Liberalism and Its Encounters in India 9781000957716, 9781032101958, 9781032195926, 9781003259930

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Liberalism and Its Encounters in India
1 Making Histories of Indian Liberalism and the Post-Comparative Turn
2 Infinite Praise: Beyond the Constituted Finitude of Life and Liberty
3 Gandhi and the Re-Orientation of Modern Political Theory
4 Freedom, Self and Truth: The ‘Liberty’ in Liberalism
5 Across Identities: Ethnicity and Nationalism in the United Bengal Movement of 1946
6 Liberal Secularity and the Indian State: Notes on the Sabrimala Judgement
7 Secularism and Its Theological Interior: An Anthropologist’s Demand on Faith
Index

Citation preview

Liberalism and Its Encounters in India

This book explores the future of liberalism in India. It moves away from traditional approaches and draws upon resources from other disciplines – those subjects which some might think don’t strictly fall under political science or theory – like anthropology, literature, philosophy – to critically engage with the condition of late capitalist modernity in India. The essays in the volume trace liberalism’s journey through modern Indian history to give us a new standpoint to understand current debates and also point to some internal contradictions of Indian liberalism. The volume will be of importance to scholars and researchers of political science, especially political theory, and South Asian studies. R. Krishnaswamy is Associate Professor and Co-Director for the Centre for Social and Political Research, O.P. Jindal Global University, India. He has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Delhi, India. He works on issues related to the philosophy of mind and language. One of his current interests is researching issues like normativity of language, use-theory of meaning and other related problems in philosophy of language. He has also published works in political/social philosophy. His recent book Wittgenstein and the Nature of Violence (2020) explores what role linguistic behaviour plays in how we engage with each other on the political and social plane. His forthcoming book The Language of Recognition: The Norms of Intersubjective Engagement explores whether our rational capacity to use language can create a viable discourse-theoretic model towards recognising our innate need for social recognition. Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist. She earned her doctoral degree from Yale University (2014). She has been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto (2016–18). Her doctoral work on industrial decline and spatial life in eastern India culminated in her frst book Time, Space, and Capital in India: Longing and Belonging in an Urban-Industrial Hinterland (2018). Her current research agenda is located at the intersection of anthropology, theology, and the philosophy of religion, specifcally concerned with the devotional practice of Bhakti. She is currently Associate Professor (Social Sciences) at the National Law School of India University, India.

Ethics, Human Rights, and Global Political Thought

Series Editors: Aakash Singh Rathore and Sebastiano Maffettone Center for Ethics & Global Politics, Luiss University, Rome

Whereas the interrelation of ethics and political thought has been recognized since the dawn of political refection, over the last sixty years – roughly since the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights – we have witnessed a particularly turbulent process of globalizing the coverage and application of that interrelation. At the very instant the decolonized globe consolidated the universality of the sovereign nation-state, that sovereignty – and the political thought that grounded it – was eroded and outstripped, not as in eras past, by imperial conquest and instruments of war, but rather by instruments of peace (charters, declarations, treaties, conventions), and instruments of commerce and communication (multinational enterprises, international media, global aviation and transport, internet technologies). Has political theory kept apace with global political realities? Can ethical refection illuminate the murky challenges of real global politics? This Routledge book series Ethics, Human Rights and Global Political Thought addresses these crucial questions by bringing together outstanding monographs and anthologies that deal with the intersection of normative theorizing and political realities with a global focus. Treating diverse topics by means of interdisciplinary techniques – including philosophy, political theory, international relations and human rights theories, and global and postcolonial studies – the books in the Series present up-to-date research that is accessible, practical, yet scholarly. Civil Disobedience from Nepal to Norway Traditions, Extensions, and Civility Edited By Tapio Nykänen, Tiina Seppälä, Petri Koikkalainen The Calling of Global Responsibility New Initiatives in Justice, Dialogues and Planetary Realizations Ananta Kumar Giri For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Ethics-HumanRights-and-Global-Political-Thought/book-series/EHRGPT

Liberalism and Its Encounters in India

Some Interdisciplinary Approaches

Edited by R. Krishnaswamy and Atreyee Majumder

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, R. Krishnaswamy and Atreyee Majumder; individual chapters, the contributors The right of R. Krishnaswamy and Atreyee Majumder to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-10195-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-19592-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-25993-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003259930 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Notes on Contributors

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Introduction: Liberalism and Its Encounters in India1 R. KRISHNASWAMY AND ATREYEE MAJUMDER

1 Making Histories of Indian Liberalism and the Post-Comparative Turn19 DENYS P. LEIGHTON

2 Infinite Praise: Beyond the Constituted Finitude of Life and Liberty37 SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY

3 Gandhi and the Re-Orientation of Modern Political Theory58 R. KRISHNASWAMY

4 Freedom, Self and Truth: The ‘Liberty’ in Liberalism74 LAKSHMI ARYA THATHACHAR

5 Across Identities: Ethnicity and Nationalism in the United Bengal Movement of 194697 SUCHARITA SEN

6 Liberal Secularity and the Indian State: Notes on the Sabrimala Judgement114 VISHNUPAD

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Secularism and Its Theological Interior: An Anthropologist’s Demand on Faith

128

ATREYEE MAJUMDER

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Soumyabrata Choudhury is Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. He has authored Theatre, Number, Event: Three Studies on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth, Ambedkar, and Other Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme and articles on ancient Greek liturgy, the staging of Ibsen, psychoanalysis, Phule, Nietzsche, Ambedkar, and Hegel. His latest book is Now It’s Come to Distances: Notes on Coronavirus and Shaheen Bagh, Association and Isolation. Denys P. Leighton is Professor and Dean, Jindal School of Languages and Literature, O. P. Jindal Global University, India. He has held academic positions in India and the U.S. Trained as a historian, areas of his research and publication include 19th- and 20th-century British history, modern India, liberalism and socialism, T. H. Green, William Morris, Hegelianism, utopias, and environmentalism (especially in Britain and America), secularization, temperance and anti-alcohol movements, Late Romanticism, and decadence. Sucharita Sen is Associate Professor of Politics at the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities (JSLH), O.P. Jindal Global University (O.P. JGU), Haryana, India. She completed her PhD at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi in 2020. She received her MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge in July 2013. Her areas of interest are the study of nationalism, ethnic identity constructions, and issues of modernity. Lakshmi Arya Thathachar is Associate Professor and Associate Dean – Research at RV University, Bengaluru. She has a PhD in Modern Indian History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research is inter-disciplinary and spans History and Philosophy, particularly political philosophy, epistemology, and the socio-cultural history of modern India. She has previously held faculty positions at various institutions including O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, and the Centre for the Study

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of Culture and Society, Bangalore. She has been awarded several fellowships, including a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and a Charles Wallace Fellowship. Vishnupad is currently Professor, Dean of School of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at SRM University, AP. He has a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University, NY. He was previously with Azim Premji university for several years.

Introduction Liberalism and Its Encounters in India R. Krishnaswamy and Atreyee Majumder

A Map of Indian Theory It is still a moot question whether there is something called an ‘Indian’ liberal theory. The term ‘Indian’ becomes dubious not only because ‘India’ has been geographically indeterminate but also parts of India, civilizationally, have had strong political sub-cultures (Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Shaivite, Vaishanavite, Islamic etc.) (Kulke & Rothermund, 2016, pp. 50–108; see generally on the question of origin of India, Asif, 2020) as well as been part of different empires that have stretched in the West to Greece and in the East to places as far as modern-day Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand (Allen, 2019; Karttunen, 1997; see generally, Pollock, 2009). Moreover, India, because of its central location in a naval trade route that stretched from the Middle East to the far East, witnessed the trafc of diferent cultures across its land and assimilated diferent traditions (Subramanian, 1996; see generally, Subrahmanyam, 2005). But still many intellectual and historical accounts of modern-day India take the inescapable, traumatic and recent event of the Partition between India and Pakistan which happened in 1947, as the politically charged reference point that requires explaining why and how India became a historical entity (Bayly, 2012; Devji, 2013; Jalal, 1985; Pandey, 2001). This is quite natural because after all the one modern-day event which has shaken the political consciousness of the Indian subcontinent in recent times, and still continues to play a major role in local geopolitics, is the event of partition. From a temporal perspective, taking the Partition as the climax of the modern Indian story has the virtue that at least the historical description will be up to date. But on the other hand, a necessary consequence of taking Partition as a major constituting factor in modern political consciousness is that subsequent political theorizations tend to look at themselves as intellectual and sometimes therapeutic exercises to come to terms with this traumatic event in our collective consciousness. If we were able to, counterfactually, raise ourselves above the din of history and look at things sub specie aeternitatis then we might realize that the choice of any historical turning point becomes quite arbitrary. In that case, one ought to become indiferent

DOI: 10.4324/9781003259930-1

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as to whether one takes the Partition or the Sepoy’s Mutiny (1857) or the Battle of Plassey (1757) or the First Battle of Panipat (1526) or the Battle of Raichur (1520) or even the mythical defeat of Ravana in the hands of Ram as the start of Indian political consciousness. But fortunately, or unfortunately, we are historically situated fnite beings and therefore can’t quite bracket out history from our collective consciousness. That probably explains why diferent people use political history to motivate diferent political agendas in the present because if it were possible to partake of cosmic time, where the past, present and the future were equipresent (as God would see it), then none of us would feel the need to worry about what we did or what we ought to do in the future. Because of our fnitude, beginnings (and endings) have played a necessary role in instituting political narratives. And so, it is the case with Indian liberal theory as well. We take the modern Indian liberal tradition to preoccupy itself with three diferent kinds of histories. And by histories, we understand a hermeneutic or narrative continuum with minimally a simple internal structure of beginning, middle and an end (the consequences of that ‘end’ ought to still have current relevance) and an external function of serving a political aim of restructuring current social equations.1 One main narrative, we have already pointed out, is the story of the Partition and the constellation of social and political issues that come out of it. The set of issues and questions which the event of Partition raises occupies itself with are religious harmony, Hindu-Muslim identities, the role of government in curbing inter-religious violence, governmental neutrality and the extent of it, public duties and private rights among other related things. Sucharita Sen’s article (Chapter 5) delves deeper into the Partition debate and highlights the rising tensions around issues of nationalism and identity that are becoming increasingly difcult to parse apart in contemporary times. It examines the period of decolonization in India in the 1940s to fnd alternative proposals of constructing nation-states that fuse religion and ethnicity within the folds of civic citizenship instead of treating them as binaries as some western models of nationalism propose. The chapter examines the work of Indian political thinker Abul Hashim during the United Bengal Movement of 1947, with the intention of looking at nationalism as an identity marker in the historical horizon of humanity, within the map of modernity. The other event which has preoccupied modern Indian theory is the colonial encounter with the British. We know that the advent of the British in India though was a gradual process, which took decades, did bring about substantial changes in the ways of life of people by infusing ‘native’ lifeworlds with foreign epistemic and political practices (Cohn, 1996; Dirks, 2001). This encounter, though diferent historians would want to place in diferent points along a temporal axis, has had such a huge impact that we have postcolonial theorists who are still unearthing the subterranean efects of our colonial history. (We use the term ‘postcolonial theory’ in a very broad

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sense to mean any theory that deals with the colonial period and imputes imperialist motives to the colonial exercise in order to explain conditions in the current time). Colonialism has been not only a case of political subjugation but also a discursive-normative one. That is, the ‘high politics’, as Gilmartin would say (Gilmartin, 1998, p. 1069), of colonial history would only enumerate the major political and bureaucratic events that happened during the British rule. But this wouldn’t include the history from below which, if we take it seriously, would have to catalogue the ways in which British rule invaded people’s daily routines, afective habits, their goals in life and even how they thought of themselves. Such a history would have to look at people’s changing practices and habits as well as what the epistemic changes were that brought about a transformation in worldviews. Within this postcolonial narrative, there are obviously diferent strands and theoretical stances. But one thing that unites them is a revisionary approach to looking at colonial history. Though approaches may overlap, historians and political thinkers of the colonial period in India have completely different and even opposed solutions to deal with the problematic legacies of colonialism. Borrowing from Aakash Singh Rathore (Rathore, 2017), there are two kinds of Indian postcolonial theory – thin and thick. Thick postcolonial theory wants to re-start the Indian political clock, so to speak, from even before when the British came. To be more exact, the objective is to re-discover India’s identity as it might have existed before not only the British but before even the West as a colonial and imperial force was on the horizon (Balagangadhara, 2013; Roover, 2015). Given recent research that has shown that modern liberal theory has borrowed theological assumptions from Christianity (Asad, 2003; Cavanaugh, 2009), the objective of thick political theory is to eschew western methodological assumptions regarding what a good political theory ought to be and what the objectives of a political society are. ‘Thick’ theorists are partly motivated by a deep suspicion of all things western, including their own anthropological and political theories. That is why they want to radically critique western philosophical and political outlook and fnd autochthonous roots for creating a new ‘Indian’ political theory. Usually, such accounts look for pre-modern linguistic, political and philosophical tools. An interesting ‘thick’ interpretation on Indian political theory is given by Lakshmi Arya (Chapter 4) where she argues that a proper discussion of Indian or western political traditions cannot take of without a proper understanding of what a tradition is. She ultimately defends an essentialist notion of tradition, which makes a case for looking at Indian and western traditions as holding incompatible assumptions and theoretical starting points. She further says that much of the present confusion regarding Indian liberal theory comes because of confusing the boundaries between the western intellectual tradition and the Indian. Thin postcolonial theory, on the other hand, also critiques modern western theoretical methods harshly but can sometimes be ambivalent towards

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the possibility that one could have an ‘Indian’ liberal theory that is tailored only to Indian social and political issues. Some of the thinkers whom we consider non-committal on this issue (Appadurai, 1996; Chatterjee, 1993; Kaviraj, 2010) freely use western theories to buttress their anti-imperial stances. There are some scholars who admit that Indian liberal theory can be generated out of modern Indian intellectual traditions. These scholars use modern Indian thinkers like Gandhi or Tagore (Bilgrami, 2014; Parekh, 1989; Puri, 2015) and their thought as a departure point for creating new theoretical pathways which would be truly postcolonial because it is argued these were the frst people to resist the British forces both intellectually and politically. These people were not only ‘freedom fghters’ as they are described in school textbooks, but also thinkers in their own right with elaborate ideas as to what kind of a future India should subscribe to. People like Gandhi, Tagore and even Nehru thought of Indian history with its traditions and culture differently and lent their focus on diferent things that were Indian. There are enough intellectual resources for modern political theorists to build a liberal theory out of these modern thinkers or so it is argued. But there are also others, within the postcolonial theoretical paradigm, who think that instead of looking at these thinkers, who were never systematic in their writing and also were also products themselves, in many ways, of the colonial era, we ought to use modern western paradigms like Marxism and left-liberal thought to counter colonial prejudices. We have in mind specifcally the subaltern studies group who initially formed an association to bring in western especially Marxist, especially Gramscian (as well as deconstructionist and post-structuralist) theories into the discussion of Indian theory (Guha & Spivak, 1988). For these thinkers, the faultline between the West and India is not a geographical one. It is not that people of the geographically determined West become automatically suspect. For the subaltern studies group, we should encourage ourselves to engage with thought systems that are truly suspicious of western imperial paradigms. It is further argued that with these western thinkers (like Marx, Althusser, Hegel, Derrida etc.), one can build a new postcolonial liberal theory which can truly be the starting point for a view on how global politics ought to be run. Given these diferences, both kinds of postcolonial theory want to escape the epistemic strictures that have come with a series of global events in the past 250 years or so, which have acquired the name of imperialism. The kinds of issues that matter for postcolonial theory are issues of capitalism, imperialism, relations between religion and state, modern and classical history, role of western political theory versus Indian historical traditions. In this context, it would be good to read Chapter 1, by Denys P. Leighton who engages in a critical comparison of the history of the idea of modern liberalism across both the West (chiefy Britain) and India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He situates his own verdict on the history of liberalism in India by frst critiquing the many modern scholars

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who repudiate the notion that liberalism is something that could have been ‘home-grown.’ He points to diferent credible alternative discourses regarding Indian liberalism which can help us excavate a form of Indian liberalism which is not a purely western import. By going through different intellectual movements within the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and engaging in a methodology of political analysis, which he calls, comparatism, Denys P. Leighton helps us see that the question of how liberalism originated in India can’t be one of a simple binary of being either autochthonous or foreign. The third narrative that has come to occupy modern debates around justice and equality is a critique of social and religious practices. The prophet of that approach is generally considered to be Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and therefore one fnds many scholars dealing with issues of caste discrimination, epistemic injustice, social hegemony etc. invoking his political and scholarly work (Omvedt, 2004; Rathore, 2020; Yengde, 2019). This narrative is usually ahistorical in the sense that the main political issues that need dealing with, according to them, can be dealt with adequately by looking at the present institutional structures of the modern Indian nation. What requires immediate attention, they say, are social injustices and problems of epistemic violence and inter-subjective mis-recognition. And these problems all have roots that either go back to established religions or imperial subjugation. The Ambedkarites (for want of a better name to call these groups who critique Indian social life) do feel that history, either colonial or pre-colonial, is useful only to the extent that it can be a warning sign to show what went wrong and a reminder of things that one ought not to do. New beginnings require new solutions, they feel. The only way in which modern problems can be dealt with is by bringing in new institutions that can set right historical injustice. Thus, these writers are sceptical of history as such and their story usually starts with the Constituent Assembly debates and projects a future India as a nation which will have enough legal infrastructure to handle diferent kinds of social problems. Some of the key questions and issues that this book takes seriously are those of caste, social and historical injustice, modernization, urbanization etc. An erudite elaboration of this argument can be found in Chapter 2, where Soumyabrata Chowdhury paints a complex picture of how the political underpinnings of the modern Indian state evolved. By comparing the political project of Savarkar versus that of Ambedkar, Chowdhury crafts a genealogical history of modern Indian constitutionalism. Chowdhury argues that Ambedkar was always skeptical of the attempts of Savarkar to create a ‘fgural thread’ to an immemorial ethnic past (Hindu) and resisted any reduction of the political question to merely historical narratives. Chowdhury drawing upon the work of Foucault and Agamben establishes how Ambedkar thought though historical narratives saturate political reality, politics is ultimately a subjective act, which is exhibited in the moment of popular (electoral) decision.

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As a contrast to Ambedkar, to know of what Gandhi (considered to be Ambedkar’s intellectual antagonist) R. Krishnaswamy’s article (Chapter 3) is informative in that it points to a critical impasse that modern political theory has arrived at of not being able to decide for itself whether political theory has to be normative or descriptive. To resolve this problem, Krishnaswamy argues, one will have to creatively appropriate Gandhi’s thought and action. Krishnaswamy theoretically engages with Gandhi’s ascetic practices, broadly termed satyagraha, so as to re-open the normative question of how a society can transform itself into a good society. This question though is as old as Plato, because of Gandhi’s somaesthetic ideas, is opened up again for a critical reappraisal. He wants to establish that Gandhi’s own ideas of satyagraha can possibly ofer a solution to the old political problem of creating a society which can live in harmony and without violence. Though we have presented the three main narratives that today inform Indian liberal theory, we don’t intend to convey the idea that these three narratives don’t mutually infuence each other. All the issues that we have enumerated as being central to diferent political theories do have the ability to crossover and with diferent thinkers of diferent ‘schools’ we will always fnd a melange of issues and theories from across the spectrum. What we have done here is to create merely a map so a reader of Indian liberal theory would be able to categorize the diferent genealogies of diferent arguments. Current Indian Concerns If the earlier section was a map of Indian political theory and the state of liberal thought in India at present, in this section we want to look, even if it is briefy, at the ever-shifting normative horizon of what constitutes modern Indian identity. ‘Questions of identity,’ ‘the markers of inclusion’ and ‘the framework of social cohesion’ have been some of the recurrent thematic concerns of liberal thinkers within India. We want to inquire into the persistence of these concerns in modern political discourse. Why is it that these questions and themes have found not only resonance but also theoretical purchase within the modern political tradition in India? That is the central question motivating this section. This section though might not give a defnitive answer to this question hopes to, at least, look at the underlying causes that have given prominence to the debates that have sought to answer this question. We argue that the current constellation of issues around identity, inclusion etc. comes about because of a peculiar ‘Indian’ infection given to the ‘linguistic turn’ that is currently at play within global discourses. By going into this cross-infuencing pattern between Indian liberal theory and global ‘linguistic’ concerns we can possibly explain the current manifestation of political issues. That is, we wish to see if politics identity via the use of language – which is a major shareholder in the business of everyday politics in India – has anything to do with a parallel intellectual movement on a global

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scale which prioritizes language and its intersubjective rules as the condition of sociality and normative identity. The linguistic turn that we are referring to, though cannot be accurately dated, points to certain paradigm shifts that socio-political thinkers took especially after the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan on the continent and Richard Rorty, John Austin and others in the Anglo-American world. Currently, whether it is work on feminist philosophy (Benhabib, 1992; Butler, 2004; Irigaray, 2016) or deliberative democracy (Gutmann & Thompson, 1997) or communicative action theory (Habermas, 1987, 1998), there is an importance given to language as the constituting force of both agency as well as political obligation which is unparalleled in intellectual history. Without going into the philosophical underpinnings of this linguistic turn, we want to share, for the purposes of furthering our discussion, two characteristics of this global theoretical turn. Before we do so, we want to make our stance clearer. We talk of discursive theories not as a purely creative exercise of isolated thinkers and philosophers but as the emergent, crystallized interpretive responses to ‘facts on the ground.’ That is, theories though are normative exercises by individuals and possibly academic schools, we see them as a formalized articulation of a Zeitgeist that sweeps people and periods. After all, one of the main purposes of intellectual history is to unravel the underlying social realities through the mapping of intellectual positions and philosophical schools. The two features of current political theory, after the linguistic turn, which are actually in tension with each other, can be articulated thus: On the one hand, language is considered to have a world-disclosing ability. That is, the possession of language by a community is able to give the people in that community a worldview which is more or less total. Through the possession of a common language, the rules of intersubjective engagement and the signifcative moves that people of a culture make can be recognized by the members of that lifeworld. These rules of signifcation, broadly construed, can thereby help people belong to a community. The afective states of friendship, family, religion etc. are all considered to be a natural consequence of growing up together and sharing in a language. But on the other hand, it is language itself through which people have to fnd context-transcending principles of social coordination and tolerance. Common laws themselves are articulated through a language which ought to be publicly recognizable and communicatively exchangeable. A feature of such legislative language is to fnd common lexical principles which would act as the minimal condition of political obligation. Now this feature of universalistic legal language we can see is in some tension with the natural recognitive concepts that people use to transact social exchanges on a daily basis. This tension has been brought well to the fore by Kwame Anthony Appiah in his book Cosmopolitanism, where he talks about how the language of social practices and cultural obligations can sometimes go against not only

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other cultural practices and languages but can present a serious problem for the modern ‘cosmopolitan’ citizen (we say cosmopolitan citizen even at the risk of it being pleonastic because the word ‘cosmopolitan’ already means world-citizen. But we have found such usages common, so we are going by that convention) who feels she has ‘obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship’ (Appiah, 2006, p. 14). That is, she thinks it is her duty to be motivated by concern for the impersonal other while at the same time, she wants to take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them signifcance. People are diferent, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our diferences. Because there are so many human possibilities worth exploring, we neither expect nor desire that every person or every society should converge on a single mode of life. Whatever our obligations are to others (or theirs to us), they often have the right to go their own way. As we’ll see, there will be times when these two ideals – universal concern and respect for legitimate diference – clash. There’s a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge. (Appiah, 2006, p. 14) This is the genre of clash we see in the Indian political landscape time and again. This challenge is expressed most starkly by Jef Spinner-Halev who presents the modern liberal problem as that of reconciling diferent ‘exclusivist’ languages with each other. The problem is this: what happens if religious people speak publicly in their own exclusive, sectarian language about public matters? Some worry that doing so will exclude others from public discussions. Sectarian languages should not be used in public since they are only spoken by a segment of the population. What is needed, some liberals argue, is a public language that is accessible to all, one that is based on reason instead of narrow sectarian languages. (Spinner-Halev, 2000, p. 142) Though we don’t have the space here to go into whether a liberal solution is right or wrong, what we can see from what people like Appiah and SpinnerHalev are talking about is the modern ‘linguistic’ problem of fnding a universal vocabulary which, while universally recognized, can be contextually rich at the same time. Political disputes come through the disconnect in the vocabulary that people use to understand their aims and purposes. And in modern Indian political history, this tension has been a fecund source of theorizations and

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interpretations. This tension between the language of transparent motivation within cultures and the lexical rules of obligation has created the question of how to solve social injustice which is historically conditioned, with a language of law (especially colonial law) which speaks literally in a diferent language (English) and has been produced in a diferent context (England, the West) as a framework for universal concepts. It is this dilemma which has also produced in modern-day India the see-sawing of political debate between linguistic sub-nationality (Ramaswamy, 1997) and national integrity. Whether we need linguistic sub-nations or a national unity with one language of law is still a moot point with many people. Again, the tension between oral and written forms of cultural communication is also an expression of the modern ‘linguistic’ situation we fnd ourselves in. The centrality of the language is seen in cultural debates around issues of whether cultural codifcation as written rules changed the contours of how cultural and educational practices were performed (Srinivasan, 2019; Subramanian, 2011) Did the writing of rules for cultural practice reproduce the colonial logic of subjugation? Do we need therefore to ‘go back’ to oral forms of cultural production to fnd the originary sources of social belonging? These are some of the questions which now, within Indian socio-political theory, fnd discussants. But importantly, language has also created a space for an afective longing in people. Modern literary movements within India from diasporic writing (e.g. Jhumpa Lahiri, Hari Kunzru) onwards, has showcased people wrestling with themes of home and away, belonging and alienation, modernity and community, usually with tropes of travel in space or time. In most diasporic writing, the protagonist at some point fnds himself or herself either traveling to the West or to India. Today, even if indigenous writing both in the vernacular and in English has fourished in number, the problem of fnding the right ‘voice’ still continues to haunt cultural expression. This only goes to show the importance that language and its politics still plays in postcolonial India. Habitation of Liberalism: Friendship and Allied Ingredients Let us now step back from contemporary India, to be able to join some of the dots through which current liberal formation could have emerged. If liberalism was imported from Europe into India through the multitude of ideological formations that accompanied colonization, the question remains: how was it administered to the Indian subject? How did the Indian subject receive and inhabit it? E. M. Forster ends the novel A Passage to India (1924) with a haunting comment about the impossibility of friendship between Aziz and his British friend, Fielding: “Who do you want instead of the English? The Japanese?” jeered Fielding, drawing rein. “No, the Afghans. My own ancestors.” “Oh, your Hindu

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friends will like that, won’t they?” “It will be arranged a conference of Oriental statesmen.” “It will indeed be arranged.” “Old story of ‘We will rob every man and rape every woman from Peshawar to Calcutta,’ I suppose, which you get some nobody to repeat and then quote every week in the Pioneer in order to frighten us into retaining you! We know!” Still he couldn’t quite ft in Afghans at Mau and, fnding he was in a corner, made his horse rear again until he remembered that he had, or ought to have, a mother-land. Then he shouted: “India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one! Hurrah! Hurrah for India! Hurrah! Hurrah!” India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last corner to the drab nineteenthcentury sisterhood! Waddling in at this hour of the world to take her seat! She, whose only peer was the Holy Roman Empire, she shall rank with Guatemala and Belgium perhaps! Fielding mocked again. And Aziz in an awful rage danced this way and that, not knowing what to do and cried: “Down with the English anyhow. That’s certain. Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say. We may hate one another, but we hate you most. If I don’t make you go, Ahmed will, Karim will, if it’s ffty-fve hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea and then” he rode against him furiously “and then,” he concluded, half kissing him, “you and I shall be friends.” “Why can’t we be friends now?” said the other, holding him afectionately. “It’s what I want. It’s what you want.” But the horses didn’t want it they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single fle; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.” On a similar note, it may be pertinent to open this section with a reminiscence of Satyajit Ray’s iconic flm Charulata (1964) based on Rabindranath Tagore’s novella Nashtanirh (The Broken Nest). In the flm, the character Bhupati, a landlord and a newspaper publisher, is seen rejoicing at a particular result of the British Parliamentary elections. He throws a party to celebrate, and a certain pride and sportly pleasure is exchanged among him and his landlord associates. This enjoyment at the outcome of British elections, sitting in Calcutta, the colonial capital, and imagining a friendship with the colonial, imperial centre where there exists no possibility of such friendship, is symptomatic of the moment of production of a colonial liberal self. Such imaginary relations between the Indian elite (in this case, Bengali landlords who adopted liberal stances on questions and fashioned themselves as liberal subjects of empire) and the violent and exclusionary imperial centre generated a mode of liberal habitation and production of selves through such habitation. In consonance with thinkers like Uday S. Mehta (1999) and

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Karuna Mantena (2010), we are convinced that liberalism and its growth in the colonies have a fraught trajectory, torn in many ways from the epicentres of mainstream European liberalism (see also Losurdo, 2010; Sartori, 2014; Pitts, 2006). This fraught trajectory further weds itself with the entrenchment of the global logic of capital within the colonies and the generation of market capitalism in the colony (see generally Birla, 2010). Edmund Burke and Henry Maine whose intellectual biographies are sketched in Mehta’s and Mantena’s texts are key fgures in bringing liberal arguments to bear on the exceptional space – the colony. In Maine’s case, there arose a ‘culturalist’ stance with which the native ‘traditional society’ was viewed justifying the liberal exception. In all of this, pockets of liberal alignment arose across the sub-continent in elite, English-educated corners as early as the nineteenth century. There is actually a limited scholarship on liberalism’s reception history in late colonial India. One might locate Raja Mohun Roy (see generally, Kopf, 2015) as the frst Indian liberal subject of the empire. Lynn Zastoupil shows Raja Ram Mohun Roy emerging on the imperial stage with his liberal claims and through liberal methods of appeal to imperial authority, helping shape a transnational fold of liberalism (Zastoupil, 2010). He is the epicentre of the growth of a Hindu modernity and initiates the rise of a secular Brahmo Samaj, all the while retaining a loyalist friendship to the empire. Severe battle-lines are drawn across the Bengali bhadralok society on issues of women’s rights, sati, women’s education and the question of autonomy over the Bengali cultural sphere (Chatterjee, 1993). It is from Sukanya Banerjee that we get a genealogy of imperial subjects who are trying to carve out claims of citizenship within the empire, despite their colonized status, especially by inhabiting the bureaucracy and other professional services (Banerjee, 2010). Banerjee writes (2010, pp. 4–5): True, citizenship in its guise as a universal rights-bearing category was not formally codifed till the drafting of the constitution of an independent India, but the fact of codifcation alone should not detract from the longer processes – partial, incomplete, fawed, and often futile – through which the languages of citizenship were refracted from at least the late nineteenth century. Bypassing the various ways in which the idea of citizenship was formulated in late-colonial India – often with tangible efect – blunts the efcacy and urgency that the category lent to anticolonial critique; it also overlooks the fact that it was the liberal premise of citizenship that presented itself as a viable mode of self-presentation by racialized colonial subjects well before the envisaging of an autonomous nation-state. Thinking with Banerjee, we are less concerned with the legal transference history of the category of ‘citizenship’ to colonial subjects at various points. We are, instead, particularly, concerned with the afective response that took

