibar makes a significant comment in this respect when he speaks of the context of collective citizenship, ‘And we must attack the obsessive question of collective insecurity by beginning precisely with the situation of the most “insecure”, the nomadic populations who are the source and target of the obsession with law and order that is so closely intertwined with the obsession with identity’ (italics Balibar’s; p. 176). The point is if we have to ensure the micro-security of the migrant

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worker, one of the principle constituents of the nomadic populations, we have to dismantle the macro-security of a continental scale. Or, to put it somewhat differently, it is the overall architecture of security, the macro-security, which creates molecular insecurity. To face that insecurity and negotiate that to a satisfactory solution political society requires to get down to the micro-tasks of dialogue, management, negotiation, and direct presentation of interests and cases—a process that is exactly opposite to national representative systems which can thrive only on votes, xenophobia, and the eternal construction of fictive ethnic identity. In any case, we have to be aware of the dialectic of the local and the global in the continuing dynamics of citizenship, a dynamics that the citizen is still unable to inhere. The lesson is clear; our reflection on citizenship must constantly move its axis according to the historically predicated dialectic of time and scale. And this takes us to the final point, namely that the de-anchoring of citizenship from the universality of nation, and anchoring it to the historically predicated dialectic of time and scale signifies that the political subject re-assuming the stand of the militant is going beyond the cast of the citizen. Balibar speaks of labour as the worksite of democracy, and he speaks of the convergence of labour struggles and the new forms of associative movements. He is right, for the evolution of the labour structure in Western Europe in the last 50 years have shown the crucial place that immigrant workers have occupied in that structure. On one hand, as very early studies of immigrant labour in post-war Europe showed that labour relations were metamorphosing into ‘race relations’, on the other hand, they showed the immense political challenge that labour movement faced in linking labour struggle with democracy. Citizenship politics soon showed its limits, and with it failed Marshall’s narrative on social citizenship,4 which remained half-real, because citizenship was a concept and an institutional reality that had no space within for an interface with immigration.5 Balibar has written on the vital connection between democratic tasks and the phenomenon of immigration—all the more the reason that we must now think of the new political subject that makes the connection in practice, in democratic movements, in movements for rights, and more significantly in the calls for justice.


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BORDERS AND REFLECTIONS ON TRANS-NATIONAL CITIZENSHIP In this book Etienne Balibar stands on the borders of Europe. And in a memorable language he tells—the reader will sense the voice of philosophy ruminating on the past and the current conundrum. Indeed it is with this that We the People of Europe? opens. I am speaking of the ‘Borders of Europe’ in Greece, one of the ‘peripheral’ countries of Europe in its traditional configuration—a configuration that reflects powerful myths and a long-lived series of historical events. Thessaloníki is itself at the edge of this border country, one of those places where the dialectic between confrontation with the foreigner (transformed into a hereditary enemy) and communication between civilizations (without which humanity cannot progress) is periodically played out. I thus find myself it seems, right in the middle of my object of study, with all the resultant difficulties. The term border is extremely rich in significations. One of my hypotheses is that it is undergoing a profound change in meaning. The borders of new sociopolitical entities, in which an attempt is being made to preserve all the functions of the sovereignty of the state, are no longer entirely situated at the outer limit of territories; they are dispersed a little everywhere, wherever the movement of information, people, and things is happening and is controlled—for example, in cosmopolitan cities. But it is also one of my hypotheses that the zones called peripheral, where secular and religious cultures confront one another, where differences in economic prosperity become more pronounced and strained, constitute the melting pot for the formation of a people (demos), without which there is no citizenship (politeia) in the sense that this term has acquired since antiquity in the democratic tradition. In this sense, border areas—zones, countries, and cities—are not marginal to the constitution of a public sphere but rather are at the center. If Europe is for us first of all the name of an unresolved political problem, Greece is one of its centers, not because of the mythical origins of our civilization, symbolized by the Acropolis of Athens, but because of the current problems concentrated there. Or, more exactly, the notion of a center confronts us with a choice. In connection with states, it means the concentration of power, the

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localization of virtual or real governing authorities. In this sense, the center of Europe is in Brussels, Strasbourg, or in the City of London and the Frankfurt stock exchange, or will soon be in Berlin, the capital of the most powerful of the states that dominate the construction of Europe, and secondarily in Paris, London, and so on. But this notion has another, more essential and elusive meaning, which points to the sites where a people is constituted through the creation of civic consciousness and the collective resolution of the contradictions that run through it. Is there then a ‘European people’, even an emergent one? Nothing is less certain. And if there is not a European people a new type of people yet to be defined, then there is no public sphere or European state beyond technocratic appearances. This is what I meant when I imitated one of Hegel’s famous phrases: Es gibt keinen Staat in Europa (‘There is no State in Europe’). But the question must remain open, and in a particularly ‘central’ way at the border points. (pp. 1–2)

And then he proceeds to link the issue of borders with national identity, nationalism as an organic ideology corresponding with the institution of the nation, and in his words, ‘this institution rest(ing) upon the formulation of a rule of exclusion, of visible or invisible “borders”, materialised in laws and practices’ (italics author’s; p. 23). Balibar also links borders with violence, violence caused by fixed identities— identities, which are fixed by the institution of borders. But borders are borderlands; they ensure that while borders may become central to the life of the nation, they have a life of their own, which is the life of ‘middle-ness’, and borderlands therefore produce an ‘extranational political and social phenomenon’, whose relevance to cosmopolitanism cannot be exaggerated. Once again we are back to the issue of the local. Balibar himself raises the issue of the local to ask, who is accountable, how can accountability be enforced, and who can mediate? (pp. 228–29) As we have indicated, this recognition of the local has to be considered as a strategic factor in building a new universal. Therefore the programme to democratise the institution of borders cannot depend solely on building trans-border institutions, such as transborder new labour ethos, guarantee of the rights of migrant workers, the right of circulation and residency, or the trans-border judicial institutions guaranteeing certain significant rights, but by reading the phenomenon of borders in a new way that enables us to see the significance of borderlands, where the nation is marginal and


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overlapping identities settle their balance in a contingent fashion. These borders in any case have replicated themselves in the life of the nation, producing visible and invisible frontiers within, producing at the same time borderlands there too—areas still unconquered by the nation form, or areas retaining their own centrality even in a nationalist cosmos. These are the tradition of the commons, strong and robust local labour consciousness, peasant groupings, new roaming populations in search of jobs, reminding us of the population groups of several centuries earlier, whom the anthropologist Eric Wolf had called ‘peoples without history’. A reorganisation of relations within, a new negotiation of internal borders, and recognition of the borderlands are to say the least the first minimum step towards assessing the possibility of European/trans-national citizenship. Balibar says, ‘Democratising the borders would thus mean democratising some of the non-democratic conditions of democracy itself that always come between the people and its theoretical sovereignty’ (p. 109). With this task of democratising the borders we can successfully negotiate the contradiction between democratic citizenship and borders, because at the heart of aporia is the question of many sites of political subject-hood, which this theoretical sovereignty and the norms of citizenship try to erase. The opening it seems to me is to look for the contours of the newly emerging political subject, who combines in him the characteristics of both a citizen and a non-citizen, the denizen of the borderland. Only when we have linked the fissures within with borders there on the outside, we shall be able to ‘desacaralise’ the representation of borders, and reinvent politics in the context of globalisation (p. 114). That would mean, in the first place, an undertaking of the task, as he rightly says, both from below and from the top—both as a function of the principles of right and of popular interests—and second, and here my emphasis lies, the undertaking of the task from within, an invocation of the principle of dialogue, only which can link the principles of right with popular interest, which therefore removes the local–global spatial arrangement and places instead the arrangement of intersecting circles in a constant dialogic universe. The political subject of that trans-national universe will not only carry the mark of the citizen, but also those marks that the institution of citizenship had suppressed all through its history as it developed through national armies, wars and killings, demarcation of

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alien-hood, suppression of women, workers, and dissenters of all kinds, and finally the institution of border as the chief marker of a national society within which citizenship could develop. It is in this light that the 19th-century history of popular struggles has to be re-read today as the dual account of the development of the national citizen and the militant international carrying the long tradition of cross-border continental activities of the various sects in defence of virtues and the millenarian dreams. Large sections of east Europe and central Europe (also Latin America) carry those linkages vividly. They suggest a new geopolitical site of political subject-hood than the traditionally received one. They also suggest a new reading of some pages of old history, a task in which philosophy will help us little, political history will help us more. Balibar himself suggests such a new reading when he interprets Hannah Arrendt’s crucial notion of a ‘right to have rights’ (p. 119) in expanding his idea on the possibilities of expanding the notion of citizenship. He suggests that there is always the phenomenon of a ‘politics of politics’, by which he means politics that aims at creating, recreating, and conserving the set of conditions within which politics as a collective participation in public affairs is possible, or at least not made absolutely impossible. In other words, this is a politics of ‘civility’—not a very satisfactory term, but let us keep on reading Balibar’s ideas—which aims to ensure the conditions necessary to build a polity. Politics of extreme violence in this sense is anti-political, because it destroys the very chance of politics. This politics of civility will give a new meaning to citizenship by way of insisting on democratisation of borders and the need for a new orientation to representative institutions, which will be not merely territorial and certainly not purely national, but also will give resonance to what he calls ‘the cosmopolitics of human rights’, where citizenship and civility are closely associated. But once again, how does the right to have rights historically get instituted? How do conditions of civility get ensured? What to do with the foundational violence with which rights begin their career on earth? The problem I see here is with the rigid contrast of extreme violence and civility on three grounds. First, it makes cases of extreme violence a uniform, undifferentiated phenomenon, and therefore does not see that civility and violence are not mutually exclusive opposites, but intermeshing and interacting phenomena in history that had always combined legality with illegalities, and rule of law and rule of violence.


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Second, though unknowingly, it divides the world into certain zones demarcated by differential degrees of intensity of violence, again forgetting that in many areas on earth citizens were born from massacres. Third, the periods of civility prepare the periods of extreme violence (Iraq, Rwanda, India, and other instances); and therefore we need to analyse the periods of civility much more closely to see what are the civil acts of fomenting structural violence and endemic violence for decades that destroys any chance of politics preserving a polity, because politics has devoured itself. Balibar is right when he relates extreme violence as becoming part of a system and having connections with globalisation, and therefore suggests the need for ‘different kinds of strategies of civility’. The system had caused the breakdown of the new states in many parts of the world, the system had broken down, and the new imperial system had encouraged violence of different kinds—a ten-year violence on Iraq ending with imperial genocide, breakdown and violence in Africa, long periods of right wing catastrophic violence in Latin America and South-East Asia causing massacres of millions with which the ‘long peace’ was ensured. The cold war and the post-cold war histories of violence are thus closely interconnected, and only a patient working out of the principles and practices of dialogic politics can show us the exit from this violent phase of our political life. The displacement in the significance of the institution of citizenship in the process will be from a right-bearing institution to a dialogic agency engaged constantly in defining the standards of minimal justice. Yes, Etienne Balibar is right when he suggests that politics viewed from this perspective is ‘permanent revolution’. The question of civility has to be lodged there. The astute nature of Balibar’s reflections on trans-national citizenship is because of one fundamental fact: he has chosen to stand at the border—the border of Europe, of other places, of categories, of institutions, of time, and of history. I have tried to show how with an interrogation mark at the end of the title of the book it becomes a liminal exercise. This is possible because his is the voice of philosophy that has the power to reflect on inside and outside. Politics requires that you take positions, and Balibar has taken position continuously by political judgements. Therefore, The Reflections echoes two voices, at times in harmony, at times in discord. In teasing out the history of past thoughts and current anxieties, his political positions help. Yet in

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reflecting on future, only philosophical ruminations are of assistance. This is nothing unnatural. Yet, politics requires more. The Reflections stops from where politics has to carry on picking up the threads. We shall see duly why this is the case. Balibar discusses the issue of social citizenship in the context of the possibilities of trans-national citizenship and suggests that while social citizenship, the product of welfare state, socialist movements, and a tradition of collective rights realised in form of the individual citizen, ‘was never fully incorporated into the constitutions of the economically most developed countries and democratically most advanced nation-states’ (p. 165), the realisation of social citizenship on more solid and broader foundations on a continental scale was critical for democratic citizenship—the path to trans-national citizenry. The point is, what will be the nature of the constitution that builds on the acknowledgement of social citizenship? Balibar recognises that current constitutionalism expresses a marked preference for individual and collective rights and for the notions of democratic principles (p. 183), yet he knows that this constitutionalism is not enough. Apart from the Brazilian experience, the current European conundrum over a single European constitution suggests that without the realisation of social citizenship within the country at least in a juridical and constitutional form—in the locality, in the workplace, in the daily site of living—a constitution of Europe promising an el dorado to the people of the continent means the disappearance of the sovereignty of the people in all practical sense. Once again we are back to the issues of the local, and concrete political practices, without which democratic citizenship remains an illusion. Thus, the problem of the triad of citizenship, her rights, and sovereignty cannot be solved either by re-emphasising citizenship, or by re-emphasising her rights, or simply by re-defining the nature of sovereignty. The task is dialogic; a dialogic enumeration of the principles of minimal justice can redefine the relations between the three by re-defining each of them. Shared forms of sovereignty, legal pluralism, and local citizenship as the most affective form of dialogic institution are three main forms that suggest as to how we should approach the task of making new political societies and their rules of constitution. Therefore ‘the world citizens that we are in the course of becoming, or that we are trying to become’ (to the extent that is true; p. 201) must stand before the constituent task of redefining the political space by upsetting hierarchies and making politics federal.


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In that federal society of politics, the federal framework acts as the mediator of statements, judgements, passions, rights, positions, and contests. The arrangement becomes the mediator and therefore it never vanishes. The political subject becomes political by becoming the agent of dialogue, embracing the framework of federality, and facilitating the contested conversations that mark the federal nature of this new politics. In such a politics, unlike that in its most direct form where political relations are war-like relations, mediation becomes the mark of a federal political order. Is this vision too political? Yes, and that is the point which should make us read Balibar’s thoughtful evocations for one more time.

