Heptanesian Archives

Partha Chatterjee, ed., Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-State, Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1998.

Recent years have seen a significant enrichment of the theoretical depth of Indian political and social analysis, inspired both by revised disciplinary perspectives — most notably, the work of the Subaltern Studies collective — and by contemporary political changes. This volume, edited by one of the most outstanding of such recent theorists, brings together both seasoned analysts and new contributors from the fields of social, cultural and political analysis in a solid collection of essays that examine the experience of postcolonial democracy and nationalist modernity.

Partha Chatterjee’s editorial introduction sketches a contribution to the debate on civil society, lucidly explaining a framework that incorporates a domain of political society mediating between the elite institutions of nationalist civil society and the state. Making clear a concern with governance and power which underpins all of the essays, Chatterjee suggests a new founding perspective for critical analysis of politics and society in the processes of democracy. In the first section, concerned with more conventional discussions of state policy apparatuses, Rajni Kothari (“The Democratic Experiment”) narrates the democratisation of the polity over the past fifty years; Prabhat Patnaik (“Political Strategies of Economic Development”) discusses political economy; and Achin Vanaik (“India’s Place in the World”) examines the course of foreign policy and India’s future role in a multipolar geopolitical order as an aspiring great power.

The second, most compelling, section extends the guiding concern with democracy and national identity to cultural forms – Tapati Guha-Thakurta (“Instituting the Nation in Art”) analyses of the modern canonisation of Indian tradition in cultural and artistic representations. Sudipta Kaviraj’s lecture (“The Culture of Representative Democracy”) contains rich and eloquent observations on the cultural and social consequences of egalitarian principles in a hierarchical society. Madhav Prasad’s discussion of the film industry (“The State In/Of Cinema”) examines the constitution of popular subjectivity and configurations of the state and community through one of the most effective technologies of nationalist discourse, the cinema.

The third section joins essays by Javeed Alam (“Communist Politics in Search of Hegemony”) and Aditya Nigam (“Communist Politics Hegemonised”), exchanging views on the decline of the Left in India, accounted to the failure to effectively manage the terrain opened by the deepening democratic process, to articulate the cultural and social demands of new social identities to a collective will and hegemony. Both authors underline the narrow class reductionism of the organised Left, its strategic inflexibility, and the dismissal of democracy and culture as politically unimportant, thereby allowing the neutralisation of the Left by the dominant nationalist discourse.

The final sections gathers reflections on specific issues of recognition, inclusion and identity — of caste, gender and region. Kancha Ilaiah’s polemic (“Towards the Dalitization of the Nation”) describes the ambitions of the newly activated groups arising from the new lower-caste and Dalit political ferment, while M.S.S. Pandian (“Stepping Outside History?”) analyses new Dalit literature from Tamil Nadu which challenge conventional notions of historical memory. Nivedita Menon (“Women and Citizenship”) problematises the ability of the state to effect change for women in the face of other domains of patriarchal authority in the family and community, through an examination of arguments for an Uniform Civil Code. Subir Bhaumik (“Northeast India: The Evolution of a Postcolonial Region”) examines the changing relations within the Northeastern States and in their relationship with the Centre.

While intended for publication in 1997 to commemorate the golden jubilee of Independence, the volume appeared a year after the anniversary. But it is no less timely a contribution to the study of Indian politics and society, and can be recommended to almost anyone concerned with the processes and consequences of postcolonial modernity in the subcontinent.

Originally published in Contemporary South Asia, vol.8, no.3, Carfax Publishing (Bradford, U.K.), 1999.

Saurabh Dube, Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780-1950. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.

The prevailing narrowness of disciplinary boundaries in history and anthropology have prompted a now well-developed critique of the isolation of the archive and the field, respectively — the privileging of elite archival sources, textual authority, and their master narratives on the one hand, and the ahistorical essentialism, questionable epistemic and cultural perspectives of fieldwork on the other. The effort undertaken by the Subaltern Studies collective to use the anthropologist’s tools in the writing of history has, in the study of Indian society, introduced questions of culture and power, identity formation and representation, and everyday cultural and social practices into the historiography of modern India. This recent book deepens this project of ethnographic history through a study of the Satnami community of Chhatisgarh in contemporary Madhya Pradesh.

Dube navigates his analysis through the “overarching oppositions” of ritual and reason, myth and history, tradition and modernity, community and state by showing how each of these concepts is interwoven in the signification of its opposite in the historical and symbolic processes of identity formation of the Satnamis. The work documents the founding of the sect and elaboration of their organisation, the changes undergone in the community through shifts in land settlement, patterns of governance under the Marathas and British, and the experience and recasting of the community’s identity through contact with colonial administration, evangelical missionaries, and nationalist reformers. This historical detail is enriched by an ethnographic perspective which places these wider processes within their everyday significance in local arenas of village life, ritual practices, and gender and caste authority. In the latter part of the book Dube explores the configurations of the past in the community both as mythical and historical truths, building on his explanations of the discursive construction of the caste-sect in earlier chapters and the formation of the group as modern self-recognising community in the field of modern politics opened by the colonial regime.

Within this narrative Dube intervenes in several important debates in different disciplines. Addressing the central category of Hindu religious identity and community, Dube argues for an understanding of the contested and negotiated nature of this category by marginal groups like the Satnamis. In the debate on caste, he argues against the rigid separation of definitions of caste and sect, ascetic and householder, and synthetic theories of caste based either on principles of ritual purity or kingship, claiming that they are intermeshed in their actual practices and symbolic constitution. Arguing against the tendency in recent political and historical work to portray a too-rigid separation between state and community, Dube both argues for the internal differentiation of the community on issues of law, property, and gender, and he endorses a view that sees the community as fashioning itself through the symbols and metaphors of colonial governance in its notions of order, law and identity, and casting itself in the form of modern civic associations like the Satnami Mahasabha.

Dube’s elegant work is notable for its methodological insights most of all, complemented by solid archival research and fieldwork, both often narrated with a refreshing self-consciousness about the limits of knowledge production in the archival-ethnographic encounter. At times his arguments are unnecessarily repetitive, sometimes making an unnecessary theoretical flourish or clever turn of phrase at the expense of an otherwise clear and lucid work — an irritating tendency in much work in cultural studies, though here only a minor distraction. Additionally, there is an slight unnevenness in his prose style between some chapters, which could have been eliminated by a better arrangement and editing of the separate papers that composed this volume. However, despite these slight defects, the book is very worthwhile reading for students of history, anthropology and sociology, religious studies and social and cultural theory.

Originally published in Contemporary South Asia, vol.8, no.3, Carfax Publishing (Bradford, U.K.), 1999.