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on the garb of liberalism to construct a kind of public self (see generally, Benhabib, 1992) that all the while wrestled with the contradictions of its own liberal habitation. The terms of citizenship, we argue, are shaped by an emotional leap of faith where one is interpellated into a social and political formation in which one’s exclusion is but obvious. These persons articulating liberalism in their claims to the empire and in shaping public selves, nevertheless, have not become ideal poster-boys of the liberal project. They are, in our estimation, marginal fgures (often, men who own property), crying out for political centrality of some sort, while grappling with their material status as racialized colonial subjects. This leap of faith often takes the form of friendship in literature as we see in the ending of Forster’s novel A Passage to India. These stories of friendship, like the ending passages of the novel, represent aporias that are generated by the travel of the liberal project from Europe to the global ecosystem of colonies. The Bengali bhadralok (landed gentry)2 emerges as a signpost for such an agent of a larger reception history of liberalism in the colonies. The realm of such agency expands vastly and quickly into the postcolonial era. Liberalism in the Postcolony This habitation of liberalism, in the postcolonial afterlife, throws up various scafoldings of liberal identity that made demands on the postcolonial state in the public sphere for recognition and redistribution (Fraser, 2003; see generally, Galanter & Dhavan, 1997; Baxi, 1991; Kapur & Cossman, 1996; Menon, 2012; Jayal Gopal, 2013; Narrain & Gupta, 2009). Liberalism and its wide reception across social strata opened a window of creative opportunity for various combinations and alliances to arise in the wake of decolonization. Liberalism begins to look very diferent amidst the cacophonous politico-legal public sphere of postcolonial India (see generally De, 2018). A wide variety of citizen-claimants appear to engage in a confdent conversation with the state, especially the judiciary, and stake their claims in the larger political game of liberalism. These ranged from companies that staked their freedom of speech and expression as legal persons (Dhavan, 1986) as also members of vulnerable communities like Muslim women who asserted their right to maintenance under a liberal framework that recognized codifed Muslim personal law (Dhavan, 1987). Vishnupad (Chapter 6) takes us further into the debate around questions of liberalism in modern India by showing that modern forms of secularism in liberal and postcolonial states (a) afrm the ascendancy of the political over the religious, and (b) frame the transactional relation between them – which includes across a continuum a relation of distance or intimacy, neutrality and non-discrimination, autonomy, tolerance and publicity within the proscriptions set by political sovereignty. Within these parameters, juridical secularism in India begins its trajectory in India with a promise of expansive freedom

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to soon however be curtailed by an avowed reformist urgency. While laying out this narrative of secularism in India, this paper engages the dissenting voice in the Sabarimala judgement (2018), and recognizes in it yet another searing questioning, if not dislocation of, the privileges of juridical hermeneutic in determining the core of any religious formation. The challenge proximates, without rigorously replicating or feshing out, what in anthropological circuits, has been called the ‘restitution of intelligibility’ argument. Any comprehension of and sincere engagement with religious imaginaries and sensibilities, the latter argues, demands an ethical recovery of its innate and immanent rhythms; this recovery subsequently however doesn’t imply submission to the putative religious imperatives as much as a normative, political and open-ended engagement. To help us rethink the terms of the debate between the religious and the secular, Atreyee Majumder (Chapter 7), in an auto-ethnographic paper, speaks of a devotee-ethnographer’s journey to the sacred geography of Krishna worship – Vrindavan. In her sojourns along this sacred geography, she excavates a descent into practical reason that takes place routinely in religious institutions such as temples. In fnding this descent emotionally troubling, Majumder exposes an anatomy of an original secularism (with a mystic or theological interior) with which she interrogates the descent into practical reason in the contemporary worlds of Krishna worship. The public-private divide became one of the primary habitational strategies for the liberal individual person. In postcolonial India, we witness the faultline of public-private realms along which questions of social and cultural injustice are fought. We also witness the growth of a robustly public realm in which the liberal person confdently asserted claims against socio-economic exploitation and historical disadvantage. The case for reservations in public institutions of education and employment are examples of such public battles. These took on the language of liberalism, although one might argue that the claims themselves are far removed from the original liberal intentions of equality, freedom and dignity that are enshrined in Western political institutions. These were claims that brought upon the state which then had to answer for illiberalisms of the past, and the gross inequity that the present was enmeshed in on account of such historical processes. For example, in the context of the demand for uniform civil code, the right to communitarian governance of laws regarding marriage and inheritance was adopted in the public sphere, to articulate the survival strategies of groups in the liberal political milieu. In such acts of translation from cultural norms into liberal laws, various sleights of hand were enacted. These yielded several unlikely characters in the liberal public sphere as benefciaries, if not champions, of the Indian iteration of liberalism. The logic of group rights (Kymlicka, 1995) began to be encompassed in the public arena of state-citizen conversation. The widespread entrenchment of the language of rights and entitlements and various diferential entitlements

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couched in the language of equality came to shape the postcolonial India politico-legal public sphere (Chandra & Majumder, 2013). A series of civic and political movements populated this realm from the 1970s to the 2000s that articulated the rights and entitlements of women, queer persons, Dalits and Other Backward Classes, Adivasis, alongside making generalized liberal claims on the state based on the right to freedom of speech, right to information, right to food security and right to compulsory primary public education. An enumeration of these movements is not necessary here. It should sufce to note that the transition to a neoliberal economic model with the opening of foreign direct investment and marketization of public goods such as key industries, infrastructure and transport, brought about its own confguration of Indian liberalism. We fnd in Leena Fernandes’ (2006) account of the rise of the new middle class in India’s metropolitan cities a new register of claims and self-fashioning where the liberal person afrms their location in global fows of capital and attends to realms of being that borrow from such access (see generally Appadurai, 1996). Simultaneously, there grew spaces of exception in India – evidently in the cases of secessionist movements in Kashmir and the northeastern regions, as also internal armed rebellion across the Red Corridor (Chakravarty, 2008). These battle-lines of direct confrontation with the sovereignty of the Indian nation-state (see generally Ghosh & Duschinsky, 2020, on the unleashing of ‘hyperlegality’ by the Indian state in Kashmir) were solidifed even as one witnessed the rise of a middle-class that was most comfortable in protecting its economic privilege that enabled its entry into the revolving door of global capital. While new identities like those of transgender and queer persons begin to be recognized in the legal regime and there is a seeming expansion of the liberal state’s reach, the persons who live in vulnerability continue to feel that the technologies of statepower are being used excessively in governing unruly citizens and their ambits of self (Saria, 2019). In this milieu, we come to inhabit our set of essays in this volume. They range from contemplating the liberalisms of Ambedkar and Gandhi, the illiberal persistence of religion in the public sphere to visiting the dilemmas posed by the Sabarimala temple entry case. Conclusion In this Introduction to a set of essays that contemplate India’s liberal trajectory, we (Krishnaswamy, a philosopher, and Majumder, an anthropologist) consider with our divergent disciplinary toolkits, a map of Indian theory. As we see it, there have been four problems that have perpetuated a continuous theoretical dialogue within modern India. The four problems are the problem of caste and social injustice, Hindu-Muslim relations, the relevance of colonial institutions and the question of language and its self-assertive politics. The three strands of liberal theory which we talked about in the frst section, we situate as intellectual stances to the frst four problems. These three

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kinds of theory have diferent methodological approaches. There are those that position themselves within western liberal theory and ones that position themselves in opposition to all western theoretical formulation and want to revive an authentic Indian theoretical corpus, and yet others who want a clean break from the past and formulate theories for a utopian Indian future. We then considered the impact of such theory upon Indian political concerns, in the act of articulating liberal politics. We further considered the arrival of the liberal apparatus into the Indian colony and its administration to various Indian subjects, some of whom avowed a camaraderie and friendship with the liberal imperial centre while negotiating their own status as a racialized colonial subject. We then showed a quick history of the postcolonial twists and turns of the actual trajectory of such Indian liberalism in the politico-legal public sphere, which produced new subject formations that took the tenets of liberalism in diverse directions. Notes 1 We take our ideas on narrativity and history from Hayden White (1987). There is an active historiographical tradition which takes issues of narrativity, history and hermeneutics very seriously. For more on this, read Danto (1985) and Ricoeur (1980). 2 We further fnd in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s canonical text Provincializing Europe an account of other historical habitations through which liberal modernity was being accessed by the bhadralok of colonial Calcutta (Chakrabarty, 2000; see also Chakrabarty, 2002).

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Benhabib, S. (1992). Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Post-modernism in Contemporary Ethics. London and New York: Polity Press and Routledge. Bilgrami, A. (2014). Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Birla, R. (2010). Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge. Cavanaugh, W. T. (2009). The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Confict. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Diference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chakrabarty, D. (2002). Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Chakravarty, S. (2008). Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Chandra, U. & Majumder, A. (2013). Introduction: Selves and Society in Postcolonial India. South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 7. https://doi.org/10.4000/ samaj.3631. Chatterjee, P. (1993). The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cohn, B. S. (1996). Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Danto, A. C. (1985). Narration and Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press. De, R. (2018). A People’s Constitution: Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Devji, F. (2013). Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dhavan, R. (1986). The Press and the Guarantee of Free Speech and Expression. The Journal of the Indian Law Institute, 28(3), 299–335. Dhavan, R. (1987). Religious Freedom in India. The American Journal of Comparative Law, 35(1), 209–254. Dirks, N. B. (2001). Castes of Mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fernandes, L. (2006). India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. Minneapolis, MN: University Minnesota Press. Fraser, N. (2003). Redistribution and Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso Books. Galanter, M. & Dhavan, R. (1997). Law and Society in Modern India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ghosh, S. N. & Duschinsky, H. (2020). The Grid of Indefnite Incarceration: Everyday Legality and Counter-Insurgency Lawfare in Indian Controlled Kashmir. Critique of Anthropology, 40(3), 364–384. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X20929393 Gilmartin, D. (1998). Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative. The Journal of Asian Studies, 57(4), 1068–1095. Gopal, N. J. (2013). Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Guha, R. & Spivak, G. C. (1988). Subaltern Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Gutmann, A. & Thompson, D. F. (1997). Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Habermas, J. (1987). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures. Cambridge: Polity. Habermas, J. (1998). The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Irigaray, L. (2016). Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Diference. New York and London: Routledge. Jalal, A. (1985). The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kapur, R. & Cossman, B. (1996). Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law in India. New Delhi: SAGE Publications. Karttunen, K. (1997). India and the Hellenistic World. Helsinki, Finland: Finnish Oriental Society. Kaviraj, S. (2010). The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas. New York: Columbia University Press. Kopf, D. (2015). The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (Original work published 1979). Kulke, H. & Rothermund, D. (2016). A History of India. New York: Dorset Press. Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Losurdo, D. (2010). Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliot. London: Verso Books. Mantena, K. (2010). Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mehta, U. S. (1999). Liberalism and Empire: A Study in the Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Menon, N. (2012). Seeing Like a Feminist. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Narrain, A. & Gupta, A., eds. (2009). Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives on Law. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Omvedt, G. (2004). Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India. New Delhi: Penguin. Pandey, G. (2001). Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parekh, B. (1989). Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination. New York: Macmillan Publishers. Pitts, J. (2006). A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pollock, S. (2009). The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Puri, B. (2015). The Tagore-Gandhi Debate on Matters of Truth and Untruth. New Delhi: Springer India. Ramaswamy, S. (1997). Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rathore, A. S. (2017). Indian Political Theory: Laying the Groundwork for Svaraj. London, New York and New Delhi: Routledge. Rathore, A. S. (2020). Ambedkar’s Preamble: A Secret History of the Constitution of India. New Delhi: Penguin.

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Ricoeur, P. (1980). Narrative Time. Critical Inquiry, 7(1), 169–190. Roover, J. de. (2015). Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saria, V. (2019). Begging for Change: Hijras, Law, and Nationalism. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 53(1), 1–25. Sartori, A. (2014). Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Spinner-Halev, J. (2000). Surviving Diversity: Religion and Democratic Citizenship. Baltimore, MD: Hopkins University Press. Srinivasan, S. (2019). Liberal Education and Its Discontents: The Crisis in the Indian University. London and New York: Routledge. Subrahmanyam, S. (2005). Explorations in Connected History: From Tagus to Ganges. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Subramanian, L. (1996). Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion: Bombay, Surat, and the West Coast. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Subramanian, L. (2011). From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, H. (1987). The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Balitmore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Yengde, S. (2019). Caste Matters. New Delhi: Penguin. Zastoupil, L. (2010). Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 1

Making Histories of Indian Liberalism and the PostComparative Turn Denys P. Leighton

Philosophical comparatism, by which I mean a branch of comparative philosophy as well as a preferred practice of some political theorists, historians and other scholars of ideas and concepts, is supposed to open eyes to the wide interplay of philosophical ideas and foster intercultural understanding. Nevertheless, indiference to how philosophy is done in ‘other’ cultural and social environments, even by other schools or in groups existing in ‘our’ midst, is so common among contemporary philosophers and other scholars of thought as to be unremarkable. Debates about theory in political philosophy as well as in intellectual history refect disagreements over how to negotiate the conficting impulses to always particularize and to always connect (or compare), but sharper debates have arisen in recent decades about how to defne frames of analysis (conceptual, temporal, spatial, etc.). The transnational and global ‘turns’ championed by many political philosophers and intellectual historians have seen the proliferation of connected histories of ideas that purport to challenge boundaries – for example, those established by Western scholars c. 1750–1950 as they wrote Whiggish histories and ‘universal’ histories that were actually Eurocentric ones. Fashionable forms of transnational and global intellectual history appear to afrm principles of philosophical comparatism by requiring us to justify our frames of analysis, but there is no stable consensus about which or whose requirements such framework adjustments should satisfy. Without delving very deeply into contemporary debates about politics of knowledge, this chapter considers how recent political theorists and intellectual historians with specifc interest in India have rethought epistemic frameworks and questioned the processes by which conceptual vocabularies are created and employed. More particularly, it examines scholars’ disagreements about the proper defnition and analysis of the ‘political’ ideas and ideals of modern India, and the role of liberalism in India’s history. Although several generations of scholars of India and political thought have identifed liberal ideas and discourse in India since the nineteenth century, and while historians have attempted to trace the workings of liberalism

DOI: 10.4324/9781003259930-2

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in Indian politics, it is also the case that many recent scholars of Indian political ideas and history are disinclined to examine liberalism as a living tradition in India – that is, as a pattern of practice with rhetorical resonances in Indian thought-space in several milieus and junctures in time and having an enduring presence in debates about the organization of life. This resistance is in many instances a theoretically informed choice, not only of recent postcolonial and postmodernist scholars but among nationalists and Marxists before them. So, is it the case, as Partha Chatterjee, Bhikhu Parekh and several other infuential scholars have claimed, that there simply is no ‘historical tradition’ of liberalism in India, and is it pointless or mischievous to argue its importance? (See N. Bose, 2015 on some debates over the actual or imagined presence of Indian liberalism and mentioning Chatterjee; also, Parekh, 1992; and Rathore, 2017, chap. 3 on ‘problems’ of Indian political theory.) The present essay suggests that the signifcance of liberalism in India and Indian politics has been widely misunderstood, simultaneously underestimated and overestimated, and the essay attempts to sketch contours of an approach for de-alienating study of liberalism in India’s history. First, it is relevant in assessing liberalism in India to recognize that the scholarly tradition in the north Atlantic world of naturalizing liberalism – nationally and transnationally – has both afrmed the hegemonic character of liberalism there as well as prompted several kinds of reactions among observers in the supposed homelands of liberalism (Britain, France, America) and those outside it. (On Anglo-centricity as well as ‘overextension’ in the study of liberalism, see especially Bell, 2014.) To take the case of scholarship about America, Louis Hartz’s book The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) has been a major landmark, prompting responses by historians as well as political scientists, sociologists and philosophers (Kloppenberg, 2001; Abbott, 2005). Some recent scholarship has shown that concepts and attendant social practices closely associated with the ‘West’ were not in fact domesticated or embedded there in the way we once assumed. Take property and possessiveness, two notions regarded as indivisible from liberalism. Rafe Blaufarb, in The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property, contends, The term ‘property’ [in pre-1789 France] was an empty signifer, a battleground, not a solid concept with a fxed defnition . . . The term does not refect the legal and institutional complexity of the many types of property in Old Regime France. (2016, p. xiii) Blaufarb’s claim is important not only because it reopens an avenue for debate about conditions and consequences of possessive individualism, ‘bourgeois’ revolution and social transformation. For if concepts previously considered to have been (discursively) domesticated, ready for use in political life, in

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Western societies between c. 1700 and c. 1850 turn out to have been less than fxed, then reappraisals of the workings of concepts in specifc social environments could realign debates about ‘the rule of colonial diference’ (pace Chatterjee and others) and the making of modernities within and ‘beyond’ the West. As concerns India and the world, whether scholars’ approach is via study of political philosophy, ideology, realms of ideational practice or traditions of thought, one is conscious of a tendency to pre-judge India as a society chronically or organically resistant to liberalism as an alien worldview. In this regard there is remarkable consistency across past and contemporary assessments refective of Orientalism (e.g., James and J. S. Mill, T. B. Macaulay, Henry Maine and – arguably – Louis Dumont), those issuing from Indian nationalist and Marxist standpoints, and those representative of postcolonial thought (e.g., Partha Chatterjee, Prathama Banerjee). To maintain that liberalism and its political dynamics in India have been misunderstood is not to say that scholars have ignored liberalism in India. Studies in intellectual history over the past twenty years have put liberalism at the centre of the story of colonialism, struggles for Indian freedom and the emergence of Indian modernity (see especially U. S. Mehta, 1999; Pitts, 2005; Wilson, 2008; Bayly, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2012; Mantena, 2010; Sartori, 2008, 2014). Moreover, recent studies of ‘thought’ and communicative action in colonial India have countered an earlier tendency to focus on bilateral communication between Britain and India as explaining intellectual and social change and determining the formation of ‘political’ publics and partisanship in India. Thus, Isabel Hofmeyr and Antoinette Burton (2014) indicate the functioning of an ‘imperial commons’ as a network of intellectual exchange that was not controlled from the metropole and that indeed linked British colonies, dominions and points all around. Kris Manjapra has drawn attention to ‘entanglements’ of Indian and German intellectuals during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Manjapra, Sugata Bose and others have demonstrated India’s location in ‘cosmopolitan thought zones’ (S. Bose & Manjapra, 2010; Manjapra, 2014). Attention to these patterns and modes of communication helps us understand the co-development of modern political ideologies, including liberalism, and their dynamics in India. Classic studies of Indian political theory written in English over the past hundred years have identifed specifc ideas and modes of argument in India as liberal and they recognize key liberal conceptual categories at work in Indian thought. One of the more recent of these is V. R. Mehta’s Foundations of Indian Political Thought – An Interpretation (1996; originally, 1992), which while lacking sustained discussion of liberalism per se concludes with a chapter (‘The Individual, Community and Political Order’) representing ‘Indian political thought’ as being animated over a long period of time by (supposedly universal) liberal categories and political concerns. Gurpreet Mahajan’s India: Political Ideas and the Making of a Democratic Discourse

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(2013), though puzzling through the applicability of Western conceptual categories for comprehending Indian politics and debates, nevertheless examines notions of freedom, equality, democracy, and so forth as if they were natural, directly perceivable features of thought and capable of realization through Indian political action. And Mahajan does not hesitate to align several of these notions with liberalism, as being closely if not exclusively associated with it (see also Mahajan, 1998). Yet when we view the whole tableaux created by generations of scholars, we might ask how it is that liberalism and liberals are consigned to an isolated place on the terrain of Indian history, even of the modern era. It is as if a succession of disappointments and ‘failures’ of liberalism in modern India renders superfuous any further estimate of them. Political scientist Vivek S. Sharma expresses something of this viewpoint when he observes, ‘Neither the [contemporary] Indian state nor its society is liberal, although it is indeed democratic,’ and interactions between Indian society and state are ‘profoundly aliberal’ (2015, p. 66). Christopher Bayly, whose book Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire and other writings shall receive attention here, has noted the proleptic character of much writing about liberalism in Indian history – the sense that liberalism was doomed to failure or bound to amount to little (2012: introduction). It is useful to summarize here a familiar and supra-partisan account of Indian liberalism and Indian liberal ‘suspects’ that, it seems to me, continues to function as an implied narrative for many political theorists, despite an accumulation of nuanced historical scholarship over the past quarter century. Bayly (2007, 2012), following several Indian predecessors, has deemed Rammohan Roy the frst Indian Liberal, while Lynn Zastoupil (2010) has emphasized Roy’s signifcance for British imperial and global history by representing him as a pioneering Victorian (cosmopolite?), an agitator and polemicist as well as moralist and political thinker. Debendranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Aurobindo, among others, have been recognized for firting with liberalism and rejecting or outgrowing it. Bipin Chandra Pal – to whom I turn later – and Lala Lajpat Rai are among those represented as having refned techniques of liberal communication, social mobilization and protest against imperial autocracy – radical exercises in futility, it would seem. G. K. Gokhale and Motilal Nehru have been typecast as misguided liberals, not attuned to the Indian zeitgeist: the former’s expression of the Indian nation was anaemic and uninspiring and the latter embraced liberal governing institutions while rejecting any immediate possibility of Indian national independence. Liberalism played a negative role in the Indian national freedom struggle – according to many nationalist and leftist histories – in spite of Indian liberals’ ‘correct’ perception that struggles for individual and collective freedom were inextricably joined. Scholars have recognized how liberalism informed debates about constitutional rights and citizenship during the few decades

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just before and just after Indian independence, but many continue to discover the dramatic arrival of liberalism on the Indian scene in the 1980s and 1990s, when there was an upsurge of arguments about economic liberalization. What is remarkable about this last mentioned judgement about the coming of age of Indian liberalism is not its status as an objectively true statement (i.e., that India’s economy was partly liberalized from the 1990s) but rather the attendant assumption that Indians, or at least those Indians whose opinions count in academic and public debates, were essentially forced by global events to consider (or reconsider) liberalism as containing a relevant scheme of social development; liberalism carried with it an alien model of economic functioning that capitalist elites around the world projected upon the Indian thought-space and realm of practice. Since the 1990s, a host of historians, including many of the aforementioned, have drawn attention to ‘imperial liberalism’ as the way Indians from about 1800 were subjected to liberalism in a debased or compromised form. Onur Ulas Ince (Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism, 2018) implies that there is by now an excess of the same kind of culturalist studies of liberalism in the British imperial context and he sees a retreat of political economy studies. There is indeed no shortage of examples of thinkers and ideas that might be assembled to establish a tradition of Indian liberal thought since c. 1800. Bayly’s Recovering Liberties is far more than a survey of the men-and-ideas variety, and one of its strengths is the attention given not only to many previously recognized (canonical) liberals but to intellectuals who had absorbed elements of liberal thought and employed them in public as well as more narrowly expert debates – for example, the sociologist B. K. Sarkar, usually recognized as a Hindu nationalist of the political right (Chakrabarty, 2016; Sartori, 2017). And yet the picture of liberalism presented by many scholars to the present day is in terms of ideas, terms and tropes that were supposedly of scant relevance to the concerns and preoccupations of the Indian liberals’ countrymen and women. The implication is that liberal ideas never formed doxa in India, much less achieved the status of orthodoxy, until the present era. I use doxa here in the manner made familiar by Pierre Bourdieu in his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972): acts of speech that are constitutive as well as refective of thought and that form a familiar or natural vocabulary of a whole society, or at least of some of its sectors. ‘Doxic’ ideas might be contested, but the language through which they are expressed is naturalized. Another way of describing the status of liberalism in scholarship about modern India is to say that liberalism has been represented as a failed or thwarted movement, languishing after at most fve or six decades due to liberals’ contradictions and hesitancies in the face of the British authorities’ retreat (post-1857) from any substantive measures of evolution towards (what Liberals in Britain called) limited government and a constitutional regime of rights. According to the national-left historical consensus, Indian liberals rendered themselves irrelevant through failures to ameliorate the

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policies of the colonial masters and because of their supposedly half-hearted or inefective eforts to forge a mass movement. Thus, in terms of actual politics, Indian liberalism could be said to have been fully discredited by the time of the Simon Commission that reported on the Indian government in 1930. In the most stridently nationalistic statements, whether of scholarship or in Indian public life, liberalism was a civilizational disturbance, and for some, it remains so. It was/is culturally as well as politically irrelevant. Several recent scholars observing Indian politics share, consciously or not, the sentiments of renowned Indian nationalist intellectuals of the period c. 1880–1930 that it is (still) inappropriate to employ liberalism, as such, as a category for interpreting contemporary or historical Indian realities. Prathama Banerjee, for example, argues that characteristic liberal binaries of individual-society, nation-(religious) community, religious-secular, beingrepresentation – though very evident in Indian ‘political’ discourse since the 1880s – render it exceedingly difcult to understand Indian political realities of modern or earlier times (2021: especially the chapter ‘Renunciation and Antisocial Being’). Claims about liberal political failure can be evaluated according to the historical evidence one selects. There is scarcely any signifcant disagreement between nationalist and international historiography about the record of successive administrations of British India after the 1860s in denying or withholding Indian freedom. But are there deeper theoretical presuppositions behind the familiar evaluations of doomed Indian liberalism? Let us call scholars who dispute the normativity of liberalism in India, among some other ‘Western’ theories, cultural incompatibilists, because they are sceptical of attempts to compare (supposedly) distinct conceptual worlds. Incompatibilists contend that many supposedly liberal ideas employed by Indians in debates between c. 1830 and c. 1960 did not square with liberal doctrines found in ‘the West’. The Indian traditions that India’s frst liberals attacked or defended were of a diferent order than those that activated liberals in Britain or France. Aristocratic government and oligarchy, generically, was the bane of many European and Latin American liberals. India, in contrast, had nobles and hereditary elites but no subjective experience of aristocratic domination of government. Neither did Indians have a conception of absolutism or traditions of opposing absolute monarchy as such, and J. S. Mill and other liberals had to invent a distinction between ‘Oriental despotism’ and progressive autocracy (see U. S. Mehta, 1999; Pitts, 2005, chaps. 4–5). Incompatibilist arguments hold that liberalism is Western, whatever contradictions appear between its expressions in Europe and the Americas over the past three centuries. Incompatibilist claims gloss over inconsistencies and contradictions among liberal doctrines in the West: for example, around articulations of citizenship roles and national (or social) duties as correlatives of (individual) rights versus liberal arguments that make individual rights unqualifable and limit the ‘role of the state’. (Consider the divergent political traditions or

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cultures of two liberal republics, France and the United States.) If one resists the homogenizing of ‘Western’ liberalism, it becomes problematic to entertain at face value incompatibilist claims about Indian liberal arguments not matching up to Western ones: which Indian liberal arguments fail to square with which Western ones, and why are incongruities really signifcant? But liberal arguments, incompatibilists contend, have simply not resonated clearly within the Indian thought-space, and for this reason, liberalism has proved inefective in mediating Indian social relations even in the present day. Moreover, since contemporary English-language debates in political theory position liberalism at the center of ethical and social analysis and are essentially quibbles about liberal values and objectives (in relation to non-liberal or illiberal ones), Anglophone political theory has been arguably overdetermined by liberalism both in content (the ideas analysed) and methodology (the tools of analysis). Anglophone political theory is self-afrming and skews analyses in a distinctively liberal way, and, as Emmanuel Lévinas put it, liberal theory is ‘egology’. Lévinas, Alisdair MacIntyre and Raymond Geuss have been among the recent critics in the West appreciated by those I call incompatibilists. (See Cosimo Zene, 2020 on Lévinas and others in relation to claims about the poverty of Western and Indian political theory.) To mention only two scholars who have recently challenged us to re-think Indian political theory by resisting comparison, Ananya Vajpeyi (2012) and Stuart Gray (2010, 2016, 2017) point out that it is problematic to analyse the play of Indian ideas about the organization of life at any point in time before the present through the inherited ‘Western’ conceptual categories such as individual, society, community, the public. Gray contends that ‘rajanical thought’ (rajaniti), enduring from ancient times into the modern period, is problematically analogous to ‘political thought’. Rajanical thought refected Indian consciousness of a cosmological order wider and less focused than the realm of ‘politics’, at least as the latter was understood by canonical Western thinkers from c. 1500 CE. Therefore, an analysis working through the features of rajaniti would presumably yield a clearer understanding of the Indian thought-world than attempting to locate ‘democracy’, ‘republic’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘representation’, ‘legislative assembly’ and other such conceptions across decades, centuries or millennia of Indian history. Vajpeyi suggests in Righteous Republic that in order to grasp the true nature of even modern Indian ‘political’ discourse – she focuses on Gandhi, Rabindranath and Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru and B. R. Ambedkar – we should pay attention to non-political Indian/Indic terms of discourse: ahimsa, viraha, samvega, dharma, artha, dukkha. (Sushmita Nath, 2014 adeptly points out methodological implications of Vajpeyi’s Righteous Republic in comparison to the works of V. R. Mehta, Mahajan and Bayly that I have already mentioned.) ‘Compatibilist’ scholars, while accepting that there is friction in the intercultural travel of concepts, hold that it is possible to achieve a high degree

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of fdelity in their translation from one linguistic (hence social) environment to another. V. R. Mehta, Bayly, Andrew Sartori, J. Barton Scott and others maintain that Indian political actors as well as thinkers/theorists have regularly employed concepts central to liberalism – albeit frequently subsuming them within the even more capacious notion of modernity. Compatibilists can point to Indian political thinkers and actors since the nineteenth century who understood themselves as liberals and were also recognized as such by anti-liberals. Indian liberals were not mere receivers or consumers of foreign ideas, according to this view. Bayly in particular suggests how misplaced it is to characterize these liberals as mimic men. Indian liberals made signifcant contributions to debates about Indian ‘freedom’ and other matters as they widened the conceptual horizons of liberalism, globally as well as locally. It is signifcant that Bayly, Sartori (who repeatedly refers to ‘vernacular histories of [Indian] liberalism’) and some other compatibilists over the past thirty years have implied or explicitly stated that any epistemic rupture associated with liberalism was probably no more shocking to Indians of the nineteenth century than it was to many other people around the globe – including inhabitants of ‘Europe’, in the supposed heartland of epistemic modernity and its characteristic ‘-isms’. At the beginning of his compact and penetrating book Indian Political Theory: Laying the Groundwork for Svaraj, Aakash Singh Rathore announces that ‘political theorists of Indian politics continue to work with categories and concepts alien to the lived social and political experiences of India’s “common man”, or everyday people’ (2017, p. 1). In a similar vein, Rajeev Bhargava remarks on the ‘epistemic injustice of colonialism’ that not only vitiates much contemporary theorizing (e.g., about global justice, gender justice) but complicates historical understanding of liberalism (and other Western ‘-isms’) in India (2013). To be sure, Rathore repudiates the notion that only indigenous or India-centric conceptual vocabularies illuminate Indian political theory or that they alone provide guides to social action and change. Indeed, he contends that ‘thick svaraj’ as articulated by Gandhi, Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya and other elite Indians refects a romanticized, exclusivist and divisive nativism – a projection of savarna knowledge – that cannot, ultimately, emancipate the majority of Indians. While they make sharp objections to the conceptual barrenness of both ‘Western’ political theory and many Indian academic debates, few scholars I associate here with non-comparatism or incompatibilism – least of all Bhargava and Rathore – actually mean to argue that it is pointless or wholly pernicious to employ ostensibly non-Indian categories of ‘political theory’ in interpreting Indian thought. They do not deny that there could be an appropriate form of conceptual history for India that locates resemblances and afnities between concepts and terms used by people occupying ‘diferent’ cultural spaces. As pointed out by Cosimo Zene, Rathore himself sees an afnity between decoloniality as analysed by Latin Americans Walter