THE POST-COLONIAL PREDICAMENT The Reflections ends with ruminations on the possibilities of mediation through the many heritages, traditions, lineages, strands, contests, and voices towards democratic citizenship. And strangely it seems from the book, all these require a dialogue with the United States, specifically voices from America. Who will mediate? Will it be the intellectual, or the continent with its enigmatic history, or the open passages or the pathways of politics, and indeed who will mediate this passage to democratic citizenship, the permanent passage that politics requires for trans-national citizenship to emerge on a continuous basis? Balibar recalls the contradictions and illusions that any mediation must face. He weighs the possibilities of the lessons that can be learnt from the late 20th-century European civil war (the Balkan war), the transformation of the violence of social antagonisms into collective political capacities, conflictual democracy (possibly this I term as ‘dialogic democracy’), an appropriate argument of human security and disarmament (so crucial to Europe in relevance to its mediating role), and the local and global processes with their intersecting fault lines. And then, the wistful thought expresses itself on the entire dynamics of politics, which we have been told already will not be a confrontational war any more, but a war of manoeuvre, We are thus led to an additional meaning of the idea of the ‘vanishing mediator’—perhaps our utopia or our myth. Europe as the interpreter of the world, translating languages and cultures in all directions. This

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is an attempt to restore the political function of the intellectuals: notwithstanding other activities and commitments, intellectuals would continuously broaden the horizon of their translating capacities. It also points at a broad, ‘organic’, function of the intellectuals. Intellectuals would ‘disappear into (their) own intervention’ as Louis Althusser used to say. They would be necessary, but without monopoly. They would be borderlines themselves. (p. 235; italics Balibar’s)

Is it a utopia or a dream, as Balibar rhetorically admits? But I have no objection on that because Etienne Balibar more than any other political philosopher of his time has sought to engage with contemporary problems, has constantly reoriented his arguments, and has sought to ground his thinking in the architecture of nascent movements. Or, is it an over-expectation of the intellectuals’ abilities and roles? On that too, we may quarrel pettily, but given the strong presence of the intellectuals in the public politics of the country of France, this is natural. But what can we say of the idea of Europe as translating languages and cultures? That too we can wait with open arms to greet, if indeed one day it happens, because it can only benefit the non-European peoples of the world. In fact let everyone, every people, every land, assume the role of interpreter and translator, for that indeed is the opposite of xenophobia. But presently which Europe will do this? Balibar suggests, though not in as many words, the Europe of intellect and the intellectuals, possibly those who will become democratic citizens, the intellectual-citizens— they will be the mediator. And there lies my objection. The problem here is that it does not recognise the strong presence of an underclass throughout Europe—proletarians and sub-proletarians, minority peoples and nationalities, underdeveloped regions and localities, divided peoples and non-recognised nations, and internal colonies. Who would interpret their aspirations? There is every likelihood that the earlier schism will reappear—Romans and non-Romans, a comfortable, intellectual, and democratic Europe and a Europe of underclass; a Europe that converses with America, shelters the visitors, and requires and guarantees the immigrant workers particularly the frontier-workers because of the needs of capital, that refuses to recognise its present colonial structure, dialogue with erstwhile colonies, and face the ‘post-colonial predicament’ with honesty and integrity and a Europe of an unruly underclass at times modelling its behaviour along that of the wealthy neighbours, and at times showing


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new political initiatives towards massive social change. The Europe that will choose the cosmopolitan destiny, the first Europe, will be kind, knowledgeable, elitist, ‘social-democratic’—the best that pomp and circumstance can give us. But what are we to say of the real contradictions that produce borders and insecurities, except that Europe by being itself the borderline by virtue of its vocation of mediation will suffer permanently the pang of being suspended between two destinies—a social-democratic fortune and the life of the misery of an underclass? This is where one should realise why a social-democratic vision requires a dialogue with the United States and not with the colonies and ex-colonies of the world. We can push this line of argument to extreme as Althusser used to say. A non-European reader from the erstwhile colonial world has to think, will this fortune of trans-national citizenship be available to the ruled of the world? Is it all that a special journey? After all people in most parts of the world secured emancipation from colonialism after centuries-long efforts, and have struggled against neo-colonialism from then on, and have defended norms of independence, freedom, and citizenship. As researches into liberation struggles have showed, anticolonialism had gone hand in hand with cosmopolitanism or internationalism. B’ath revolutions, a pan-Arab sentiment, Afro-Asian unity, Guevara’s dream of a continental revolution in Latin America—all these and many others were utopias and dreams of peoples of most of the world; yet these caused historical incidents, no less real than the cases of extreme violence that seems to characterise these regions. In their case, that is to say in our case, will national citizenship proceed to democratic citizenship? The trouble with such vision is that it premises itself on a theory of advance from nationalism to internationalism and from the nation form to the trans-nation possibilities, whereas the dream of citizenship was enmeshed from the beginning with cosmopolitanism, the nation and the international mutually conditioned each other’s growth; and it was chiefly by killing cosmopolitanism that national citizenship evolved. Passive revolutions everywhere had the same story for us. The militant had always this double register. If we recall the histories of the militant internationals of the 19th century, its previous century, and the first part of the 20th century, we shall realise that part of the task is to excavate this past of double existence, and redeem the glory of the humanity’s intertwined past of local and the global.

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As I have shown elsewhere, it was no different in the colonial world too. We shall require hard choices in the pursuit of the goal of an enriched democracy, which will be able to address the concerns of the local, the man and the woman, as well as the broader concerns born out of thinking. In this, the patterns of collective politics, the dynamics of claimmaking, and in general the emerging patterns of contentious politics will be of critical significance. Balibar in some pages of the work tells us of those patterns of collective politics, but does not perch his overall vision of democratic trans-national citizenship on the reality of contentious politics. Long and patient work of establishing hegemony of new politics and collective confrontation including collective violence based on a mixture of both legalities and illegalities will be in ample evidence. Subjugated ideas, consciousness, and politics may not always wait for the politics of civility, if civility fails them. We are then facing another possible opening. That opening is in studying collective politics on the ground that the political subject emerges from ‘politics as activity’, and that we should be aware of ‘illusory character of any conception of society which makes it appear that norms or rules have a power of their own, as if they were something outside and apart from the groups of people, and could serve as such as an explanation for the way in which people group themselves as societies’.6 That study of the forms of politics will also tell us the possibilities and the limits of law in realising the goal of trans-national citizen, for, on one hand, we shall require legal plurality of the most innovative kind responding to the requirements of the local, on the other hand, the new citizen will require for her appearance not only new European courts, but the skill and ability to converse outside law, thus reducing the operations of governmentality to an ever possible degree. The frontiers of legal theory today suggest a much more practical approach to law; likewise historicism in legal scholarship suggests possibilities of grounding law in historical possibilities, and a solid economics of justice, by which I mean calculations about the gain and loss from a big centralised legal edifice that can only actualise governmental form of justice.7 No one more than Balibar knows the manifest impasse and the impossibility of European unification, and the dual history of two aspirations in European thinking—that of Immanuel Kant (democratic and cosmopolitan) and that of guarding Europe by means of surveillance of the movement of peoples and cultural minorities by the


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most powerful states. And, as he says elsewhere, all this proves that the notions of interiority and exteriority, which form the basis of the representation of the border, are undergoing a veritable earthquake, and impacting on the theory and reality of sovereignty, which lies at the heart of the citizenship debate. If we are not to replay the failed duality of these destinies—local and the global—we must reject the theory of choosing one of the two, and make a new way on the basis of today’s patterns of collective politics that seems to pitchfork the two in a single popular strategy of politics. We have to be grateful to Etienne Balibar for the insights he offers on the issue of citizenship through his stress on the strategic importance of including the history of colonial expansionism in any critical reflection on the question of European citizenship. This inclusion is now a fundamental issue of everyday life in Europe due to the increasingly larger presence, despite the various discriminations, of populations of colonial origins. It not only means what he calls a ‘lesson of otherness’ into the structure of European citizenship, but it means displacement of the notion of citizenship itself along unforeseen and unanticipated lines—largely along the line of de-linking citizenship from the governmental realities of the legal-political world. Freedom of clandestine labour not only requires a strengthening of European institutions such as the commission and the EU Court of Justice in Luxemburg, but instituting dialogic mechanisms at various levels to negotiate the labour question that is at the core of the citizenship debate. This implies that a framing of a European constitution from the top conceived according to the classical categories of European constitutionalism will not work. The constituent process manifested through collective struggles must not come to a stall, so that within it and I borrow here the words of the Italian political scientist Sandro Mezzadra, ‘through struggle and political action, all the elements of material reconstitution of democratic citizenship that have been accumulating throughout time’ can continue gathering strength. Once again Balibar notes—elsewhere—that the positive side of this condition may not be an unfortunate closure, but the growth of political spontaneity. This is important because globalisation and Europeanisation are the other names of emerging oligarchies, which will establish peace, and most important ‘social peace’, through new mechanics of representation in which some version of European citizenship will also play a part. The issue from the point of popular

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politics is that, will popular forces be capable of intervening in the making of this new Europe/globe in this situation? Can they mediate without drawing their movements into the present mechanism of representation of which citizenship forms a part? I think from the point of the ruled, the issue of citizenship becomes a part of political contest—a contest that will actually change or displace the meaning of politics also to a significant extent. Let me try to explain the point by referring to Althusser one more time. Althusser commented in his discussion on Montesquieu on the factual nature of politics as practice.8 He pointed out what united Montesquieu with the theoreticians who preceded him and what distinguished him from them. Montesquieu had in common with them the same project: to erect a political science. But he did not have the same object (emphasis Althusser’s), because he proposed to produce the science not of society in general but of all the concrete societies in history. And for this reason he did not have the same method, for he did not want to grasp any essence, but to discover laws. This difference in object and method made Montesquieu the most determined opponent of their abstraction. Therefore, he did not propose any social contract as the origin of any political society, when contract was the most prevalent form in which the foundation and nature of a society was sought to be explained. Montesquieu therefore had the duty to study facts, myriad and minute facts, but not the onus to carry an explanation about beginning. Therefore he could see through various forms of power, and left the world of philosophy to study politics and political actions. Althusser further noted that in the past each great doctrine had thought itself in form of a specifically ‘philosophical’ object and its theoretical effects. The Platonic Idea, Aristotlean Action, the Cartesian Cogito, and the Kantian Transcendental Subject, for example, had as objects no theoretical existence outside the domain of philosophy proper. The objective function of a philosophical theory to be quite precise was to become engaged with the problems that elude in the very ‘problems’ it elected. Philosophy is therefore always liminal. Whence came the break—the call to study politics, political objects, and political actions: simply, politics as activity? If that is the case, then we need to be careful about the universalism inherent in the object of trans-national citizenship. Even when we break this universalism into appearance and real, the danger of choosing


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‘universal’ categories to examine a phenomenon in universality remains. There we need concrete history, study of concrete politics, and situating oneself in concrete historical contingency of action. Balibar makes one decisive break—he does not follow the line of Foucault who had said that politics was the other form of war.9 He agrees that politics is about conflict, but says at the same time that politics as war destroys the possibility of carrying politics as activity. Though we cannot be happy with the term of ‘civility’, probably he indicates that this ‘civil’ is the sphere where politics as activity can be maintained. If I have understood him, We the People of Europe? is an examination of that possibility carried out in the great tradition of political philosophy, a task that Habermas would have been proud of achieving, for after all this is in some ways great Habermasian work even when the arguments are deployed by Balibar differently and the universal here is fragmented into several forms and operations. A last point then—there is no non-functional category in politics, far less in contemporary life, be it the category of ‘civility’, or ‘cruelty’, or ‘Europe’, or ‘trans-national citizenship’, or ‘democracy’. We cannot escape this duty to be thoroughly alert lest we opt for non-functional categories as the basis of our political thought by taking recourse in a Lacanian manner that this category such as universality is real, imaginary, and symbolic. Balibar more than others has shown in other works too that, that concrete universality is a complicated reality, which calls for political engagement on a continuous scale and in a continuous manner. In his work on racism, the nation form, and citizenship, we can see how the issue of universality is to be negotiated—a manner at once instructive, and at once theoretical. All the more therefore, we must take this project of enriching citizenship also as a ‘living contradiction’ much in the same way Marx saw the proletariat as the living contradiction. Proletariat stood for universal humanity not because it was the lowest and the most oppressed section of society, but because it gave form to the most fundamental imbalance and paradox of the capitalist social reality. Citizenship must continue to represent political activity not because it is the greatest form, but because it embodies the greatest contradiction of a democratic society that will forever try to purge itself of otherness. Therefore we must work towards a theory of the political subject(s), who is more than the citizen, in whom the local and global conditions and dimensions are condensed and congealed,

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who in course of politics negotiates the citizen and the alien, whose political activities in short represent the dialogic universe of conflict and settlement. Is this too much of a demand on the theorists of citizenship? May be this is a bit exacting, but consider the position of the ruled in most of the world. Border-crossing everywhere has become a routine activity in search of life and community; citizenship and border-crossing as I showed in The Marginal Nation go together. Nations are waging war against the migrants, but migrants have arrived. In this state of permanent insecurity, new underclass is being created with the help of the components of ideologies of anti-Islam, Christendom, war against terrorism, crimes, and AIDS, and democracy as opposed to closed societies, and a new social peace is being constructed. The point is—how will the ruled become citizens overcoming this fundamental divide? Till that comes, what kind of constituent process are we witnessing—a process that is leading to a void constitution—and what kind of politics shall we want to save from extreme cruelty and give a chance to play? It is here that any idea of enriched citizenship—enriched at both ends of a horizontal scale—confronts the reality of the constituted order of powers. And it is here that we must note that the possibility of political action means the capacity to circumvent the borders that are being created and reproduced within societies, within countries, and between countries… It is already being done by the ruled by often giving slip to the weary eyes of the security guards, by micro-actions, by inventing political actions in collective forms that break many borders, and most significantly by discovering new dialogic forms to meet the demands for minimal justice without caring much whether those forms meet legal approval. Our possibilities of gaining trans-national citizenship frankly therefore are at this stage very dim. But the possibilities of the emergence of an enriched political subject are great, because the political subjects of today, unlike in most of the preceding ages, are tackling the problem of combining legality, semi-legality, and illegalities skilfully. I know this was not Etienne Balibar’s direction in this work, but the work provides the occasion for dialogue on many issues of concern to the people of the once colonial world. It is not fair also to burden him with our expectations and dump on him our experiences and anxieties. Yet, the greatness of a work makes people associate with it with their


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own anxieties and answers. We the People of Europe? is a great work, for beyond stating what it does, it provokes more thinking.10 A liminal exercise is after all an exercise on possibilities.