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Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano and pratyahara, an Indian concept Rathore analyses at length but whose simplest English equivalent might be ‘withdrawing the senses from their objects’ and which Rathore believes is a necessary technique for ‘silencing, for us, the deafening noise of transatlantic political theory’ (Zene, 2020, p. 239; Rathore, 2017, pp. 36–38). Rathore does not venture to explicate his preferred ‘thin svarajist’ political theory in specifc terms of decoloniality, but he hints that ‘a thin svarajist political theory will fnd deep resonances with the fruits of decolonialist work’ (Rathore, 2017, p. 214 n4). He contends that afnities between philosophical and political ideas generated in what we today call the Global South are more meaningful than those between Western and non-Western conceptions. Moreover, it is implied that a common experience and shared over-comings of colonialism, epistemologically as well as politically, have prepared the Global South for an exchange of ideas designed to secure liberation from what Rathore characterizes as tyranny of transatlantic theory. This concession by Rathore reafrms the possibilities of intercultural translation. In the Epilogue of Key Words for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the Twenty-First Century (edited with Rukmini Bhaya Nair, 2020), Peter Ronald de Souza remarks that scholars in and/or of India have a responsibility to ‘“infltrate” the conceptual vocabulary that [West-oriented] scholars and students use when speaking about India’ in order to engage more efectively in ‘the larger battle in the politics of knowledge’ (2020, p. 417, my emphasis). Many of the almost three hundred Indian terms and phrases explained in de Souza and Nair’s conceptual lexicon have long histories of elite (and specialized) and/or plebeian (and broad) usage. Exploring the intercultural dynamic of liberalism and liberalism’s career in India need not fxate on long-drawn debates about cultural relativism or validate purportedly universalist methods of comparative political theory and intellectual history. While I have already stated that there seems presently to be no stable consensus among political theorists and intellectual historians about analytical frameworks for ‘comparison’, comparative philosophers have skilfully demonstrated, for example, how to handle textual and oral forms of knowledge in comparative analyses, which is particularly relevant in the Indian context (see especially the edited collections by Larson & Deutsch, 1989 Timm, 1992; Sweet, 2012). The historical studies of India already cited have been more or less efective in demonstrating how conceptual domestication and transculturation occurred during the colonial period. Mantena (2010), to some extent, and Sartori (2008, 2014), especially, devote attention to processes of domestication of liberalism in relation to the legal establishment of custom and recognition of economic and moral claims of cultivators (rights to the fruit of their labour). Sartori’s investigations in Liberalism in Empire (2014) of the minds of ‘Lockean’ north Indian agrarian cultivators and their political spokesmen strike one as more plausible in some instances than others, and they derive from a limited number of textual sources in Bangla and English. Space does

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not allow additional observations here about Sartori’s pragmatic materialistidealist method or about what kind of Indian liberalism he excavates, but it is instructive to compare his eforts to analyses of Wilson (2008) and Mantena (2010) that depend more heavily on texts produced by British jurists and colonial administrators. Sartori’s claims that Indians were becoming ‘liberal’ because they accepted and were attempting to engage in ‘market relations’ before 1800 might be overdrawn. Sartori claims in Bengal in Global Concept History (2008), ‘Liberalism certainly did not have to await the emergence of full-blown market society to fnd its voice [in Bengal]’ (2008, p. 73). And Bengali liberals c. 1830–1860 ‘did not have to invent a new political or religious idiom’ to be liberals, but they ‘needed to be able to relate the textual abstractions and ideological concerns of wider imperial discourses to their own regional social and political context’ (2008, p.  74). Sartori has tried to show how a ‘liberal age’ in Bengal c. 1830–1880 was followed by a ‘culturist’ and dharma-ist era, at least among Bengali Hindus, which did not, however, entail abandoning previously acquired liberal idioms or terms of cultural and political debate. He attempts to explicate some non-‘obvious’ ways in which Bengal Muslims from the later nineteenth century connected an ideology of ‘freedom’ to ‘agrarian political aspirations’ in ways refective of their ‘broadly Lockean commitments to the normative centrality of the labor-property nexus’ (2014, pp. 141–192; quotations from page 143). Sartori wants us to see how liberalism developed into a pattern of thought shared by Indian elites, but including the upper peasant strata, and was not merely a random amalgam of doctrines or rules of conduct that could be easily rejected and replaced piecemeal. Sartori’s approach is indicative of how an Indian liberal mentality or pattern of thought and behaviour can be detected in ‘history’ and in cultural products as embedded in institutions, and this approach can help to de-limit the relativization of ‘diference’. To trace the emergence of an Indian liberal pattern of thought during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is not to imply its cultural dominance; but it is to acknowledge that ‘liberal language’ and afects achieved an enduring presence in several spheres of Indian society and in various forms of communicative action. This is to venture into the territory of scholars working at the junction of political theory, history and cultural studies, and who examine sociability (afective relations) and materiality as well as textual communication. To mention just a few such examples: Dipesh Chakrabarty has drawn attention to the Bengali adda (a form of conversation simultaneously public and intimate) as a way of ‘dwelling in modernity’ (Chakrabarty, 1999; also, Manas Ray on adda, in de Sousa and Nair, 2020). Partha Chatterjee has highlighted the signifcance of a new kind of late-nineteenth-century Bengali public event, the ‘memorial [condolence] meeting’, that impressed poet Nabinchandra Sen as unseemly (Chatterjee, 2001). Samarpita Mitra has pointed to the north Indian emergence of committed periodical readership of the Bengali magazine Prabāsī and how such

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readership shaped the formation of problems and public issues (Mitra, 2013, 2020). And Chris Mofat has analysed the life of the ‘radical’ library of books bequeathed by Lala Lajpat Rai, collected in 1930s Lahore and subsequently deposited in Chandigarh (Mofatt, 2020). The point is not that the Indian phenomena mentioned earlier were somehow expressions of exclusively liberal communication and ideas/ideology, but rather that they activated the sensibilities privileged by liberalism as an emergent ideology; and they fostered communication and learning in ways that encouraged individualization through forms of liberal and ‘radical’ (democratic) sociability. Liberalism in India and elsewhere is poorly understood apart from materiality, sociability and communication practices. Bayly hinted at the same dynamics in his magisterial global history textbook The Making of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (2004), in which ‘liberalism’ and ‘imperialism’ are represented as co-constitutive (the existence of non-liberal empires notwithstanding). For Bayly, it is signifcant that ‘publics’ emerged rapidly c. 1750–1900 in colonial cities and towns as well as the metropoles; occasions and places in towns where (male) colonial subjects gathered, talked and read – whether or not in conformity with colonial laws – seeded modernity in which ‘liberal’ ideas were discussed along with others (2004, pp.  76–80, and chap. 8). For all that can still be learned about liberalism in India through analysis of historical texts, there is yet more to be gained by examining ideas in social context and through communication practices. In this regard, some recent studies of Victorian Britain, while at frst glance appearing to have little to do with political history and political theory narrowly conceived, have helped widen our view of liberalism as practice, and these works complement the studies of Indian individuality and sociability just mentioned. Two works in particular stand out: Elaine Hadley’s Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (2010) and Phyllis Weliver’s Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism (2017). Both of these books identify individuation as a defning feature and ideal of liberalism. While sociologists have typically linked individuation with modernity and social modernization – therefore, in ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ societies, a matter of being in/with society itself, regardless of which ‘party’ or political ideology a person aligns with – there is little doubt that faith and optimism in individuation was more essential to liberal than to European conservative, nationalist or socialist politics during the nineteenth century. It is not the least success of the books by Hadley and Weliver that they demonstrate how changing forms and styles of communication during Britain’s High Liberal Era were registered in new defnitions of ‘public’ questions and new (habits of) responsiveness to them, even by women, who were excluded from many other forms of political participation. This assessment hardly suggests the specifc contents of the two books, but something of the importance of Hadley’s book is gleaned from James Vernon’s appreciative

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observation: Living Liberalism demonstrates how ‘the techniques of liberal individuation became a new invisible hand’ during the period between the parliamentary Reform Act of 1832 and outbreak of the Great War (Vernon, 2011, p.  305). Weliver’s book focuses on the intellectual-aesthetic pursuits and ‘political’ activities of a daughter of the dominant British prime minister of the nineteenth century, not only recognizing Mary’s underestimated role as William’s private secretary during the later 1870s but as what we might today call a political operative and a cultural trend setter. As a salonnière, Mary Gladstone brought together over several decades mid-level and highlevel political personalities and intellectuals in London and at Hawarden (the Gladstone estate). If eighteenth-century salons were vehicles of Enlightenment, as so many scholars have argued, so the conviviality promoted by Mary Gladstone worked to great efect in late Victorian Britain, which was liberal if not democratic. Individuation (or individualization) was clearly an inspiring ideal too of countless Indian thinkers, particularly those concerned with religion and dharma, and political actors during the era of liberalism and empire. Rammohan Roy was intrigued by the right to vote (to elect ofcials) as an activity or property of individuals and also a collective responsibility. To rule over others and including oneself was to be a free individual. Karsandas Mulji thirty years after Roy thought of svatantrata (self-rule) as the distinguishing trait of the British (J. B. Scott, 2018, p. 208; see also Kapila, 2007 on Indian ‘individualism’ as primed by Herbert Spencer’s sociology). Samuel Smiles around the same time declared, ‘Liberty is the result of free individual action, energy and independence’ (1863, p. 17). That Indians tended during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to think through issues of individuation and egalitarianism in dharmic terms is uncontroversial enough, though the evident interpenetration of Indian ‘religious’ and ‘political’ thought has stimulated some irresolvable (not to say pointless) debates about secularism. What political theorists frequently ignore is that an intermingling of religious and political thought was as characteristic of the British nineteenth century – a period that George Kitson Clark judged the most religious English century since the seventeenth – as it was of the Indian. Barton Scott, in Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule, demonstrates afnities between British (and American) anti-clerical religious sects and movements, neo-Vedanta and colonial syncretisms such as Theosophy, and he posits the importance of these afnities for the formation of a stable anti-imperial politics by the early twentieth century. In this, Scott tells us, ideas about bodily present-ness and discipline fed into a new Indian politics for which ‘body and nation became critically analogous’ (2018, p.  209). Andrew Sartori likewise contends (in accord with Bruce Carlisle Robertson (1995) and Brian Hatcher (1996)) that ‘Advaita Vedanta became, in Rammohan’s hands, a doctrine of liberal egalitarianism’ (2008, p.  82). Like anti-clerical (and comparatively egalitarian) forms of Dissenting Protestantism that historians have linked to the fortunes

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of the British Liberal Party down to 1914, modern Hinduism reframed itself as a householder religion of self-regulation instead of one mediated by pandits (see J. B. Scott, 2018; and Joshi, 2002 on republicizing Hinduism). Against the foregoing observations it could be objected that the defnition of liberal habits and mentality is so extensive and attenuated as to be indistinguishable from the whole pattern of modernity. While there is substance in such objection, it need not get in the way of excavating Indian liberalism by studying discourse and analysing social practice (e.g., forms of sociability and association). Anthropologist David Scott has drawn attention to the ways in which colonized peoples were ‘conscripted by modernity’ c. 1800–1950, but his approach is not antithetical to tracing participation of the oppressed in discourses and processes of politicization that involved entire societies and were products of global intellectual exchange (D. Scott, 2004). David Scott understands governmentality in Foucault’s sense as power not depending on pre-existing state authority; it is rather about authority being formed (concentrated and dispersed) through processes of individuals’ self-defnition in any society. It has been suggested here that political theory/political philosophy investigations of modern Indian preoccupations and political conficts can gain from consideration of ‘soft’ ideology and by examining relations between the specifcity of concepts and doctrines and their socially lived expressions. Christopher Bayly’s claims about soft liberalism (or liberalism of habits) dispersed globally gesture towards the idea of a globale Sattelzeit: a global ‘saddle-period’ in which several societies around the world worked through their ‘own’ concepts and realigned them with one another, breaking through to political modernity. Bayly’s extension and adumbration of Reinhard Koselleck’s notion of Sattelzeit (applying particularly to Germany c. 1770–1850) has been reinforced by Jürgen Osterhammel and other global historians and can be seen in several recent eforts in comparative intellectual history that assume relatively low-friction circulation of ideas (Zarrow, 2012; Osterhammel, 2014; Hanssen & Weiss, 2016; Li, 2016; Brusadelli, 2020a, 2020b; and see Pankakowski, 2010 for an illuminating treatment of Koselleck’s history of concepts). If it is more difcult to link liberalism in India than in Britain or the United States to a stable, widely-shared set of doctrines or a programme of an identifable political group or formation, if Indian liberalism appears as something akin to a mood or cluster of values and afective dispositions, it should not lead us to the conclusion that liberalism was not there. Liberalism is in its sentiments as well as its dogma. *** I conclude with some observations about comparison of concepts in relation to the career of one Indian liberal, usually styled a liberal-nationalist, Bipin Chandra Pal. Pal was in 1898–99 a lecturer for the Anglo-Indian Temperance Association, an organization linked to the United Kingdom

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Alliance for the Total and Immediate Legislative Suppression of the Traffc in Intoxicating Liquors as Beverages [!], whose leaders included Liberal Members of Parliament, and to the Indian National Congress. Many AITA members, Indians and resident Europeans, were concurrently involved in primary education campaigns and some were Christian proselytizers. They were not merely concerned about alcohol as a dangerous commercial product upon which an irresponsible or unresponsive government levied taxes for dubious purposes. Temperance was part of a larger practice of self-liberation from (internal) bad passions, external infuences and nefarious social interests. Indian temperance activists appealed to self-discipline and selfcontrol – swaraj – and their appeals were linked to campaigns for reform of Indian family life, for more efective management of material, sentimental and somatic resources. Temperance advocates inhabited an international liberal organizational web and performed in a liberal discourse-space. Pal himself was drawn into a metropolitan circle of ‘social reformers’ around journalist W. T. Stead, editor of the London Pall Mall Gazette. Stead’s British supporters were typically Liberals or ‘Radicals’, not Conservatives or socialists. Pal’s support for the swadeshi agitation in Bengal in 1905 was infected with the Liberal-Radical moral enthusiasm of the Stead circle. (On Pal’s social reform activism and imperial citizenship, see Frost, 2018.) The swadeshi-boycotted goods included alcohol as well as cloth and other imports. We may surmise that refusal of alcohol as part of swadeshi, as far as Pal was concerned, was no mere symbolic gesture but a technique for promoting liberal sociability. Pal did not maintain a consistent line over his lifetime on the means and ends of Indian national liberation, but militancy, particularly that of bomb-throwing freedom fghters, was at the far range of his tolerance. In Nationality and Empire; A Running Study of Some Current Indian Problems (1916), essays originally published between 1910 and 1913, Pal defended what were as late as 1916 politically realistic proposals for Imperial Federation. Pal’s essays parsed English terms such as nationality, self, autonomy and freedom, attempting to show that these were more than approximately comparable to Indian (often styled Hindu) ideas, and hence were worth talking and negotiating about. Pal took up ideas of Hegel, Mazzini, J. S. Mill and Hyppolyte Taine, among others, in urging upon Indian and European political actors a case for Indian national recognition and autonomy within an Imperial Federation. The essays are replete with analyses of Indian words (e.g., swaraj, narayana) whose exact and multiple meanings he matches to words and ideas in European languages. Pal preferred swadheenatā to D. Naoroji’s swarāj: ‘In fact, our Swadheenatā means a good deal more than what even the terms self-restraint, self-regulation, or self-dependence would convey in English. For the self in Hindu thought, even in the individual, is a synonym for the Universal’ (Pal, 1912, p.  33). Without entering here into questions

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about the supposed Hindu-ness of Pal’s conception of swadheenatā, or whether it functioned in Indian discourse the way Pal claimed it did, his swadheenatā appears commensurate with English liberal T. H. Green’s ‘positive freedom’ (1881) and L. T. Hobhouse’s ‘social liberty’ (as explicated in Liberalism, 1911). Pal’s recognition that there was no English word or phrase to convey the full meaning of swadheenatā is signifcant, but he clearly believed that an intercultural translation was possible and necessary for comity and political existence. One could say that Pal’s liberalism demanded such faith in the face of increasingly illiberal political realities of colonial India. References Abbott, P. (2005). Still Louis Hartz After All These Years: A Defense of the Liberal Society Thesis. Perspectives on Politics, 3(1), 93–109. Banerjee, P. (2021). Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Bayly, C. A. (2004). The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914. Oxford: Blackwell. Bayly, C. A. (2007). Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–30. Modern Intellectual History, 4(1), 25–41. Bayly, C. A. (2010). India, the Bhagavad Gita and the World. Modern Intellectual History, 7(2), 275–295. Bayly, C. A. (2012). Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bell, D. (2014). What is Liberalism? Political Theory, 42(6), 682–715. Bhargava, R. (2013). Overcoming the Epistemic Injustice of Colonialism. Global Policy, 4(4), 413–417. Blaufarb, R. (2016). The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Bose, N. (2015). The Cannibalized Career of Liberalism in Colonial India. Modern Intellectual History, 12(2), 477–484. Bose, S. & Manjapra, K., eds. (2010). Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice [1972], trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brusadelli, F. (2020a). Confucian Concord: Reform, Utopia and Global Teleology in Kang Youwei’s Datong Shu. Leiden: Brill. Brusadelli, F. (2020b). Russia, China, and the Universalism of Modernity: The “Account of the Reform of Peter the Great” by Kang Youwei. Journal of Modern Chinese History, 14(1), 1–22. Chakrabarty, D. (1999). Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity. Public Culture, 11(1), 109–145. Chakrabarty, D. (2016). Reading (the) Late Christopher Bayly: A Personal Tribute. South Asian History and Culture, 7(1), 1–6. Chatterjee, P. (2001). On Civil and Political Society in Postcolonial Democracies. In S. Kaviraj & S. Khilnani, eds. Civil Society: History and Possibilities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 165–178.

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de Souza, P. R. & Nair, R. B., eds. (2020). Key Words for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury. Frost, M. R. (2018). Imperial Citizenship or Else: Liberal Ideals and the India Unmaking of Empire, 1890–1919. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46(5), 845–73. Gray, S. (2010). A Historical-Comparative Approach to Indian Political Thought: Locating and Examining Domesticated Diferences. History of Political Thought, 31(3), 383–406. Gray, S. (2016). Cross-Cultural Intelligibility and the Use of History: From Democracy and Liberalism to Indian Rajanical Thought. Review of Politics, 78(2), 251–283. Gray, S. (2017). A Defense of Rule: Origins of Political Thought in Greece and India. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Green, T. H. (1881). Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract. In P. Harris & J. Morrow, eds. Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 194–212 (Original work published 1986). Hadley, E. (2010). Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hanssen, J. & Weiss, M., eds. (2016). Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hatcher, B. A. (1996). Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hatcher, B. A. (2008). Bourgeois Hinduism, or the Faith of the Modern Vedantists: Rare Discourses from Early Colonial Bengal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hobhouse, L. T. (1911). Liberalism [and Other Writings], ed. James Meadowcroft. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Original work published 1994). Hofmeyr, I. & Burton, A., eds. (2014). Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ince, O. U. (2018). Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Joshi, S. (2002). Re-Publicizing Religiosity: Modernity, Religion and the Middle Class. In D. Peterson & D. Walhof, eds. The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief and Politics in History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 79–99. Kapila, S. (2007). Self, Spencer and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism, 1890–1920. Modern Intellectual History, 4(1), 109–127. Kloppenberg, J. (2001). In Retrospect: Louis Hartz’s “The Liberal Tradition in America”. Reviews in American History, 29(3), 460–478 Larson, G. J. & Deutsch, E., eds. (1989). Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Li, G. (2016). Republic in Early Modern China: The Cross-Cultural Dissemination of a Political Concept. Chinese Studies in History, 49(3), 142–151. Mahajan, G. (1998). Identities and Rights: Aspects of Liberal Democracy in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mahajan, G. (2013). India: Political Ideas and the Making of a Democratic Discourse. London and New York: Zed Books. Manjapra, K. (2014). Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mantena, K. (2010). Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Mehta, U. S. (1999). Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Mehta, V. R. (1996). Foundations of Indian Political Thought – An Interpretation (2nd ed.). Delhi: Manohar. Mitra, S. (2013). Periodical Readership in Early Twentieth-Century Bengal: Ramananda Chattopadhyay’s Prabāsī. Modern Asian Studies, 47(1), 204–249. Mitra, S. (2020). Periodicals, Readers and the Making of a Modern Literary Culture: Bengal at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Leiden: Brill. Mofatt, C. (2020). The Itinerant Library of Lala Lajpat Rai. History Workshop Journal, 89, 121–139. Nath, S. (2014). Changing Trajectories of Indian Political Thought. SüdasianChronik/South Asia Chronicle, 4, 271–304. Osterhammel, J. (2014). The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century [2009], trans. Patrick Camiller. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pal, B. C. (1912). Hindu Nationalism. In Nationality and Empire: A Running Study of Some Current Indian Problems. Calcutta and Simla: Thacker, Spink and Co. [1916]; reprint Delhi, D. K. Publishers (Original work published 2002). Pankakowski, T. (2010). Confict, Context, Concreteness: Koselleck and Schmitt on Concepts. Political Theory, 38(6), 749–79. Parekh, B. (1992). The Poverty of Indian Political Theory. History of Political Thought, 13(3), 535–560. Pitts, J. (2005). A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rathore, A. S. (2017). Indian Political Theory: Laying the Groundwork for Svaraj. London and New York: Routledge. Robertson, B. C. (1995). Raja Rammohan Roy, the Father of Modern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sartori, A. (2008). Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sartori, A. (2014). Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History. Los Angeles, CA: California University Press. Sartori, A. (2017). C. A. Bayly and the Question of Indian Political Thought. Modern Asian Studies, 51(3), 867–877. Scott, D. (2004). Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Scott, J. B. (2018). Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule. Delhi: Primus; orig. University of Chicago Press (Original work published 2016). Sharma, V. S. (2015). Myth of Liberal India. National Interest, 140, 66–71. Smiles, S. (1863). Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct [1859]. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. Sweet, W. R., ed. (2012). Migrating Texts and Traditions. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Timm, J. R., ed. (1992). Texts in Context: Traditional Hermeneutics in South Asia. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Vajpeyi, A. (2012). Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vernon, J. (2011). What Was Liberalism, and Who Was its Subject? Will the Real Liberal Subject Please Stand Up? Victorian Studies, 53(2), 303–310.

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Weliver, P. (2017). Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, J. E. (2008). The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zarrow, P. (2012). After Empire: the Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924. Palo Alto and Los Angeles, CA: Stanford University Press. Zastoupil, L. (2010). Rammohum Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zene, C. (2020). Review of Indian Political Theory: Laying the Groundwork for Svaraj, by A. S. Rathore. CASTE: A Global Journal of Global Exclusion, 1(1), 237–240.

Chapter 2

Infinite Praise Beyond the Constituted Finitude of Life and Liberty Soumyabrata Choudhury

Protocols: Discourse of Praise Contra Constitutional Discourse Though its mode of formalisation can vary a constitutional discourse’s fundamental aim is to produce a form. Whether the question be of a biological, political or artistic constitution, the eventual formal stability of any of these is the result of a whole set of constituent activities that can be both historical and philosophical. Depending on the nature of these constituent activities one can even go to the extent of positing a constituent source, power or being from where the formalisation originarily fows. However, the constituted form inscribes the multiple forces of history as well as thought going into the making of a constitution, within certain structural limits. These could be called the limits of law. Here law is not simply the domain of legal instruments but the general protocol of a repeatable, normative and regulatory regime that organises and formalises the constituent forces that have hitherto played upon the historical and philosophical surfaces of a society with a certain indeterminate intensity. To this extent, law is both the formalisation and pacifcation of the contestatory milieu that surrounds any constituent activity. One might schematise this entire relationship as one between a subjective traversal of history and objective economisation on the fundamental irresolutions and equivocations of any historical process. If the main aim of a constitutional discourse is to inscribe a formal limit to an ongoing and even inchoate historical process then it is possible to imagine this history in at least two ways. Firstly, it is possible to think of this historical process as already constitutional insofar as every epoch inherits a range or bundle of several constitutions from the past. To that extent, a constituted form in the present actually serves the imagination of a continuous modifcation of earlier regimes and forms. But the constituent historical process can also be imagined in a diferent way; this history can be envisaged as a discontinuous series of new principles that a society decides to constitute itself by, in sharp contradistinction with earlier societies with diferent and incommensurable principles. In this second

DOI: 10.4324/9781003259930-3

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imagination, the historical process undergoes a particular kind of event, an event both of thought and practice, that forces the protocols of discourse to actually personify this historical novelty of the principles or thoughts as a new constituent power and being. In our times we have more or less recognised this new personifcation as a “revolutionary” one. And the discourse of a revolutionary constitutional process encompasses as if an unprecedented space with entirely fresh fgures of philosophical and political creation. It is the claim of modern politics, from at least the French revolution, that new constituent principles can be personifed in constituted historical forms of law with the greatest adequacy and animation. At the same time, the revolutionary sequence of these personifcations also gains a certain mythical universality. It is important to investigate this mythical constitution itself within the sequences of modern politics. To do this one must distinguish between the philosophical construction of “principles” and the fgural strategy of “personae”. Is it entirely certain that these two structural strands are in themselves commensurate? As a purely philosophical construction, the constituent decision on enunciating a set of principles is essentially axiomatic. That is to say, these principles are enunciated with a certain subjective force and objective consistency without them being in any way demonstrated or proved. In the so-called revolutionary principles enunciated with the “event” of 1789 – the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity, collective justice and happiness – the burden of proof lies entirely on the commitment of the revolutionary militant who acts by these principles and not on the discursive protocols of demonstrating them. In any case, what would it mean to demonstrate that liberty, equality and fraternity are “true”? Without this referential solidity these arbitrary “words” actually become the very events of constituent enunciation without immediately being converted into repeatable forms of constituted law. But what is the specifc protocol of discourse that allows itself such arbitrary and undemonstrated utterance with the claim to real consequences on both the subjective commitment of social individuals and objective formalisations of social life? One can think of two sets of protocols, not at all of the same discursive rationality that are capable of producing such an arbitrariness and such a reality. The frst of these could be called a mathematical or axiomatic discourse which takes upon itself the responsibility of undemonstrated assertions with real consequences with the proviso that these assertions are within themselves both consistent and underivable from any earlier propositions. In this sense, they are purely acts of thought.1 The possible reception of such acts of thought can only be one of intellectual and practical vigilance towards the consequences of these acts. In this sense, the subjects who carry out this vigilant “research programme” are militants of thought. Militants because the thought can only be re-lived as a subjective and partisan act of commitment but thought itself as an incorporeal afair prevents such militancy from being included in a corporate form whether that be a party or a nation. If

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one wants, one could also rephrase this as a kind of philosophical militancy without philosophy being understood as an exclusive afair of the university. In any case, this much can be asserted that with the claim of a modern revolutionary rupture or event what is entailed is also a new type of revolutionary subjectivity that does not lend itself to corporate identifcation, nomination and predication. However, the second type of discursive space that produces a cascade of revolutionary or modern personifcations obeys fgural protocols that are essentially incommensurate with the non-corporate and anonymous subjectivations of thought entailed by the axiomatic protocol. The gallery of heroes, militants, revolutionaries of modern political history amply demonstrates a corporate presence that is available for a kind of poetic reception in the form of praise. It is this discourse of praise that one must discuss with an eye to its constitutive act of both objectifcation and glorifcation even while enacted with the greatest subjective intensity. What is signifcant in this mode of reception is that not only is it dependent on the rhetorical strategies that come from multiple directions whether those be literary, mythological or religious but also taken together this kind of fgural or theatrical space is essentially a space of manifestation or demonstration.2 The discourse of praise corresponds to the supposed phenomenon of a manifest and demonstrated “quality” that the agent of praise encounters. In this respect, exactly in opposition to the axiomatic commitment to an undemonstrated act of thought, the receiver of the fgural demonstration by the corporate presence and gestural manifestation praises this subjective experience with the peculiar result that this very experience proves the objective reality, nay, truth of the corporate entity being identifed, named and praised. Surely the paradigm of this experience of fgural praise is that of religion. It is in the religious space that the god is identifed, named, brought into some form of corporate presence – and praised for its divine predicates. As a logic, the discourse of praise is both polymorphous and monolatrous. As an object of praise, the god, the hero, the militant, the philosopher-ideologue . . . must be praised for their multiple qualities which the discourse of praise efectuates with frank promiscuity when it creates endless “mixtures” – the god who is a physical hero as well as a philosophical sage, the philosopher who possesses both godly miraculous powers as well as the physical prowess of the hero, the hero with the poet’s intuition and so on – and all of these qualities must be consolidated into a homogenous and objective presence whose identity is often consolidated in terms of exclusive traditions whether of religion, race, ethnicity, language, etc. to the point that this consolidated presence can be ofered up to a kind of monolatrous worship. There is another aspect which distinguishes the fgural protocol of discourse from the axiomatic one. In the latter, the entire enunciative gamble is to speak old words and idioms in an entirely new way such that the very act of speaking becomes an act of “thinking” these words. So with the formal

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enunciation of liberty, equality and fraternity in the French revolution the words are not new but the claim is that they are thought of as if for the frst time as values. But these values cannot be demonstrated with any objective or referential guarantees; they can only be lived in social and individual terms such that the social individual herself is a new “value”, physically indiscernible from any other individual and yet signifed as a new being by the axiomatic move. So, even if there are heroes of the axiom they cannot be recognised by any discernible heroic predicates or qualities that distinguish the fgural hero of history. In this respect, the counterrevolutionary tradition is exactly that – a tradition. Even in its newest acts of praise for its latest counterrevolutionary militants and heroes, it already revives its earlier models of a kind of consolidated traditional heroism which it has encoded in its mythical and religious narratives as well as its traditional literature. In that sense, the counterrevolutionary hero is always an ancient fgure with multiple accretions and modifcations that take place in time. And even the voice of praise that resounds in a particular present for the traditions and identities of the past actually has its source in that same common ancient presence. This is not to say that counterrevolutionary history has no inventions or that within its narratives there are no internal subversions or disobediences.3 There are several examples of these but the essential point remains that even with these inventions and subversions with tradition, the discursive protocols of the acts of praise themselves do not experience any disturbance. They remain a traditional and formulaic resource for any new counterrevolutionary subject or hero to praise or be praised. There is a fnal diference that axiomatic discourse has with respect to the discourse of praise in relation to political constitution. This diference becomes highlighted in modern politics when in both liberal democratic law as well as radical socialist states it is a matter of common acceptance that the constituted form of law will only allow a limited actualisation of the infnite axiomatic principles that a constitution is based on. Each of the modern constitutions, with their most unconditional avowal of the axioms of thought, whether received as liberal or revolutionary, sets severe limits on these very principles in what could be called states of “situated negativity” or what is most commonly called “exceptions”. These exceptions of historical exigencies expose the negativity of a fnite situation against the infnite afrmation of a principle. But the crucial point here is that the logical and philosophical level at which the axiom stands cannot be confused with the level at which the order of constituted law stands. This diference of orders protects the axiom from ever being compromised or bellied in principle even while in reality it appears that these principles are repeatedly suspended by the law of exceptions. Now this discrepancy of levels while extremely crucial in theory, practically challenges the subject of modern politics to continuously scrutinise the situations of exception or forms of situated negativity to arrive at an evaluation of whether the actual form of law deserves to be obeyed in view

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of the danger to the truth of a principle, or the principle deserves to be suspended in view of the danger of the situation.4 In other words, to every axiomatic principle and its philosophical discourse there exists a corresponding critical historical discourse that measures philosophy against history in every temporal present. In contrast, the counterrevolutionary discourse despite the most overwhelming challenges of historical present asserts that the presence of the ancient past and its inexhaustible praiseworthiness cannot be restricted by any exigent negativity or situated critical limit. Thus, counterrevolutionary praise becomes infnite in its production and the modern challenge to the thought of politics becomes the following: if it became possible for counterrevolutionary thought to “value” the axioms of liberal as well as revolutionary principles as their own then could it actually raise the scale of these values to the point that they become objects of an uninterrupted and infnite praise without the shadow of critical negativity? In other words, life and liberty as objects of absolute, infnite – and counterrevolutionary – praise? Objects of Praise I: National Life Though one dominant type of counterrevolutionary discourse is anti-historical and seeks some sort of an ancient place of epiphany for its narrative source as well as fgural personifcation, this very search for an immemorial presence is born of a historical desire. Obviously, the source of this desire is a kind of rupture or at least interruption that takes place in history and challenges the discursive continuity of traditions, narratives and heroes. The most rousing for this interruption is “revolution”. Having said this, sometimes the initial “event” is far more local and empirical but the attendant discourse of such an event brings with it deeper and far-reaching echoes towards both the future as well as the past. An example of this can be found in the situation as it was emerging in the 1930s during the Indian National movement – a movement though led by the Congress Party, that is a political as well as corporate entity, but also contained a whole range of relatively nascent social as well as political subjects with profound implications but with relatively less pronounced formal or corporate attributes (at least compared to the Congress party). One such “event” was the Lahore declaration by the Muslim League in 1940 during its general body session which demanded a separate nation-state for the Muslims of India – a nation-state with the name Pakistan around whose enunciative intensity the future of this demand unfolded with nearly uncontrollable volatility as well as a peculiar lucidity. Probably the most striking and singular text that documents, interprets and distills these enunciations into “thoughts” is B. R. Ambedkar’s book with the two alternative titles “Thoughts on Pakistan” or “Pakistan or the partition of India”.5 We will have occasion to come back to the discursive procedures of this text in the next sections. Here let us simply note a part of Ambedkar’s documentation which dealt with the openly “reactionary” position adopted by

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the Hindu Mahasabha in and around 1935 to the possible demand for Pakistan on behalf of the Muslim League and its intellectual stabilisation into a counterrevolutionary discourse of politics and philosophy in the works of V. D. Savarkar, particularly some of his speeches made during this period. In fact, Ambedkar cites Savarkar at length to represent the latter’s arguments against the demand for Pakistan. Not only with an immediate implication for the corporate tactics to be adopted by the Hindu Mahasabha against the Muslim League or even against the Congress party but also with a view to propose a theory of the Hindu Nation whose stakes were political and yet beyond the mere interests of constituting a sphere of state law or state power. In Ambedkar’s representation of Savarkar’s proposals, there are three diferent though interrelated dimensions. Firstly, Savarkar indeed responds from within the milieu prevailing then around the question of Pakistan and its formal demand in the Lahore Declaration in 1940. This response is presentist and the discursive forms in which it is expressed are mostly speeches made at the corporate sessions of Hindu Mahasabha. The main thrust of this response is a clear refusal of any state form, which is also a constituted legal form, for the “idea” or “thought” of Pakistan. We must remember that this refusal of Pakistan as a state form is only one episode in a larger discussion about the future state form or constituted form of an independent nation once freed from British rule. So the logical question would arise, what was Savarkar’s view about a future Indian state with an independent constitution (Ambedkar, 1979)? Would he prefer a constitutional democracy with a liberal philosophy and jurisprudence? Would he like a republican form of government but with a clear majoritarian subject as its main constituent with a hierarchy of other constituent subjects such as religious or other minorities (that is, would he propose a structure of graded citizenship?)? Or would Savarkar argue for a religious and theocratic form of state power? Though all these questions were enormous both with regard to Savarkar’s views as well as the larger agenda of Hindu Mahasabha, there was also a second dimension to the Savarkarite proposal and prescription, in relation to the demand for Pakistan. This could be called the historical dimension of the concerned response. To be able to reach the place of an ancient immemorial epiphany that would ground and stabilise a reactionary response in the form of a counterrevolutionary “thought”, Savarkar had to frst create a kind of narrative, poetic or even fgural thread that would pass through all of the historical past to then reach beyond any temporal threshold and make contact with this immemorial epiphanic place. To do this as Ambedkar represents and cites Savarkar, we fnd a linguistic strategy in operation which proposes that the homogeneous space of ancient belonging to this particular land, called “India”, is not primarily a territorial afair. Savarkar says that frst of all we must nominate India substantively – that is India must be called the land of Hindus, which is to say “Hindustan” (Ambedkar, 1979, p. 135). For Savarkar, this is an intense and substantive naming because the

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name “Hindustan” already creates an irreducible totality such that not only the Hindus belong to this land nominally called India at a particular present but also the land itself is converted from being a territorial unit to a kind of consecrated and Hinduised value. So the very linguistic strategy of insisting on a name produces a peculiar discontinuity of the physical land named alternatively India, Bharat, Hindustan, etc. into a discontinuous and subjectivised entity that does not exist on the same plane anymore as all the territories and nations of the world. In this sense, the exceptional and substantive name Hindustan is meant to express something fundamental and infnite rather than performing the usual function of a name which is constitutive and limiting. But the very act of enunciating such a name actually performs this exceptional evaluation of a banal physical piece of territory. So in the Savarkarite discursive strategy, the insistence on the name is both purely descriptive and entirely performative. But this linguistic operation cannot remain isolated from certain other procedures that Savarkar employs. One such procedure is explicitly theological though it is as much a linguistic move. Savarkar says that this is a land of the Hindus not in the territorial meaning exclusively because historically it cannot be doubted that other historical subjects including Muslims are territorial Indians. Even the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was a territorial Indian because he was born in India. So also such contested and remarkable Muslim heroes from history such as Tipu Sultan who were hereditarily Indian (Ambedkar, 1979, p. 135). Hence the question of the Indian subject can be resolved as a conjunction of territory and heredity. But the question of the national subject was not either purely territorial or statist, both of which had legitimate non-Hindu even Muslim place-holders. In this sense, the question of the nation was a question of “life” but life itself could not be reduced either to hereditarily biological existence or to individual territorial being. In Savarkar’s view Hindus were the subject of a “national life” and national life was indeed an organic existence but the meaning of “organic” had to be rescued from merely biological reality to something like “organic being”. This is the philosophical efect of a set of linguistic operations to the point that we move from both territorial and juridical nationhood to ontological nationalism.6 Once this ontological ground has been created by Savarkar’s linguistic strategy he attaches it to a particular theological motif which is the motif of a kind of holy pilgrimage. According to Savarkar, the Indian land is actually the Holy Land of the Hindus – their punyabhoomi – as diferent from it being only their mother or fatherland (Ambedkar, 1979, p.  140). While other people can be Indians in the territorial or even statist senses only Hindus have Hindustan as their holy land even as Muslims and Christians have their respective holy lands in other sites of sacred consecration and theological evaluation. This theological cementing of a linguistic and political discourse is particularly interesting. Savarkar otherwise doesn’t favour an

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over-religious projection of the so-called Hindu religion in favour of what he calls Hindutva – which in contrast to the merely religious philosophy of Hinduism actually expresses the moment-to-moment life of Hindudom that is all the Hindus in their national and organic lives that go far beyond the merely constituted spheres of a fnite law and a circumscribed citizenship. In this respect, Savarkar prescribes a future Indian constitution which would grant minorities the fundamental liberal principle of being part of political citizenship with the governing electoral protocol of one man one vote but this statist idea must remain subordinate to the national principle of organic and ontological belonging that is expressed in a linguistic and theological conjunction of name and dogma (Hindustan and Holy Land) which secure a form of existence whose praise now becomes infnite and transhistorical (Ambedkar, 1979, p. 142). Every constitution including those with the presence of non-Hindu populations in Indian history only manifested relative confgurations of state power while in Savarkar’s theological poetics, the motif and value of a national ontology reached beyond these strata of history. At the same time, we must remember this ontological efect is indeed a poetic production (albeit in extremely prosaic and schematic terms as Ambedkar’s citation from Savarkar shows); that is to say the claim to a national belonging beyond historical modes of existence is an efect of “praise” – for the name Hindustan and the value punyabhoomi (Holy Land). However, this linguistic and poetic procedure, as it traverses multiple historical epochs to approximate a transhistorical or immemorial place of epiphany, is not a move merely oriented to the past. The third dimension that we might extract from Savarkar’s discourse is his eventual political interest in securing a saturated Hindu Polity which he himself calls the stakes of Hindutva. Hindutva includes the politics of constituted state power and its apparatuses but it claims to go beyond this level to communicate a kind of existential national life. Savarkar chooses the terms of this communication through the word Hindutva with an organic efect: he clearly says that in political life the subject also behaves like any other organic entity which develops organs of attack and defense in relation to other living entities (Ambedkar, 1979, p.  142). So all the metaphoric powers of biological confict are mobilised by the phrase “organic life” when Savarkar says that the Hindu nation is an organic nation – and not merely a constituted one. One might even commit the political scandal of using some Maoist vocabulary to call Savarkar’s Hindutva Hindu massline that goes beyond the mere state form and party form to activate the very core of the Hindu “mass” (Hindudom) as a force of Hindu life (Hindutva).7 The thread that unravels along the politics of this kind of Hindu massline is indeed the horizon for a future Savarkarite prescription for organised Hindu politics that would go far beyond the corporate fguration of either the party form or the state form. Having opened up this radical horizon for a continuous battle on the grounds

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of Hindu massline penetrating the innermost core of Indian society, Savarkar nevertheless closes of his discursive strategy with a specifc corporate prescription, nay, command. He says that the crucial element of this organic life of the Hindu nation must be equally a pure linguistic life. Savarkar says that the Sanskrit language must become the exclusive and exhaustive language of Hindus in all their existential communication. Interestingly he clarifes that Sanskrit as a language of epiphany that he names devbhasha (language of the gods) from which the national administrative language Hindi will follow, is to be distinguished from the language of the present that is known as Hindustani, a mixture of idioms such as Hindi, Urdu and so on with surely mixed regimes of gods and epiphanies at their source.8 However, this infnite linguistic and rhetorical perspective that opens up with the praise of Sanskrit must itself be reapplied to the very present moment of history when Savarkar issues his cultural and existential prescriptions. This means that he is asking for the state to be constituted in such a way in the future independent India that it must be able to deploy its juridical powers to purify the social life of a nation of its several impurities including the linguistic one such that society can be governed by the state with a kind of eugenic linguistic technology. This administrative prescription is highly historical and fnite meant to achieve a particular set of practical efects in the foreseeable future so as to re-evoke the ancient immemorial image and place of a national ontology and its attendant epiphany. But can any fnite state with an apparently secular and liberal constitution achieve this kind of cultural and ontological purifcation within certain fnite limits to reach the threshold of an infnite counterrevolutionary Hindu life? Wouldn’t the fnite exigencies of history in response to the contingent interruption of the present “event” allow for a degree of tactical fexibility and even errancy that would make any immemorial counterrevolutionary project constitutively impossible? In Thoughts on Pakistan Ambedkar points towards this internal contradiction haunting Savarkar’s position. Objects of Praise II: Historical Freedom(s) Before anything else, it has to be noted that Ambedkar in Thoughts on Pakistan by and large dismisses the claimed raison d’etre of the Hindu Mahasabha as an organisation meant to establish a deeper autonomous and primordial Hindu identity. In fact, he says that the Hindu Mahasabha would efectively dissolve once the contestation with the Muslim League over the matter of seperate electorates going on in the 1930s was resolved. To that extent, the raison d’etre of Hindu Mahasabha was precisely historical because its justifcation lay in opposing separate electorates for the Muslims being demanded by the Muslim League in the new electoral system being worked out with the British government between 1930 and 1935 (Ambedkar, 1979, p. 133). While separation of electorate was demanded for several constituencies

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including the constituency of depressed classes within Hindu society, the real edge of the Mahasabha’s justifcation to actively exist as an organisation and pressure group was to produce a sharp, if not hostile, historical opposition to the Muslim League and its internal constituency. In Ambedkar’s view, the real force of this historical opposition even if formally posited as separation of two primordial national societies as it were, two nations, Hindu and Muslim lay in the decision to seperate in efect as two nation-states in that historical present. In this matter, Ambedkar notes a peculiar contradiction within Savarkar’s position. He says that while Savarkar relentlessly argues for the existence of two separate societies or nations within the Indian territory he does not want two separate states. Savarkar prefers a constitutionally “liberal” state including all the existing social constituents of which Muslims were also a part, with the principle of “one man one vote” governing the electoral system but with no special political or administrative provisions for the Muslim minority. Efectively this meant that Savarkar was prescribing a political system with a liberal egalitarian form of adult franchise but was essentially thinking towards a distribution of political power accomplished both electorally and culturally, which would consist of a permanent Hindu majority and Muslim minority. Such an eventuality stood to reason because the Hindus would not vote as individuals in a society of two nations or a territory with two societies but would do so as one of the societies/corporations. In other words, despite the formal liberal principle of “one man one vote”, in practice this would not translate into “one man one vote” one value. Ambedkar fnds this Savarkarite prescription illogical because it doesn’t achieve the purported aim of deciding on the proposed formation of Pakistan in a move of partitioning India which was to achieve a state of peace and end internal social confict and communal hostility, in other words, to end the communal question. For Ambedkar, there were only two ways of resolving the question of a majoritarian nation confronted with a minoritarian one within the same territory. One way was to totally destroy or assimilate the minority constituent and the other was to grant the principle of selfdetermination to a minoritarian demand for a separate sovereign nation-state (Ambedkar, 1979, p.  143). And if Savarkar was unwilling to choose any of these two ways then to Ambedkar it betrayed either a certain lapse of judgement regarding the logic of historical situation then or another more surreptitious and perilous historical agenda. After all, Savarkar was willing to grant the Muslims a certain separate minority status both in terms of cultural and social identities that had sedimented over many centuries in India. Culturally the Muslims were allowed to practice their own religion as well as other social practices including linguistic ones. At the same time, he insisted on a state policy which would be unapologetically majoritarian, for example, the policy of imposing Sanskrit and Hindi as part of education and administrative agenda for the future of independent India. There are two ways of

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interpreting this apparent contradiction in Savarkar’s thinking. One is that the Hindu Mahasabha ideologue expects the minority corporation to simply submit to the eventual dominance of permanent social and political majority of the Hindus. This could be envisaged on part of an interested party like Savarkar, who is a partisan of Hindutva, as a historical revenge of the Hindus over the Muslims for the latter’s political control through the Mughal rule over many years of the Indian territory. In that sense, Savarkar’s discourse of praise always containing an undertone of a discourse of loss and lament for the historical emasculation of an ancient Indian Hindu capacity was actually a call to take a new imperial hold over the Muslim minority in the new Indian state with the instruments of coercive as well as ideological state apparatuses being mobilised for majoritarian power. In fact, the praise of Sanskrit was nothing but the linguistic mobilisation towards an imperial cultural practice that would use all the state instruments including ideological ones, consisting for instance of educational policy, to naturalise a permanent majority over time through the apparently liberal electoral system which would be coupled with an ever greater saturation of society by a kind of “Hindu knowledge”. But the other side to this imperial project remains perilously permeated with the very historical milieu of confict between diferent societies/nations that forms the basis for this larger project. To imperially dominate the minority in a programmatically foreseeable but empirically unknown future one must enter into a real historical relationship with that very minoritarian entity in the present. What does “relationship” mean here? Ambedkar points out that it would be wishful thinking to assume that the Muslim minorities will simply accept the majoritarian constitution and will forever live peacefully as a separate nation but within the same state. If the very relationship between the majority and minority “nations” is one of domination and subjugation, then this very economy of historico-political power implies that the subjugated minority will also resist majoritarian power. And all resistance is already a complication of the immaculate imperial picture in the direction of something like a perpetual civil oscillation and recalibration of power with no possibility of ever exiting this economy which is essentially an economy of war. For Ambedkar, any schema or prescription that perpetuates such a war like civil state is illogical insofar as the fundamental aim of social and state policy is security, stability and peace. At the same time, Ambedkar’s own discourse of Thoughts on Pakistan is strikingly free of any overriding political or philosophical morality that afects the objectivity and impersonality of what Ambedkar calls “thoughts” in clearing the ground for eventually all concerned parties to decide whether consensually or confictually on the “thought” of Pakistan as a real stake for the future of India insofar as Pakistan is now the name of a real historical demand. In Ambedkar’s own presentation of the diferent arguments for and against Pakistan coming from the diferent concerned parties, it is the very terrain of history that gets vividly portrayed in the process of its clearing so as to arrive at the most rational resolution to

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the question. Without entering into this dense and vivid discourse one can summarise the result of Ambedkar’s massive historical treatment as following: no party emerges looking good from the cauldron of history, everyone has blood on their hands! In this respect, Aishwary Kumar’s diagnosis of Thoughts on Pakistan as a singularly pioneering text of “force” in the history of the “Indian Political” is absolutely accurate. (See Kumar, 2015, pp. 109– 164) Ambedkar’s own economy of discourse is constituted by a continuous and modulated circulation of power, confict, legitimacy and thresholds of change in the distribution of power that are precarious yet productive thresholds of danger and illegitimacy in history. Often we see in Ambedkar’s archaeology from India’s political and military past that critical junctures with the most brutal and unjust actions perpetrated by invaders, rulers and tyrants actually produces irreversible and decisive historical change including change of sovereignty, dynasty and ofcial religious dogma and church. Of course, it is possible to read Ambedkar’s epic text as eventually moving towards a modern political world with a particular kind of secular and liberal threshold of legitimacy and constitutionality that moves beyond the age of religion and religious wars. But this would already be to restrict the force of Ambedkar’s discursive treatment to the form of a political theory. Thoughts on Pakistan remains an exceptional and somewhat inassimilable text precisely because it doesn’t belong to the curriculum of political theory and the theoretical legitimation of modern constitutions whether liberal or of any other type. Instead one could characterise Ambedkar’s text as an inexorable discourse on the confguration and reconfguration of historical forces producing multiple and open-ended historical constitutions. In this respect, Ambedkar’s text fnds an unlikely and anachronistic interlocutor in Michel Foucault’s 1975–6 College de France seminar Society must be defended. Foucault, during this seminar schematises the reactionary French historian Boulainvilliers from prerevolutionary France in the following way: Boulainvilliers wrote an unbroken history of war in his portrayal of the formation of France from the time of the ancient Roman empire. But instead of picturing this long history as a history of rights and legitimate forms of constitutional power, whether monarchical or otherwise which was periodically interrupted by exceptional situations the paradigm of which was “war” during which rights and constitutionality were suspended, Boulainvilliers depicted every sequence of history including statist and constitutional ones as sequences of an endless economy of war (Foucault, 2003, pp.  156–163). So war was not an exception to the “liberal regime of rights” – in this sense, all constitutional thinking is liberal thinking including that of constitutional absolutism – but the modes and forms of political constitution and juridical power were themselves modalities of a more immanent and immersive milieu of war. Via his interpretation of Boulainvilliers, Foucault brings out a double structure in the site of war as it is articulated in society through its diferent

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nations including the nobility, the church, the people and so on, in the history of France between at least the age of Louis XIV to the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the nobility which feels deprived of its place and power in history by a long reign of monarchical sovereignty in direct compact with the popular masses, now wants to assert a kind of military and waring superiority over the others thus enforcing a reign of robust inequality, also on the other hand produces a peculiar intra-noble equality that could be called the internal characteristic of a new “military caste” (Foucault, 2003, p.  150). Within this caste that the nobility forms itself into, there is very little place for constituting a legitimate sovereign or even a legitimate owner of property which includes booty and loot gained during battle.9 This radical anti-constitutional and non-legitimate caste equality is not to be confused with another form of caste constitution that is supported by the instruments of customary law or juridical power, seen for example in Indian society. At the same time, this military caste is deeply invested in enforcing a general efect of inequality such that its own freedom as militarily exercised can only be measured by the historical injustice and deprivation that it has been able to infict on the other “castes” or other “nations”. Yet in Boulainvilliers’ portrayal, the nobility as a military caste is not interested in instituting a new caste constitution or caste law for the entire society. Instead, its peculiar exercise of freedom and immanent production of internal equality is in direct proportion to its strength or power that it is able to extract from the materiality and the contingency of war and its forever open-ended historical constitution. The demonstration of this historical materiality lies in the most vivid efects of inequality that both articulate a society and at the same time subject it to endless war. One must further clarify that while a kind of immanent strength or power is on the same side as the extraction of freedom from the historical feld, this power is not at all the same thing as juridical power that has a certain formal transcendence and constitutional legitimacy. In that sense, the more freedom there is produced in its exercise the less one is subject to legitimate forms of power but the more freedom is exercised, the more there is the efect of power. It is this paradox of historico-political power of freedom freed from the regime of constitutional juridical power that will create the basic schema for a new kind of social arrangement that is the arrangement of capitalist society. Objects of Praise III: Capitalist Infinity (Or Nothingness) In Foucault’s condensation of Boulainvilliers the nobility neither has inherited genetic essence (e.g., an ethnic, a racial or religious essence) nor an economic consistency of the sort proposed by Marxist historians. One could then characterise Boulainvilliers’ nobility to be a nobility “in action” rather than in structure. This angle of historical vision grants this internal “society or nation” within the French territory a set of vivid attributes that sometimes

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are described as an open and splendid barbarism, sometimes as an alternative “Germanicity” (Foucault, 2003, p.  202) to the inheritance of Roman imperial law and right. What is this Germanicity? It is nothing but freedom in historical exercise instead of being a constitutional abstraction of Roman law. In its exercise freedom is both productive of worldly results (like conquests and acquisition of wealth) and self-productive (as a quality to be praised and propagated). But to this measure freedom is also the historical technique of depriving other freedoms through efects of non-juridical and infra-institutional power. The analogy with capitalism lies in the proposition that the space of accumulating and circulating commodities not as use value but pure exchange of capital, is indeed a space of freedom in its exercise such that a formally equal space of economic activity by symmetrical individuals and corporations is meant to result in some freedoms becoming more productively successful and some weakened in this very activation of a kind of Germanic-capitalist freedom. Foucault in his seminar actually notes that the historical constitution of a feld of war as forever open-ended and modifed by a relation of forces does not simply culminate in discrete victories and losses but keeps extending the historical feld of forces as an economy of strength and weakness (Foucault, 2003, pp. 161–162). Extrapolating this analytical grid one can imagine capitalist society as a single almost egalitarian bloc with a peculiarly immanent internal heterogeneity and inequality of its parts, with their mutual struggles, rivalries and sub-wars. If the initial fgure for the nobility that in this vision forms the leading part of the whole was that of a military caste, then the prototype of caste itself could be imagined as the paradigmatic space of society that is now going to be more and more articulated as a history of classes and races as lines of force being distributed by the initial grid of caste. Transposed to the logic of capitalism we could then propose both a single social feld for a new kind of capitalist class or even caste and at the same time visualise such a class endlessly and infnitely dissolving into corporate and individual fragments engaged in mutual battle that in the language of capital is called, nay, praised as “competition”. This more or less completes the outline of the analogy between Boulainvilliers’ nobility and capitalist caste/class. However, unlike the counterrevolutionary historian’s praise of an immanent historical freedom in vital exercise most vividly animated by the scene of battle and the “thought” of war, capitalist class is formally constituted as a realm of abstract, universal and democratic freedom guaranteed and secured by a form of state. At one level, this is the founding contradiction of capitalism but on the other, it is the mobilization of this contradictory logic in the history of capitalism that both produces strategic grafts of diferent structural and temporal strata (e.g., those of the free market and the security state) as well as demands a discourse of praise that is now all the more layered with multiple subjects and protocols.

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In an essay by Giorgio Agamben called “Capitalism as Religion”, the author demonstrates a remarkable articulation between religious and fnancial discourses as both the logic of capitalist structure as well as the modality of subjective belonging to that structure (Agamben, 2019, pp.  66–77). To make this articulation efcacious in contemporary history Agamben shows that the graft of religion onto the body of capital provides a key discursive resource. He takes the actual historical reference to the freeing of the American dollar in 1971 from the gold standard, which move for him signifes the increasing dematerialization of money in capitalism. Apart from the obvious correlate of this observation which is that the dematerialization of money is actually its increasing fnancialization and total commodifcation, there is also the interesting dimension in what could be called the history of praise or the chronicle of glory that the material objects of value of which gold was the most precious, hitherto embodied the most resplendent glories of the world. So the obvious puzzle is what makes this dematerialised purely notional money an object of glory and praise far beyond any known “substance” that has till now been praised for its value and qualities? Agamben gives a precise theological answer to this question: “faith”. In his demonstration, the philosopher and philologist utilizes the Christian notion of faith or pistis which does not actually pertain to any objective or idolatrous representation of God but to the very self-referential act of showing that faith itself (Agamben, 2019, p. 69). This Christian or even Pauline theology of a kind of weak strength of faith, Agamben tries to show, is homologous to the purely – and infnitely self-referential – performativity of nominal paper money in which the promise to pay a certain amount is signed and countersigned by the individual holder of money as well as the institutional authority of the bank, totally subtracted from any material and objective reference or support. The structural puzzle is also a metaphysical one because what exists as an immanent feld of worldly circulation of money and commodities has also now acquired the subjective locus of pure faith that hitherto could only be understood as a faith in Idol, God or Substance. It is in this return to a metaphysics that capitalism begins to graft or articulate a transcendental or abstract discourse of both religious faith as well as democratic right with the historical discourse of an immanent, efective and barbaric freedom that Boulainvilliers attributed to the pre-revolutionary nobility.10 Clearly, this is a contradictory if not self-cancelling picture of capitalist history. But in actual practice we see that it is this open recourse to incommensurable logics that capitalism owes its greatest successes to. For example, the rhetoric of capitalist development actually is a discourse of perpetual praise of crises. Every crisis is an opportunity for disruption and innovation – and in a way, this recommendation is an exact replica of the barbaric (-Germanic) quality of perpetual war and continuous improvisation of tactics of anti-juridical knowledge. At the same time, every capitalist crisis is as much an occasion for the mobilization of state policies and state

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resources to solve the crisis and secure “society”. In this apparent contradiction, there lies a complicated entanglement of societies and states that was not the feature of Boulainvilliers’ discourse. If capitalism seeks the constitutional principle of liberal individual freedoms, the juridical principle of security of society and the theological principle of pure subjective faith in an unverifable transcendence, all of these evidently incommensurable principles can actually be witnessed as concretely embodied in new oligarchies of the world in which private enterprise, the state form and divine glory can be seen locked in a tight if not scandalous, embrace. Further in contemporary media society, unlike the earlier discourse of praise which was more or less activated by the fgure of the counterrevolutionary intellectual, whether historian or ideologue, now the separation between the object of praise and the function of praising becomes more and more indistinguishable. The organs of the media do not merely praise social and state subjects including nationalities, enterprises and other corporations but these objects of celebrations and glorifcation lose their earlier transcendence to become subject to the measure of media itself if not purely media creation. Conversely, the media is more and more socialised and stratifed such that it actually speaks in the name of national societies (Indian media, American media, etc.) and all glory that is attached to corporations now attaches to the media itself. But this incessant self-referentiality of media is itself to be measured by the global circulation of an increasingly dematerialised capitalism. And the praises sung for money in the corridors of Capitalism literally signify praise for – nothing. Thoughts: Beyond Counterrevolutionary Praise A few days before this chapter was being concluded, around the middle of February 2020, a violent controversy broke out involving the social media “giant” Twitter, the Indian government, and a number of individuals who took to Twitter to praise and express support for the farmer’s protest going on since the end of 2019 in opposition to new farm laws brought in by the Indian parliament.11 Among these individuals was the global celebrity popular singer Rihanna, who joined an international media campaign to show solidarity with the protesters. In an immediate and somewhat unexpected reaction, the foreign ministry of the Indian government issued an ofcial statement to the efect that someone like Rihanna should confne herself to the space of popular culture and media celebration instead of dabbling in “critical” matters like the economy and politics. The latter was an afair of knowledge conditioned by specifc historical realities while the former was an infnite circulation of praise, celebration and popular enthusiasm – which, according to the Indian government, a “celebrity” like Rihanna was tautologically meant for. Her entry into the zone of situated negativity that history throws up was actually an act of professional trespass.

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However, this violent repudiation of a media personality participating in historical afairs was structurally frustrated by the fact that the global media platform Twitter was not at all persuaded into removing any of Rihanna’s or other’s posts. So now the Indian government complained that the general form of what is commonly called social media or tech giants today was behaving irresponsibly and sovereignly as if they were beyond the capture of national sovereign law. Interestingly, the vocabulary utilised by the combined sentiments of repudiation and frustration was anti-neoliberal: the government and its core support group alleged that these companies are a new global oligarchy (or in more common parlance “bigtech”).12 This is the language of a deep revolutionary critique of neoliberal capitalism that peculiarly is now mobilised by statist discourses of recent authoritarian governments, including Trump’s America and Modi’s India, which put capitalist giants on the same side as both hyper-legitimate liberal thought as well as anti-state revolutionary, if not terroristic, leftism.13 The statist frustration arises from the fact that it’s true diagnosis of these media giants forming a new global capitalist oligarchy cannot convert itself into a victorious gigantomachy (war against giants) because the very legitimacy of the state form in contemporary world now must be measured against and borrowed from that very glory and celebration which these media giants create, circulate and capitalise. In other words, the Indian government’s eforts to repudiate, delegitimise and insult someone like Rihanna can only be rendered efcacious and legitimate by that very force and glory of the global media that Rihanna as a celebrity embodies. The project of “becoming-celebrity” of the Indian state is being historically short circuited by the real intervention of a so-called celebrity (like Rihanna) who axiomatically must be considered as possessing as much critical and political capacity as any other human being. By way of conclusion, let us schematise the frst part of our investigations in the following way: Ambedkar’s reading of Savarkar shows that the latter, when confronted with a pinpointed historical question – whether to accept the demand for Pakistan or not – actually tried to forestall the challenge of history by trying to invent a long trail through the density of time back to an immemorial cultural form or substance that owes no debt to any event in history. In that sense, Savarkar’s counterrevolutionary project was nothing if not an escapist project from history. Interestingly Foucault’s Boulainvilliers by refusing any ancient civilisational essence or forms of public right or law, creates the space for the counterrevolutionary historian who praises history itself as a continuous economy of power and weakness, victory and defeat. In this sense, his reactionary project is an escape into history wherein no irreversible or decisive historical event is possible that can go beyond the modulation or economy of power that a revolution fundamentally claims to be. Now to state the central problem of our second investigation: What is striking in the history of capitalism is that on the one hand we see the open recommendation of historical freedom in self-interested avaricious action.

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On the other, capitalism greatly depends on the legitimacy of democratic principles and values of individual freedom and equality and their constituted law and government. What is both interesting and disconcerting in this history is that more and more capitalism involves all of society globally in its intra-historical relations, the more it makes this very materiality of relations into an absolute metaphysical value. So even when life and liberty are not any more axiomatic principles or values to be abstractly afrmed and are instead to be invested, manipulated, controlled and securitised, capitalism produces a new philosophical metaphysics of life and liberty as pure potentiality or virtuality to be not merely thought but be praised. In this move, the new metaphysics begins to closely resemble an axiomatic discourse where the principle of infnite virtuality and potentiality of life and freedom are asserted as fundamental and ontological rather than economic and historical but contradictorily, these very terms, “life, and freedom”, are promoted as a new anthropological brand: the human being as a virtuality of enterprise, creativity and innovation, all of which can be capitalised and monetised. At this point, the revolutionary axiomatic and the counterrevolutionary praise of a virtuosic capitalisable anthropology become nearly indistinguishable. And the possibility of exposing and exiting this contradictory strategy can only come from a new thought of politics. This chapter does not intend to elaborate on such a political proposal. That will require a sequel to this initial historical and structural clearing. Nevertheless one might conclude with a few indicators towards the alternative protocols for this “thought” of politics that can be seen from the material analysed earlier. For example, for B R Ambedkar, the “thought” of politics arises between an intense, almost saturated historical narration and abyssal unfounded moment of popular decision. Afterall, to take the view that one is for or against the principle of self-determination (in context of the demand of Pakistan in this case) must require that such a principle is capable of being thought or is thinkable. To subjectively decide on which side of the principle one is on historically is already to grant the principle certain thinkability which in itself cannot be founded historically this way or that. To this extent, one could very well say that politics for Ambedkar is a subjective act, whether performed individually or collectively, and this act is nothing if not an act of thought. But suppose the praise is not an afair of praising infnite objects of glory, whether immemorial or historical, to be performed by fnite beings within certain discursive protocols; suppose the gift of praise is made by a being whose proposal towards fnite and graspable forms of glorious “objects” is not a delegation of a greater infnity beyond human fnitude but the material trace of the capacity of human beings to think infnitely.14 Yet one must not neglect to traverse this little trace of some form . . . in an old Hindi flm Mirza Ghalib by Sohrab Modi (1954), in one of the frst scenes we see young Ghalib go to an assembly of poets where each of them recites or sings his

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poetry with practiced charm and professional delectation. The protocol of public performance and the act of collective praise are perfectly harmonised with each other in this scene where all participants know how to conduct themselves in this traditional form of sociability and culture that still persists on the threshold of modern life in the nineteenth century. When it comes to Ghalib, we fnd him not reciting, singing or performing his poetry but merely speaking a few lines, speaking nearly tonelessly in contrast to a discourse and world of praise permeated with tonality and music, with qualities and predicates, with protocols and etiquettes, Ghalib appears invisible and inaudible if not illiterate and without culture. Yet we do hear him speak just a few words without quality, predicate or tone. The words he says are essentially selfreferential and provide a motto for this subtractive reality of a song without tone, speech without protocol, thought with barely a form. The poet as if appeals to the God (or the Other if you will) who makes the gift of poetry to mortals: if you can’t make my tongue more expressive, make my listener’s heart more receiving.15 Or equally: if you can’t lift the limits on my form, make the thoughts of my interlocutor more infnite. Notes 1 For similar formulations, see Badiou (2008). 2 A paradigmatic discourse of praise is that of theatre reviews, which apart from having critical elements have also hosted the most eloquent and afrmative praise of theatre as pure manifestation particularly in and through the fgure of the heroic actor. As probably the most striking example of this in the history of English language theatre reviews, see Kenneth Tynan’s writings (2007) on the productions and performances featuring Lawrence Olivier. 3 As an early instance of such subversion one can read the sophist Gorgias’ Encomium to Helen which praises and justifes the character Helen from Homer’s Iliad otherwise condemned to a kind of sexual notoriety for having caused the fall of empires through her beauty. The very protocols of the sophist discourse of praise can also become a new genealogical source of subverting both the function of language and the fgure of the hero as consensually accepted in terms of civic value and public (or political) persona. For such a sophistic genealogical subversion, see Cassin (2014, pp. 66–68). 4 It was as a result of this sort of practical evaluation carried out within the very element of revolutionary principles that the earliest revolutionary constitution in post-1789 France enunciated the right to resistance as following from the principle of justice. The people have a right to resist injustice even if it is issued from a constituted legal or sovereign source. The philosophical stakes here were that insofar as the sovereign legal source was constituted it was only fnite while the principle of justice was infnite. This discrepancy in the levels of the infnite and fnite were sought to be brought together in a space of “historical constitution” by the enunciation of a right to resistance. With the Thermidor in 1794 this kind of an open ended and infnite historical constitution was given up in favour of a fnite constitutional form which took away the right to resistance and in efect brought in the law of sedition.