CITIZENSHIP, NEW DEVELOPMENTS, AND THE FUTURE OF THE POLITICAL SUBJECT Readers will clearly note that in speaking of the possibilities of transnational citizenship, I have of course looked at the whole thing from the angle of ‘our’ possibilities—the possibilities of ex-colonial countries— and the title of this essay makes it clear. Once again we cannot burden Etienne Balibar with the expectations of the people of ex-colonial countries. Balibar is speaking of Europe in the Reflections, while reading Balibar I am thinking of India, Asia, and the ex-colonies; Balibar speaks of a Europe marked by the stamp of India, Asia, and by the ex-colonies, and I am thinking of the extraordinary similarity of the problems around the issue of citizenship, and therefore of Europe while judging the situation in India, Asia, and the ex-colonies. In what way exactly do these two—European history and post-colonial reasoning—intersect today to form a powerful current of ideas in terms of a new perspective of politics and the political subject? I intend to end my reflections with three observations on these. The first is related to the new perspectives on sovereignty opening up today. Balibar points to the problematic of sovereignty in the context of the possibilities of European citizenship. This sovereignty, textbooks tell us, resided for long in form of nation-state or the state and now exists today in a discrete manner flowing from the European nation-states to the European Union. But it is necessary to recall in this context that sovereignty had already existed in the past in a discrete form, which the political scientists and historians had forgotten for a time. It was the case both in Europe and India. In such discrete existence the distinction between the state and the government was crucial. The government let us recall the European experiences usually was a person or a group that made peace, waged war, enacted laws, exercised justice, determined the currency, and looked after the internal security on behalf of the society, and some welfare as well. Sovereignty was, on the other hand, a distinctly legal person, a corporation which authorised

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all these activities but could be authorised or recognised only through the lens of other similar entities, and by the performance of these functions over a certain territory inside which its jurisdiction was exclusive and comprehensive. Government was universal, sovereign statehood was only one of the forms that governing could assume.11 It was the same in India. Did the imperial form of governance change it? Imperial authority was often a federal authority over a territorial space marked by several political units, overlapping authorities, and divided loyalties. Centralised empires like the Mughal empire, the Ottoman empire, or the Spanish empire existed; but there was also the model of the Holy Roman Empire; and even the centralised one as the Spanish one was actually a federation, and the Mughal one, an exception in a long line of federated countries, was marked by coalition, truce, and attritions. Markets provided, as both European and Indian experiences show, interconnections and coordination, and empires functioned when they were appropriately governed and the rights of distant participants were secured and sustained. Plurality of authority structures marked the scene. In place of unitary nation-states there were ‘composite states’ or ‘composite monarchies’ with complex government structures within composite supranational polities. Imperium meant rule, and the transition to centralised rule as the only form of imperium came in the early modern era with the beginning of colonialism that placed a critical question before imperial governance: How were these new territories to be ruled? What would be the relation between the settlers and local inhabitants, and between the settlers and the monarchs ‘at home’? Would the local inhabitants ‘there’ be treated as equal to monarch’s original subjects? At the same time when colonialism was providing impetus to centralisation, imperial Diets in some cases represented federal ties, complex governance structures, at times devolved government, and institutionalisation of shared sovereignty. The popular story of 1648 is thus only half true. The territorial rule of electors, princes, kings, and estates, which included the right to levy taxes, legislate for their subjects, raise an army, and enter alliances, had a countervailing phenomenon also, namely that territorial laws must not contradict imperial legislations and norm-setting rulings. In South Asia the limits to the territorial rule of a sovereign power were more obvious, caste, religion, and region being the primary limit-setting


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factors. Thus, citizenship whose story is bound with that of the nations and nation-states grew up as a social and political reality against another perspective also—namely, the perspective of shared sovereignty.12 The second feature of the situation catching our attention is the fact that the process of European ‘integration’ is such that it generates several sites of viewing the issue of common citizenship. There are local imaginations in the making of new Europe; different cultural repertoires, narratives, and different collective memory are leading the public intellectuals to articulate the programme of Europe in different ways. In this perspective citizens are acting more as spokespersons of cities than that of the emerging new composite polity. As elites think of a larger Europe, the cognitive frame of citizens is becoming more local, pointing out the democratic deficit inherent in such elitedriven project. More obvious now is the absolutely unexpected and new ways sovereignty is being discussed. The word is now a sign of everything… In India too, on one hand, citizenship is viewed with some justification as a consequence of the nationalisation of masses; on the other hand, citizenship is now more and more linked to local political imaginations. Popular legitimacy and local sovereignty are yet to harmonise with national citizenship, increasing economic union, and new structures of rule. Third, the most important and noteworthy feature of the present situation, and this we can derive from our preceding two observations, is that there are new rules of political identity formation. These new rules are: the conscious crafting of different political units and unions, the plurality of political identities and their flexibilities, and the conscious placing of the collective political self along different territorial scales according to mutual contingencies. No longer it is a matter of responding to the state as if it is the moral equivalent to an individual person, even the nature of the relation between territory and political identity has changed owing to the multi-scalar contexts in which political relations operate. As Eric Hobsbawm had reminded us more than 20 years ago, national identities never just happened. The intellectual and political strength of these identities depended on the privileged status accorded to the modern territorial state.13 Now that states are failing to live up to their promises, that the moral geography of statehood has come into question, we can see new inventions in governance to tackle the situation. This brings into question the central

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significance of citizenship that classical political theory had accorded to it. Contingent identities are emerging along different territorial scales (which by themselves are social constructs and are not ‘original’) and within different networks of subjectivity (some of which Balibar points out), which may be non-territorial (for instance information oriented) or cross territorial in form. If for a moment India were to be likened to Europe, we can witness here a similar insertion of localities and regions in world market (for instance the ‘Cyberabad’ slice of land or the ‘Hi Tech City’ in the Hyderabad agglomerate in Andhra Pradesh) and the consequent engagement of the ‘real local place’ with global economies mediated in newer ways. A study of the growth of new networks therefore seems to be the requirement today in order to track shifts in territorial identities. The growth of trans-national networks, for instance of immigrants, and the place of these in a union in terms of participation is a case in point. In short, one can say that in the democratic link up of various constituent units (simultaneously of different scales) in form of a new Europe, the interests and identities have a complex game, where notions of place, public sphere, choice, deliberation, integration, etc. may acquire new meanings and dimensions. The result may be a rather abrupt turn in the career of citizenship. Recent researches on the theme of autonomy show such possibility. In short, the significance of ‘place’ in the formation of political identity has to be re-problematised today. But the point is that ‘place’ as we know is determined to a large extent by ‘work’. In fact Balibar refers to the renewed question of ‘work’. Once again we can see the interface of the two histories here. In both histories we have to re-conceptualise the relation between various forms of work: that of the nomad, the displaced, and the settler work. There is increased casualisation of the workforce everywhere; in the United States people talk of contingent labour and in the European continent the issue is again of job insecurity. The nature of the workplace is changing dramatically with people increasingly more in temporary work rather than permanent work. The division between work time and non-work time is dissolving, and the non-work aspects of life also are becoming increasingly insecure. Part-time work is increasing, and despite the stand of old labour unions left by the communist parties people are more and more taking up jobs which are ‘insecure’. Clearly the post-Second World War industrial boom, which was an exception in many ways, is over with globalisation. The idea of a ‘job for life’, in many ways the basis of old citizenship thesis,


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is an idea that held true for a very specific time, place, and workforce. The appearance of ‘mass workers’ employed in huge factories with the parallel emergence of the welfare state, and employment in the public sector accompanying the growth in mass manufacturing—these will fast become a matter of past. At the same time borrowing is exceeding incomes due to increased house prices forcing people to live further and further from the cities and become increasingly dependent on private transport in order to reach the workplace, increasing health care costs, increasingly less support for childcare or care of the sick and elderly (because women, traditionally carrying these responsibilities working at home, are now working outside), and increased water, electricity, gas, telephone, and transport costs. Yet workers are embracing flexibility precisely to avoid job insecurity, the point to note here, in an individualist way (the nomad way) as distinct from the earlier moves in a collective way, and this is not possible everywhere. As we know, different countries have different levels of social-welfare provision, legal protection and unemployment rates. Even within countries, instability is being experienced differently.14 This diversity of experience has specific political implications for political movements. The nomad, the displaced, and the besieged settler—all are fighting in distinct manners, changing the shape of the movement altogether. Globalisation in such a milieu is making politics highly global, at the same time highly local. While the political mood among mass of labourers is showing an unprecedented uniform mood, the contexts are different, strategies are different, issues are context specific, and the path to making new political society is varied. And what is happening where there is no work at all? Or, the only present are the low skilled, the low paid for the woman worker, the young worker, the student, and the illegal immigrant workers? There we witness even more unpredictability and fragmentation of working hours. What do these two words convey in such a milieu—working shifts and Sundays? Or, do they convey anything at all? There the challenge is how to cope with the isolating effects of the workplace and achieve collective identity? Political subjects build their identity on rights; here that classical agenda gives way to a social agenda of ‘justice’. Clearly, the existence of these three segments of work—nomad, displaced, and settled—implies that even within the process of the formation of collective political subject, dialogues have a tremendous role to play. It does not mean that the formation of the collective identity

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of the political subject will be contention free. Precisely because contentions are tearing apart the hitherto unproblematic nature of the workplace, the need for dialogue is now much more, and is in increasing evidence as a social and political practice. Workplace cannot be defined in a narrow sense any more, that is as if it is configured only within the walls of the factory, shop, or office. We shall soon face the reappearance of the situation existing one century or more ago when workplace struggles went hand in hand with locality movements. Given this re-problematisation of the ‘place’ in the formation of the identity of the political subject, not unsurprisingly the market, the national-civic, and the cosmopolitan—all these viewpoints are desperately trying to put their respective programmes in place, and seeking in every political development vindications of their respective projects. Only a view of contentious politics with the prospect of new conflicts overwhelming the politico-juridical scene can afford to admit uncertainty in the way the new political subject will emerge. The point from this angle will be: Is a theory of citizenship enough in such contentious scenario? Will it be able to convey newer forms of claim-making? And in the changing relationship between place and identity formation shall we not need a ‘new theory of the political subject’? The question is important because we have clear grounds to suspect if citizenship as a theoretical category can embrace multiplicity suspended between the open and the closed, or the reality of the ‘layered’. Any institutional form of such a subject has to give expression to the possibility of multiplicity, which would allow singularity from within…15 The similarity of the relevant situation in the countries, which were once colonial powers, and the ex-colonies is now marked by the convergence of two histories also—European history and that of postcolonial reasoning. The similarity and the convergence are producing today powerful currents of ideas in terms of new perspectives of politics and the political subject. Indeed what we witness today is not the provincialisation of the Europe, but the universalisation of postcolonial predicament. The main thing the interface of these two histories is bringing out is the assertion of autonomy by politics,16 and there is no doubt that these autonomous assertions will have a decisive impact on the future of the political subject.17


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NOTES 1. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights—From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 2. Etenne Balibar, We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. Bruce Robbins, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 3. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class—Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Smith (London: Verso, 1991). 4. T.H. Marshall, ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, in Class, Citizenship and Social Development—Essays by T.H. Marshall (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1965), 65–122. 5. Stephen Castles and Godula Kosack, Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe (London: Institute of Race Relations and Oxford University Press, 1973). 6. Norbert Elias, ‘The Quest for Excitement in Leisure’, in The Norbert Elias Reader, ed. Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 101. 7. See Richard A. Posner, Frontiers of Legal Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), Chapter 5. 8 Louis Althusser, Politics and History—Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1972); prepared for the Internet by David J. Romagnolo, [email protected] (July 2003). 9. Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macetl (New York: Picador, 2003). 10. One of the things to be noted here is the method of Balibar’s analysis, which I do not specially discuss here in view of my principal concern, which is not exactly related to the question of method here. But readers interested in the issue of his method in this book may see, Jason Read, ‘Writing in the Conjuncture’, Borderlands— E Journal 3, no. 1 (2004). Avilable online at http://www.borderlands.net.au/issues/ vol3no1.html (accessed on 29 January 2007). 11. One of the best reviews on this till date is Martin von Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 12. Roland Axtmann, ‘State Formation and Supranationalism in Europe—The Case of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’, in Europe Without Borders— Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in a Transnational Age, ed. Mabel Berezin and Martin Schain (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 118–39. 13. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions—Europe, 1870–1914’, in The Inven-tion of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 263–307. 14. On this, Colin Crouch, Social Change in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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15. We are here once again back to the idea of ‘fold’ of Deleuze; see on this the discussion on Deleuze by Alain Badiou et al in his, Theoretical Writings, Chapter 6, ‘One, Multiple, Multiplicities’, (New York: Continuum Press, 2004), 67–80. 16. On the transformation of the problematic of the politics of autonomy into an autonomy of politics, see the introduction to and other essays in the collection, R. Samaddar, ed., The Politics of Autonomy—Indian Experiences (New Delhi: Sage Publications 2005). 17. I have discussed in details the two interconnected themes of politics as autonomy and the claim to autonomy as the mark of the political subject in The Materiality of Politics, vol. 2, Subject Positions in Politics, Chapter 4, ‘Autonomies of a New Society’, (London and Delhi: Anthem Press, 2007), 139–66.

10 Empire, Globalisation, and the Subject

T

ill now we were studying the emergence of the political subject in the specific historical context of a country. Yet this specific context was also the colonial and post-colonial context, marked as we have seen by several overlaps, recalling as it were a global moment in the history of domination and resistance. We noted while discussing the emergence of a specific Muslim public sphere in colonial India the dynamics operating in the emergence of a ‘concrete universal’, a phrase that expresses the relations between singularities, and invokes the concept of the ‘fold’, that is crossing boundaries yet composing a universe. We also noted the global trajectory of the militant anticolonial subject, much in the way Benedict Anderson has recently invoked the imagery of political astronomy, which tells us to study the gravitational pull of stars (anti-colonial political entities) even when they seem stationary. We also noted the militant internationalism of the anti-colonial subject, inasmuch as we saw how the problematic of citizenship has unfolded in the wake of the possibility that national borders may give way to a wider identity, and the relation between ‘people’ and ‘citizenship’ may therefore become even more uneasy. The figure of the political subject emerged out of these and other conjunctures, which means that in recovering that history we have to always negotiate boundaries of various kinds. Borders, boundaries, identity, imperial reality, juridical order, revolt, and transgression—these form the backdrop against which this book has progressed. Therefore as we are about to close this discussion, we must specifically address the question of what this context of various overlaps signifies, and specifically the question: What is this global moment we

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can recall and find in a new form in our time? One aspect of this context is the imperial one. We can say we are in the age of empire again, even if we leave aside as of now the specific sense in which Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri use the term. But the fact that with globalisation and attempts to re-colonise the world, the imagery of the empire has returned warrants that we must specifically situate our discussion on subjectivity in this specific context. We shall therefore discuss in this chapter the related issues of empire, globalisation, borders, mobilities, and the subject.

EMPIRE

AND

BORDERS

In the modern empire we have a strange phenomenon. The dream of a completely fluid and passable global space, provoked by the empire, is not only marked by unequal interconnections and movements, which at times appear as obstacles to imperial unities, but also the empire appears to have led to a proliferation of borders, security systems, checkpoints, physical and virtual frontiers. Borders are, in fact, all around us, inasmuch as the empire. In this contradictory reconfiguration of space, not only are new territories emerging at times with imperial blessing, but also the reconfiguration is leading to the reestablishment of conventional and geographical borders, likewise abstract and real borders—borders indicative of the reconfigured spaces. One of the important aspects of globalisation is the imperial form, which exists with other global forms that depend on interconnections. An encompassing view of this combination of flows (of labour, goods, capital, ideas, and information), connections, and borders gives us an unusual view of the re-emergence of the empire and imperial nations. The critical factor in this is the contemporary migratory movements, which have a decisive impact on what Sandro Mezzadra calls ‘borders/confines of citizenship’.1 The classic concept of borders arose in the wake of the emergence of the modern state and its geopolitical dimensions, within which the individual was historically constructed as a citizen. Nation, state, citizen, border—all these seemed to unite in an excellent fit. Now two things have thrown this fit into disarray. I am speaking here of the emergence of the empire and the trans-border

Empire, Globalisation, and the Subject

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migratory movements, which have collectively put our understanding of citizenship into doubt. Sovereignty in the beginning was not always strictly territorial. For instance, Goddess Athena presided over the Greek world, and there could be a pan-Hellenic universe composed of city-states.2 Imperial sovereignty was not so much indicative of the borders of the empire, and though Hedrian was the first known ruler to have territorial markers put in place to indicate the imperial reach, sovereignty was indicative more of powers, in the words of Agamben, exceptional powers to be above the law and execute lives as and when the emperor felt necessary.3 However, in this case too, the power to execute was to be moderated to fit governmental necessities of the empire—for instance in relation to the Christians in the Roman imperium.4 Who was Roman, was a problem then too, and transborder incursions of people into Rome made things only difficult. It was these incursions and the intrinsic difficulties of defining citizenship under imperial conditions that made empire as a form of the state increasingly impossible. The problem as we know was temporarily solved with the emergence of modern political society, where citizenship, territoriality, borders, and sovereignty were combined in the form of modern nationstates—but we have to note here that this was possible not only because of popular democracy (the dream of Rousseau, which every liberal political philosopher has looked forward to), but also because of colonialism, which meant in this respect several things. Colonialism meant (a) clear territorial distinction between the sovereign state and the subjugated areas known as colonies; (b) clear legal distinction between participants of the polity, that is citizens, and the subjects; (c) clearly demarcated sites of developed sectors of economy and the production of primary goods; and finally (d) an effective way of combining territorial conquest, subsequent annexation, and the long distance control of economies of the world. In this way the imperial form was taken over by the modern nation-state; and the imperial form of the nation was the historically arrived solution to the twin problems of the empire having borders, and the need to negotiate the territorial limits of the legitimacy of the power of the state. It was as if politics had solved the question of the distinction between internal and external, which was supposedly the only thing required to guarantee order and peace.