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5 These two editions of the book roughly emerge between 1940 and 1945. The initial ground of this book was a report on the question of Pakistan that was to be prepared by the Independent Labour Party (ILP) an organisation created by Ambedkar in 1935. We must read the several introductory sections to the two editions of the book including the preface and the foreword to grasp the minor but signifcant changes that Ambedkar made in the second edition (Pakistan or the partition of India), in which he acknowledged how he had been “provocative” in the frst place but for a good historical reason and not for any prejudiced personal ones. Ambedkar (1979, p. 18). 6 For the phrase ontological nationalism also see Barbara Cassin’s reading of Heidegger (Cassin, 2014). 7 The term massline is of course created and deployed by Mao Zedong, when referring to the “creative energy” of the people who are otherwise treated as merely to be the ones led by a “handful . . . working in solitude”. In Mao’s thinking, the massline both reaches into and emerges from the people in the widest and the most granulated senses and not only as those to be led but as living a popular life at every moment. It is this life lived every moment which escapes the gaze and control of the Party many a time. To this extent, even mass ideological education or even the so-called cultural revolution has its source not so much in the “organ” which is the Party but the “organism” which is the people. At the same time, one cannot ignore the striking diference between Mao’s afrmative terms when speaking of the massline and the people and Savarkar’s extremely defensiveaggressive tone when portraying the life of Hindutva in Hindudom threatened by non-Hindu/anti-Hindu forces of life, not quite under the control of any extent Hindu Party (that is when Savarkar is speaking or writing) (Tse-Tung, 1967). 8 “Our scriptures, history, philosophy and culture have their roots so deeply embedded in the Sanskrit literature that it forms veritably the brain of our Race” (Ambedkar, 1979, p. 137). 9 Foucault relates the story of King Clovis who in the sixth century, after the battle of Soissons claimed ownership over a vase that he desired to possess but one of his own fellow warriors questioned him on the right to make such a claim over the booty that they had together with the others looted. This story is a graphic indication of a military caste ill disposed towards accepting either legitimate sovereignty or monopoly over power as well as wealth. (Foucault, 2003, p. 150). 10 This diagnosis of a metaphysics within capitalism by Agamben departing signifcantly from Foucault’s scintillating nominalism in his historical analysis can also be seen as an ambiguous return of philosophy and ontology as well as the recuperation of the erudite specialist fgure of the institutional philosopher and philologist enforced by capitalism itself. So the irony or twist is that while genealogically speaking there can be schematic comparisons between the barbaric freedom of the pre-revolutionary nobles and the self-interested rationality of the classical capitalists, in the actual history of capitalism reaching up to the present “neoliberal” conjuncture we see both an emptying out of the historical feld of forces into a metaphysics, that is an ideology, of pure potentiality (the potentiality of money, freedom etc. as totally nominal and infnitely productive) and the exercise of power by newer capitalist oligarchies. So exactly when we thought that Foucault had overcome the dominance of ideological analysis inherited from Marxism by the middle of 1970s, we fnd that the inheritor of Foucault must demonstrate the return of philosophy, that is to say ideology to be the most appropriate tool to explain the capitalist neoliberal present. It is interesting to note that Agamben has featured in a recent controversy during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020 whence his position in the larger feld of philosophical and political

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analysis starting from at least the College de France seminars of Michel Foucault concerned with the emergence of a new type of liberal social power arising at that time (commonly referred to as governmentality and biopower), has come into relief. See Garo (2020). See Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Aakash Hassan, Rihanna angers Indian government with tweet about farmers’ protests, The Guardian, February 3, 2021. See Tejaswi Surya’s tweet dated January 9, 2021, 5:35 PM “Recently, the actions of social media giants have paved the way for introspection and consequential amendments in India’s tech laws. Actions of Intermediaries must be condemned and any law that provides such wide powers must be reviewed”. Because the literature here is both dense and dispersed, without citing any particular sources it is possible to illustrate the above observation by Donald Trump’s numerous assertions where he, without any qualms about the internal contradictions between them, equated a so-called liberal global media house like CNN with apparently extreme Left elements within the Black Lives Matter movement and further with the general accusatory invocation of the Intifada (a preeminently Palestinian and anti-Zionist allusion) as all conspiring against what he claims to be his permanent popularity with the American people (going beyond even the contingency of loss or win in an Election). The French philosopher Alain Badiou has recently brought out a series of text which are called texts of praise: In Praise of Love, In Praise of Theatre, In Praise of Politics (Badiou & Truong, 2008, 2012). In fact these texts are actually interviews that Badiou gave to his interlocutors Nicholas Truong, Aude Lacelin. Badiou’s use of the protocol of praise is signifcant in that it refers to the generic collective capacity for infnite human thought rather than the secondary activity of narrating, describing or even “praising” an infnite object whose provenance transcends human fnitude. A part of the poem runs as following in the original urdu: Ya Rab, na woh samjhe hain, na samjhenge meri baat/de aaur dil unko jo na de mujhko zubaan aaur.

References Agamben, G. (2019). Creation and Anarchy, trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ambedkar, B. R. (1979). Thoughts on Pakistan. In V. Moon, ed. BAWS 8. Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra. Badiou, A. (2008). Number and Numbers. Cambridge: Polity Press. Badiou, A. with Truong, N. (2008). In Praise of Theatre. Cambridge: Polity Press. Badiou, A. with Truong, N. (2012). In Praise of Love. London: Serpent’s Tail. Cassin, B. (2014). Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism. New York: Fordham University Press. Foucault, M. (2003). “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador. Garo, I. (2020). Changing Life? Fortunes and Misfortunes of “Biopolitics” in the Age of Covid-19. Crisis and Critique, 7(3), 87–92. Kumar, A. (2015). Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tse-Tung, M. (1967). Quotations from Mao Tse Tung. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch11.htm accessed 14.02.2023. Tynan, K. (2007). Theatre Writings. Mansfeld: Quite Specifc Media Group Ltd.

Chapter 3

Gandhi and the Re-Orientation of Modern Political Theory R. Krishnaswamy

Introduction: Gandhi as a Political Theorist? Can Gandhi talk to modern political problems? We must remember Gandhi was a politician and not a political scientist or a theoretician. He responded to what he thought were tough practical and political situations that presented themselves onto the Indian pre-independent scene. He along with other members of the Congress party were very much involved in the grime and slime of power politics, negotiating deals, making nuanced political stances, and resisting unfavourable power moves by the British administration, etc. Between holding political meetings, and strategizing moves, Gandhi like a lot of other high-profle politicians of that time also found leisure, at diferent stages of his life, to collect his thoughts and refect upon some higher-order political problems. During such intellectual journeys, Gandhi refected on social issues like marriage, caste, and religion, political problems like forms of government in an independent India and ‘spiritual’ matters like swarāj and personal self-restraint.1 I put the word ‘spiritual’ in quotes because unlike how people generally understand ‘spirituality’ now as a kind of a personal mindful practice, for Gandhi a spiritual regeneration was not only personal but also political. For him, spiritual exercises, what he called satyagraha, were a must for any polity to be truly self-governing. Satyagraha was a central idea for Gandhi and I will be talking about it later in this article. Gandhi was never a systematic thinker or collector of ideas. He read widely and in an unstructured way. Apart from reading books on English law, which was required for the training of his profession in England, he would read Plato, Emerson, Tolstoy, Ruskin, and Thoreau as part of his self-education in the western intellectual tradition.2 At the same time, he kept himself up with modern political changes that were happening in India and the new ideas that were simmering in the 19th century and early 20th century from reading (and interacting) with people like Gokhale, Surendra Nath Banerjee, and Naoroji among others. And this he did despite living abroad from the age of 18 till he was 45 years old. And obviously, Gandhi had an abiding interest in Hindu texts like the Bhagavad-Gita throughout his life. So we have in Gandhi a

DOI: 10.4324/9781003259930-4

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thinker and an astute politician who didn’t confne the domain of his political expression merely to words. Activism combined with a form of self-discipline were also vehicles for the expression of Gandhi’s overall political stance. Therefore, as a reader of his work and life, my own task here is not to place the motives of his actions and thoughts within the historical context that necessitated them but to see whether I can glean from some of his actions and thoughts regarding the self and its relation to the world and society, a vocabulary to re-translate the language of political debate that is current, especially around problems of justice. In this article, therefore, I am engaged in the activity of describing what I think are certain modern political problems whose solution, according to me, requires the infusion of certain Gandhian ideas. My method is diferent from the interpretive method which when engaging with the ideas of thinker of the past thinks its job is merely to describe the historical and political context in which those ideas found their expression. My method is also diferent from another technique which lifts diferent ideas from the past and ‘applies’ them to modern problem sets. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. I am not going to go into them here. My approach, to be specifc, will be one of introducing Gandhi’s political idea of satyagraha, and its attendant concepts into a diferent discursive tradition – a tradition that gets its mileage from critiquing liberalism and situating itself as a ‘pragmatic’ solution to the impasse created by modern poliframework. I will also be injecting the modern western critique with my understanding of Greek and Stoic ideas of askesis (and its Foucauldian infections) and how self-generation and embodied existence are mutually imbricated at the conceptual level. The rest of the paper is an attempt to show how and why the Gandhian idea of satyagraha needs to be resuscitated as a political concept. I wish to see if Gandhi and his ideas can help regenerate political theory by solving some of its inherent problems. Whatever intentions Gandhi might have had in using his own concepts and ideas or whatever intellectual sources he dug to come up with his own spin on the idea of satyagraha is not my concern here. That is a task for his intellectual biographer or a historian of ideas. Two Aspects to Political Theories When we review political theories across western intellectual history, right from Plato onwards, we fnd that an abiding object of political study has been the question of justice. In classical times, for example, to acquire the virtue of justice meant being in tune with the political institutions that governed one’s polis. According to Aristotle, whom Leo Strauss calls the “founder of political science because he is the discoverer of moral virtue” (Strauss, 1964, p. 27), the polis (the city) was not merely a geographic entity but was a collection of socio-political institutions which it was the duty of every individual to uphold. The moral aims of a citizen in a polis were clearly set in place by the political community. His duty (I purposely use a ‘he’ because women

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didn’t have any legislative power) was to help the polis attain the highest good possible and through that, indirectly, the individual himself would also attain his highest possible happiness. In modern times though, with the advent of the idea of the individual, with all the slants that modernity gave that idea, the problem of justice came to be expressed in the republican ideal of the right to freedom.3 One would think, going through the history of political realities and theoretical solutions, that maybe David Miller is right when he says that we can’t have one theory of justice for all situations. Diferent socio-economic contexts, he says, put people in diferent networks of power and hierarchy and it is unfair to paint with the same conceptual brush diferent political and historical canvases. He says rightly, ‘justice between friends is not the same as justice between strangers; justice in families is not the same as justice in business enterprises’ (Miller, 2013, p. 5). It looks like diferent senses of justice are at work in diferent situations for diferent people. And sometimes these senses can be completely antagonistic. For example, feminists point out to a certain kind of injustice which occurs within families due to uneven power structures which tend to, because they reinforce heteronormative gender discourses, favour the men as opposed to the women in the family. For Marxists, injustice is evidenced through class antagonism. For multiculturalists, (Kymlicka, 2001) justice is won only when minority rights are acknowledged as a signifcant political measure tool to decide how well institutions are functioning within nations. The capability approach says that injustice is when opportunities are not given for ensuring the development of human capabilities (Nussbaum, 2011; Sen, 2001). And obviously, for liberals, justice is, apart from a host of other things, when there are proper institutional procedures to ensure that rights and opportunities are distributed to as wide a group as possible. These are some of the ways in which the need for justice has been argued for and it is not by any stretch of the imagination an exhaustive list. And I have to admit that the aforementioned characterizations of these different argumentative positions regarding the question of justice are all-toobrief. A deeper study of these multiple argumentative positions could show us in greater detail how one theory or stance is radically opposed to the other and how there are incompatible assumptions that separate one view from the other and so on. But despite underlying diferences, there are certain family resemblances and conceptual aims that unite all the aforementioned political scientists. One thing that unites all the aforementioned theoreticians is a fact a bit too obvious to mention and, mainly because of that, sometimes doesn’t get the philosophical attention that it deserves, viz., that all of the aforementioned thinkers in diferent schools feel that as the world stands, along with its inter-subjective realities, is inherently unjust. Whatever the reason maybe, everyone who comes to political philosophy, either comes with the conviction – or acquires it later – that there is something fundamentally wrong with

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how we interact with each other and with the natural world. I would like to call this the norm-descriptive aspect to theories of justice. I call it the normdescriptive aspect because every thinker who hopes to be a diagnostician of his or her times, either explicitly or implicitly, starts with a description of what is wrong with society as it exists at that point in time. And we know any statement with evaluative terms like ‘wrong’, or expressions like ‘this is not how it should be or ought to be’, are normative statements. From a thinker’s perspective, whenever she says there are certain things wrong with the world, she is describing the world in a certain fashion but through the use of normative vocabulary. The second thing that unites all the various diferent viewpoints regarding the question of justice is how each thinker has a solution to correcting the wrongs of society. The prescribed solution could be in the form of exhorting people to see the truth of certain principles or it could be asking people to adopt certain afective states or, like in the literary description of various utopias, an alternative imaginative picture (of a better society) which by its very self-revelation, through the author, is supposed to convert people. This aspect of political theory I would like to call norm-prescriptive. The reason I call this norm-prescriptive is because thinkers, across the political spectrum, apart from pointing out what is wrong with the present social dispensation, also say how human relations ought to be. Prescriptions as we know are directives as to how people should act. Prescriptions are generally a set of rules which tell people what to do and what not to do. A classic example, and one of the earliest ones, of a set of prescriptive rules would be the decalogue which states what are the things people ought to refrain from doing and the things that people should engage in. It is my claim that all political theories of any hue have both a normdescriptive and a norm-prescriptive side to them. At the heart of this duality in normative theories in general is a conceptual tension. This tension lies under the surface of diferent structures threatening to ruin the success of diferent political ventures and frameworks. One is hindered from making progress in political theory because one is faced with two claims, viz., norms are descriptive as well as prescriptive, which separately makes sense but their conjunction leads to a logical impasse. Let us take the claim that norms are descriptive. By saying norms are descriptive we are pointing to diferent happenings in the social (and natural) world, and are implying that evaluative terms and what they denote exist like other things within the natural world. If I can see for myself what is wrong with, say, two people not being allowed to marry irrespective of religion or gender, and I can also make others see that it is wrong, aren’t moral and normative categories similar to ontological and objective categories like ‘tables’ and ‘chairs’? Just like when I point to tables and chairs and make my friend also see those things for what they are, when I make a moral statement I am specifying certain conditions of verifability which the other person can understand and engage with. So mustn’t moral

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terms also be objective and ‘out there’ because I can equally give conditions of verifability which can make the other person see the moral reality of a situation the same way as I see it? Moreover, just like when I watch a movie I am moved to tears or laughter, there exist real situations whose ‘moral quotient’ so to speak can have a causal impact on my behaviour and can make me be repulsed or feel good, etc. So in the aforementioned ways, norms and normative terms seem to exist in the same world that other objective categories and physical terms do. This is possibly why we are led to think that ethical categories exist and can have real-world efects. Importantly, we use norm-descriptive terms because we are able to describe what is wrong with social reality. And description, as we know from epistemological literature, connotes that what it describes is independent of the terms of that description. On the other hand, theories of justice can also be said to be prescriptive. That is, theories give out rules and directives, which if one follows, can bring about a change in the current state of afairs to something better. There are three underlying assumptions to saying there are prescriptive norms. One, I want to point to a metaphysical assumption which is at play here. The assumption is: change is possible. One can’t be a Parmenidean and believe that there is no change that undergirds the world and still believe in the power of norms to infuence behaviour. I don’t have the space here to go deeper into the validity of this assumption. For our purposes, we will take the claim that the world can be changed and that changes are not illusory at face value. The frst assumption is mentioned only to bracket it out of our consideration for the purposes of our discussion. Two, when it is remarked that one ought to follow norms it is apparent that those norms are capable of having an impact on our behaviour. One can’t have a norm which doesn’t take into consideration the physical possibilities and limitations that the agent, to whom the norm is directed, is supposed to have. I can’t be asked to fy, for example, because I can’t physically fy. This concordance between norms and physical possibility is what is captured in the dictum: an ought implies a can. Three, prescriptive rules dictate not only what kind of change is required but specify the condition of how that change is supposed to happen. A mere change in circumstances by themselves, through purely natural causes, wouldn’t account for a prescriptive rule. It doesn’t make sense for me to order my apple tree to bear fruits in the spring. It will bear fruits anyway. Thus, a necessary condition for rules to act prescriptively is that there be an autonomous agent who brings about through his voluntary actions certain changes in social relations. All these three assumptions are at work in political theories. These presuppositions, which work in the conceptual underground of political theories, is what makes every theorist posit that an individual is a being capable of obedience because she is an autonomous agent capable of bringing in changes in her behavioural disposition.

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Now I would like to come back to elucidating why political theories so far have had to grapple with an inner confict. We had said political theories are fundamentally normative because they describe, as we indicated earlier, the world in evaluative terms and also prescribe rules of action. If it is the case that normative theories provide conditions for people to perceive the world in an evaluative fashion (using moral categories like goodness, justice, evil, etc.) and also give them rules for some form of ‘afrmative’ engaged action, then the conceptual confict that is apparent here is this: how can a person who merely ‘perceives’ the world in a particular fashion be motivated to act on his perception. Moral perception and the conditions that make it possible are, from an epistemological perspective, merely passive states. I call moral perception a passive state (from a psychological perspective, if one were to be more specifc, one can call it a passive cognitive state) because to perceive is to be merely placed within the right conditions for epistemic fulflment. These conditions of fulflment themselves are not something that we can ourselves construct or engineer. It is the passivity of moral perception that I brought out when I said ethico-political theories are norm-descriptive. To be able to describe a situation one only needs to know the correct conditions for the use of moral terms. But merely knowing how to use the correct terms to describe a moral situation doesn’t necessarily mean that one is compelled to act on what one has perceived or described. This behavioural disjunction between a passive (epistemic or cognitive) state to an active-inactive state, which is what leads to a successful following of a prescriptive rule, is a problem that runs like a crack across modern western philosophy starting from Descartes and this is the problem that I wish to attempt to solve through Gandhi’s ideas of political engagement. In the coming sections, I will present some of Gandhi’s ideas and connect them to current political debates on the self and its site of resistance as to solve this impasse that western political theory has found itself in. Gandhi and Satyagraha Satyagraha literally means truth-force. Satya is truth and āgraha is holding onto something with forbearance or force. For Gandhi, satyagraha was an exercise in the pursuit of truth. Gandhi did not interpret truth from an epistemological perspective. For an epistemologist, truth was a cognitive mental state which through the fulflment of certain epistemic conditions became valid. In this cognitive approach, truth was the attainment of a state – the completion of an epistemic journey. Truth, once attained would not be subject to change and would hold for everyone across time and space. This concept was completely alien to Gandhi’s understanding. Gandhi was more interested in the question of how truth ought to be attained. Gandhi was clearly unhappy with the ‘static’ view of truth. According to him, such a view of truth is of western origin. By propagating such a uni-polar view of truth,

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which looked at specifying only the logical and epistemological rules which would make a state of afairs (or a statement) valid, the West ignored the possibility of epistemic plurality. This blindness to the possibility of plurality is seen in many of the administrative decisions that the British took in India in the 19th century. The ideological director of the educational project in India, Macaulay, infamously said that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’. Under his guidance, published through his ‘Minute on Education’ in 1835 (Macaulay, 1935), public support for the education of languages like Arabic and Sanskrit was removed and English education was introduced. What this move, along with other rules that the British brought in, only proved, for Gandhi, the colonial power’s unwarranted conviction in its valuation of its own political project and historical destiny in the 19th and early 20th centuries. For Gandhi, one needs to move away from such kinds of epistemic and political arrogance. The frst step towards the attainment of any kind of truth would be to start from a certain posture of humility gained through honest introspection at the individual level. To introspect would require that you frst see the faults in yourself before you point to how the other could be mistaken. He says, ‘if you want to see God in the form of Ramarajya, the frst requisite is self-introspection. You have to magnify your own faults a thousandfold and shut your eyes to the faults of your neighbours. That is the only way to real progress’ (quoted in Puri, 2015, p. 149). For Gandhi, there was a certain violence in the engagement of people with each other when people jostle to privilege, through diferent methods, their own understanding of truth without realizing that the other person could also be right. Gandhi was by no means a moral relativist. He didn’t believe that everyone was right in their own way and that moral categories don’t make sense or at best are valid only to the person believing it.4 At the heart of Gandhi’s view on truth was his deep conviction that there is a certain interpersonal deference, exemplifed in non-violent (ahimsa) ways of personal interaction, which needs to motivate the collective journey that any society or nation must take to attain their true nature or essence. At the end of that journey, one would reach the true nature of governing oneself (individual or collective) which Gandhi would come to call swarāj or freedom. Swarāj can be translated as self-rule or as a sense of freedom. This semantic ambivalence within the idea of swarāj – to either mean self-rule or freedom – might make one be tempted to fnd Kantian analogies to the concept of swarāj. Wasn’t it Kant who equated freedom with the ability of individuals to give rules (or maxims) to themselves to govern their actions? Wasn’t he the one to shout ‘Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding’ (Schmidt, 1996, p. 58)? For Kant, only when people can be said to have one’s own laws, will they be in an enlightened state of freedom. But Gandhi’s own idea of swarāj is very diferent from this. Gandhi didn’t

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believe in the Kantian ideal that freedom meant the ability to have autonomous rules of collective action. Gandhi’s own ideas regarding freedom/self-rule (swarāj) came through his own reading of various philosophical and religious tracts.5 Gandhi studied works like the Yoga-Sutra, Sankhya-Yoga and the Bhagavad-Gita and other writings from the Hindu philosophical tradition. The essence that he drew from these various philosophical tracts led him to believe in the distinction between the self and the atman. The atman was the whole of Brahman (the divine essence) that existed in each individual while the self was the psychological cloak over that atman. Each self through its psychological manifestation had its own dispositions, desires, wishes, and temperament. The moral purpose of each individual in life was to remove the selfsh (Ahaṃkāra) tendencies of the psychological self that pulled a person away from the reality that exists. The more an individual submerged himself/herself in selfsh desires the more he/she accrued karmic weight. The goal of each self was to rid itself of its karmic accretions. These karmic efects that get attached to the self through its multiple incarnations throughout history are part of being an earthly creature. But it was the duty of each person to try and free himself/ herself from this so as to attain moksha. This in short was how Gandhi’s metaphysics revealed itself – a worldview which he frmly believed in. As he says in a short article in Young India, when he describes his mission in life, he says, ‘I am a humble seeker after truth. I am impatient to realize myself, to attain moksha in this very existence’ (Gandhi, 2020, p. 17). Though Gandhi would imbibe such views on the self, his own take on the duties of the self was not to renounce one’s commitment to one’s neighbours but to engage in acts of care and sympathy with them. For Gandhi, the state of moksha (freedom) can be attained only through non-violence. To attain swarāj (swarāj or moksha, for Gandhi, there were interchangeable), one had to follow the truth which is to act compassionately towards the other, so as to ‘know’ the other better. That is why he says in the same article, For me the road to salvation lies through incessant toil in the service of my country and therethrough of humanity. I want to identify myself with everything that lives, In the language of the Gita I want to live at peace with both friend and foe. (Gandhi, 2020, p. 17) Active service to the other can only be possible for Gandhi through one’s self-restraint. Self-restraint was necessary because by practising a form of self-discipline, that is, by taking ascetic vows, one can remove one’s selfsh attachment towards things that merely serve the self and not the inner atman, whose universal quality gets occluded the more we indulge in ourselves. It may seem paradoxical that to engage with the other, a person must be ready

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to take difcult vows (vrata) for oneself. For Gandhi, vows were necessary paths for diferent aims that Gandhi would call brahmacarya, Śauca (purity of mind and body), or atma-vinigraha (self-control) – Gandhi’s book on selfcontrol)6 so as to produce certain somatic efects on oneself. But we must remember that for Gandhi, our natural condition is animalistic and therefore tends to violence. An ethical consequence of this view for Gandhi was that each person had a duty to try and overcome the violence that is inherent in each of us. And such overcoming is a difcult task because it requires the calming of our desires and the re-direction of our aims towards larger social causes. By self-restraint, or to use another word that Gandhi would use, tapas, Gandhi meant a voluntary control of the body and desires. By controlling one’s desires, one is obviously putting one’s body through some pain. Tapas from an etymological perspective meant more or less the same thing as putting oneself through pain. Tapa means heat and tapasya was a form of putting something through heat, that is, to subject a thing to something that is very uncomfortable for it. We must also keep in mind that all of these ideas that Gandhi borrowed from classical Hindu sources were interpreted by him so that they could fulfl a social function. Tapasya had a two-fold function for Gandhi. One, to engage in tapas was to control one’s own emotions so that when presented with a person whose views were diferent one doesn’t become prone to express an immediate reaction of disgust or hatred. Two, by controlling one’s emotions, you are opening up the possibility for yourself that your own ethical stance could be mistaken and might require revision in light of your interaction with others. Through self-control, I dis-engage my emotions from my belief states. By doing so, I am not so attached to the truth of my own worldview. Though our lives are determined by our moral worldview and our everyday lives are guided by the set of large purposes we give ourselves, an important outcome of tapas is to enable us to develop the moral quality of self-sacrifce to gain the possibility of empathy with the other. Engaging in a form of self-sacrifce (I am using tapas, self-sacrifce, and self-restraint interchangeably) is a very difcult act. It requires a huge amount of courage (abhaya) and struggle to be able to attain such a non-violent state. If one is successful in gaining that courage, through years of practice, then what one is able to do is to bring about social transformation through ahimsa. A true ahimsavadi would be someone who would be emotionally indiferent to the existence of multiple and contrarian worldviews. Not only that, through his/her self-control, he/she will be an example to everyone as to how to express moral fortitude in the face of opposition. And as an exemplar of moral courage, people who come in contact with him/her would slowly lose the idea that there is only one moral truth that is universal and that everyone must obey that or be in danger of perpetuating error or evil. An ahimsavadi when he meets someone who aggressively wants to impose their own moral, social and civilizational rules on you, like the British did to the Indians, then

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the duty of the ahimsavadi would be to be steadfast in being non-violent. By experiencing frst-hand how non-violent resistance works, the aggressive person (in Gandhi’s case, the British) would automatically begin to doubt their own sense of ethical superiority and thus together both of them would take the frst step towards moral transformation. That is why Gandhi believed that the pursuit of swarāj meant both selfpurifcation and active service to the other. In a way, these two methods to attain swarāj were two sides of the same coin for him. The reason that selfcare practices (like self-restraint) were so important for Gandhi to be able to empathize with the other was because, according to him, the basic condition for engaging with the other will have to be from a standpoint of personal humility. This humility is a cultivated habit with afective potential. Humility is not merely a cognitive state of feeling that one could be mistaken in one’s epistemic attitudes. To be truly introspective and humble would require that one identifes oneself with all humans not only in their state of joy (ananda) but more crucially identify with their sufering (dukkha).7 In the seminal text of Gandhi, Hind-Swaraj, Gandhi makes connections between India’s need for political need for home rule to the individual spiritual need to attain the state of freedom. Swaraj did not mean the institutional set-up of fair rules of self-governance for Gandhi, as would be for modern liberal philosophers. For Swaraj to be a true political condition for India, he believed, each individual of that nation had to submit themselves to selfrestraint. True freedom would come to India only if each individual attained self-rule. That is why he says, ‘the outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inner freedom to which we may have grown at any given moment. And if this is the correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within’ (quoted in Puri, 2015, p. 140). An Alternative Framework We have come to the last section where I hope to do the unravelling (denoeuement) of the conceptual knots (noeuds) I had indicated earlier. In the earlier section, we saw some of Gandhi’s ideas of spiritual self-generation and political freedom. Spiritual engagement, for Gandhi, is both engagement with oneself as well as with the other. In this section, I am going to talk about how Gandhi’s own project of satyagraha, a project which has close afnities with western antiquity’s notion of askesis,8 can help us begin to talk about an alternative political framework. In the section earlier to the last one, I had presented a key dilemma that modern political theories face. The dilemma can be expressed succinctly in the aporia that if I know what is right (and wrong), am I necessarily compelled to do what is right (and avoid what is wrong)? There is a disjunction here between knowing and acting, believing and performing. This is a problematic dialectic that does call out for a review

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and a possible solution as well. In the rest of the section, I will attempt to draw, brief though it will be, a way out of this maze. Gandhi’s own ideas of satyagraha, tapasya, vrata, etc. have the kernel for a possible solution to the dilemma, which I had outlined, that runs across political theories. Towards achieving that aim, I wish to place Gandhi’s own project within a larger political discourse, which draws its concepts of selfcare, truth, courage, etc. from the Greek and Roman practices of askesis (Hadot, 1995, pp. 291–292). Askesis which literally in Greek means ‘exercise’ was a form of emotional and bodily preparation to confront struggles in life that was recommended in classical Greek times. The reason that a regime for emotional preparedness was felt to be important then was partly conditioned by people’s understanding of their psychological makeup. During antiquity, the received common opinion, or to put it more accurately, the folk-psychological understanding, was that each individual was a theatre of internal battles (Foucault, 1988, p. 67; Hadot, 1997, p. 83). The metaphor of battle served to designate the constant struggles that each individual had to undergo to keep his desires and pleasures under control. Just like exercises kept one’s body ft to face any hurdle in the world, askesis was supposed to keep an individual, through the constant engagement of his desires, ready to gain the ability to engage in his social duties (Dodds, 1951, p. 140). One had to be constantly at vigil with one’s own emotions and other non-cognitive states, in order not to cave into one’s untoward emotions. To give ourselves an idea as to what kind of practices were recommended as part of a therapeutic-somatic regime we have a list from Philo of Alexandria (1st century CE). The list includes engaging in activities like research (zetesis), thorough investigation (skepsis), reading (anagnosis), listening (akroasis), and attention (prosoche) (as listed in Hadot, 1997, p. 84). What all these prescriptions for exercises did was to instil in an individual the necessary education to be a proper member of one’s polis. Education (paideia) during antiquity, we must keep in mind, was not the imbibing of diferent skills alone. We may think of education today as a necessary way of equipping ourselves with the skill sets that are required for the successful conducting of our lives. These skills themselves are supposed to be codifed according to diferent rules and laws and they are believed to get their justifcation from diferent theoretical disciplines. And to be successful in life generally means today to be rational, that is, aim for goals that are both plausible and self-serving in the long run. But an important diference separates our understanding of education from the ancients. For the ancients, a skill (techne) was not something that could be separated from the practitioner of that skill – least of all could it be codifed into theoretical laws. A techne was something each person embodied (to a greater or a lesser extent). This embodied-pragmatic interpretation of techne was very crucial for the intellectual vision of someone like Socrates, who was one of the pre-eminent philosophers of the 5th century BCE and through his infuence on Plato

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had a decisive infuence in the turning that the intellectual tradition took after the 4th century BCE.9 Socrates despised, or at best was indiferent, to philosophy as it was done by the Pre-Socratics. For the Pre-Socratics, natural phenomena constituted the proper aim of knowledge (sophia). The PreSocratics like Thales and Anaximander were involved in cosmological and physical explanations of things and ‘what the old philosophers had called knowledge was really philosophical hypotheses about the universe-which, for Socrates, [meant] cloudcapped fantasy, gorgeous nonsense’ (Jaeger & Highet, 1939, p. 32). Someone like Socrates was not interested in high-fying theories regarding the origin of things or the cosmos. For him, the highest form of knowledge was contained in the technique (in the classical Greek sense) of cultivating the self because that is the best form of knowledge one could get. It was knowledge that was both embodied and directed at oneself. Such kinds of knowledge put a person closer to being himself than the mere imitation of others and their practices. Any knowledge has to have some immediate impact on behaviour; otherwise, it is not knowledge at all for Socrates. That is why, ‘his ideal of knowledge was τέχνη [techne], which was best exemplifed in the art of healing, especially because that art had a practical aim in view’ (Jaeger & Highet, 1939, pp. 32–33). In medical practice, the aim was direct – to produce a change in the body – to change the sick body to a healthy one. This kind of praxis was able to produce afective changes within oneself.10 Socrates’ idea of self-care had analogies with medical practice. A good self was that which could fnd out what was wrong with itself and administer the right ‘medicine’ and change itself for the better. For Socrates, thus, a good polis or political structure is that which allows for self-cultivation. Self-cultivation is not merely the cultivation of our interests and freedom to be oneself, nor should self-cultivation be equated with rights that a government is supposed to give me so I can lead my own life. Self-cultivation as we saw is a difcult act because to introspect and be vigilant against oneself in a way is to be ready to watch over one’s own inner instincts. Moreover, self-cultivation is a somatic exercise which is supposed to have efects on one’s afective attitudes towards oneself and others. It is not a passive state of letting oneself ‘develop’ or ‘gong with the fow’. Socrates realized that we are both natural beings driven by our drives and instincts as well as political beings who have the ability to take care of ourselves – to ‘rein in the horses’ (to use Plato’s metaphor in the Republic) – when the need arises through diferent therapeutic exercises. I have so far juxtaposed Gandhi’s own practice of satyagraha and Socrates’ ideal of ‘knowing thyself’ as a spiritual/somatic quest, I hope to put in service their ideas, with certain underlying mutual similarities, within my own framework of problems and assumptions. My own arguments and questions related to what political theory can and cannot do are situated around what I understand to be a crisis within the development of modern political theories. To repeat, my central concern is how to solve the problematic divide between

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action and motivation, obedience and governance, obligation and norms. Here we can fnd that both Gandhi and ancient philosophical practices of askesis can look help us look at the self as a locus of both resistance and production. In a way, the self through its very exercises of looking at itself and engaging with caring for itself resists, on the one hand, the multiple ideological and epistemic infuences that might try and constrain its behaviour, and on the other, through self-care, and the ability to be always vigil against the overpowering social determining factors, has the power to ‘create’ its own identity. A central point I want to take away from my discussion of both Gandhi and ideas of the self from antiquity is that we as agents within a polis to function properly need some kind of ethical integrity. But this integrity consists of our own self-refective moral, social and epistemic categories. My integrity is built up of the beliefs I have about myself, the values that I hold dear and the desires and aims I have in life. Just like my physical integrity – which is made up of fesh, sinews, bones, etc. at the biological level – needs to be renewed every day, my ethical integrity needs to be re-produced on a daily basis for me to be able to act as a conscionable member of political society. Again, just like physical integrity is at constant risk of being eroded without my active intervention in maintaining my life, my ethical integrity is also constantly at risk of being taken over by political and social forces. That is why, as much as physical life requires that I maintain my physical body to help me lead a normal healthy life, I need to be internally vigilant (prosoche) or take vows (vrata) to maintain my sense of ethical self. Unfortunately, it is the nature of our existence that as soon as we are born there are forces that are at play which tend to invade us, both physically and ethically. By ‘ethical invasion’, I mean how our consciousness becomes an agential node in a network of socio-political relations even before we acquire a social consciousness.11 We are already pre-formed to acquire one set of beliefs and practices if we are born in part of the world and another set if we are born in another part of the world. Thus, our ‘identity’ seems to be confgured much earlier than we even acquire self-refective or linguistic faculties. In Foucauldian terms, we can say the self is constituted through large structures of knowledge practices or epistemological frameworks, which Foucault called episteme (Foucault, 2000). We may fnd ourselves hemmed in by multiple forms of power and this is especially true in modern times, when the sphere for personal creative action seems highly limited. Modernity and the political framework that comes with modernity has inherited Kant’s dictum that to be free one must be able to create maxims for oneself that one can follow. Modern nation-states with its idea of individual freedom, human rights, etc. have followed Kant’s philosophy and made his ideas the basis for modern political democracy (Arendt, 1973, pp. 295–299). For Kant, freedom is a form of autonomous obedience in the sense that a person is free as long as she obeys rules that she herself has formed. For Kant

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and therefore for modern ideas of the person, a self is someone whose reasons for actions are supposed to have a certain internal conceptual correlate. These reasons are supposed to be exhibited through the manifestation of concepts which constitute rules for self-action. Thus, a self is supposed to have a certain moral content, that is, certain implicit rules of action, that can be epistemically accessed by that person, for society to count that person as a legitimate member of a polity. But this idea of the self presupposes there to be a person one needs to have contentful mental states. But once we allow the possibility of a self with a content (whether it is moral or epistemic) so to speak, we are on the path to the skeptical impasse that I had delineated earlier. We are faced then with insoluble questions like these: If a self has content, how does it relate to non-contentful beings, like other sentient organisms in the world? How can an individual convert his non-contentful states (behavioural dispositions) into rational or moral dictates? Thus is born the whole skeptical problem of the relation between belief and action, theory and praxis. What Gandhi’s own ideas regarding satyagraha and the need for selfrestraint, etc. shows is that according to him the duty of a self is to show epistemic humility through emptying oneself of all our desires and emotions. These emotions and desires tend to make us intolerant towards the opinion of others and thus become violent towards diferences. To tolerate the other is not merely an application of the harm principle which lets the other believe what they want and do what they want as long as it doesn’t produce disharmony in society. For Gandhi, we would need a ‘Gestalt switch’ in our understanding of our selves and the constituting forces behind it. Such a shift is a must before we can hope to be proper members of society, that is, members who can deal with each other in a non-violent way. To function politically, each member must gain ethical integrity. This ethical integrity is therefore not a function of flling up life with contentful moral actions but can only be attained through rigorous exercises in a kind of self-emptying. This act of self-emptying in medieval theology was called kenosis.12 The modern subject, I would like to argue, fully aware of the theological undertones of the act of kenosis, needs to be an ‘empty’ self, and not the homo faber who in recent political philosophy has been given the identity of individualism. The political advantage of having a self that is auto-directed and is involved in an exercise to empty moral content is that by involving itself in these exercises the self can resist heteronomous political forces. By fashioning a transparent identity, a kenotic subject can fulfl its political function of having the courage to speak the truth (parrhesia) at all times.13 Notes 1 Some of his writings on religion, caste, marriage, etc. have been extracted from his diferent writings and published as separate books. One book called Conquest of Self (Gandhi, 1943) is a selection of his essays on topics like ‘the Ideal Marriage’, ‘Birth Control’, ‘Equal Rights for Women’, etc. Another book more recently

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10 11 12 13

R. Krishnaswamy published called What is Hinduism (2017) contains topics like ‘What is Hinduism’, ‘Hinduism of Today’, ‘Hindu-Muslim Tension: Its Causes and Cure’, etc. As Gandhi says in his Autobiography (Gandhi, 2018, p. 166) that his own legal education was not complete without studying works like Broom’s Common Law, Snell’s Equity, White and Tudor’s Leading Cases, among others. Also read Anthony Parel’s introduction to Hind Swaraj (Gandhi, 1997). Parel talks there about the diferent intellectual sources that provided Gandhi ideas and inspiration. At diferent stages of his life, Gandhi would state his indebtedness to the works of people like Tolstoy, Emerson and Thoreau. Though Republican ideals of freedom were said to exist even during Romans times, ‘it is in the English and American developments of the republican heritage that the polarized language of freedom and servitude, freeman and slave, really comes into its own’ (Pettit, 1999, p. 32). For more on the history of republicanism as an idea, read Pettit (Pettit, 1999, pp. 17–50). Akeel Bilgrami also supports this view. He says, rightly, one mustn’t read Gandhi as a relativist who came to believe in non-violence because of lack of foundational truths (Bilgrami 105). Please do read (Puri, 2015, pp.  33–66) detailed analysis of how Gandhi’s own ideas of satyagraha were infuenced by Pantanjali Yoga’s and Sankhya-Yoga’s concepts of virtue. Also read Bhikhu Parekh’s account of how Gandhi’s intellectual development were enriched by his reading of Hindu texts and philosophical tracts (Parekh, 1989, pp.  65–84). My own understanding of Gandhi’s philosophical sources is indebted to these authors’ commentary. Read Ananya Vajpayee (Vajpeyi, 2012, pp. 65–79) for a more detailed analysis of how Gandhi’s ideas were connected to the classical Hindu religio-philosophical tradition. For more on this, read (Parekh, 1989, p. 106). For afnities between Gandhi and stoic ideals of self-care practices, look at (Sorabji, 2012). In modern political philosophy, the person who was instrumental in bringing the discussion of Greek and Stoic ideals of askesis was Foucault. See his Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure. (Foucault, 1988). Even though somebody like Nietzsche would fnd Socrates to be a ‘questionable’ phenomenon did admit in his book The Birth of Tragedy that ‘one cannot do other than regard Socrates as the vortex and turning-point of so-called world history’ (Nietzsche, 1999, p. 74). This probably explains why at diferent points in the dialogues such as Apology, Crito and Phaedo, Socrates would compare the soul needing a doctor because it was sick. Foucault talks about both the repressive efect of modern power as well as the ‘productive’ side to modern networks of power (Foucault, 1995). For more on the theological idea of kenosis, look up (Dubilet, 2018). To speak the truth (parrhesia) is not merely being free to say what you believe in or think. It is the freedom to be able to self-fashion one’s self in the way that can guide one’s behaviour. For more on this, read (Foucault, 2010, pp. 61–74).

References Arendt, H. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism (New ed.). San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Dodds, E. R. (1951). The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Dubilet, A. (2018). The Self-emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern. New York: Fordham University Press.

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Foucault, M. (1988). The History of Sexuality II: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (2000). The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (2010). The Government of Self and Others. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gandhi, M. K. (1943). Conquest of Self: Being Gleanings from His Speeches. Bombay: Thacker&Co Ltd. Gandhi, M. K. (1869–1948). (1997). Hind Swaraj and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gandhi, M. K. (2018). An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth (translated from the original in Gujarati by Mahadev Desai). New Haven: Yale University Press. Gandhi, M. K. (2020). What is Hinduism. New Delhi: National Public Trust Publications. Hadot, P. (1995). Qu’est-Ce Que la Philosophie Antique. Paris: Gallimard. Hadot, P. (1997). Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase. Oxford: Blackwell. Jaeger, W. (1939). Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, by Werner Jaeger, trans. Gilbert Highet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kymlicka, W. (2001). Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macaulay, T. B. M. (1935). Speeches by Lord Macaulay with His Minute on Indian Education, ed. G. M. Young. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, D. (2013). Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. W. (1999). The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings/Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Raymond Geuss & Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Parekh, B. C. (1989). Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination/Bhikhu Parekh. London: Macmillan. Pettit, P. (1999). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Puri, B. (2015). The Tagore-gandhi Debate on Matters of Truth and Untruth. New Delhi: Springer. Schmidt, J. (1996). What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions/James Schmidt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sen, A. (2001). Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sorabji, R. (2012). Gandhi and the Stoics: Modern Experiments on Ancient Values. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strauss, L. (1964). The City and Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vajpeyi, A. (2012). Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chapter 4

Freedom, Self and Truth The ‘Liberty’ in Liberalism Lakshmi Arya Thathachar

At the heart of political liberalism is the idea of freedom or liberty. In this paper, I unpack the liberal notion of freedom and posit that it is of a piece with the problematisation of freedom in the larger Western intellectual tradition. To say that there is such a thing as a unifed ‘Western’ intellectual ‘tradition’ invites criticisms, which I will address in the paper. One such criticism is that any tradition of thought is internally diverse and heterogeneous, and defes easy unifcation: There are many Wests (as there are many Indias). For instance, it is argued that the modern, secular tradition of the West is diferent from its theological tradition. Another criticism is that the boundaries between intellectual traditions are porous, given the dialogue between them, over the ages. They do not lend themselves to strict demarcation. I posit, in this paper, that an intellectual tradition provides a coherent setting for the formulation of questions or intellectual problems. In other words, within an intellectual tradition, questions are posed and answers are invited. This creates a feld of debate that has coherence as system. The pre-suppositions that underpin the questions are, however, ‘outside’ of the system and underpin them. How does the Western intellectual tradition problematise the question of freedom and what pre-suppositions about the human actor and knower underpin this problematisation? I join the dots across various modern, secular schools of thought – liberalism, Marxism, feminism – to show what they share in common in their refection on freedom. I also challenge the dichotomy between the secular-political and the religious registers of freedom in Western thought, by excavating their shared presuppositions. To develop a comparative perspective, I examine the problematisation of freedom in the classical Indian traditions, and the fundamental diference they present to the Western story about freedom. Part 1: The Idea of an Intellectual Tradition What Is an Intellectual Tradition? Once, while teaching a class on free will and determinism, I was asked by a student where I stood on this philosophical problem. I answered that this DOI: 10.4324/9781003259930-5

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question (of free will) was not important to me. It may seem odd to dismiss a problem that has occupied philosophers in the West for over two thousand years so summarily; a problem on which other important questions, such as those of agency and moral responsibility rest. This, however, is the focus of this paper. I want to ask: What becomes a question or problem for a group of people to ponder over, debate, and seeks answers to, and why? On what do they write treatises, on what do they argue? Indeed, on what do they disagree? For, the answers given may be disputatious and contradictory. However, what unites an intellectual tradition is not the many answers that it gives, but the questions that it formulates as worthy of consideration. I have introduced here the term ‘intellectual tradition’. An intellectual tradition, I posit, provides a coherent setting for formulating questions. I illustrate this contention by taking up the question of free will and its centrality to the Western intellectual tradition. In fact, I want to show that in western thought, the question of free will cannot be separated from the question of what it means to be human. The roots of the free will question are theological. Freedom/liberty in the Western intellectual tradition is freedom of the will. I also demonstrate that the Indian intellectual tradition does not problematise free will when pondering on the nature of human action or indeed, freedom. I shall use the idea of a system to elaborate on the notion of an intellectual tradition. Crucial to systems thinking is the notion that all parts of a system are inter-connected. Imagine the human body as a system: the diferent parts/ organs do not work in isolation. Each is linked to the other.1 A human body is an example of a biological system; there are non-biological systems as well: For example, the several parts of a car make up a system too. There are systems where both abiotic and biotic components interact, such as an ecosystem. The inter-connectedness of the parts distinguishes a system from a set. A set is a grouping of objects with similar properties. For instance, a set of felines can include a cheetah, a tiger, a lion, a puma, a tabby and so on. However, the objects in the set do not interact with one another. (Unless these felines were placed together in an ecosystem, where they would interact with other animate and inanimate components of the system as well.) The parts of a system do. Thus, we understand a system holistically (as opposed to pulling apart its parts and analysing them). When these individual parts of a system are put together, the system as a whole has a property, which is greater than the properties of its individual components. Since such a property only emerges when the parts are put together and interact, it is called an emergent property.2 The system I am talking about is not a material system; it is not made of animate or inanimate material parts. Imagine instead a system consisting of beliefs: All the beliefs in the system are linked to one another inferentially. This calls for some explanation. When we make an inference, we proceed from certain premises to a conclusion. For instance, if I see smoke on the hill, I infer that there must be a fre on the hill. From the observation that there is smoke on the hill, I come to a belief (justifed through inference) that there is also fre on the

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hill. This is an example of an inference that is often cited in Nyaya (Sarukkai, 2005, pp. 43–52). The structure of reasoning or justifcation is as follows: Premise 1: There is smoke on the hill. Premise 2: Smoke and fre always occur together simultaneously in the same place. Conclusion: Therefore, there is fre on the hill. The conclusion is justifed and true, if the premises are true.3 I draw on BonJour’s coherentist view of empirical justifcation to explain how justifcation works within a system. BonJour’s view is holistic, that is, he does not analyse individual beliefs, but sees the system as a whole as the unit of justifcation. In other words, the beliefs in a system refer to one another in circles or loops. The imagination here is circular and not linear. If it were linear, there would be a foundational belief/s, let’s say beliefs A and B, which would serve as the premises for conclusion C. Beliefs C and D would then be the premises for conclusion F, and so on. This leaves us with the problem of infnite regress. In a coherentist perspective, there is no originary or starting (foundational belief) (Christias, 2015). The system, therefore, hangs together and sustains a certain idea of truth (say, about what human nature is). In place of beliefs, let us substitute questions and answers, and the feld of debates they engender. An intellectual tradition has internal coherence because answers are proposed to the questions that are formulated. This feld of interlocking questions and answers engenders debates within the tradition. Further to this hypothesis, I suggest that the questions that are salient to one intellectual tradition may simply not be so to another. Thus, we can distinguish between intellectual traditions in terms of the questions they problematise. It may be pertinent here to ask why an intellectual tradition problematises some questions and not others; what accounts for this epistemic diference? Many philosophers have argued that the roots of Western thought are Christian.4 Philosophy was overtly theological until the Middle Ages: It was the pursuit of monks in monasteries. Post-Reformation and Renaissance, it comes to us in its secularised forms, that is, with its theological roots hidden under the ground (Balagangadhara, 1994). Western philosophy, therefore, gets its questions from Christian theology. There are certain criticisms that I anticipate the hypothesis would draw. I address these in the next sub-section. Criticisms Essentialism What does it mean to speak of an intellectual tradition and what difculties beset such speaking? One obvious criticism is that such demarcation is essentialist. Can we draw a boundary around an intellectual tradition and say that

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this is Indian, this Western? Is such a boundary stable? An intellectual tradition can be destabilised both from within and from without. INSTABILITY FROM WITHOUT

Boundaries are porous and intellectual traditions have had contact with one another through various means: migration, education, travel, colonialism, the mobility of the written word after printing, and globalisation. We have all been exposed to other ways of thinking; of posing new questions, seeking new answers. Even if we were to slice out the last hundred years of world history, it would bear testimony to this. International history, the history of relations between nation-states in the modern period, has many aspects. The relations between nations have been economic, political and cultural. They have also been intellectual. There are many instances of this impact of thought across borders. Martin Luther King read and was infuenced by Gandhi. Saloth Sar, who later called himself Pol Pot, was one of the Khmer students who studied in Paris in the 1940s, while his country (Cambodia) was a French colony. In Paris on a scholarship provided by the French colonial government, he joined the French Communist Party and together with a few other Khmer students formed a study circle to read Marxist texts (Gough, 1986). Mao too belonged to one such study circle in China, in Beijing University; a study group formed in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, to read Marx and Lenin. Both Pol Pot and Mao went on to shape the political and ideological destinies of their nations. Mao, someone who never left his homeland, China, until the winter of 1949, when he paid Moscow a visit, was infuenced by currents of thought in distant Russia. As I said, these are instances from only the last 100 years. Throughout human history, ideas and thoughts have travelled. Such exchange happens, for instance, when we sit today in a classroom and read what Marx or Freud thought. With the increasing internationalisation of education, students have greater ease in mobility and are able to travel to other parts of the world and have a dialogue. We have come a long way from the days of Fa-Hien, who walked from China to India in the ffth century AD, crossing snow and mountains – on foot, no less – to visit Buddisht sites and collect texts. There are, no doubt, concerns about what internationalisation of education has meant. From where does knowledge fow, to where? What centres and peripheries are formed in this (unequal) exchange? Has internationalisation of education created a genuine dialogue, or resulted in a monologue, as the West exports its knowledge to other parts of the world? (Unkule, 2019) These are questions, though valid, I don’t want to address here. In the present, printing has made it easier for texts to travel, without people having to do so. Textual mobility has reached dimensions in the contemporary world, which makes journeys redundant. Even a walk to the library

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may increasingly become unnecessary. Over time, groups of people who have migrated (or been forced to migrate) to other parts of the world – as slave labour, as prisoners, as refugees, in search of jobs, or education – have taken with them their refections and absorbed those of others. In short, questions have travelled, just as forms of food, music and dance have. They have copulated with other practices and produced mongrel forms of food, music, dance and much else. When pizza travels to Japan, sea food becomes a topping; in India, paneer does. Everything is a hybrid, just as we are. We have all migrated; even our identities are hyphenated. Ideas and thoughts are no exception to this. In light of this hybridity, to claim that there is an authentic and pure intellectual tradition, with boundaries intact, seems to come close to a dangerous nationalism, albeit of an intellectual variety: An intellectual nationalism to add to the existing kinds of economic, political and cultural forms of the phenomenon. Such a position of ‘Indian’ diference could lend itself to right-wing, nationalistic ideas of ‘Hindu India’. It could slip into a narrative of origins: the original/originary age (of the Hindus), lost and destroyed by the coming of others: the Christians, the Muslims, the Parsees, the Others. It could invent golden age histories of India before she fell to outsiders, intellectually too. It could feed into Us-and-Them binaries. In right-wing politics across the world, the Us/Them binary usually translates into a tightening of borders against ‘outsiders’. This fencing of of others takes all too familiar forms: Stricter visa regulations regulating ‘their’ entry into ‘our’ national borders. Disallowing immigrants who take away ‘our’ jobs, so that only home-grown nurses, doctors, and so on, may work within the nation. Military aggression against ‘outsiders’, who may lurk both inside and outside the boundaries of the nation-state: the secessionists, the terrorists. Also, those who look, eat, pray and love diferently from Us, even within our national borders. To speak of a diference that is essentially Indian in the face of this phenomenon may seem epistemically fawed and politically dubious. INSTABILITY FROM WITHIN

In the paragraphs earlier, I have outlined the historical processes by which intellectual traditions have interacted with and enriched one another. These are external processes of change and growth. An intellectual tradition can also be fraught internally. Individuals and social groups within an intellectual tradition may pose diferent questions. For instance, women may ask diferent questions of the world, on the basis of their experience. Likewise, the working classes, or the youth. Whose questions get heard, and whose get silenced? While there may be diferences between intellectual traditions, as I propose, there are also diferences within them, often laden with power. This is the political layer of the anti-essentialist critique: One that asserts that only those who are in power can aford to be indiferent to diference.

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Whose questions make up the ‘Indian intellectual tradition’? The questions of the Brahmin, male, heterosexual thinkers? What of tribal or Dalit intellectual traditions? Or women’s intellectual traditions? Do these traditions pose diferent questions? And if they do, can I still use the nomer ‘Indian intellectual tradition’, or does the catholicity of this category get destabilised; chipped away from within, by the many traditions that make up India and are possibly dissenting traditions. As any good postmodernist would argue, there are many Wests and many Indias. For instance, within modern Western philosophy, there are the Analytic and Continental traditions. No intellectual tradition is monolithic: It is disaggregated, plural and internally diverse. Secularisation? In addition to essentialism, other critiques are possible. Many would probably take issue with the contention that the Western intellectual tradition is rooted in Christian theology, which gives it its unity. This proposition may sound counter-intuitive given that many intellectual and political movements of the modern West have been anti-thetical to Christianity: Feminism, queer theory and other epistemes have had an uneasy relationship with Christianity. Not to mention modern science and its challenge to the Christian explanation of the universe. Or, the re-discovery of the pre-Christian, pagan, Graeco-Roman intellectual world during the Renaissance and its profound impact on modern European thinking and institutions – democracy, law, etc. The last of these is an example of the exchange between two intellectual traditions: the Christian and the Graeco-Roman. Overlaps Between Traditions The demarcation between intellectual traditions on the basis of the questions they problematise can be challenged in another way. There are questions and questions, and diferent branches of philosophy engage with them. For instance, epistemology deals with the question, ‘what is knowledge?’ Moral philosophy refects on questions of right and wrong. And so on. In the plethora of questions, is it not possible that some questions would be common to intellectual traditions; that some questions are universal, for example, the question of truth? There are also questions that are concerned with ‘this world’, the world of matter that we inhabit, and those that refect on the ‘other world’, that which transcends the material domain – the world of Gods, spirits, and the afterlife. We may call one domain of inquiry ‘secular’ and the other ‘religious’ or ‘theological’. There can be overlaps in the ‘secular’ domains of inquiry in the Indian and Western traditions. To substantiate the claim that there might be universal philosophical issues across traditions, let us shift our focus from the questions posed to looking at the methods by which we go about fnding answers to them. All inquiries

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begin with a question. We want to know: What, when, why, how? (Why does the spoon appear bent in water? When did time begin?) If we go about fnding answers to these questions systematically, we may say that we have used a method to arrive at conclusions. This method can include empirical observation (relying on the senses), reasoning, the testimony of reliable sources, and so on. Western epistemology and philosophy of science explores these methods of justifcation. The Indian school of Nyaya too talks of the pramanas, the evidentiary means by which we may justify that we have knowledge. The Nyayikas classify these as pratyaksha (that which is seen, or perceptible to our senses), anumana (logical inferences), sabda (testimony), mainly (Sarukkai, 2005). Thus, we may identify overlaps in the methods of logic and epistemology across heterogenous traditions So What?: The ‘Intellectual’ and the ‘Material’ The fnal criticism that I want to identify is the dreaded ‘so what?’ question. Even if there are intellectual traditions and diferences among them, why must we dwell on them? After all, what do the esoteric musings of Descartes or Shankara have to do with the everyday life of the carpenter or the Dalit or the woman? Do those who work with their hands, those who labour, not philosophise? The dichotomy between mind and body is also often mapped on to that between thought and action. There are iterations of this dichotomy in various intellectual traditions.5 Moreover, material conditions have often given rise to diferent philosophies and thought systems. Marx, for instance, is a philosopher of the Industrial Revolution. Gandhi’s thought developed in response to colonialism in India. Postmodernism emerged, post-1945, from the debris of modernity and its failed promise – in a world, which had witnessed two wars and experienced the rise of fascism.6 Postmodernism was a stepping back from the grand narratives of modernity – nation, science, reason; a pessimistic reconnaissance. A history of ideas would trace these shifts that occur over time, within material, socio-political and economic contexts. Likewise, as we face the future and the material possibilities contained therein, how would the contours of philosophy change? What new questions would political philosophers ask, when confronted with self-driving cars and other forms of AI? My idea of an intellectual tradition, however, is not an exploration into intellectual history; rather, I am interested in writing a genealogy. To demonstrate this, I will show, in the rest of the paper, the genealogical roots of the free will question in Western intellectual tradition, and its persistence even as philosophers raise questions in relation to AI. Responses In this section, I shall respond to the criticisms that I have identifed earlier. To begin with, the charge of essentialism. To speak of a ‘tradition’ implies an

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unbroken continuity with the past. The word closest to ‘tradition’ in Sanskrit is parampara. Time, however, implies motion and change, not stasis. Therefore, an intellectual tradition is not static or frozen in time. It is dynamic, always in a state of growth and fux, of becoming. The growth can come from interaction with other traditions/systems or from within, as discussed in the previous sub-section. It is this growth that any historian of ideas studies. To emphasise a unity and continuity to an intellectual tradition, as I do, seems to fy in the face of time, motion and change. To establish my argument that traditions despite being in a state of fux across time are ‘essentialist unities’, I will examine: (A) What happened during British colonialism of India, when two traditions interacted and (B) Whether subaltern traditions within India have posed diferent questions. British Colonialism in India: Paganism and Christianity As an example to justify my essentialist claim regarding traditions, I will now take up for consideration the changes that occurred when the ‘Indian intellectual tradition’ interacted with other traditions through processes such as colonialism and education. In such interactions, a pagan tradition (the Indian) interacted with a religious tradition (the Christian West), and produced certain results. Before I discuss how British (Christian) traditions and Indian (pagan) traditions interacted with each other, I want to briefy elaborate on the distinction between pagan and religious traditions. For this, I would need to summarise S.N. Balagangadhara’s thesis about religion (Balagangadhara, 1994). What properties do ‘religions’ have? Let us take the following (non-material) objects – Christianity, Islam and Judaism – and place them in one set, set A. In another set (B) let us place entities such as ‘Hinduism’, ‘Shintoism’, ‘Buddhism’, ‘Jainism’ and everything else that we have come to call ‘religion’. Is this classifcation, this segregation into two sets, justifed? The objects in set A have certain common properties: They all have a (true) God and a Prophet, who brings God’s Word to the people. They all have a Holy Book, a scripture, which contains the Word of God, a clergy and an ecclesiastical organisation. There may be object-level diferences between them (the Holy Book is diferent in the case of Islam, Judaism and Christianity), but at the meta-level, the properties are the same. The objects in set B do not have these properties. Yes, there are devatas (a term we may disputably translate as ‘gods’) in Hinduism, just as there are gods in the ‘religion’ practiced by the Graeco-Romans. The Graeco-Roman gods, however, are nothing like the pure, sinless God that the Semitic religions lay claim to. The former fornicate, get angry and vengeful and have many ‘human’ faws. Objects in set B lack the other properties (clergy, scripture, Prophet) that the objects in set A have. How then can we equate the two sets and say that all the objects in both the sets can be grouped together as ‘religions’? One way to achieve this equation is by saying that the properties

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that the Semitic religions have are not essential and that we can identify other properties that the two sets share in common. There are two problems with this solution. First, what would such a common property be?: A diference between the sacred and the profane? This diference, to any practicing Hindu, makes no sense. What is profane in ‘Hinduism’, as opposed to the sacred? Animate and inanimate objects – trees, dogs, mice, the plough – are worshipped and accorded the place of the sacred in ritual practices. It is in fact, impossible, to fnd common properties, at a metalevel that unite both sets. The second problem is this: Can we really say that the properties that the Semitic religions share are not essential7 and that we are therefore justifed in looking for other properties to equate the two sets? Not quite. Without the Prophet fgure (Jesus, Moses, Mohammad), or the Holy Book (the Bible, Torah or Quran) or God, would these religions even be recognisable? In other words, can Christianity exist without the Christ-head or the Bible? No! Hence, these are essential properties and we cannot dismiss them.8 Therefore, one cannot deny a fundamental diference between the Semitic religions and entities such as ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Buddhism’. An implication of my essentialism is that if the questions that the Western tradition poses are derived from Christian theology, these questions are bound to be incompatible with the questions problematised by the pagan traditions of India. Of course, the West has encountered and interacted with the Indian intellectual traditions and there may have been intellectual and cultural infuences between the two. Colonialism is one such epistemic encounter wherein the British generated, classifed and used knowledge about India through various processes: the Census, ethnographic surveys, the codifcation of Hindu Law, etc.9 In this encounter, what questions did the British ofcials, memoir-writers, missionaries and others pose? There is sufcient historiography to show that the questions that the British ofcials asked were not the right questions. Their questions had no salience in the Indian cultural and intellectual context. For instance, during the codifcation of the Hindu Law or the abolition of sati, the British ofcials formulated the question about the Shastra and its relation to custom/practice in a way that was quite incomprehensible to the pundits who were asked to respond.10 Neeladri Bhattacharya observes that the codifcation of customary law in the Punjab took a similar turn when the village elders were quizzed about rights of inheritance (Bhattacharya, 1996). The idea of an essentialist intellectual tradition also helps explain the crosscultural dialogue between the British ofcials and the Indians during colonialism. So much of historiographical scholarship indicates that there was a lack of ft between the questions that the British ofcials posed (when they wanted to ‘know’ the natives, their religion, their Holy Book, their ‘caste system’, etc.) and the answers that the Indian respondents gave.11 What pre-suppositions lay behind those questions? Did the pre-suppositions come from Christian theology? Did this cause mutual incomprehension when the ofcials spoke to the natives? These avenues of thought and research open up too.