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It is important to understand that the geopolitical, moral, and in the last instance, the juridical architecture surrounding the concept of the empire has the essential task of doing away with the issue of border; everyone within it yet many outside it; imperial confines in the nature of lines of a concentric circle taking care of inner lines, while borders retaining for the empire the function of taking note of the lines from beyond which tributes do not flow in; and thus finally we can say that the purpose of this architecture is to de-link sovereignty from its territorial form. Yet, as I have indicated in the beginning, we must in the light of the turbulent history of the empire (as a form) re-read the given history of migrations, migratory systems that we are told had an ordered geography. Readers may know, my own work on migrations questions the idyllic and peaceful representation of migrations, and in this context we should recall what Saskia Sassen has remarked of Europe, and cited by Mezzadra, namely, ‘the shadowy cone over the history of Europe’—that contains the unreported histories of masses of errant, deported and eradicated individuals who live in a foreign land, in countries that do not recognise their ‘belonging’. These migratory movements have fractured the national, ethnic, and linguistic features of polities and political societies. In a defensive move the empire now speaks of ‘metaborders’ indicating the division between the imperial land and that of the barbarians, and not the boundaries between its constituent units. Yet as a strategy it has had mixed fortunes. While in the last 15 years, this institutionalisation of ‘metaborders’ as a strategy has served the function of locating and defining the imperial land better, it has ill served the function of stopping the raids of what the empire considers the extra-planetary animals. Thus, for instance labour flows from ‘New Europe’ to ‘Old Europe’ (or, from Mexico or Puerto Rico to the United States) threaten the imperialcivilisational core of the Euro-Atlantic continent, and consequently put pressure on the internal confines of the empire. The border/confine in this way is continually under pressure, and the stress reproduces itself in the interior of the empire. In this condition, sovereignty is present, but not in one source or organ, but in the half-juridical, half economicpolitical space of the empire, where several actors are at work, and whose main feature is, namely, that more than the empire depending for its viability on the presence of sovereignty, it is sovereignty, which now depends on the imperial form for its relevance and legitimacy.


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Thus, imperial confines are being reproduced by nations everywhere to locate and keep the migrants at bay.5 The question obviously is: What happens to issues of democracy under the conditions of the empire? The easy answer is ‘global citizenship’, which is also probably one of the implications of Hardt and Negri’s Empire.6 But global citizenship, like ‘global civil society’ or ‘post-national citizenship’, is only an alluding or indicative phenomenon and not a hard reality; it does not speak so much of the reality of a global civil society or a globally expansive citizenship, as of the global form called the empire. Although it is true that imperial conditions of politics make the presence of a trans-Atlantic imperial class possible, characterised by Concorde and post-Concorde flights, constant telephone and video sessions, new connectivity, new spaces of luxury (and, as its opposite, confinement), round the year summitry, and G-8 sessions, these conditions do not warrant at the same time an expansion of national-liberal politics on which citizenship has been hitherto based. A global social collective in that sense is only a concept, based on the presumed power of the idea of citizenship as the radical promise regarding a relationship of equality. If the counter-empire is immanent in the empire, it is not the multitude as the global political actor against the empire, but the actual scattered political spaces round the globe, that are marked by incipient ideas of justice, and that call for a federated existence at all levels. That is where the important question will be—the theoretical and political articulation of an alternative to the empire. Because the empire creates more splitting lines within, the counterempire is therefore both within the empire and without. It is true that the contemporary empire is not like past empires. The US Empire has many differences with say the British or the Portuguese Empire. The British imperial rule did not bring equality of status, but all were subjects of the Crown and rule of law. In the Empire today, there is no Crown or Caesar or Presidency, which will make institutional relationship between people and the empire possible. Today’s imperial conditions inhere partly from old state forms and alliances, and partly from nuclear monopoly, certain new global rules in key areas of trade, commerce, production, and laws, the global reach of imperial arms, weaponry, and tools of surveillance, tactics of intervention and subjugation, rapacious exploitation of natural resources, and finally if necessary war and conquest. It is therefore neither Rome nor the classic colonial form of the imperial British, but a distinct form that retains

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the titular relevance of state sovereignty on the supposed model of Westphalia Treaty, and is actually based on a rapid appropriation of the newer forms of diffused sovereignty to make the rise of the new empire possible. In such a situation, the classic politics of rights on which citizenship has been based still fires imagination, but the closure of old style politics is clear. The state under the present imperial-global conditions cannot guarantee and respect rights, and rights are in this situation increasingly marked with newer ideas of justice and political society. These new ideas and resistances, contrary to the mapping of Hardt and Negri, are turning ‘multitude’ into ‘people’; the inconclusive constituent relation marked by the word ‘multitude’ is periodically transformed into ‘people’—the constituted synthesis prepared for sovereignty. Is this a return to the idea of the nation, with which the ‘people’ are connected? In a way it is, but there is no return, it is a ‘re-turn’ towards new social-political spaces of autonomies, bound by federated existences. Thus, both the empire and the nation are under challenge, both as the two final form of political existence are contested. These contests have significant implications for the hitherto institutionalised sovereignties, with which citizenship is related closely. The particular bio-political technologies that enabled the production of social reality called democracy and citizenship also make the periodic reconstitution of ‘people’ possible. In other words, the imperial form does not upgrade the multitude to the status of global citizenry rather the multitude under the imperial conditions has now the possibility of turning into newer and newer kinds of people. And, unlike in the older cases such as the Roman or the Ottoman Empire, where there was little mediation between the rulers and the ruled, today a variety of mediations between different peoples is helping the latter to re-appropriate the space left by the nation-states, and constitute themselves as the collective political subject. In this awkward relationship between bio-politics (the logic of the transformation of the multitude into people) and political economy (the logic of capital) the empire hovers.

PAST EMPIRES

AND THE

PRESENT ONE

The history of the empire is fascinating. Here is a list that may make us want to sit back and think.


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Some of the early empires: Babylonian Empire (1900 BC–1600 BC), Hittite Empire (1460 BC–1180 BC), Assyrian Empire (900 BC–612 BC), Persian Empire (550 BC–330 BC), Magadha Empire (500 BC– 300 BC), Macedonian Empire (338 BC–309 BC), Mauryan Empire (321 BC–185 BC), Chinese Empire (221 BC–1912), Selucid Empire (323 BC–60 BC), and the Roman Empire (27 BC–AD 476). Some of empires in the first millennium AD: Sassanian Empire (224–651), Gupta Empire (320–550), Byzantine Empire (323–1453), Arab Empire (630–1258), Bulgarian Empire (681–1018; 1185–1396), Chola Empire (800s–1200s), Khmer Empire (802–1462), Holy Roman Empire (843–1806), Danish Viking Empire (800s–1100s), Ghana Empire (900–1240), and Tonga Empire (950–1875). Some of the empires in the second millennium AD: Mongol Empire (1206–1502), Abyssinian Empire (1270–1974), Ottoman Empire (1281–1923), Mali (1300s–1600s), Siam Empire (1350–1909), Aztec Empire (1375–1521), Timurid Empire (1401–1505), Spanish Empire (1492–1975), Portuguese Empire (1415–1999), Mughal Empire (1526– 1857), British Empire (1583), French Empire (1605), Russian Empire (1721–1917), Austrian Empire (1804–1867), Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867–1918), German Empire (1871–1918), Japanese Empire (1871–1945), American Empire, USA (1898), Belgian Empire (1901–1962), Nazi Empire (1933–1945), and others. As many states, we may say, as are many empires … trading empires, military empires, tributary empires, rent-seeking empires, agrarian empires, sea-based empire, land-based empire, industrial empires, colonial empires, slave buying and selling empires, empires of finance capital, banking, and multi-national corporations, marauding and moving empires, national empires, and finally confederate empires. But these are only pure types; in reality they are mixed. Empire arouses in one’s mind a sense of vastness, non-national or multi-national organisation of polity, an imperial class wedded to the imperial cause, imperial council, and the emperor (modern empire does not have an emperor), the presence of praetorian guard, a regime of governors, spies, other surveillance practices, and a distinct idea that the sovereignty in an empire does not come from people or a law, or even from a distinctly bound territory, but from God, a distinct ideology of superior civility and civilisation, a sense of racial superiority, a busy war-like machinery constantly in search of glory, physical suppression

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of dissent, expansion of boundaries, constant movement of all assets (human and non-human) towards the imperial centre, vast constructions, glory, grandeur, and grand cities, and yet at the end a corruption of culture and end of creativity at the heart of the imperial centre. But empire also makes laws, imperial regimes under the divine eyes are busy in drafting and passing laws—this was true of the Hellenic Empire under Athens, of the Persian Empire, Roman Empire, Mughal Empire, Ottoman Empire, British Empire, and now the American Empire. But because imperial management is bigger than sheer legal management, it necessitates a rule by regulations, and at times rule by the person (the person of the empire who in the past was the emperor, or whoever represents the emperor/empire at a particular level). That is how you find the extraordinary powers of the imperial armies, governors, and agents to kill people at random, and their immunity from any accountability. Order by a Roman Governor to throw Christians before hungry lions or order to kill at will on the streets of Baghdad or Basra is an imperial characteristic. Empire thus combines rule of law, rule of regulation, and rule of man. For democracy the implications are scary. Yet, we must face the discourse of a ‘democratic empire’. This is a discourse made possible by the following elements: 1. 2. 3. 4.

the ideology of modernity; colonial and neo-colonial characteristics of the imperial nations; the violent practices of democracy; the intimate relations for long between liberalism and democracy; 5. the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, with the consequent end of the cold war; 6. the end of the ambitions of the third world as a collective political actor consisting of newly independent states, which were erstwhile colonies and semi-colonies of the colonial empires; and finally 7. the regrouping of forces for fierce competition for world’s assets, such as oil, land, minerals, finance capital, and sheer liquid money, that make the return of the imperial form for great powers inevitable.

Individually, none of these factors is unknown to us. For instance, Foucault, the Frankfurt philosophers, and others have discussed the


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disciplinary aspects of modernity. Many have likewise discussed the connection between the form of the elect nation, collective will, and the imperial attributes. Eric Stokes wrote on the relation between liberal ideology and colonialism. Michael Mann writes of democracy’s violent career. Lenin wrote on the link between finance capital, annexation of territories, competition between great powers, and the imperial form. And finally we are testimonies of the deluge of commentaries on defeat of socialism, and the end of the dreams of the third world. Yet, we have to still come to terms adequately with the imperial form that marks the late 20th century and early 21st century and is a result of the conjunction of these seven elements. Empires led to nations, some nations aspire for imperial attributes, and we may not be far off from that time when there can be another attempt to create another Rome on earth, Rome that was both a nation and an empire. Hardt and Negri are therefore mistaken in one major sense, namely that they do not take sufficent cognisance of the fact that nation and the imperial form may combine, though there is this bold iconoclastic stance of them that it is not imperialism, but the phenomenon of the empire on which today’s political subject must concentrate. The significance of the empire of today is enormously primarily political as it stresses more and more on its security, on the need for its global political-military reach, its opposition to autonomies, the need to crush terror, and the high voltage value of the ideology of democracy. The mark of this is, and we may have noted this also, that between 11 September 2001 and the beginning of the year of 2008, the antiglobalisation movement did not exactly die, but crowds thinned out. Meanwhile, a much more physical war started in many places, Iraq being one of these places, and in this sense Hardt and Negri are right as they write in Multitude that the empire involves a state of war, both global in scale and long lasting, with no end in sight ... strangling all social life and posing its own political order. The question we can ask here: Can we say that the multitude is the political subject today, when supposedly to protect democracies the empire must exercise the most authoritarian ‘biopower’ and sacrifice freedom as the collateral damage? Or, is the nation-state, or simply the nation, going to be the political subject under global-imperial conditions? For an answer of course, we must once more go back to the issue of what constitutes the characteristics of the modern empire, some of which I referred to just a while ago while mentioning the reality of the

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‘democratic empire’. It is to these constitutive conditions of the empire under modernity that we must return in order to finally approach the issue of the political subject. To get an idea of those features we must pay more attention to certain conditions of the emergence or the reemergence of the imperial form, rather than an analysis of the discourses of the empire. To address this issue, these are briefly the aspects: if the earlier empires were associated with what history today calls civilisation (we can easily refer to some of the prominent early empires mentioned in our list), today’s empire is associated with dissolution—dissolution of old orders, old boundaries, old inter-state relations, etc. The conditions of modernity, which include (a) a terror of the void; (b) at the same time the presence of organised bureaucratic-military machines; (c) the conditions of the ‘international’ or the ‘interstate’; and finally (d) the infusion of the demos in an expansionary state (the combination of democracy and nationalism) thus have repeatedly given rise to empires to fill in the void. The most illustrative empire is of course the attempt to build the Napoleonic Empire, which destroyed the old ‘international’ and the ‘interstate’, old borders and boundaries, brought into active play the internal divisions to destroy the divisions outside and the divisions ‘internal’ to those outside entities. Everywhere the empire created conditions of the ‘pro-revolution’ and ‘anti-revolution’. Similarly the Nazi empire sought to fill in a void left by the destruction of the 19th century system. Again, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989–92, the American Empire moved in East Europe (we have to only study the eastward expansion of North Atlantic Treaty Organization in this context). This process is so evident that we can ask echoing Artemy Magun, ‘Is the phenomenon of empire a state of civilisation or state of dissolution?’7 One of the reasons why this empire, while being a product of modernity as mentioned briefly earlier, still retains the characteristics of older empires is the emphasis it lays on terror and security. On one hand, this emphasis on security is of course due to today’s massive migration of population groups, sending the 19th century and 20thcentury citizenship projects at disarray; on the other hand, like the old Roman Empire, this empire too is scared of every convulsion, and must reinforce and expand conditions of security. Security in this dynamics is the other of governmentality. One is the response to ‘extraordinariness’; the other is the name of the ‘ordinary’. But the more territory is subjected to contest, the more is the permanence of war-like


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conditions and the relevance of the security architecture, howsoever brittle this may be. Contrary to the nature of the modern state the empire’s substance is therefore no more ‘natural law’, and the point to note here is that the modern state also is now reshaping under the impact of the empire. States may not be empires, but their democratic substance must now suffer under the imperial impact. We can now see the validity of the point we had earlier touched lightly, that the discourse of the empire is not foreign to the discourse of modernity, and the imperial reality has been closely linked with the phenomenon we term as modern, whose other aspect is what we term as the liberal, democratic, capitalist order. Like the conquests at the dawn of New Age under the leadership of great monarchies, we have similar formation of universal monarchical powers, whose outward appearance may be republican, but whose similarity with the earlier monarchies in search of glory, conquest, and drive for more resources and territory is extraordinary. To become legitimate is to try to become universal. And as was the case few centuries before, the empire of today tries to manage its affairs through coalition, conquest, local delegation of powers, suppression of all local dissents, and an assortment of federative existences to protect the imperial core. If ‘empires rise and fall’—a typical state-centric view of politics—these strategies too rise and fall with the empires, including many ‘democratic’ states like the electors of the Holy German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the compradors of many colonial imperial states. One more point: Modern socialists and communists, as we know, stressed not so much on empires, but on imperialism. Along with imperialism and therefore anti-imperialism came theories of national liberations and revolutions. Hobson, Hilferding, Rosa Luxembourg, Lenin, Bukharin, and others stressed imperialism’s economic content and linked imperialism with capitalism. Yet the form of the sovereign state had to be explained in this context. Thus, conflict among imperial states over capital, markets, and territory was the key factor in these analyses. Lenin who always had a programmatic eye drew therefore the sharpest conclusions. Hence the stress was on the ‘weakest link’, imperialism as a ‘chain’, and—and this where we must sit up—he did not suggest as a substitute national democracy, for which he did not show much respect, but a notion of alternative universality, that is Soviets as the alternative. States he knew under imperial conditions would go back to search for territory, re-arm themselves imperially,

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which would imply building up of huge military-bureaucraticscientific machines, complexes, and armies, and as a consequence of this emphasis on security, a new emphasis on conquest of large tracts of land, and now outer space. ‘Un-localised and unpredictable risk’ now marks the imperial space. Theories and laws of war are thus being re-written, the doctrine of legitimacy of conquest is being reauthored. As Artemy Magun points out, as if the old Roman concept has returned, namely that, the land belongs to no one and is therefore available for settlement, duly belonging to whoever occupies it first. Since the Indians did not necessarily put the marks of their sovereignty throughout the American continent, this argument gave the Spanish the vast authority to occupy an area and then protect it against the aborigines.8 Today the thesis of sovereignty is thus being re-drawn; it is to be judged on other principles such as responsibility, accommodation under global principles such as World Trade Organization (WTO), and deference to regime of nuclear monopoly and other monopolies, and it is already weak from inside. What Lenin marked as ‘imperialism’ therefore contains a deep political truth: It signifies a world that aspires to universality, but has to always stop short of it; and it encounters the limits it cannot surpass. Imperial universality is a closed totality, which would thus always produce the images of aliens and barbarians appearing from other spaces to conquer. Its civilisational aspirations and claims are the other of its security anxieties and functions. It is not completely de-centred as Hardt and Negri would have us believe; it retains the sovereign form of an imperial power; the United States acts as the powerful centre of global imperial forces. But what is more important is that the ideology of democracy occupies the key link in the imperial chain: it defines civilisation and legitimises security functions at the same time. In this situation, which by a good reason can be called ‘imperial’, what is the story of the political subject, ‘the anti-empire’?

THE INTERNAL IN THE

AND THE INTERNATIONAL

AGE

OF

EMPIRE

Artemy Magun in the same thought-provoking essay speaks of the Hegelian distinction between ‘subject’ and the ‘substance’, and how at one stage the substance dissolves and eats up the subject—the substance


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being here the global history, and the subject being the individual. Is that the case? Has the subject disappeared? Or do we find the collective political subject now in place of the individual standing up to imperial presence and substance? Hardt and Negri speak of the ‘multitude’, some speak of the ‘nations’ and ‘nation-states’ of the third world, or as Partha Chatterjee puts it ‘in most of the world’. In an article, ‘Empire after Globalisation’,9 Partha Chatterjee points out the similarity between the ideological foundations of the 19th-century colonial British Empire and the imperial foundational claims of today. He also points out as several others have done that this is not the first phase of globalisation visiting us. His conclusion is that if nationalism had resisted colonialism in the 19th century and the next one, today also the nations would resist the imperial presence. These observations have truths, but let me take this occasion to indicate some of the concrete realities of the empire and the anti-empire today. What are these realities? I briefly referred elsewhere to the following realities,10 which are of relevance to this discussion. These are, namely: (a) the relevance of the land question still to this day for imperial formations, and thus the issue of conquest; (b) once again the race question marking the divide of this world, as race appears more and more as the by-product of conquest; (c) states, particularly nation-states, proving increasingly ineffective in resisting imperial formations, as the combination of nationalism and democracy (the basis of third world revolutions) and the resilience of the states in the world are showing wide fault lines; and finally (d) for the ruled, among whom the frontier workers, guest workers, illegal immigrant workers, subjugated women, and aliens of other kinds form an increasingly substantial portion, the reorganisation of the political society becoming the great task at hand. In this conundrum, the dialogic exercises of the ruled, which can be termed as ‘contested conversations’ to use Charles Tilly’s words, are becoming more and more significant. Demands of autonomy now mark the discourse of democracy in the anti-empire. Autonomy is put forward no longer as an exceptional principle—to be conceded to some recalcitrant group—but as an organising principle of democratic politics. In this exercise, more and more people are joining politics, and demanding the autonomy of politics from the economics of globalisation. In short, the anti-empire is not the state, not the principle of sovereignty, not even nation-state or nationalism, but the collective political subject today insisting on sharing sovereignty, employing

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dialogic means, and intent on reorganising the political life on the principle of autonomy. The democratic subject is the justice-seeking subject—the dialogic subject who insists on autonomies of life. This is not ‘multitude’, though we can understand the temptation to use that word. For Hardt and Negri, …various forms of labour throughout the global economy are today becoming common. Agricultural labour, industrial labour, immaterial labour along with productive social activity of the poor are taking increasingly common characteristics… Producing in common presents the possibility of the production of the common, which is in itself a condition of the production of the multitude.11

Further, the multitude can arrive at a decision, because a decision is arrived at not through the allegiance to a single source of command, but by ‘communication with the body as a whole… A single decision is produced by a multitude in the brain and body’. ‘Network’ is key to ‘multitude’s political decision making’. ‘Multitude is organized something like a language.’12 And then, the crucial lines for their argument: The decision-making ability of the multitude, we should note, inverts the traditional relationship of obligation. For Thomas Hobbes, for example, and in different ways in the entire tradition of sovereign politics, the obligation to obey is the basis for all civil laws and must precede the laws. There is never in the multitude however any obligation in principle to power. On the contrary in the multitude the right to disobedience and the right to difference are fundamental. The constitution of the multitude is based on the constant legitimate possibility of disobedience. Obligation arises for the multitude only in the process of decision-making, as the result of its active political will, and the obligation lasts as long as that political will continues. The creation of the multitude, its innovation in networks, and its decision-making ability in common make democracy possible for the first time today. Political sovereignty and the rule of the one, which has always undermined any real notion of democracy, tend to appear not only unnecessary but also absolutely impossible. Sovereignty, although it was based on the myth of the one, has always been a relationship grounded in the consent and obedience of the ruled. As the balance of the relationship has tipped to the side of the ruled, and as they have gained the capacity to produce social relations autonomously and emerge as a multitude, the unitary sovereign becomes even more superfluous. The autonomy of the multitude and its capacities for economic, political, and social self-organisation take away any role for


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sovereignty. Not only is sovereignty no longer the exclusive terrain of the political, the multitude banishes sovereignty from politics. When the multitude is finally able to rule itself, democracy becomes possible.13

Hardt and Negri lace this vision of an autonomous multitude as a counterforce to sovereignty with remarks that ‘multitude’ is a class concept; since class is determined by class struggle, it is struggle by the multitude against the imperial propertied class that defines it, and now the economic and the political struggles are congealed in the bio-political struggles so much so that the ‘anthropology of the multitude is an anthropology of the singularity and commonality’.14 However, we have to remember that common labour has deep trends of segmentation also, reinforced by globalisation; and more importantly, the decision-making capacity of labour arises because multitude has been transformed into people; and the struggle of this reconstituted people is against sovereignty. The demand to share sovereignty marks the political conduct of the people at all levels, so much so that we must understand the nature of the fundamental battle raging in the political world today. It is the battle between power and desire and thus between the two principles of sovereignty and autonomy. In this battle the political subject is employing both warlike, but more importantly, dialogic strategies, a point with which in fact this book began. How is the battle against sovereignty being fought today? Once again we have to recall even if only very briefly the history of sovereignty. That history is now being recovered, re-written from all quarters, and while for the constraint of scope we cannot review those writings here, at least this much can be said that the received story of Westphalia and modern sovereign state is only partially true. Let us recall once more how the all-powerful tyrant drew all meaning towards himself, as the centre of providence, power, and wisdom. The force of tyranny drew all meanings of the past towards a single point, where theology and history, divinity and kingship, and singularity and kinship were telescoped into one source—the sovereign. And, thus the most powerful manifestation of the Unitarian force of sovereignty was not the tyrant himself, but the popular adulation for him and the good things he represented. As society progressed, the problem was how to create a critical space around the sovereign space of the ruler so that the rulers could be seen and understood by the society.

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Social interactions with ancient traditions of sovereignty began in this way, and continue till today. Sovereignty like that day still today presupposes intimate connection between the divine and the human— today the divine being represented by the God-like appearance of democracy, one or two centuries earlier it was represented by the Godlike appearance of the nation, and now the empire the only real sovereign left must invent the theology of sovereignty to connect the divine and the worldly. The problem is that the demos are not taking seriously the God-like appearance of democracy. The collective political subject—at once the democrat and the autonomous—refuses to take the sovereign claims unconditionally. The problem for the empire is how to overcome the bonds of mortality by creating its suitable myths. Here too the blood and mud of the political life, whether in Iraq or in Gaza, make the enterprise of myth-making increasingly difficult. None of the older tools is anymore sufficient: citizenship of a republican empire, international democracy-building exercise, interventions to transform sovereignty into responsibility, market ideology to open up closed economies, none. In the past empire was built up on the fusion of ideologies—consider the fusion of the Athenian and the Persian to create the sovereign mother of the Gods at Athens brought about by Alcibiades, of course after killing her minister, an emissary of Darius. Likewise, today’s empire is desperately seeking a fusion to strengthen its myth of immortality by embracing conservatism, tyranny, authoritarianism, and conservative Christianity; the fusion thus at times looks more like a mess, and that is where Hardt and Negri are partly true that it resembles a shapeless existence. Yet as we have seen in this book, the power of the political subject ignited in recent times by anti-colonialism and citizenship struggles, and battles for justice and rights, has not ebbed with the establishment of a sovereign state system under the United Nations. The effort to control, define properly, and appropriate sovereign power by sharing is the most irresistible form of politics today, also the most irresistible desire in politics. Thus, we must connect the domestic and the international. At this moment of globalisation, when more than the globalisation of economics, the globalisation of politics is turning out to be the most adventurous event, it is this connection, which will prove to be the key element in the formation of the anti-empire. In a way this connection of the domestic and the global was present in the colonial form of empire also. This was mainly in the form of constitutional and administrative


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experiments in the colonies and transporting these lessons back to the ‘homeland’ or to other colonies. I have detailed this global-colonial constitution-making phase in the history of the evolution of forms of rule as ‘colonial constitutionalism’.15 To every form of colonial rule, the empire wanted to give a legal frame marked by the discourse of responsibility (the responsibility to mature, to grow up, to be civil and civilised), yet in every such case there was a crisis of the frame emanating from the fundamental nature of colonial conquest and annexation.16 And, when one thinks of the range of modern imperial rule—ranging from the French liberty, Victorian liberalism to US democracy—one can see that the most effective form of power has been sublime and transcendent, embodying passion and wisdom, and occasional ruthlessness, calling for both parental (maternal or paternal as the case is) and erotic devotion. Power seduces the devotee in all ways, and one has to only see the attraction that the United States holds for the middle-class Indians at all levels of material and cultural life. Yet as the materiality of politics increasingly re-asserts itself under conditions of bio-politics and bio-power, leaving almost no scope for other forms, such as politics of civility or of representation, it seems that finally the greatness of sovereignty (as being both inside the legal order and outside it) is under attack from a different principle and organisation of political life. Why is it likely that this empire may be one of the short-lived empires? It seems to me that there is one break with the past responsible for the likely short life. Earlier, the God was as real as the sovereign himself, and was the nurturer of the sovereigns on earth. Their greatness was his/her measure, though their fall was the proof of their own fallibility, a feature of mortality. God’s story would continue. The next sovereign would come and again invoke the source, the God or as in some cases such as Athens, the Mother of the Gods. The immortal selfgenerating sovereign body (the Athenian deliberative council of the demos, the khilafat, the nation, or the council of the wise) would continue under the guidance of God. Where is the God of the American Empire? The empire of today has transgressed all demarcations; the empire represents democracy, sovereignty, morality, responsibility, national spaces, economy, everything. Where is the space to stand back and re-negotiate the odds? In this extraordinary transgression of boundaries between the sovereign immortal and the mortal features, we can see the danger to the empire—a danger represented by the

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political subject who has seen the absence of the critical space between sovereignty and the form of political organisation, and has turned the absence (that results in transgression of borders) into its advantage.