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We can still see evidence of a ‘westernized’ form of questioning in the studies of Indian culture and religion. For example, Indology today continues to ask certain questions (inspired by the western episteme?) of the Indian traditions. For instance, there are Western scholars who look for the free will debate in Buddhism. As Karin L. Meyers says of these Western interpreters of the Buddhist tradition, they tend to read Buddhist doctrines of action and causation through the lens of the Western debate over free will without paying adequate attention to the way these doctrines resist the categories, assumptions and values informing the debate. (Meyers, 2010, p. 2) Subaltern Traditions I now come to the second aspect of the anti-essentialist critique, one that asserts that there are subaltern traditions within an intellectual tradition, which fragment its alleged Catholicity. Let us consider feminism12 as an intellectual tradition within the West. Has this subaltern tradition of thought raised any new questions? If we take epistemology as one branch of philosophy in the West, feminist theory has indeed presented some challenges to this feld of thought. For instance, feminists have challenged the pre-suppositions that underlie disciplines such as economics or even science. When (male) economists talk of labour, what implicit assumptions do they have about what constitutes work? Feminists have shown that (male) economists presuppose that the paid work done by men is labour (Ferber, 1995). Likewise, feminist scholars have challenged the “male” logo-centric tradition of epistemology, with its emphasis on reason, by speaking, instead, of afect and emotion (Llyod, 1979). In doing so, they have brought about a reversal, a turning-around, and no doubt there are rebellions, turnings-around, reversals within each tradition. However, these only indicate that the tradition has swung to another pole, considered the opposite answer, rebelled, and turned around on itself. The swinging between poles is still within the feld of intellectual possibilities and represents its extreme limits. It does not undermine my argument about the underlying integrity of the tradition. At the heart of the tradition, a common feld of questions exists. Like a stone tossed into a pool sets of ripples around it, so does a question set of a set of debates that produce further debates and so on. I want to show that this centre exists and that uncovering this centre may give us some surprising intellectual results. Western feminist theory only illustrates this point. The debates in Western feminist thought, such as agency/determinism, sex/gender, reason/afect, etc. can be mapped on to larger debates within the Western intellectual tradition such as free will/ determinism, body/mind, ontos/episteme, and so on. Western feminist theory

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has responded to the intellectual problems that have preoccupied the West, to spawn hyphenated theoretical frameworks such as liberal feminism, Marxistfeminism, the feminist critique of psychoanalysis and so on. In the next section of this paper, I dwell on one such debate, that of free will/determinism, and map the feminist engagement with it.13 Overlapping Traditions? It is indeed true that some questions are universal, for instance, that of truth. However, the pre-suppositions underpinning them difer. Behind every question is a pre-supposition. For instance, if I were to ask a person X, ‘Have you stopped eating meat?’, the question presupposes that X eats/ate meat. An intellectual tradition, as I said before, has internal coherence as a system because answers are proposed to the questions that are formulated. There are pre-suppositions, however, which are, in a sense, outside the system and underpin it. At this point, I must take a detour and retrace my steps to Section 1.1, in which I had proposed a coherentist view of an intellectual tradition. I had said that an intellectual system is a system, which has internal coherence, because all questions and answers feed into each other in a loop. This seems to be at odds with the notion that the pre-suppositions that underlie those questions are ‘outside’ the system. By postulating this, however, I bring together the coherentist and foundationalist views on justifcation. The presuppositions are foundational and originary; questions and answers are circular and loop into one another. That there are pre-suppositions underpinning the natural sciences is known.14 What of the human and social sciences? What pre-suppositions inform them? Feminist and race theorists have uncovered the gendered and racial pre-suppositions that inform epistemology, moral philosophy, political philosophy, economics and several other branches of philosophy and social science. They have pointed out that much of the theorising in these domains comes from the experience of white, male philosophers. Mine is a far more fundamental inquiry into the pre-suppositions about the human self as actor and knower, which are implicit in the Western intellectual tradition. That the human subject has a free will is one such presupposition. At the heart of what we have come to call the modern human and social sciences is the idea of the ‘human’. We come across this human actor/ knower in history, economics, psychology, political and moral philosophy, the law and other domains. In the rest of this paper, I will unpack the presuppositions about the ‘human’ actor that permeate Western philosophy and the human sciences, but before that, my response to the ‘so what?’ question. So What? What do the esoteric musings of philosophers have to do with the everyday life of the carpenter? Quite a lot. My claim is that the questions that an

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intellectual tradition considers salient are given material form in the institutions that it evolves. It is through institutions that people negotiate their daily lives, when they wake up in the morning and go about their lives; when they go to universities, hospitals, courts and clinics. It is these western institutions that Michel Foucault studies systematically,15 as he catalogues the ways in which people marry, have sexual relations, consider themselves ill, or insane. Part 2: The Idea of the Human and Freedom Across Intellectual Traditions In this part, I take up one institution – that of the liberal state – and demonstrate that it is premised on the notion of a rational, free-willing human actor. Liberalism, at its core, contains the concept of liberty, which may be translated as freedom. Freedom in the western intellectual tradition, I posit, is freedom of the will and this is a theological notion. Also, this freedom of the will is, in Western thought, a uniquely human property. First, I will discuss the idea of the ‘human’ as it is expressed across diferent traditions. The Human What does it mean to be human? The category of the ‘human’ is at the core of discourses that claim to be cross-cultural and universal, such as the human rights discourse. The claim to universality comes from the understanding that the ‘human’ transcends all particularities of religion, colour, nation, etc. The human rights discourse has, of course, been critiqued from intersectional perspectives: Who does the category include, whom does it leave out? Here, I excavate the genealogy of the concept of the human in two intellectual traditions – the Indian and the Western. In other words, I ask how these two traditions problematise what it means to be ‘human’. How do they distinguish the human from the non-human? This inquiry is diferent from a scientifc one, which would identify human in terms of a genus and species (homo sapiens) and biological properties. The ‘Human’ in the Pagan Graeco-Roman and Indian Traditions In Graeco-Roman mythology, we come across creatures that are half-beast, half-human; the minotaur, centaurs and satyrs, for example. There are also those unfortunate humans who are turned into beasts or insects by a curse of the gods: Arachne, who incurred the wrath of Athena and was turned into a spider, as punishment for her ‘irreverence’, comes to mind. Other ancient civilisations have imagined such creatures too; the Egyptian Sphinx is one such. What of the boundary between the human and the gods? In the GraecoRoman civilization, one of the key diferences between humans and gods is that the former are mortal and the latter immortal. However, gods sometimes mate with mortals and their ofspring are demi-gods. Helen of Troy, born

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of the rape of Leda by Zeus, was one such demi-goddess. Zeus, in order to fornicate with Leda, assumed the shape of a swan. Therefore, the gods could take on the forms of animals too. Moreover, as mentioned previously, the Greek gods were nothing like the pure, sinless God of the Semitic religions. They were human-like and fawed. In Indian mythology, the line between gods, humans and animals is blurry as well. Vishnu, a devata, takes many avataras, some human and some animal (matsya, varaha, narasimha). The boundary between the human and the non-human is fuid too: In the cycle of birth, death and re-birth (samsara), the human being can be re-born as an animal or some other creature. Most importantly, the distinction between creator and creation does not hold in the Indian traditions. Everything in the world of prakriti (nature) has the same consciousness. In the non-dualistic tradition of Vedanta, it is all one. As the Upanishads say, there may be many objects made of copper (a trinket, a glass, a wire), but it is essentially copper (Ganeri, 2007). Likewise, we may see an iceberg, ice, an ocean and a river, but it is all water. The consciousness that permeates all creation is ‘divine’: it is not unique to the devatas.16 Hence, puja is ofered to creatures and objects in nature, both animate and inanimate: one may worship a tree, or a snake-hill. There are temples to mice and dogs as well. It is because of this universal consciousness that Shankaracharya in the Nirvana Shatakam can say ‘Shivoham’, or ‘I am Shiva’.17 Can a human being say ‘I am Allah’ or ‘I am God’ in the Semitic religions? No, that would amount to blasphemy! This brings me to the next sub-section. The Human in the Semitic Religions: The Free Will Question The Semitic religions exhibit a stark contrast to what we observe in the Indian or Graeco-Roman traditions. The distinction between the human and God is one of the fundamental tenets of the Semitic religions. God, in these traditions, is both transcendent and immanent. As a Creator, he is distinct from and stands outside of/transcends all that He has created. Yet, he is also immanent in creation, as His power is observed in miracles, etc. Also, only God is worthy of worship (ibadat) in the Semitic religions; not humans, not beasts, not objects. There is also a frm distinction between humans and other animate and inanimate creatures. This distinction hinges pivotally on the idea of free will. Humans have free will; non-human beasts, plants, matter and natural phenomena do not. In the Western tradition, free will is linked to moral responsibility and to the theological problem of evil. What is the theological problem of evil? That which is evil is that which causes sufering. There is plenty of sufering in the human and non-human worlds: it can be caused by human agents (say, a man who rapes), or by natural causes (say, an earthquake). However, only human agents are seen as responsible for evil, since they act with a free will. In other words, only humans are held morally responsible for their actions. A tsunami that causes

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immense loss of life is not held to be morally responsible.18 This seems to be commonsensical; however, there is a Christian-theological basis to the question of free will and morality. The theological roots of this notion of the uniqueness of human will go back to the Biblical story of the original sin. Adam and Eve inhabited the Garden of Eden until one day, when the Serpent tempted Eve, Eve gave in. That was the original sin, which led to the fall of Adam and Eve. They were banished from the Garden of Eden, banished to life on earth. Eve’s choice to eat the forbidden fruit is an example of what constitutes sin in Christian theology. In Semitic traditions, human beings are said to always be faced with a choice. For instance, if there is a bowl of ice cream in front of me, I have the choice to be tempted and eat it or resist that temptation. In making every such choice, a human being can either give in to temptation, that is, to the Devil who lures, or follow God’s will. This is the theological basis to the notion of free will. Only humans in God’s creation have a free will because only humans have souls. Animals, plants, tsunamis, the wind, etc. do not. God made Adam and Eve in his own image, hence the uniqueness of their place in Creation. Free Will and Moral Responsibility in Secular Western Philosophy The Free Will Problem and Its History The intellectual problem of free will has a long history in the European intellectual tradition. Just as the problem of truth has, as its underside, the problem of falsehood, the problem of free will stands in binary opposition to that of enslavement, unfreedom and determinism. Determinism takes many forms, some theological and some secular. A theological form of determinism is that everything is pre-determined by God. It goes by many names: fatalism, naseeb, taqdeer or kismet. The Greek tragedy, Oedipus Rex, is read as a fatalistic tale – no amount of human endeavour could prevent what was prophesised, that is, that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother. The secular forms of determinism are many – Determinism can be causal, biological, neuroscientifc, economic, discursive or social.19 There are compatibilists, who think free will and determinism are compatible, and there are incompatibilists, who believe they are not. There are libertarians who hold that humans have free will.20 All of these are diferent, contradictory answers given to the central question of free will. The ‘Liberty’ in Liberalism: The Liberal Social Contract The question of free will brings us to the concept of liberty and its role in western political theories. Edward Said’s Orientalism was path-breaking in

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its analysis of how the West represents the Other, the non-West. But what of how the West represents itself; the story it tells of itself? The dominant historiography of Europe paints a certain picture: With the advent of modernity (around the sixteenth century), Europe became secular, that is, ways of acting, knowing and being in the world became less religious. This shift is seen as occurring in various domains – epistemic, social, political and economic [See, for instance, LeGof (1980)]. However, there is also a counter-narrative to this story: One that says that in modernity, Christianity became secularised, that is, that ‘secular’, modern Western philosophy has theological roots [Agamben (2011), Balagangadhara (1994)]. I will demonstrate that this is indeed so, with respect to the question of free will. Consider the following set of questions: Can the state interfere in my bedroom and tell me whom I can have sexual relations with? Can the state regulate what I may buy or sell? Can the state regulate what I say or write in diferent fora? Can the state tell me how many kids I may have? Often, the state can, and it does. But ought it to? All the aforementioned questions are iterations of one central question: That of individual freedom (to sleep with whom ‘I’ will, to have as many children as ‘I’ will, to say/write what ‘I’ will) versus state regulation. This freedom is expressed in the language of rights. For each of the aforementioned questions, there is a correlative right: sexual rights, right to freedom of speech and expression, reproductive rights, and so on. An ‘illiberal’ state is one that tramples on or takes away individual rights. A liberal state is one that does not interfere. In other words, the liberal question of freedom is the freedom of the individual (the ‘I’) vis-à-vis the collective (the ‘We’). In this problematisation of freedom, two components are critical: Individual will and reason, and their confguration. Freedom is freedom of the will. The free will is one that is guided by reason. The Analogy of the Cage To understand the confguration of will and reason in the Western liberal tradition, I would like to introduce what I will call the analogy of the cage. Social contractarians identify three distinct and evolving stages of beingtogether. According to Hobbes (Hobbes, 1651), the state that precedes the social contract is the state of nature. This pre-social state is one of complete and unbridled individual freedom. However, it is also a state full of violence: The strong take away the life, liberty and property of the weak. If an analogy were to be drawn, the state of nature is, if Hobbes were to be believed, much like a jungle: the lion eats the deer, and so on. Then comes the social

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contract, when people come together and agree to give up some part of their freedom, so that everyone may have the security of life, liberty and property. To continue with the analogy, if the state of nature is like a jungle, the social contract is like a zoo: Each individual in a cage, wherein they have a certain area of freedom. The size of the cage may difer according to the kind of social contract. If the state is maximalist, the size of the cage is small: The individual has given up most of their freedom and the state can, indeed, tell them what to do in most spheres. If the state is minimalist, the individual has a really large cage and keeps most of their freedoms. The two great ideologies of the twentieth century – capitalism and communism – warred on this idea of individual liberty. The liberal democracies of the West saw the communist states as taking away the will/freedom of their citizens and imposing the State’s will on them. The area of individual liberty, that is, the area of the cage within which one can roam free with no interference from the state, is termed the private sphere. Outside of the cage is the public sphere, where one is a citizen and not a private individual. There is a fnal state, a utopian one: one in which there are no cages. Human beings roam free, as they did in the state of nature. However, they do not harm one another. They live in harmony. To continue with the analogy, this state is neither a jungle, where nature is red in tooth and claw, nor a zoo. It is, indeed, a garden, similar to the Garden of Eden (Berlin, 1969). This statelessness is the utopia of liberal anarchism. Now let us look at the confguration of free will and reason in each of these stages. In the state of nature, human free will is driven by self-interest, that is, the base nature of humans. In this state of unrestricted freedom, when humans act ‘freely’, their ‘free will’ is, in fact, enslaved by their lower natures: Hence, their drive to self-interest and competition. When the social contract is formed, human free will is curtailed in the interests of harmony. However, there may be those who ‘freely’ will to murder, rape and loot. Such are the unenlightened: Those whose ‘free wills’ are not guided by reason. They are removed from the social contract and reformed in incarceration. The state, in this imagination, is reason embodied, and hence, the errant, those who lack reason, can be brought in line by the state.21 In the utopian state of liberal anarchism, there are no cages. Humans again have unbridled freedom. However, since their will is guided by reason, they live in harmony. They are guided by reason and duty towards others, that is, their higher natures. It is remarkable to note how close liberal anarchism comes to the Marxist utopia. Marxism seems, on the surface, opposed to liberalism, as the latter is based on individual freedom – the freedom of the I. In communism, there is no I; hence, there is no ‘mine’. No private property. No self-interest. Thus, people do not compete with one another to further their self-interest. They cooperate. A capitalist society, on the contrary, is driven by I and mine. Human beings think of themselves frst and are pitted against one another. The fttest will survive in this competition. Also, if it is human nature to only strive and

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labour for one’s own interest, incentive becomes essential. Historians often tell us that one of the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union was the lack of incentive for labour and managers alike. The factory labourer was not incentivised with more money for more work, because the communist state did not allow great disparities in salaries. The managers, likewise, were not incentivised with greater profts for greater production. The state controlled how much should be produced and fxed prices. There was, thus, no incentive to compete and produce better quality goods for the market [See William J. Duiker and Jackson J. Spielvogel (2007, p. 755)]. Marx delineates stages of history and societal evolution, which end, not surprisingly, in a stage, similar to liberal anarchism, where the state withers away. And hence, in this Marxist teleology, human society comes full circle: From the initial state of ‘primitive communism’, where there is no private property and no family, to the fnal telos, where the communist state is no longer needed to enforce a sense of duty on its citizens. Human evolution, for Marx too, ends in something like the Garden of Eden. Citizens are not guided by self-interest and competitiveness in this Marxist end game.22 Cutting across these two seemingly incompatible ends of Western political thought is a remarkable commonality: The notion that the human being is split into two – a base nature and a higher nature – and of the human will as being driven by one of these two masters.23 Must I reiterate the theological underpinnings of this problematisation of this understanding of human nature and free will, in the secular Western political tradition? Part 3: Freedom in the Indian Intellectual Traditions The classical Indian intellectual traditions are diverse and plural. They include the emotive, aesthetic, spiritual and intellectual traditions of classical India. I want to focus, for now, on the intellectual/spiritual traditions of India (and I use the/deliberately). The Indian intellectual traditions have been classifed in diferent ways: There are the six darsanas (Nyaya, Vaisesika, Samkhya, Vedanta, Mimasa and Yoga). There are, we are told, the Astika and the Nastika traditions (those that derive from the Vedas and those that don’t). In all this heterogeneity, are there any common questions that unite the Indian intellectual traditions? Since we are on the question of freedom, I will focus on how this question has been problematised in Indian traditions. Freedom goes by many names in these traditions such as moksha and nirvana. Moksha/nirvana frees one, but from what?: from sufering (dunkha); from untruth (avidya/mithya); from fear of death (bhaya); and from the wheel of birth, death and rebirth (i.e., samsara). Hence, it is also that which takes one to happiness (ananda), truth (sat) and to the state of consciousness (chitta) that transcends samsara. In other words, it is the state of sat-chitananda. This is the state of enlightenment.

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What is moksha and how is it diferent from the Christian notion of salvation? I want to highlight three fundamental diferences in the rest of the paper. First, one does not have to die to attain moksha. Moksha is attainable while one is alive; in fact, to fnd moksha is the purpose of being-in-samsara. There are many routes available to the seeker to fnd mokhsa. These are called the margas (paths) and include jnana, bhakti, karma and yoga. It may help to have a teacher/guru. However, a teacher/guru can only show one the path, the one who seeks the truth has to walk the path herself. In other words, a guru can show the seeker where to look, but not what to fnd. Thus, these are experiential traditions – philosophy in practice, as it were. Each of these margas entails following practices (meditation, ritual, action without attachment, etc.) whereby the seeker transforms herself into the desired state of being. Thus, all these margas involve what Foucault may call practices of the self. But what is this self in the Indian traditions, and how is it diferent from the Christian notion of the self? This is the second fundamental diference that I want to highlight. In Christian theology, the self is split into a higher and a lower nature (soul and fesh), as indicated in the previous section. The higher self is the true self. One can be in the grips of a false consciousness of the self and thus enslaved by the fesh, deceived by the Devil. However, by certain practices of the self, which chiefy involve denying the fesh, one purifes the soul and attains the true self. A life lived thusly is a moral life, which, after death, on Judgement Day, will ensure the seeker eternal life and a place in heaven. One’s actions, thus, have to be guided by pure will, not by the deceptions of the Tempter. The Indian traditions too make a distinction between the true self and the false self. Yes, one can be deceived and have a false knowledge of the self. This false knowledge is called avidya or mithya. It occurs when one identifes oneself with what one is not, that is, when one misrecognises oneself. A story, often told, illustrates this misidentifcation. A lion cub, separated from his mother, was brought up among sheep. He believed that he was a sheep too. One day, all grown up, he encountered a lion, and shivered and bleated like the other sheep. The lion asked him why he was afraid; after all, he was a lion himself. The grown cub replied, ‘I am a sheep’. The lion asked him to look into a pond – he did not look like the other sheep. He was a lion (see MacPhail, 2016). The story, like many others, illustrates the nature of avidya: ignorance of one’s true self. So what is the false self – that which I am not? Adi Shankaracharya, it is said, when asked the question, ‘Who are you?’, replied by listing all that he was not. In the verse, known as the Nirvana Shatakam, which is attributed to him, Shankara eliminates all those things that he is not – I am not my emotions, desires, hatred, body, mind and so on. What, then, is left after this process of elimination? The only line in the verse when he afrms who he is, is when he says, ‘Chidananda rupaha, Shivoham, Shivoham’. He is chidananda. He is Shiva, the enlightened one. He is ‘God’. In Advaita Vedanta, to become enlightened is to lose the dualism of I and

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others (animate and inanimate others); I and God. Therefore, it is also to lose the sense of an ‘I’ (aham/ahankara), who is separate from others/from God, from the not-I. There are techniques whereby one may realize this oneness (Brahman). We fnd these practices across Indian traditions. This sense of (non)self could not be further away from the Christian I, torn between fesh and soul. And this brings me to the fnal diference I want to highlight: the question of what it means to act ‘freely’ and its problematisation in Indian traditions. In Christian theology and its secular variants, two masters – one good and the other, evil – guide one’s free will and, therefore, one’s actions. If there is no outer world (and no I), as the Indian traditions posit, there can be no desire/hatred/revulsion/jealousy for objects in the world. The insight in the Indian traditions is that when we act, our actions (prayatna) generally spring from attachments to objects in the world – we either desire an object or are repulsed by it. We act accordingly (Freschi, 2010). However, if the world and the self-in-the-world are both mithya, the only way to act in samsara is without attachment to objects in the world or to the possible fruits of our actions. Actions, therefore, are not moral or immoral. They are attached or detached. The ideal way to act is to act without desire (niskama karma). Finally, a note on the subaltern traditions of India, those that are nonbrahminical and non-male: Do women and Dalits have their own intellectual traditions and do they problematise questions of freedom, self and truth diferently? To answer this, I would turn to the Bhakti traditions, which included many women and Dalit fgures such as Basavanna, Kabir and Akka Mahadevi. A close reading of Basavanna’s and Akka Madadevi’s vacanas, and Kabir’s dohas shows that the conception of self, truth and freedom therein is not very diferent from the conception of the self in Vedanta, hence pointing to the unity of the Indian intellectual traditions.24 In conclusion, I would like to summarise the main arguments of this paper. In the paper, I have proposed the idea of an intellectual tradition and addressed likely criticisms. I have posited that there is a unifed, coherent Western intellectual tradition, which problematises certain questions, and that those questions have certain underlying presuppositions. The presuppositions come from Christian theology, and they inform even the so-called secular philosophy of the West. This, I understand, is a very vast claim. I have narrowed down the scope of my inquiry to the question of freedom in the Western intellectual tradition, and demonstrated that a common question runs through the meditation on freedom therein: That of free will, a question with theological underpinnings. This question is also at the heart of liberalism. I have also considered the problematisation of freedom in the Indian intellectual tradition and demonstrated how it is fundamentally diferent from the Western/theological problem of freedom.

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Notes 1 Hence, the notion that medicine ought to treat the body as a whole (holistic medicine) and not treat parts/organs. 2 According to some theories, consciousness is an emergent property. 3 There are inductive and deductive inferences; however, I will not go into the distinction between them now. 4 See, for instance, Agamben (2011), Nietzsche (1887), and Foucault’s later work, cited in this paper. 5 Take, for instance, the Greek distinction between the contemplative life (the life of the philosopher) and the active life. Or, Marx’s famous declaration, ‘Philosophers have thought about the world; it’s time to change it’. 6 See Matthew J. Van Cleave et al. (2019, pp. 171–174). 7 The Platonic notion of pure forms speaks to the essence of an object. See Plato, The Republic, Book VII: On Shadows and Reality in Education. Likewise, Aristotle too says that certain properties are essential to a substance: without those properties, we would not be able to diferentiate that substance from another. See Nussbaum’s discussion of Aristotelian essentialism, wherein she distinguishes between essential and accidental properties Nussbaum (1992, p. 207). 8 I am summarising Balagangadhara’s argument in The Heathen in His Blindness (1994, pp. 11–27). 9 See, for instance, Cohn 1996. Bernard Cohn describes the various modalities of colonial knowledge-production: enumeration, survey, codifcation, etc. 10 See Mani (1989) and Bhattacharya-Panda (2008), for the processes by which the British appropriated the Dharmasastras, during the abolition of sati and the codifcation of Hindu Law. 11 See, for instance, Oberoi (1997). 12 I use this as an umbrella term, to include the various strands within it – liberal, Marxist, post-structuralist, intersectional feminism. 13 Within the Indian intellectual tradition too, the ‘subaltern’ traditions share much in common with the ‘dominant’ traditions. A careful reading of the lower-caste Bhakti poet, Basavanna, reveals that the notion of the self in his verses is not very diferent from Shankaracharya’s, or that of Akka Mahadevi, a lower caste, woman Bhakti ‘saint’, for that matter (Jalki, 2018). I elaborate on this in the fnal section of this paper. 14 Newtonian physics, for instance, has certain pre-suppositions about space and time. Also, feminist theorists have unmasked the male presuppositions that underpin the natural sciences (Harding, 1991). 15 See Foucault’s work on the prison, the asylum and the clinic. Foucault (1975, 1994, 2001). 16 I am deliberately avoiding the word ‘gods’ here as that would not be an accurate translation. The concept of the ‘devata’ in the pagan traditions of India is not equivalent to the concept of the Abrahamic God. 17 There is also the idea of Aham Brahmasmi (‘I am Brahma’). 18 See Mathew Cleave et al. (2019, p. 128). 19 Liberal thinkers celebrate choice and agency, which, really, are versions of free will. Marxist and post-structuralist theories challenge the liberal tradition by showing that there is no free will: We are subject to determinism. For Marxists, economic circumstances are determining. How freely does a surrogate in India, for instance, ‘choose’ to rent out her womb, if her poverty compels her to do so? Post-structuralism and constructivist theories consider the determinism of social discourses. In feminism, for instance, this takes the form of the question: Do women freely will to wear high heels? Or, is their agency, or free will, determined by social discourses, which produce in them a false consciousness?

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20 Mathew Cleave et al. (2019, pp. 81–98) (Chapter 5: The Problem of Free Will and Determinism). 21 Hegel in Elements of the Philosophy of Right (2016) writes, The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. It is ethical mind qua the substantial will manifest and revealed to itself, knowing and thinking itself, accomplishing what it knows and in so far as it knows it. . . . The state is absolutely rational inasmuch as it is the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness once that consciousness has been raised to consciousness of its universality. This substantial unity is an absolute unmoved end in itself, in which freedom comes into its supreme right. On the other hand this fnal end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state. 22 Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, writes, Along with [the classes] the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquity, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe. (Engels, 2010) 23 Adam Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments gives us a similar notion of the human being, as composed of two parts (self-interest and sympathy), which come into confict with each other. Immanuel Kant in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals also talks about self-interest and duty, and how the two may be reconciled (essentially, by doing unto others what you would have them do to you) (Smith, 1759; Kant, 1785). 24 Concepts in the vacanas, such as bayalu, Parasiva and sunya refer to the state of consciousness that transcends the material.

References Agamben, G. (2011). For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. L. Chiesa & M. Mandarini. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Balagangadhara, S. N. (1994). The Heathen in His Blindness: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion (Studies in the History of Religions). New York: Brill Academic Publishers. Berlin, I. (1969). Two Concepts of Liberty. In I. Berlin, ed. Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bhattacharya, N. (1996). Remaking Custom: The Discourse and Practice of Colonial Codifcation. In R. Champakalakshmi & S. Gopal, eds. Tradition, Dissent and Ideology: Essays in Honour of Romila Thapar. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 20–51. Bhattacharya-Panda, N. (2008). Appropriation and Invention of Tradition: The East India Company and Hindu Law in Early Colonial Bengal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Christias, D. (2015). A Critical Examination of BonJour’s, Haack’s and Dancy’s Theory of Empirical Justifcation. Logos and Episteme: An International Journal of Epistemology, VI(I), 7–34. Engels, F. (2010). The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. London: Penguin Classics (Original work published 1884).

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Ferber, M. A. (1995, May). The Study of Economics: A Feminist Critique. The American Economic Review, 85(2), Papers and Proceedings of the Hundredth and Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association. Washington, DC, January 6–8, 1995, pp. 357–361. Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1994). The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage Books Foucault, M. (2001). Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. R. Howard. New York, London: Routledge Freschi, E. (2010). Indian Philosophers. In T. O’Connor & C. Sandis, eds. A Companion to the Philosophy of Action. UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 419–428. Ganeri, J. (2007). The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories of Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gough, K. (1986). Roots of the Pol Pot Regime in Kampuchea. Contemporary Marxism, 12/13, Southeast Asia (Spring), 14–48. Harding, S. (1991). Whose Science? Whose Knowledge: Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca: Cornell University press. Hegel, G. W. F. (2016). Ethical Life: The State. In S. W. Dyde, trans. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. New York: Dover Publications (Original work published 1820). Hobbes, T. (1968). Leviathan. Baltimore: Penguin Books (Original work published 1651). Jalki, D. (2018). Vachanas as Adhyatmic Refections: Going Beyond the European Images of Indian Traditions as Reform Movements. Ujire: CIRHS, SDM PG College. Kant, I. (1998). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Original work published 1785). LeGof, J. (1980). Merchant’s Time and Church’s Time in the Middle Ages. In Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Llyod, G. (1979). The Man of Reason. Metaphilosophy, 10(1). MacPhail, J. (2016). The Lion Who Thought He Was a Sheep. www.academia. edu/54398623/THE_LION_WHO_THOUGHT_HE_WAS_A_SHEEP Mani, L. (1989). Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. In K. Sangari & S. Vaid, eds. Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 88–126. Meyers, K. (2010). Freedom and Self Control: Free Will in South Asian Buddhism (A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the Divinity School, The University of Chicago, in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy). Nietzsche, F. W. (1994). On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. K. Ansell-Pearson & C. Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Original work published 1887). Nussbaum, M. (1992). Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism. Political Theory, 20(2), 202–246. Oberoi, H. (1997). The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Plato. (1968). The Republic, trans. A. Bloom. New York: Basic Books. Sarukkai, S. (2005) Indian Philosophy and Philosophy of Science. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Pvt. Ltd. Smith, A. (1759). The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: Printed for A. Millar, and A. Kincaid and J. Bell.

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Unkule, K. (2019). Internationalising the University: A Spiritual Approach. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Van Cleave, M. J., et al (2019) Introduction to Philosophy (E-textbook licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License). https://pressbooks. online.ucf.edu/introductiontophilosophy/ William, J. D. & Spielvogel, J. J. (2007). World History (5th ed.). Belmont, CA, US: Thomson Wadsworth.