GLOBALISATION, LABOUR, UNRULY POPULATION FLOWS, AND IMPERIAL RATIONALITY Perhaps some of the readers can already anticipate here the return I am making to the theme with which I began discussion, namely the significance of transgression of boundaries in an imperial world. We can once again see that the key to an understanding of the formation of the political subject under the conditions of the empire is to work towards an adequate analysis of this phenomenon of transgression of boundaries, a phenomenon represented most directly by the moving population groups in today’s world. The nature of current population flows across boundaries of different kinds poses in a nutshell the problematic of governmentality under conditions of the modern empire. I do not have the time to discuss here the various dimensions of mixed up, messy population flows, desperate governmental and intergovernmental policies to contain them, and the innovations at a furious pace of humanitarian methods, functions, institutions, and principles—all ostensibly for the protection of the victims of forced migration. Some of the readers may know of my writings on the issue of forced migration.17 For instance we can note situations of protracted displacement in many countries such as India. In terms of the sustainability of rights under protracted situations of vulnerability, the situation regarding the rights of the internally displaced persons, particularly those displaced due to developmental reasons, region after region is one of the most precarious. In India the stiff political resistance put up by the displaced with the help of various public organisations in the last few years against displacement only attests to a widespread reality. Judicial guarantees are few and far between; law in most cases remains silent. National human rights mechanisms offer little in terms of falling back upon. On the other hand, in India alone, due to developmental projects, the number of the displaced is said to be more than 30 million. Each of the relief and rehabilitation policies takes


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displacement as given. The main thing to note in the context of our discussion is that this is a permanent state of injury caused by loot and violence (a state of primitive accumulation in this renewed phase of global capitalism), in which all kinds of displacements have piled on each other, and which now reflect the phenomenon of the mixed and the massive nature of displacement. More and more people are in a state of uprooted and travelling in search of livelihood. Conflict causes displacement, development causes displacement, environmental mismanagement causes displacement—and all these result in mixed situations of migration, which defy neat classificatory governmental strategies to cope with population flows. Yet, we have to remember that in this age of the empire and globalisation, governing strategies must ensure that labour flows must not be directionless; they must conform to the ways the ruling regime of division of labour has laid down. This is the governmental rationality under imperial conditions I am referring to. The reserve army or the army of surplus labour must conform to the institutional rules of the global labour market. All these explain the incredulity with which the national governments and international agencies such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) or the International Organization for Migration (IOM) hear of ever-new waves of population entries braving the seas, lands, and skies, into the northern hemisphere and other regions. These massive flows are rocking social sciences, which were all built on a certain idea of the ‘social space’, and which have no clue as to how to comprehend this figure of the migrant knocking, and now banging the heavy doors of settled states, formations, villas, forts, castles, and camps. The figure of the migrant is now one of the abnormal. We should therefore trace as to how this abnormal figure of the migrant has emerged—a figure that upsets all rational ways of ordering life and economy. Governing the migrant has become today a task of attending to pathology. Humanitarianism is part of the clinical task. Classical humanitarianism wanted to change the soul of the ‘abnormal’, therefore there were educationists, pedagogues, missionaries, administrators, and thinkers as to how to reform the abnormal societies. Modern humanitarianism has to combine the old techniques with new ones of care, protection, information gathering, interference, intervention, and invention of a skewed theory of sovereignty, a one-sided theory

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of responsibility, and the gigantic humanitarian machines which work like trans-national corporations (TNCs). In practical terms this means managing societies, which produce the obdurate migrants, to stop them from leaving the shores, keep them within the national territorial confines, and eventually manage these societies in ‘an enlightened way’. These policies have gone hand in hand with law-makings, regulations, directives, new manuals about care, managing camps, shelter, food, water, and medicine, while even more initiatives have been taken to ‘anticipate’ the arrival of migrants in order to keep them at bay, and therefore to build up specially trained forces to prevent the latter’s entry. One recent report prepared by the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), ‘Defending Refugees’ Access to Protection in Europe’, has pointed out facts about how Europe’s external borders are managed, and how a special agency (FRONTEX) has been raised to preserve these borders; likewise the report points out inconsistencies between the Schengen Borders Code, the EU Asylum Procedures Directive, and the International Human Rights Laws including the International Refugee Law. It also tells in details new techniques of prefrontier controls (visas, carrier sanctions, posting immigration liaison officers at airports, biometric methods and information databases, and measures to ‘control trafficking and smuggling’). There are now developed methods for interception at sea in the name of rescue, border monitoring to thwart the immigrants, and managing land, sea, and air borders to keep away the people who come as stowaways, or through tunnels, or in the bellies of ships….18 One of the biggest problems the figure of the migrant represents is the way s/he interferes and disturbs the ordered circulation of labour, capital, and bodies. It is not that the modern global economy does not want ‘free’ circulation of commodities including the commodity called the human body and the human labour power. Yet, it is free only in the sense in which market wants these circulations, and not unruly circulations, which disturb ‘economy’. Freedom is thus a space of negotiation only under a regime condition, and that is where the insecurities haunt those who call for freedom: What would happen if there are too many mouths to feed, if there are too many claimants for the bread and water, and more anxiously, what if bodies mix too much resulting in mixing of blood, networks, communities, hamlets, houses,


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order of descents, and genealogies? Care as ‘ideology’ has thus always been accompanied by racism, xenophobia, and control techniques. This figure also threatens the institution of border and along with it the boundary-making exercise, one of the eminent control techniques. By itself boundary-making is nothing new, nor feared; it is like difference—a practical thing of life to be negotiated by practice—in practice. But border is a theological institution, it defines territorialised landscapes, epistemic perspectives, and sets up the regime under which mutations of capital and labour go on. It sets up the parameters of the organisation of power, which will then determine points of reinforcement and crossing or transgression. Borders are crucial for capitalist development—possibly more so today, ‘when capital needs global mobility, but the reserve army of labour building up on a global scale must be retained to harness in a national form’. Borders thus shape labour markets. What will then happen to the moving bodies? It is here where we are entering a completely new terrain. The problem is: the entry of mass of human bodies as labour is not enough; also it is not sufficient to say (though it goes some way in recognising the closure that capitalist reorganisation of labour market faces today as it increasingly assumes the form of control of migration) that labour is the link between the bare body and the sovereign power. The critical point is that this body as the repository of labour power must be reproduced as the free juridical subject, known as citizen. Even though the production of the labouring subject has its dark and illegal side, often representing what we have come to call the primitive mode of accumulation, and this complicates the scenario, yet by and large the reorganisation of labour market must happen with a free juridical space, and that is where space as ‘territory’ becomes critical to global capitalism today. It helps the multiplication of labour, at the same time retains the heterogeneity of the global space of capital without which global domination of capital is impossible. What all these imply in simpler terms is that labour flows, which migration flows are ultimately are, must be controlled and regulated with laws and governmental techniques, though these techniques have to be reinforced by a capitalist rationality, which must be housed and sourced back therefore to a sort of sovereign power. Thus, managing Europe’s external frontiers or Australia’s ‘Pacific Solution’ style camps, and the combination of humanitarian protection

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and border controls by police-military methods in the frame of policy are neither symbols of pure governmentality, nor pure economic techniques. They are the terrain of the merger of the governmental and the sovereign power, and specifically they represent a technique of power, namely differential inclusion of labour in the world market, hence a differential global migration regime. The migrant as the subject thus epitomises the conflicts and challenges around the border, which functions as a terrain of differential inclusion. The subject also demonstrates that the ‘border’ as an institution is not a mere object of analysis, rather a strategic method by which social relationships are being continuously reconstituted in a world guided by economic rationality. Of course this economic rationality produces its other, the figure of the migrant worker, often ‘the illegal migrant’, the incomplete juridical other of economics. Since this method does not remain unchallenged, hence in the real world we find a number of associated concepts, such as frontier, borderland, and boundary, because bodies are continuously trying to displace borders. Bodies and borders characterise today’s interdependent but opposite poles of global mobilities.19 These mobilities not only signify the changing relation between labour and power in a global frame, but they also signify the contest in a terse way. They show that although the administration of migration flows seeks to control these population movements in a way so that they remain congruent with the ruling pattern of differential zones of mobility, the mobile subjects of course refuse to be governed in such a way. They refuse to be the docile subject, who can be called the disciplined labour. These mobilities are characterised by interruptions, discontinuities, hiding, disappearance, turning back, long stopovers, layovers, frequent shuffles, shuttling back and forth, and sudden emergence in a labour market, which can be termed only in terms of its discrete nature (also of division of labour) marked by the borders of the states and boundaries of metropolis– periphery relations. This is how the migrant as the labouring subject is inserting itself into the global organisation of power—but only as a thorn in the flesh. Hence the obsessive concern with the mass of bodies spoiling, polluting, clamouring, and crowding the imperial spaces; hence is the concern to find out ways to keep these bodies at bay, yet maintaining them though often at a bare level and without work, in a fearful


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proximity to death. In this deadly game, on one hand, several evasive strategies are adopted by the migrants to escape the cordons and eventually to arrive—among these strategies every possible technique is adopted including grabbing citizenship, learning European languages, and successfully passing the test of being an American or British. On the other hand, are the military-police-financial methods, deadly ethnic moves, and sanitising techniques to keep the Euro-American world and the world wherefrom migrants generate clean of the stains of any rough method. These techniques collectively called humanitarianism may include care, protection, temporary supply of provisions of shelter, pity, periodic atonements, display of grace, visits by high officers, strict prohibition of display of pomp in front of the victims and their camps, and finally the modification of the behaviour of both—the caregivers and the objects of care—in the interest of a protection regime. Life in a civil form must be given minimally in these simulated sites of protection—therefore there have to be programmes of education, baby care, self-help training, etc. But this does not mean that the caregivers must renounce wealth. It is neither religious asceticism nor stoicism; it is a technique of sharing a little, prudent wealth management, and most importantly, modifying the behaviour of the collective, the multitude, as distinct from modifying individual behaviour, which was the goal of the ancient regimes of spiritual training. The stakes are high on both sides; we must understand that there is no moral principle involved here. The bodies must arrive where they cannot be allowed to appear, hence the evasions by the bodies on move; on the other hand, the brutal and the intense response of the praetorian guards to stop the bodies from arriving. Do the tactics always succeed? In this ongoing game, as long as capitalism reigns, there is no final victory or defeat on any side. In November 2005 the suburbs of Paris erupted with immigrants’ riots, the suburbs were in flames, and well-versed persons too ruminated if this was the return of the political subject.20 The riots have stopped, France now has a right-wing president who is bent upon teaching unruly migrants a lesson, and sans papies are fuming, angrier than ever. Some others think, this is not the way labour will erupt as the political subject. Riots will not work, that is not the way; France has to work for more democracy and the widening of the meaning of citizenship, though this is no guarantee that the immigrant labour will remain committed to bourgeois

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civility—a precondition for the advance of capital. Clearly nobody knows however how the multitude will behave, neither the forces of order, nor those who swear by the capacity of the multitude. We can now see the specifics of the imperial rationality of governance. It cannot be confused with ‘reason of the state’ (a principle of rationality which began with the early modern age and in the main meant ensuring national spaces defined by borders and national citizenship); it also cannot be confused with liberal governmentality (which began in the 18th century and meant freedom of the market which would in turn create a social state based on least governance and freedoms of other kinds); imperial rationality is a distinctly different rationality in the making, which would mean achieving a synergy between fluid and passable spaces (which empire creates) and differential inclusion of labour in society and economy. Only one thing is certain in this situation: present governmental technologies for stabilising populations cannot bring back the old order of segmented population flows—refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, economic opportunity seekers, technically competent immigrants, poor destitute escapees—for which administrations have respective appropriate policies of management…. They all disturb uncluttered national histories, so essential for the modern organisation of power. They all appear in the chiaroscuro of bourgeois civility and the new imperium as mass of invading bodies.

NOTES 1. Sandro Mezzadra, ‘Borders, Confines, Migrations, and Citizenship’, trans. Maribel Casas Cortés and Sebastian Cobarrubias. May 2006. Available online at http:// observatorio.fadaiat.net/tiki-index.php?page=Borders%2C%20Migrations%2C% 20Cittinzenshp (accessed on 14 July 2008). 2. Mark Munn, The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia—A Study of Sovereignty in Ancient Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 3. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer—Sovereign Power and Bare Life (California: Stanford University Press, 1998). 4. Joyce E. Salisbury, The Blood of Martyrs—Unintended Consequences of Ancient Violence, Chapters 1–2 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 9–53. 5. On this, Yasemin Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); see also, John Urry, Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-first Century (London: Routledge, 2000).


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6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 7. Artemy Magun, ‘The Concept and the Phenomenon of Empire in the Contemporary World—The Process of Civilisation or the State of Dissolution?’. Available online at http://www.ceeisaconf.ut.ee/orb.aw/class=file/action=preview/ id=164446/magun.doc (accessed on 14 July 2008). 8. Artemy Magun, ‘The Concept and the Phenomenon of Empire in the Contemporary World—The Process of Civilisation or the State of Dissolution?’ 9. Partha Chatterjee, ‘Empire after Globalisation’, Economic and Political Weekly 39, no. 37, 11–17 September (2004): 4155–64. 10. Ranabir Samaddar, ‘Empire after Globalisation: Some Comments’, Economic and Political Weekly 39, no. 45, 6–12 November (2004): 4942–45. 11. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude—War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 338. 12. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, pp. 338–39. 13. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 340. 14. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 126. 15. ‘Colonial Constitutionalism’, Identity, Culture and Politics 3, no. 1 (July 2002)/ www.codesria.org/Links/Publications/icp/july_2002.htm 16. On this some of the recent writings, for instance, Niall Ferguson, Empire—The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2004); Daniel. J. Hulsebosch, Constituting Empire—New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005); R.W. Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power—Victorian Power and the Rule of Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); John Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace—The Constitution and the Foreign Affairs after 9/11 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). 17. For instance, R. Samaddar, The Marginal Nation (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999); The Materiality of Politics, vol. 2 (London and New Delhi: Anthem Press, 2007), Chapter 5. 18. Sonia Sirtori and Patricia Coelho. ‘“Defending Refugees” Access to Protection in Europe’, ECRE, December 2007. Available online at http://www.ecre.org/resources/ policy_papers/988 (accessed on 27 November 2008). 19. On this see, Hamida Hossain, ‘Boundaries, Borders, and Bodies’, and Flavia Agnes, ‘The Bar Dancer and the Trafficked Migrant—Globalisation and Subaltern Existence’—both published in Refugee Watch, 30(December 2007). 20. Rada Ivekovic, ‘French Suburbia, 2005’, Refugee Watch, 27(June 2006): 19–28.

Epilogue

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his book has worked on the interstices of history and philosophy. The practices of the formation of the political subject form the main theme of this work, and it was the only sensible way I felt I could do some justice to this theme. The significance of this theme cannot be exaggerated; we all are witness to how this theme has appeared in modern time, even though frequently in metaphysical form, claiming a great stake in our life. However, having gone through the book it may appear to the reader that I have tried to posit here an elemental difference between Western thinking and Eastern thinking. I do not deny that some pages of this book convey this impression; since in course of emphasising the practices of the political subject I may have suggested at times as the opposite of my account various ‘contemplative meditations’ (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase) whose countless instances can be found in the European history of thought. Yet I am aware that there is no singular ‘Eastern’ inasmuch as there is no single ‘European heritage’. In fact I believe that the European radical thinkers of our time would have to take the lead given by critical postcolonial thinking on the question of a historical understanding of the emergence of the political subject and rewrite Europe’s own history of politics. Mainstream European political thought taught us to think of the state, or at times nation, or the free autonomous individual, at times even law as the political subject. This is here where we can gain from the anti-colonial and post-colonial history of politics. I also did not aim to present a new theory of post-colonialism or post-colonial politics. It is simply my own existential position that propels me towards finding out all the relevant stories and arguments from colonial and post-colonial experiences. However, one thing is true: I have said this in course of writing this book, namely, what I have termed elsewhere as ‘the post-colonial predicament’ is a global predicament today. Europe and the Euro-American world in general will find more and more its colonial past and along with that the post-colonial predicament within its own belly, and never before the destinies of the

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ex-colonies and the countries, which were once colonial powers, so linked to each other. It is in this sense, and here I can only repeat, that the task is not to provincialise Europe’s history but to globalise the colonial and post-colonial history. Some American and European thinkers seem to be aware of this task. But in general thinkers of the EuroAmerican world are far behind their governments and rulers who understand much better the need to link up with Asia and other excolonial regions in order to escape the wrath of economics—the fall and the crash of 2008. There is of course one more reason why this account of the political subject can be seen as reconstructing the post-colonial. This is because of its unambiguous emphasis on practices, activities, and actions. But this is no reason to think that I have done away with ideologies and ideas. Obviously this book discusses ideas, ideologies, but not as sovereign entities, but as ‘ideas and actions, ideas in actions’.1 Therefore, I did not follow the conventional path of studying ideas as a unity (the other name of this is ideology), but tried to discuss them as part of the activity and actions of the subject. This is of course the Althusserian way that seeks to view the materiality of politics in the mirror of a conjuncture of circumstances, of real life elements. Finally, there is one more explanation that I require to submit here. I have deliberately eschewed any frontal engagements with other theories or arguments on the political subject, not because they are not necessary, but because in the scheme of the book more important is the task of laying down the distinction between two approaches: On one hand, there is the philosophical construct of the subject (one of the best examples of this would be Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self— The Making of Modern Identity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989), on the other hand, the notion of the political subject proposed here is of one produced by historical-political circumstance and conflict (especially that between the colonial powers and their subjects) and conceived through what I term as an anti-colonial idea of a philosophy of practice and action. In this second approach, politics appears as the practice of autonomy of the subject—the subject who emerges to exercise freedom from the shackles of society and rules of the contemporary regime of power. This exercise of freedom is related in turn with the ontological condition of politics. Therefore the engagements this book makes (in the second section) with other

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theories, books, and discourses are limited in their scope; they were necessary only to the extent to which such engagements made clear the contingent character of the story of the subject (illustrated in the first section). If that is the way a book on subjectivity has to be written, we cannot help. Our time is an extremely securitised time, militarised time, when contingency, tactics, and mutations in politics have become significant. Earlier theories do not make much sense now; they are worth only for archivists of thought and doctoral students. Therefore for the political subject the imagery of engagement is of a busy war room and not probably of a porcelain workshop….2 Contingency is foundational for the survival of subject groups today. One reason behind this fact is the breakdown of the liberal way to rule. Liberal way to rule is possible today only through encouraging and engaging in an all out social war, which in turn makes liberal way to rule very difficult. But more important here is the fact that it makes the liberal way to war also a difficult, at times, an impossible exercise. This of course is a matter of discussion at length, which will go much beyond the confines of this book. We shall have to discuss the problems that arise in the wake of the conquest of power by the political subject through contingent circumstances. It will involve a much deeper discussion on the phenomenon of transfer of power than what has been hitherto done in the history of modern political thinking. At this point we must stop, while at least we can acknowledge the fact before closing the book that in that task too the lessons of the actions of the political subject as the constituent power will remain crucial when power has been constituted and the process of subjectivation has renewed. In order to have a better understanding of how the anti-colonial heritage works in our time, we shall have to read other accounts of subject formation in various colonies in the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century. We shall realise how imperial conditions could not deter the political subject from making its mark; on the other hand, we shall see that the last two centuries are the perfect illustrations of how political subjectivity ‘exceeded’ the given institutional forms of state, law, and the nation. Recovery of that history will throw new light on the philosophical profile of the subject. This is a challenge to political

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historians to start working anew. But the reward will be great. They will be able to say that empiricist history is not always bad philosophy or to put it differently, good philosophy can be empiricist history as well.

NOTES 1. Louis Althusser, ‘On Brecht and Marx’, republished essay as Appendix to Warren Montag, Louis Althusser (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 146. 2. The name of Antonio Negri’s recent work, The Porcelain Workshop—For a New Grammar of Politics, trans. Noura Wedell (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), some of its insights I appreciate and concur with, while I take note of the fact that the general setting of the book seeking to outline a new grammar of politics leaves out the political experiences of the bulk of humanity.

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304


Index

Abdul Gaffar, 50 Abdul Karim, Maulavi, 26 Abdul Rahim, 42, 50 actions about practice and politics, 34–36 act of terror, 106–08 autonomy of, 32 doctrine of, 104–08 as duty, 32 identity of, 130, xix–xv politics as discourse of, xiv–xix theory of, 10–11 Aesopian language, 110 Agamben, Georgio, 73, xx–xxii agrarian ideologies, 20 Ahl-e-Hadis, 89, 91 Ahmad, Qeyamuddin, 41, 51 Ahmadullah, 42, 53 Ahmed, Abul Mansur, 84, 87, 94 Ahmed, Maulavi Ekinuddin, 26, 29 al Afghani, Jamaluddin, 69–70, 86, 99 alem samiti, 88 Algerian Revolution Year 5, The, 215 Algerian war, 215, 229 Ali, Amir, 87 Ali, Enayat, 42 Ali, Maulavi Sarfaraz, 48 Ali, Mubarak, 42 Ali, Muhammad, 68–69 Ali, Rajab, 41 Ali, Shere, 52 Ali, Wilayat, 42 Ali, Yahya, 50 Al-Islam, 85–86, 88–89, 95 All India Krishak Sabha, 15 All India Muslim League, 26, See also Muslim League Althusser, Louis, 138–39, 150, 205, 253, 256, xxx

Ameen, Muhammad, 67 Amiruddin, 67 anarchism, ideology of, 80, 115–16, 118, 137, 167 anarchists-terrorists, revolutionary ideology, 108–15 Anderson, Benedict, 79–80, 115, 118, 120, 187, 267 Anisuzzaman, 87 Anjuman-e-olema-e-bangla, 87–90 Anjuman movement, 85, 87–88, 92, 100 antagonism, 140, 142–43, 149, 158 anti-Brahmin revolt, 16 Anti-Carlyle Circular Society, 26 anti-colonial/anti-colonialism, 53, 69, 118, 205, 211, 216, 222, 226, 228 attitude, 127 basis of, 175 brand, 70 consciousness, 100, 120, 206, 216 existence, 99–101 history, 127, 151 ideology, 25 imagination, 104, 115–18, 120, 123 language of, 83, 111 manifesto for political subject, 206– 11 militant, 114, 126 Muslim, 84, 101 nationalism, 70, 85, 104, 115 origins and spread, 115–18 political activists, 206, xiii politics, 11, 13–14, 27, 35, 71, 73, 81–82, 103, 119, 267, 292, xxiii, xxvii preaching of, 99 problems of, 223 religious, 69

Index resistance, 70–71, 102 revolution, 36, 211–13, 215, 233 struggles, 9, 81–82, 119, 227, 267, 292 thinking, 69, 121, xvi, xxvii anushilan, in practice, 106, 113–14, 123–25, 127 Anushilan (secret society), 30 anushilantattva, importance of, 10, 112, 123, see also actions Archaeology of Knowledge, 197 archives, and memory, 193–96 Arendt, Hannah, 248, xxi Aristotle, 12, 14, 16, xxi–xxii Arthashastra, xi Asaduzzaman, 144–45, 156 Assam Chashi-Majur Samity (Assam association for peasants and workers), 96 Assam Congress, 95 Atmacharit, 29 Augustine, 14 Austin, 167 autonomy, 164, 171, 173 of consciousness, 136, 225 demands of, 279–81 federal, 96 notion of, 214, 262 of politics, 22–23, 33, 91, 157, 214, 216, 236, 264, 293, xviii–xix, xxiv, xxviii of will, 22, 32 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 18–20, 23 Balibar, Etienne, 229–30, 238–59, 262, xxvi Ball, Charles, 49 Bandopadhyay, Upendra Nath, 109, 127 Banerjee, Suren, 13 Banerjee, Surendra Nath, 26 Banga-Assam Praja Samity, 96 Banga-Assam Praja Sammelan, 96 Bangiya Krishak Praja Dal, 87 Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Parishad, 86, 90 Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Samity, 86 bare life, 73, xxii–xxiii

305

Barelvi, Syed Ahmed, 40, 42 Barman, Rebati, 17 Bengal Pact, 89, 100 Bengal partition of 1905 arguments against, 26 development of situation for, 25–26, 100 and dialogues produced, 24–34 right-sizing and right-shaping strategy, 27 strands to protests against, 28–29 Benjamin, Walter, 80, 108, 183, 198, 215, xvi Bentham, 36 Beralbhih, Saiyad Ahmed, 86 Bhabha, Homi, 211 on Fanon, 223–29 Bhagavadgita, 10–11, 107, 121 Bhasani, Maulana, 13, 93–97, 143 Bhaumik, Subir, 181 biopolitics, theory of, 47, 141, 148, 157, 159, 272, 283, xx–xxi, xxiii Black Mountain Expedition (1880–89), 54 Black Skin, White Masks, 208, 214, 222 Bogdadi, Saiyad Nasiruddin, 95 borders and empires, 268–72 Bose, Jagadish Chandra, 26 Bose, Subhas, 13 Bourdieu, Pierre, 292, xii Brecht, 48, 215 Bukharin, 277 Burke, Edmund, 13, 107 Bux, Elahi, 50 Camus, Albert, 229 Capital, 156 Carlyle, 105 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 188–93, 199 character (charitra) philosophy of, 121–30 reformation, 111 Chatterjee, Partha, 279 Chattopadhyay, Bankim Chandra, 15, 17, 74, 105–07, 123–26

306


Chattopadhyay, Ramananda, 26 Chaudhury, Pramatha Nath, 26, 109 Che Guevara, 206–07, 216, 228 Cicero, 12–14, 16 citizen-militant, 240–42 citizenship, 269, 272, 282, 289–90 borders and reflections on, 245–51 militant, 240–42 new developments and, 259–64 post-colonial predicament, 251–59 social, 250 trans-national, 245–51 worksite of democracy and, 238–44 civility and violence, 248–49, 257 civil wars, 8–9, 16, 19, 122 class struggle war, 9 Clausewitz, 6–8, 10, xxvi collective sense, xx colonialism anti-colonial movements and, 100 apologists of, 81 basis of, 109, 175 cultural issues and, 223–24 democracy and, 73 end of, 31, 215, 219 imperialism and, 53 and language of dialogue, 84–86 linguistic structure, 83 Muslim under, 69 national ideology and, 275, 279 nature of, 221 phenomenon of, 14, 47, 118, 128, 134, 157, 207–08, 211–13, 216, 218, 227, 253, 260, 269, xiv, xxviii truth of, 15, 99–101, 127 coming community, spirit of, 31 Communist Manifesto, The, 17, 19 contentious situations, micro-politics and dialogic existence, 97–99 contested conversation, 18–24, 27 conversation as dialogue contested, 18–24, 27 political, 12–17 Dainik Azad, 89 Dainik Jamana, 89

Dainik Mohammadi, 89 Dalrymple, 48 Dange, 13 Das, Bipin, 13 Das, C.R., 14, 89, 109 Das, Pulin Behari, 26, 29 death and dialogue, 71 truth and politics in Mahabharata, 3–11 Death and the Labyrinth, 201 Deleuze, 28, 84 democracy, 20, 31, 68, 73, 97, 102, 254, xxiv, xxvi–xxvii conditions of, 247 deficit of, 156 dialogic, 251 under empire, 271–72, 274 ideology, 275, 278 language of, 111 and nationalism, 276–77, 279–83 political subject as product of, xix–xx, xxiv politics of, 174–75, 207, 237, 257–58, 269, 272 resistance to, 137 return of, 144 worksite and citizenship, 238–44 Democratic Action Committee, 144 Deuskar, Sakharam Ganesh, 109 Dhaka, anti-Ayub upsurge in, 143–49 Dharmatattva (The Theory of Religion), 106 dharma (virtue), 7–10 dialogic consciousness, 18–19 dialogic existence, in micro-politics and contentious situations, 97–99 Dialogic Imagination, 18 dialogic politics, 242–43, 249 dialogue contentious situations, 97–99 contested conversation, 18–24, 199 and death, 71 and dialogic consciousness, 18–19 language and colonialism, 85–97 practice of, 164–66 and rhetoric, 11–17, 218

Index difference principle, xxix discourse analysis, 213–14 double-voiced, 18 internal bifurcation, 18–19 Discovery of India, 15 displacement, 6, 22, 121–23, 127, 136, 162, 170–71, 188–89, 202, 218, 236, 243, 249, 255, 284–85, xxvi–xxviii Dravida movement, 13 Dum Dum Barasat uprising, 114 Dutt, Michael Madhusudan, 72 Dutt, R.C., 14 Dutta, Bhupendra Nath, 109, 126 Dutta, Ullaskar, 104–05, 121, 126, 128 Dying Colonialism, A, 228 East India Gazetteer, 55 Edwardes, Herbert, 50 Eighteenth Brummaire of Louis Bonaparte, 17 Ellenborough, Governor-General, 52 Empire, 271 empires and borders, 268–72 democratic, 274–76 globalisation, 284–90 history of, 272–78 internal and international in age of, 278–84 past and present empires, 272–78 realities of, 279 Engels, 140 equality principle, xxix Euro-Marxism, 20 European citizenship, 238, 240, 255, 259 Faith and Future, 105 fanaticism, 58, 72, 84, 97, xv Fanon, Frantz, 150, 206–33 armed virtue, 228–33 globalisation and re-colonisation, 206–11 Homi Bhabha on, 223–29 theorist of constituent power, 216–23 political subject, 211–16

307

Faraizi movement, 40, 72, 100 Fazlul Haq, 14 Fearless Speech, 12, 180 foreign goods, boycott of, 28–29 Foucault, Michel, 4, 12, 31, 33, 64, 73, 141, 150–51, 155–56, 180, 197, 200–01, 217, 257, 274, xiv, xxi Fraser, Nancy, 140 freedom, 10, 22, 125, 168, 172, 224, 253, 255, 275, 286, 290, 293, xii–xiii, xv, xxx an affirmation of relationships, 10 anti-colonial, 222 from death, 5 and emancipation, 212 and equality, 105 political, 163, xxii principle of, 137 uncertain path to, 108–20 war to gain, 9 Freud, 139 Gandhi, 14–15, 35, 105, 151 Gandhi–Jinnah accord, 30 Gazzali, Imam, 86 German Ideology, 36 Ghosh, Arabindo, 26, 109 Ghosh, Barindra, 126–27 global citizenship, 271–72 global civil society, 271 globalisation, 117, 156, 249, 255, 262–63, 279, 281–82, ix age of, 117–18, 120, 158, 228, 282 economic of, 279, 282 and empires, 284–90 labour and unruly population flow, 284–90 recolonialism and Frantz Fanon, 206–11 Gramsci, Antonio, 9, 17, 135, 239 Great Partition, victims memories about, 99, 191–200 Grundrisse, 140 gunas, theory of, 11 Habermas, 257 Habitations of Modernity, 189, 200

308


Hall, Stuart, 211, 213, 223 Hardt, Michael, 150, 268, 271–72, 275, 278–82 Hedayatullah, Muhammad, 29 Hegel, 83, 140, 167, 231 Heroes and Hero Worship, 105 heteroglossia, 20–21 Hilferding, 277 Hind Swaraj, 15 Hindusthan Republican Army, 9 historiographical operation, 188, 192–93, 198, 201 History and Class Consciousness, xviii history in memory and archives, 193–96 of partition victims, 189–93 and political subject emergence, 197–202 Hobbes, Thomas, 280 Hobsbawm, Eric, 187, 261 Hobson, 277 Home Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, xx–xxii Honneth, Axel, 140 Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat, 26 Hubullah, 41 humanitarianism, 285, 289 human rights, 169, 248, 284, xxi Hume, 32 Hunter, William, 51–52, 54 Hunter, W.W., 55, 60 Hussain, Farhat, 42 Hussain, Syed Muhammad, 42 Hussain, Syed Nazir, 51–52 Hyderabad Conspiracy in 1839, 41 Ibrahim, Maulavi, 67 Illuminations, 80 Imagined Communities, 80 Imperial Gazetteer of India, 55 imperialism, 53, 78, 116–17, 275, 277–78 imperial rationality, 284–90 independence, path to, 108–20 Indian National Army, 9, 114 Indian National Congress, 9, 13, 35, 89, 109

insistence, 137–38 Islamabadi, Maulana Maniruzzaman, 13, 26, 85–89, 92, 95 Jafar, Muhammad, 50 Jalal, Ayesha, 81, 156 Jamait-e-olema-e-hind, 88 Jamal al-Din, 69–70 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 14–15, 89–90 Johnstone, Colonel, 54 Jugantar, 108–12, 119–20 justice access to, 239–40 character of, 31 concern for, 239 divine, 49 economics of, 254 equality and, 112 issues of, 30, 36, 93, 179–80, 198, 243–44, 258–59, 263, 271–72, 280 language of, 111 principle of, 243, 249–50, 258, xxix quest for, 171, xi rights and, 282 search for, 178, xxiii system, 174, 240 Kanai Lal, 126 Kant, Immanuel, 22, 32–33, 36, 137, 200, 254, xvi–xvii Kanungo, Hem Chandra, 104–05, 121, 126–27 karma (action), 11, 110–11, 120–21, 124–25 karmanusthana, 124–26 Kautilya, xi Khan, Akram, 13, 26 Khan, Ayub, 91, 143 Khan, Bakht, 48–49 Khan, Maulana Akram, 86–94 Khan, Saiyad Ahmed, 86–87 Khan, Shamsuzzaman, 86 knowledge domains of, 213 theories of, 214 theory of, 10, 118

Index Kojeve, Alexandre, 231 Krishak Praja Party, 13 Kropotkin, 105, 121 labour and unruly population flow, 284–90 Lahore Declaration, 15 Lebanon, nationalist resistance in, 102 legal reasoning, 14–15 Lenin, 8, 17, 19, 110, 135, 140, 171, 226, 275, 277–78 liberalism, 20, 107, 243, 274, 283 liberty, 68, 110, 232, 283, xvii, xxix Location of Culture, 229 Lucknow Pact, 1916, 30, 100 Lukacs, Georg, xviii Luxembourg, Rosa, 277 Machiavelli, 14, 16, 138, 226 Magun, Artemy, 276, 278 Mahabharata, 13, 15, 22, 34–35, 105, 111, 122–23, 125, xxvi politics-death relationship in, 3–11 Manifesto of the Communist Party, 17, 19, 150, 158, 227 Mann, Michael, 275 Mao, 9, 16–17, 135, 206–07, 226, xxvi Marginal Nation, The, 98, 191, 258 Marshall, H., 66, 244 Marx, 9, 17, 19, 36, 135, 140–41, 156, 167, 226, 237, 257, xxviii Marxism, 20, 116, 189, 211 Masik Mohammadi, 89–90 Materiality of Politics, The, 24 Maududi, Maulana, 93–94 Mayo, Lord, 52 Mazzini, 86, 105, 121 Meghnadbadh Kavya, 72 Meherullah, Munshi, 87 memory of history and archives, 193–96 and political subject emergence, 197–202 of partition victims, 189–93 and political activism, 188 of trauma, 190

309

Memory, Power, Identity, 55 Mezzadra, Sandro, 255, 265, 270 Mia Jan, Qazi, 50 micro-politics contentious situations and dialogic existence, 97–99 of terrorist initiatives, 114–15 Mihir O Sudhakar, 85–86 militant citizenship, 240–42 Mirajkar, 13 Mitra, Krishna Kumar, 26, 29 Mitra, Kumudini, 26 modern nation-state, 269 Montesquieu, 256 moral law, 22–23 Mostafacharit, 92 Mother Courage, 48 Mughal aristocracy, animosity of, 49, 84 Muhammad, Dost, 41 Muhammad, Wali, 41 Muhammad Baqar, Maulavi, 48 Muivah, Thuingaleng, 163–72, 175–83 Mukherji, Bankim, 13 Mukhopadhyay, Ashoke Kumar, 104 Mukti Kon Pothe (Whither Freedom?), 109 multi-languaged consciousness, 19 multitude of city-states, 167 phenomenon of, 207, 271–72, 275, 279–81, 289–90, xix Multitude, 275 Muslim nationalism, 90, 95 Muslim Awami League, 92–93, 95 Muslim Bangler Samayikpatra, 87 Muslim League, 13, 15, 87–89, 91–92 Muslim-nationalist identity, 86–88 Mutiny of 1857, 30, 40, 47, 51–52 Naga rebel leader vision as counter figure of sovereignty, 163–66 criticism and position interstice, 181–84

310


dialogue structure, 171, 177–81 fearless speech, 177–81 in historical context of sharing sovereignty, 172–76 legacy of politics, 181–84 pragmatism and experience, 166–72 Naicker, Periyar E. Ramaswamy, 13, 16 Naoroji, Dadabhai, 14 Napoleon, 68 Nasrullah, Sayyed Hassan, 102 National Awami Party, 96, 143 national consciousness, 216, 220–23, 227, 232 national culture, 217, 220, 223, 227 national identity, 217, 246 nationalism, 20, 31, 67–68, 80, 117, 216, 222–23, 226–27, 253 anti-colonial, 70, 85 Bengali, 96 crisis of, 81–82 democracy and, 276, 279 doctrine of, 74, 106 growth, 87 history, 190 ideology, 246 linguistic, 91 militant, 114, 116 Muslim, 90, 95 origins and spread of, 115–18, 187 paradox of, 88 politics of, 95, 97 virtues, 89 nationalists-terrorists, dialogues between, 19 National Mohammedan Association, 87 national wars, 8 Negri, Antonio, 150, 207, 268, 271–72, 275, 278–82 Nehru, 13–15 neo-colonialism, 206, 208, 229, 253 Nivedita, Sister, 26 Nora, Pierre, 195 Norman, Chief Justice, 52, 64 open-ended dialogue, 21, 23, 30 Origins of Totalitarianism, xxi

Orme Collection, 55 Ottoman rule, 68 Pal, Bipin Chandra, 26 partition narratives, See memory partition victims history and archives, 193–96 and political subject emergence, 197–202 memory of, 189–93 Pascalian Meditations, xii Patel,Vittalbhai, 14 people’s wars, 8 Phenomenology, 83 Phulwari, Maulana, 87 Plato, 99–100, 125 political argumentation, 14, 17 communication, 21 conversation, 12–17 identities declarations, 98 practice and philosophy of character, 121–30 refugees, xxi spirituality, 126 political subject acquiring political knowledge, xxiv as agent unsettling rule, 69–75 autonomy, 23 characteristics for study, xxiv–xxv citizenship and future of, 259–64 constitution of, 36 as constitutive force, xxv–xxx death and emergence of, 70–72 dialogue and Bengal partition of 1905, 24–34 contested conversation, 18–24 and rhetoric, 11–17, 31 emergence and memory of history, 70–72, 197–202, 267 Fanon as theorist of, 206–11 genealogy, xviii–xix hermeneutics of, xi–xiv, xxviii identity, 98, xix–xv

Index legal reasoning, 14–15 manifesto for anti-colonial, 206–11 not state-centric, xxvii–xxviii politics as discourse of actions, xiv–xix practice and philosophy of character, 121–30 practice of dialogue in history of, 62 product of democracy, xix–xx, xxiv and resistance, 149–59 role in unsettling rule, 39–75 role of terror in formation, 10, 106–08, 128–29 senses, xx women as, xxiii politico-social realities, 214–15 politics and death in Mahabharata, 3–11, 35 dialogue and rhetoric, 11–17 as discourse of actions, 33–36, 71, xiv–xix and ethics, 4 impossibility of, 7–8 intensity of, 104–08 language of, 21 nature and reasons, 33 practice and actions, 34–36, 71 self-knowledge of, xxiv split of, 12 terrorists language of, 120 and truth, 3–11, 35–36 polyglossia, 20–21 population, strategy of right-shaping, 27 post-colonial conditions and situations, 14, 17, 168, 174, 211, 223–24, viii, xi–xii, xv–xvii politics, 24, 31, 70, 156, 207, 215, 237, 267, 292–93, xii–xiii, xxvii predicament, 251–59 studies, 189, 206–08, 229 practice anushilan in, 106, 113–14, 123–25, 127 theory of, 5, 118, 121 pragmatic theory of truth, 99–103 praja movement, 88

311

pre-language of dialogue and colonialism, 83–85 Prince,The, 153–54, 227 Prison Notebooks, 17 pure politics, 7 Qadir Baksh, Maulana, 87 Quran, 85, 92 rajas guna, 11 Rampuri, Muhammad Ali, 41 Ranger, Terence, 187 Rawls, John, xxix rebel identity, and Wahabi movement, 56–67 Renan, Ernst, 187 Report on the Human Peasant Uprising, 17 Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan, 227 resistance anti-Ayub upsurge in Dhaka in 1969, 143–49 behavioural trait, 133–39 character of, 157–59 forms of, 142–43 lessons from, 147–49 as manifesto, 150–51 of political reason, 151–56 and political subject, 149–59 potency of, 138–39 to power, xx process of, 139–49 revolutionary, 140 revolutionary wars, 7 rhetoric and dialogue, 11–17, 218 Ricoeur, Paul, 188, 194, 196 rights, 33, 97, 111, 198, 236–37, 260, xx–xxii, xxiv, xxix of citizens, 169–70, 240, xxi–xxii collective, 250 discourse of, 199 in federal framework, 251 guarantee, 98, 108, 246 human, 168, 169, 248, 284, xxi identity on, 263

312


intellectual, 208 and means, 98 movements for, 244, 282 revolution, 23, 36 right to, 248 sacred and inalienable, xxi sustainability, 284 of trade union, 144 Risley, H.H., 25 Rizal, Jose, 120 Rorty, Richard, 103 Rousseau, 167–68, 269 Royal Indian Mutiny, 114 rule of law, 31, 68, 74, 107–08, 118–19, 138, 162, 175, 248, 274 Russell, 43, 45–46 Sabhyatar Sankat, 15 sadhana (spiritual pursuit), 105, 110, 113–14, 123–25, 127 Sahid, Maulana Ismail, 86 Salimullah, Nawab, 87 Sapru, Tejbahadur, 14 Saptahik Comrade, 89 Saptahik Mohammadi, 89 Saptahik O Dainik Sebak, 89 Sartre, 215, 228 Sarvar-ul-Mulk, 48 Sassen, Saskia, 270 satva guna, 11 Satyendra Nath, 121, 126 Schmitt, Carl, 140–41, xxi Sekyi-Out, Ato, 227 self care of, xvii identity of, 130, xix–xv theory of, 214 Self and Sovereignty, 81, 156 self-consciousness, 231, xviii self-knowledge, 10, 33–34, xxiv Sen, Ranen, 13 Shafi, Muhammad, 50 Shahidullah, Muhammad, 86 Shariatullah, Haji, 71 Sher Singh, 40

Shikha, 87 Shiraji, Ismail Hossain, 26, 86, 95 Sier Mutaqherin, xi singularities colonialism and language of dialogue, 84–85 singular lives, 85–97 and solidarity, 80–83 social citizenship, 244, 250 social equality, xxix socialism, 20, 68, 189, 207, 275 solidarity, 79–83 contentious situations and dialogic existence, 97–99 dialogue language and colonialism, 85–97 ideal of singular lives, 85–97 pragmatic theory of truth and, 99–103 and singularities, 80–83 theory, 84 Somnatha-The Many Voices of a History, 197 Sources of the Self-The Making of Modern Identity, 293 sovereignty, 33, 50, 61, 73, 81, 112–13, 123, 129, 205, 211–15, 226, 236, 243, 245, 247, 250, 255, 259–61, 269–70, 272–72, 278–85, xvi, xx–xxi location issue, 81 political subject counter figure of, 163–66 criticism and position interstice, 181–84 dialogue structure, 171, 177–81 experience and pragmatism, 166–72 fearless speech, 177–81 historical context of sharing, 172–76 legacy of politics, 181–84 state political affairs of, 122 strategy of right-sizing, 27 State and Revolution, The, 171 Stokes, Eric, 108, 275

Index Studies in a Dying Colonialism, 215 Surahwardy, 14 Suttarah Akhbar, 41 Swadeshi, spirit of, 29 Swadesh O Samaj, 15 Swu, Isak, 177 Sykes, Colonel, 55 Tagore, 26, 28, 72, 216 tamas guna, 11 Tariqah-i-Muhammadia movement, 40 Tariq-i-Muhammadia, 87 Taylor, Charles, 293 Taylor, William, 50 Teggart, Charles, 128 Temple Entry Movement in Vaikkam, Kerala, 151 Terrorism in Bengal, 60 terror/terrorists acts, 106–08, 129–30 and formation of political subject, 10, 106–08, 128–29 identity, 109–10 language of politics, 120 Thapar, Karan, 163 Thapar, Romila, 197 Theory of Justice, A, xxix Tilak, 13 Tilly, Charles, 27, 79, 155, 279 Titu Meer, 93 Toward the African Revolution, 228 Trans-national citizenship borders and reflections on, 245–51 new developments and, 259–64 possibilities of, 236–64 post-colonial predicament, 251–59 trauma, memory of, 190 truth death and politics, 3–11, 35–36 ethico-political issue, 127 pragmatic theory, 99–103 recognition of, 179–80 Under the Three Flags-Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination, 80, 115

313

unmadana (madness), 105, 113 unruly population flow and labour, 284–90 utilitarianism, ideology of, 36, 74, 106, 118, 137 utopia, 92–93, 95 Vaikkam Satyagraha, 151 Village Crime Note Books, 56 violence and civility, 248–49 Wadud, Qazi Abdul, 87 Wahabi movement contribution to anti-colonial resistance, 69–75, 84, 100, 106–07, 162 legacy, 53, 74, 87, 94 politico-religious activities, 40–42 rebel identity, 56–67 rebellion and concrete universal, 67–70 reports on, 42–46, 56–58, 60–67 revenge of rulers, 49–54 survey and settlement operation, 54–56 trials, 40–49 Wahabi Trials, 54, 59, 67, 71, 74 Wakil, 86 war, 5, 10, 34, 73, 122–26, 135, 171, 185, 196–97, 205, 225, 258, 271, 273, 275– 76, 278, 294, xv, xxiv, xxvi–xxviii of annihilation, 98 anti-colonial, 84, 101, 230 against British, 40–41, 47, 51–52, 54, 63 civil, 9, 16, 19, 122, 251 cohabitation with, 23, 30 cold war, 249, 274 deliberation on, 11–13 dialogue and, 32–33 of liberation, 229 of manoeuvre, 239, 241–42, 251 peace continuum, 6, 181 politics, 6–8, 21–22, 39, 129, 162–63, 216, 225, 251, 257

314


of position, 239, 241–42 religious (jehad), 49, 53, 66 right to, 168 tactics and strategy, 8 time famine, 196 We the People of Europe?, 238, 245, 249–51, 257, 259

What is to be Done?, 17 Which Way Lies Salvation, 109 Wolf, Eric, 247 Wretched of the Earth, The, 206, 211, 214–16, 219, 223, 228

About the Author

Ranabir Samaddar is the Director of the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group. Acclaimed as a critical political thinker, he is the author of The Materiality of Politics. The four volume set on Social Justice in India, of which he is the series editor has been published recently by SAGE in July 2009.

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