Chapter 5

Across Identities Ethnicity and Nationalism in the United Bengal Movement of 1946 Sucharita Sen

Historical Background The history of Islamic nationalism in Bengal and its political manifestation in the form of an organized political party in the early 20th century has fascinated historians of partition, Indian nationalism and identity alike. In the wake of majoritarian Hindu nationalism and Curzon’s scheme to partition Bengal in 1905, Muslim leaders organized themselves formally as the Muslim League in 1906, to fght for Muslim interests and foster better relations with the British. The League warned Muslims ‘that unless they united and worked in loyal unison with the government, they would be submerged by the Hindu food’ (Wasti, 1964, p.  78). East Bengal saw several communal clashes in 1906–07 and one of the possible causes of the widening in Hindu-Muslim relations was the wave of Islamisation that swept across Muslim villages in that part of the province. The partition of Bengal was seen as an opportunity to ‘purify’ Indian Islam from non-Islamic rituals and beliefs (Nanda, 1989, p. 67). Such incidents of polarization spurred nationalist leaders like Gandhi, whose anti-colonial political vision depended on the possibility of syncretism within the sub-continent, to look for an underlying historical and political consensus among the diferent religious persuasions in India. His approach often created a sense of uneasiness among those who were accustomed or inclined to view the world in Manichaean categories of caste, class, ideology, etc. Gandhi came to embrace the idea of an open-ended conversation even as he stood unequivocally for certain moral, political and epistemological positions. In the early 20th century, while Bengal was amid a violent phase of sociocultural transition, pan-Islamic fervour was spreading fast in parts of North and Northwest India. The writings of Ameer Ali (1849–1928), and poets like Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) contributed to the religio-nationalistic fervour popular among Muslims at the time. Ameer Ali’s books1 reminisced the glorious past of Islamic rule and he asserted that the real history of the subcontinent had begun with the arrival of Mussalmans in India. Iqbal provided a philosophical base for Pan-Islamism, rejecting the idea of a nation-state

DOI: 10.4324/9781003259930-6

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based on geographical boundaries and claiming that Islam transcends the boundary of space and time and in many ways is considered to be both a cosmopolitan and traditionalist.2 Around the time of Iqbal’s writings, provisions made by the colonial government for separate electorates with weighted representation for Muslims in the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909 added to the discontent of the Indian National Congress (Morley, 1909, p. 126). Having realized the importance of improving relations with the Muslim League, the Congress hosted a series of invitations and ofers and eventually accepted the Muslim demand for separate electorates. Khilafat had provided Gandhi with an opportunity to collaborate with prominent members of the Khilafat committee at least if not the League. But over the next two decades it would become quite apparent that any substantial collaboration between the Congress and the League would become virtually impossible to achieve. Keeping this in mind, this chapter intends to focus on the unique proposal that surfaced in the Bengal province between 1946 and 1947 that put forth a strong resistance against partitioning the province. The United Bengal proposal was a fnal anti-partition plea made by a political coalition between the League and the Congress in the province based on a unique aesthetic identity of its people. The primary architects of this proposal – H. S. Suhrawardy, Abul Hashim amongst others from the Bengal League and mainly Sarat Bose from the Bengal Congress formed a coalition shortly before partition, even if partition at that point seemed to be a possible outcome that so many historians have mentioned in their work. This chapter particularly focuses on Abul Hashim’s writings as a guiding framework to understand the process by which the creation of a united front was made in Bengal. The arguments to remain united were made based on the unique cultural or ‘aesthetic’ identity of Bengal where, given the polarized nature of communal politics in the rest of British India by the 1940s, are not only worth examining but prove to be quite useful to form a more nuanced understanding of the political history of the Bengali people. Abul Hashim, who served as the general secretary of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League in the 1940s, was aware of modern realities of nation-building and wanted to encourage the setting up of a religious constitution which would generate civic principles of political legitimation in the new country of Pakistan/Bangalistan. Unlike secular philosophies, which supposed that the duty of the state was to be neutral to the religious views of its people, Hashim believed that it was impossible for any state to be completely neutral in any of its decisions. Since neutrality was conceptually impossible and all states, even liberal ones, according to Hashim were perfectionists, in the sense of forcing, directly or indirectly on its people, some value or the other (be it liberty or equality), it is important for the state to acknowledge this fact, he argued. Hashim thought that Islam provided within its Hadith, Fiqh, and the laws in the Quran, enough jurisprudential principles which could help

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create a nation that could be Islamic without necessarily being intolerant of people of other faiths (Hashim, 1974). This, he thought, can be managed if one fnds certain larger associational principles that bind people, be it language, shared myths and history, geographical continuity, which can create an overarching normative horizon where people can recognize each other’s role within society and abide by shared rules of social engagement. The best way to understand his views would be to use the lens of what I call ‘aesthetic nationalism’, – a term I use to denote the kind of large associational principle Hashim hints at – language, myths, historical continuity, etc. He thus argues that one could have a theocratic state which could fulfll the promises that a liberal state makes vis-à-vis tolerance, religious rights, etc., if there are certain ‘aesthetic’ norms that people can identify with. It is this idea of Hashim’s that I want to explore deeper in the following sections. Understanding Civic and Ethnic Nationalisms Through the Works of Anthony Smith To place the United Bengal proposal under a theoretical context, I will be looking at the standard dichotomy of ethnic and civic nationalism that was initiated by British political thinker Anthony Smith, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The reason I want to subtend my arguments regarding the proposal of the Bengal Muslim League in the 1940s through the theoretical work of Anthony Smith is that Smith’s theories give us a handy tool to refect upon these nationalist leaders’ many statements regarding the future of HinduMuslim community. By going through Smith’s infuential dichotomy between ethnic and civic nationalism, I will be arguing that Abul Hashim and others were able to formulate a series of propositions regarding a new nationstate that did not completely fall within the dichotomy of Smith. But all the same, the contribution of Smith to our understanding of nationalism must be acknowledged to be immense. In the next couple of paragraphs, I will be summarizing Smith’s arguments for civic and ethnic nationalism. The early half of the 20th century saw several calls for nationalisms that found their originary roots in regional identities. They were deeply entrenched in the politics of local language, caste politics, religious equations and yet contained a larger provincial, national, if not universal message of the right to self-determination and total independence from any kind of political or social subordination. In this, the master narrative in India is that the birth of the ethnic identity of the native people of British India is to be intrinsically associated with religious identities because in any given context, religious identity derives itself from the ‘sphere of communication and socialization’. As Anthony Smith explains, They (religious identities) are based on alignments of culture and its elements – values, symbols, myths and traditions, often codifed in custom

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and ritual. They have therefore tended to join in a single community of the faithful all those who feel they share certain symbolic codes, value systems and traditions of belief and ritual, including references to a supra-empirical reality, however impersonal, and imprints of specialized organizations, however tenuous. (Smith, 1991, p. 6) Here it is also important to show that ethnicity often serves to draw demarcations within a religious fold. Smith shows how in medieval Europe and in the Middle East, world religions such as Islam and Christianity were further subdivided on ethnic lines. On the other hand, Smith has also historically argued for the proliferation of civic nationalisms across diferent modern countries. When we look at the history of a political collective like the Greek city-state, we can see that there was no concept of a nation-state among them. From this juncture, – to skip a few centuries – there was a shift in the western world after the French Revolution, particularly with the birth of the ‘political community’.3 Civic nation, mostly applicable to the process by which the west evolved its own concept of a nation and in turn nationalism, marks an important stage in the historical transformation of religious to political communities. In this western model of national identity, Smith points to mass media and the public education system that are entrusted with the role of creating a political community with common cultural ties. Within this paradigm, I wish to argue that there was a particular formulation of nationalism, discussed by the Bengal Provincial Muslim League between the years 1943 and 1947, which saw a view of the nation-state that cut across both civic and ethnic (understood as religion broadly) nationalisms to a view of a community which can be united through certain common narratives – tied together by language, a common history, geographic contiguity, modern values and religious afliations. The United Bengal Movement: The Conception of an Aesthetic Identity for Bengal (1946–1947) This brings us to the question of the United Bengal Movement of 1947. It is easy to see that common vernacular language, mirror attitudes to caste and other social constructs between Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims, shared enthusiasm for the cultural milieu of the province were all perfect ingredients for Suhrawardy-Hashim and Sarat Bose to collaborate on bidding for an independent nation. The underlying tensions of a Muslim-led independent Bangalistaan and its repercussions on a sizeable Hindu minority should not be undermined. The discussion on ethnic and civic nationalism helps to place the United Bengal movement within a theoretical framework. It shows how nationalisms in the subcontinent evolved diferently from the west, where language,

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race, religion and of course culture become determining elements in stirring the consciousness of the Indian people. Naturally, elements such as religion and language had a spill-over efect on the common cultural or ethnic identity of the people of Bengal. This cultural or aesthetic identity becomes the fnal binding force for nationalism as imagined by Abul Hashim in British India to manifest itself as a political discourse or movement. Movements like the one to keep Bengal united in 1946, or the Self-respect movement that spurred Dravidian nationalism in the south in the 1930s and 1940s, surfaced on the basis of this argument of common, distinct cultural identity. This identity, within ethnic nationalism borrows from religion, language, geography, social variegations and eventually becomes the ground for seeking political independence. This kind of an identity that exhibits both ethnic and civic characteristics and is also rooted deeply in a variety of narrative commonalities – is what I understand as a kind of aesthetic identity for the people of Bengal. This identity, I further argue, although theorized and proposed by a member of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League (BPML), was made possible only because of the collaborative attitudes of the BPML and the Bengal Congress, especially at a time when the political polarization between Hindus and Muslims in the rest of the country had reached its peak. Since its very inception in March 1912, the BPML remained committed to the cause of separate electorates for Muslims, education for the Muslim youths, and other issues faced by the community, mainly restricting its political activities within the city of Calcutta. At the time, the League had very little credibility with nationalist factions who wrote it of as a temporary political phase that would soon meet its demise. Historian Mohammad Shah, in his work on the BPML, shows that the hostile attitude of the British towards Turkey and Iran, the recent demolition of a mosque in Kanpur, ordered by the British where some Muslims lost their lives, were primarily the reasons for this new radical wave that was quietly penetrating the BPML’s support base in the early 1910s (Shah, 2002). The more important reason perhaps was the slow assimilation of a Bengali Muslim identity that saw itself juxtaposed against the well-formed Hindu bhadralok identity along with that of the British. BPML was only one of the political manifestations of this new Muslim identity. The Party was seen by some as being too accommodating of religious cooperation that further led to more insular Muslim factions within Bengal. After the Lucknow Pact of 1916, it was felt by some factions of Bengali Muslims that the League in Bengal was taking a very weak stance as far as Muslim representation in the provincial legislative council was concerned. Some leaders like Nawab Ali Choudhury broke away from the BPML to join the Central National Mohammadan Association and some joined the Indian Moslem Association in Bengal (Shah, M., p. 38–39). It is quite signifcant to note here that the breaking away of those Muslim factions that were more conservatively oriented, meant that the grounds for possible cooperation between Hindus

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and Muslims were clear for the BPML especially after the BPML subsequently undertook the task of transforming itself into a more mass-based party. Since the 1910s, there were several instances of Hindu-Muslim friction brought on by numerous factors. The Shuddhi movement in 1923 and the opposition of Hindu leaders to the Bengal Tenancy (Amendment) Bill and the Primary Education Bill are found in existing literature including Shah’s work. Given these circumstances, a unanimous verdict was reached at the All Bengal Muslim Conference in Barisal in 1921 that a new consolidated Muslim identity needs to be constructed for the Muslims of Bengal through a thorough revival of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League party. It refused to confne itself to the clutches of the Dhaka Nawabs and made a concerted efort to become a broad, mass-based political party that acknowledged the real issues of peasants, class exploitation and the struggles of ordinary people of the province. Abul Hashim’s own eforts towards the revival of the BPML are extremely signifcant for several reasons – one it gives us an insight into the political re-orientation within the BPML particularly during his term as general secretary. But one could also perhaps treat his writings and philosophical contributions to the study and practice of Islam as a tool to bring into the fold a pre-existing cultural identity in Bengal that cuts across religious lines. For example, Hashim perceived India not as a uniform country but a conglomeration of diferent countries – something like modern-day Europe. He therefore saw in the Lahore Resolution (that was subsequently adopted as the creed of the AIML the following year in the Party’s annual session in Madras) the frst possibility of viewing his own Muslim identity not as a minority in a large predominantly Hindu nation but rather an independent Muslim in a Muslim majority country – Bengal. These ideas are not only found in his writings but were also discussed extensively during his tours across the province. Organizing BPML district ofces, long discussions with peasants, young Muslims, etc. all proved worthwhile when by the 1940s the base of BPML grew by more than half a million members (Hashim, 1974, p. 22). Most of the existing literature on Bengal’s political history of that decade acknowledges that the political contributions of Hashim are signifcant even if the United Bengal movement is only mentioned in passing. But interestingly, it is during these critical years that Hashim’s philosophical ideas on nation, Islam, multiculturalism, etc. take shape that go on to provide the very backbone of what was to become the proposal to keep the province united, fnding greater resonance with the people, especially after 1942’s Quit India Movement that created a political vacuum in the province after the arrest of several top Congress leaders. His writings, especially found in As I See It (1965), published by the Islamic Academy appear idealistic but in no way communal. In one of the essays titled ‘Greatness of a Nation’, Hashim states, The idea of moulding the entire human species into one human nation based on a universally accepted ideology is now in the melting pot of

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human history and this idea is the spirit of our age. The crown of greatness of our century goes to the nation or to the family of nations that will give active lead to materialising, in letter and in spirit, the ideal of universal brotherhood of man. (Hashim, 1965, p. 71) The United Bengal Proposal is treated as a guiding framework to theorize the concept of an aesthetic identity for the people of Bengal. The logic of the proposal itself was situated outside of religion – in common language, culture, social interactions and the similar infuence that the two major cultural cities – Calcutta in the western side and Dacca in the eastern side – had, on the lives of the Bengali people. It is important to note here that the whole attempt made by the Muslim League in Bengal – to introspect and revive itself as a party that would appeal to the masses, was not unique to the province. Similar trends were seen in Punjab too, where the League was making great eforts in sympathizing with the ordinary oppressed masses without making religious distinctions. The Muslim League in Punjab, particularly at a time when the idea of Pakistan was gaining momentum, launched various campaigns to reassure the haris (farm labourers) and mazdoors (workers) that the League was on their side and that they would be provided a life of security and dignity in the newly carved out nation of Pakistan. A Communist Party report spoke of the Punjab League’s proud record of service in the kisan [peasant] movement .  .  . These workers of Punjab’s new Muslim League have taken the message of Pakistan deep among the peasant masses. But the message they teach is not one which separates the Muslim kisan from his Sikh and Hindu brothers [sic], but on the contrary, unites him with them.4 In drawing such parallels between Bengal and Punjab, it becomes possible to bring to focus the ambiguous nature of the prospect of Pakistan – a new nation or nations, and who were going to be its future inhabitants. Jinnah’s own plea to Mountbatten made in April 1947 further lends to this ambiguous nature when he asks the latter not to ‘play with the unity of Bengal and Punjab which have national characteristics in common: common history, common ways of life, and where the Hindus have stronger feelings as Bengalis or Punjabis than they have as members of the Congress’.5 Perhaps these are clues into the foundation of the united Bengal scheme and also what historian Ranabir Samaddar, in a diferent context, later argues in one of his works, as the presence of an aesthetic or cultural sense of ‘self’ in Bengal.6 He also writes, The political and historical identity came to be based on what can be grossly called and was aestheticized. In short, our self-inquiry has

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not been through the philosophical route or even as its substitute through historical route, but through an examination and reconstruction of our aesthetic self. The interrogation and cross-examination of our aesthetic proclivities formed the core of our critical sense of the present.7 The rhetoric on cultural identity formation has always been quite central in the political landscape of the province, but to use this aesthetic identity (constituted through several narrative commonalities such as language, social customs, class, etc.) as a tool to view the people of Bengal as a nation is signifcant. The discussion on cultural identity has taken many forms and has been infuenced by the complicated web of multiple perceptions of the people of Bengal on revivalism, reformation, common cultural practices and customs. It is through these diferent perceptions that the people of Bengal gained the ability to indulge in the alternative imaginings of ‘nation’ other than communal or religious nationalism. In many ways than one, the United Bengal movement became the culmination of this synergized understanding of its peoples’ cultural identity. The authors of Selected Subaltern Studies ofer an interesting engagement with notions of religious vs. cultural identity. The book highlights that there seem to be two contrasting opinions regarding India’s colonial journey and its implications on identity formation. The frst argues that native Indians promptly turned to religion to legitimize and voice their opinions, bargain for political power, etc. Religion qualifed as one of the ‘primordial loyalties’ of the Indian people. But it is also true that religious identities were co-constructed by the colonialists and their sympathizers to camoufage the real issues of class confict, exploitation and poverty (Chatterjee, 1988, pp. 351–352). Hashim’s writings point to this complication that eventually led to the evolution of a dominant communal discourse in colonial India which perhaps served as the biggest blow to the United Bengal movement. There is also enough evidence to show that Hashim dedicated a lot of time in developing a sense of introspection and renewed understanding of the basic tenets of Islam. In some sense, his philosophical arguments on the subject can be categorized under cultural Islamic revival, especially the questions he raises about religion, race, basic duties, morality, etc. But the principal essence of Islam being the equality of man and that of British India representing the same entity as Europe – an amalgamation of diferent cultural nations, remain two very pivotal points in surmising Hashim’s political thought in keeping with the question of ethnic nationalism. Hashim writes, Biologically, the Muslims of the sub-continent are not a nation but ideologically they are; they constitute a brotherhood based on a common ideology and this ideology is Islam. The Buddhists, the Sikhs, the Jains and

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the Brahmins are also ideological nations having distinct and fundamentally diferent outlook on life and living. (Hashim, 2006, p. 7) In his later writings, it is quite clear that Hashim’s anger was directed mainly at the Indian National Congress for having failed to see these cultural distinctions and these multiple cultural ‘nations’ that existed in the subcontinent. He explains, [Thus] Muslim League demand was not partition of any country or of any biological nation of the sub-continent on the basis of religion. Muslim League did not demand partition of Bengal or of the Bengalees, partition of the Punjab or of the Punjabees or partition of Kashmir or of the Kashmiris. For the partition of the countries and the biological nations of the subcontinent not Muslim League but the Congress was responsible. (Hashim, 2006, pp. 26–27) Hashim’s disillusionment with the political unraveling prior to partition was indeed painful. The movement for United Bengal had been rejected and at this juncture, the ugly game of power politics had revealed itself. In his autobiography, he describes quite painfully his confusion about moving to either Pakistan or East Pakistan. The joint meeting of the legislatures of Bengal on the 5th of August forced Hashim to reconsider his political stance and in the end, he chose to remain neutral. The event is described, in great detail, in his book In Retrospection and has also been reproduced in secondary literature.8 At this meeting of the legislatures of the Bengal province, the legislature of the Hindu majority area voted in favour of partition and that of the Muslim majority area voted against partition (without making any assumption that this naturally meant they were in favour of the United Bengal position). Hashim describes the meeting as follows: On the 5th of August two meetings were held under the presidency of Mr. Chundrigarh. In the meeting of the Legislators of East Pakistan Mr. Suhrawardy contested Khwaja Nazimuddin for the leadership of the Parliamentary Party of East Pakistan. Mr. Suhrawardy secured 39 votes only. Mr. Suhrawardy immediately after his defeat rushed into the room, with Mr. Abdur Rahman of Bashirhat, where West Bengal members of the Muslim League Parliamentary Party sat to elect their leader. Mr. Abdur Rahman proposed Mr. Suhrawardy’s name. Mr. Suhrawardy was elected leader of West Bengal Muslim League Parliamentary Party. This was a sight for the gods to see. A man who a moment ago decided to migrate to Pakistan and aspired to be the Chief Minister of East Pakistan got his name proposed for the leadership of Muslim League Parliamentary Party of West Bengal. (Shuwajima, 2015)

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The reader gets a sense of the author’s frustration and even a hint of irony from the extract. Hashim remained neutral and decided not to support Suhrawardy. Historians and political scientists who have written on this time period have mixed opinions about Hashim and his contribution to the political revival of the BPML. But there is some agreement that Hashim’s intentions to bridge the gap between Hindus and Muslims – whether cultural, social or otherwise were genuine.9 Towards the end of his political career with the BPML, Hashim had already begun to sufer from poor eyesight. As a result of this, his political participation became limited. He stayed on in West Bengal, now part of newly created India a few years after partition. His brief encounter with Gandhi at the time of independence (Gandhi was in Sodepur Ashram) was also in some sense tragic, as both these fgures, separated by their political afliations and ideologies, were joined in their grief for the deep fracture that partition had caused to the socio-cultural fabric of the Indian people. Hashim’s last few years in West Bengal are well documented and in his own autobiography he gives a detailed account of his political position in this new state – now as an opposition member to the newly created Congress government. In an environment gripped with communal clashes and total religious antagonism, Hashim experienced a gradual shattering of all his political beliefs in these last few years in West Bengal. He remained clear about his political stance in favour of multi-nationalism even in the light of partition and its aftermath. However, now as an opposition member and especially after Suhrawardy’s departure for Pakistan in 1949, Hashim actively demanded that the Muslim League Parliamentary Party be dissolved. In his autobiography, he enumerates his eforts to also speak against violence against the communists in the state – especially state-sponsored violence targeting communists, custodial violence, etc. Shuwajima’s biography reproduces an extract from Hashim’s writings on his reaction to the newly created Constitution of India that came into full efect in 1950. The extract itself gives an invaluable insight into what Hashim believed were his true political ideals – ideals that he tirelessly attempted to infuse into the political and social psyche of the Bengali people. He writes: The New Constitution of India has been ushered in an atmosphere of grim disappointment. The new Republic of India came into being equally in an atmosphere of grim disappointment created by inefcient, dishonest and corrupt administration of the Congress Party. The krishak (peasants) and mazdoors (labourers) of India associated themselves actively in India’s struggle for independence in the hope of, and I should add relying upon the well-pronounced policy of the then Congress, of having a Krishak Mazdoor Raj. They have been thoroughly disillusioned. There is nowhere in the Constitution any trace of any kind of Krishak Mazdoor Raj. (Shuwajima, 2015, p. 125)

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The history of political cooperation in the Bengal province is traced back to the developments of collaboration between the Huq ministry and the Congress in the late 1930s and early 1940s. For the purposes of clarity, this is chosen as the frst instance of cooperation that has very direct repercussions on future collaborations between the Congress and the League in Bengal, the ultimate crystallization of which, in some ways is the United Bengal movement. It is also argued however that such collaborations were not occurring in isolation – that they were very much a product of the common socio-cultural fabric that interwove Hindu and Muslim identities in the province. The evolving intellectual tradition in the early 20th century, the political activism aimed at religious reforms and the channelizing of political actions towards issues of caste and class were all contributing factors that laid the grounds for such collaborations to take shape. This is something that probably Hashim’s own writings hint at. When one looks at the decades preceding the 1940s, there are some notable instances of political cooperation and alliances. It is difcult of course to trace the genesis of the United Bengal movement that far back, to events that may not have had any direct consequence on the bid to keep the province united and sovereign in 1947. But these instances, undoubtedly signal the existence of the unique nature of identity construction in Bengal, that keenly focused on common language, common culture and in its own limited way, a common ideology. To bring back a term used earlier – a common aesthetic identity for the people of Bengal. Nationalism and Modernity: The Construction of the ‘Other’ To a large extent, the question of the Hindu-Muslim divide is tied to the selfrepresentations that had gained currency in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Indian subcontinent of those people themselves. Obviously, much of the traction that diferent formulations of what constituted Hindu or Muslim identity gained was due to the development of certain representative (self-appointed or otherwise) groups. However easily we take for granted the social or religious identity that we use to transact social business in our everyday lives, we must also be aware that behind the discursive use of categories of identity, religion, etc. there have been many large-scale shifts in our imaginative vision of what constitutes our existence as humans. The larger goal of unearthing the many cross-infuencing political and epistemic forces that lead to our state of modernity and its allied valencies is a task that is beyond the scope of this work. All the same, drawing upon the major politico-social currents that made possible modernity, this chapter has attempted to trace the historical and genealogical roots of the diferences and commonalities between the Hindu and the Muslim identity. Here, I intend to briefy refer to global forces of modernity, especially nation-state as a marker of collective identity, while keeping myself grounded on the reality of the

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Hindu and the Muslim identity within the Indian sub-continent in the rest of this concluding section. Ever since the Indian subcontinent was brought under the Western colonial empire, there has been not only an attempt by the colonial power to ‘imagine’, to use Benedict Anderson’s phraseology, the nation, but there has also been a more complex form of infuence through the infusion of certain colonial practices which have normatively infuenced the political, moral and epistemological categories of the Indian nation-state. If colonial ventures of the West tied irrevocably the global world order economically, it is only fair to assume that there must also have been a subterranean trafc of certain evaluative, pragmatic and epistemic categories between peoples. It is these categories which shaped the destiny of modernity – both in the West and the East. Thus, in conclusion, it would be useful to view nationalism as an identity marker that is new on the historical horizon of humanity, within the map of Modernity (with a capital M). If modernity in its philosophical, epistemological and political aspects implied certain changes in the imagination of people, what did nationality as a modern event mean for colonial subject countries? The advent of the discourse of statehood, western democracy and the beginning of human rights – all heirs to modern discourses, came to play an important role for India in the throes of its struggle for independence.10 Among the many causes towards the success of the colonial project (at least initially from the colonizer’s perspective), it has been argued that there have been two parallel forces that have spurred the self-aggrandizement of the colonizer’s power and they are – capitalism and the project of/for nationhood.11 In both these forces, we can see a latent form of ‘othering’. Both these forces of history were particular to the western world. Both can be seen to have its sources in the Enlightenment. A description of the story of capitalist expansion and the call of nationhood would be in a way the story of the modern western world. Modernity in a way implies these two currents and India’s beginning as a nation must be seen within the prism of modernity and its political and cultural implications. Without going into the overall political efects for global world order because of the colonial project, we can discern at least certain immediate efects of the British’s arrival in the subcontinent. After the advent of the British and its superior industrial and armed power, the Mughals, whose administrative setup and its technological reach must have seemed primitive, slowly retreated into the background and became mere spectators of the power game in which the main participants were the British (see Bayly, 1990). The British came into a social reality in which though the Mughals ruled a large part of India, it was defnitely a decadent period in Mughal power. Another social fact of Indian life was the easy or the uneasy relation (depending upon one’s political persuasion and the geographical region you took within India your answer would difer) between the Hindus and the Muslims. The tryst with the West for India meant that at once India was plugged into

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the global discourse of ‘balance of power,’ ‘geographic limits,’ ‘sovereignty,’ ‘governments’ – in short the discourse of nationalism and the nation-state. Even during those early days of a nascent national consciousness in the 19th century, the whole question of Muslims and their role in a future India as a nation was mooted.12 Among the diferent formulations of what a future India must be, there was already a discussion as to how to look at the Muslims within the Indian community and their integration within social and political life. It is possible that our access to what could have been the ‘real’ relations between the Muslims and the Hindus in the 19th century is hermetically sealed but what we can glean is that in some groups at least there was a perceived hostility towards the Muslims, which was equally ‘foreign’ as the British were.13 It can be argued that the whole movement towards looking at the Muslims as the ‘Other’ took a turn during the British rule which was diferent from how history had looked at Hindu-Muslim relations until then. What were the changes that a re-orientation of Hindu-Muslim relations brought about? Curiously, the form that such notions of organic unity took in India was through religion. Europe had had its share of religious wars and therefore found refuge in newer notions of genetic and linguistic commonality. But India steeped in its history needn’t go anywhere else and found religion as a rallying force of unity. The post-British notion of Hindu unity was diferent from the earlier forms of communal unity. All opposition to the Mughal advance throughout India was met with armed fervor but the presence of the Muslim as the ‘Other’ did not bring about unity among all the Hindu kingdoms in a way that would have been advantageous to its self-preservation. The peculiar form of unity that the religious feeling in the 19th century brought about was tied to the nation as sovereign. The sovereignty of nation – the transcendence of power – was an inviting proposition for the Hindu feeling. For the frst time, there was the possibility of the Indian subcontinent being called one and this oneness – this equality – paradoxically was predicated on the possibility of acknowledging religious diferences at home. This logic that we have followed is sound as far as it goes. But it has its limitations. If we follow this logic, it can lead to certain consequences that I would like to avoid and if not avoid, refute. A consequence of this colonial logic outlined so far (and to a large extent valid) is that much of the HinduMuslim debate can subsist only within the framework of modern nationalism. The framework of modern nationalism gets discursive sustenance on the diremptive nature of the constituting forces of identitarian categories. In other words, within modern political discourses, it is assumed that identities are formed as a self-refection of the consciousness of the ‘Other’. This would mean that the Indian consciousness as a country after its instantiation as a modern nation-state can only hold onto its identity if it has an ‘Other’ – in this case the diferential existence of Muslims. Thus, the existential question of India as a post-independent country can be and only be predicated on its

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acknowledgement of a certain ultimate diference with the other and that Other is the Muslim other. This would mean that in a way the Hindu-Muslim animosity was underwritten all along and will continue to be a major force for India as a country to exist as a modern nation. I would like to avoid the conclusion that Hindu-Muslim animosity is both the political cause and the efect of identitarian consciousness. It is true that imperialism must be understood as the gaze and the countergaze of two diferent communities and culture. Within this agonistic grasp of heterogeneity or ultimate diference, the economy of imperialistic power had the tendency to abrogate itself the power to impose certain ready-made social categories which also lent itself to ease of administrative logic. The administrative logic of modern imperialistic power was topographical in its political imagination and categorical in its social understanding (might want to engage with Bernard Cohn here – the idea of the numerological and ethnographic state). And the need to create a representation of the other was refracted through the self-imposed prism of a particular contingent historical western picture. This modern western administrative canvas could only hold the variety of any people’s social reality within the diremptive framework of physical and imagined boundaries. Thus, the nation-state in a way is the physical and topographical embodiment of the British imperialist logic. But at the same time, an attempt is being made to explore other formulations of the Hindu-Muslim debate which can cut across diferences in religion and seek to formulate the Hindu-Muslim question within the framework of other political categories. I will be arguing that there was such an instance in Bengal where within the paradigm of the modern – there was an attempt to argue for a nation that would undermine the master paradigm of religion as the foundation of the nation-state but instead argue for a certain aesthetic identity based on cultural and narrative commonalities. Conclusion Cutting across the dichotomies of ethnic and civic, public and private, is the work of Abul Hashim and his interesting views on nationalism. He had through his many speeches and writings given an alternative vision of a political society argued for an ‘aesthetic identity’ which had its normative identifcatory roots neither in the civic nor the ethnic religious camps but in a narrative commonality bound together by the people’s history, cultural practices and language. Hashim believed in materializing the idea of universal brotherhood of man in letter and in spirit as well as arguing that Bengal could be an independent country with a Muslim majority rooted in a panIslamic ethos.14 Politically, he helped build an alternative voice which for a short term between the years 1943 and 1947 was seriously considered by the BPML that looked towards a united Bengal. The underlying tensions of a Muslim-led

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independent Bangalistaan and its repercussions on a sizeable Hindu minority were not something that went unnoticed in other nationalist circles. But all the same, Hashim earnestly believed an aesthetic identity rooted within both religious principles as well as civic ideals is possible and that in a new united Bengal common law can be underwritten through religious ideals (mainly Islamic in his case) and they need not be necessarily opposed as much as western discourses have taught the world. He believed in two tenets. One, the principal essence of Islam is the universal equality of man, and that two, British India represented an amalgamation of diferent cultural nations similar to Europe.15 Hashim believed that diversity, a hallmark of India, was reconcilable within the fold of a future country with Muslim laws and a common civic code. He honestly believed and explicitly wrote in many journals that the justifcation for a modern society as a modus vivendi between religious sectarianism and public law is a false one which is bound to lead ultimately to violence and resentment. The United Bengal Movement of which Hashim along with Suhrawardy and Sarat Bose were the leaders should be seen as ofering an interesting practical and philosophical alternative to how we can understand Muslim-Hindu relations as well as a paradigm for re-imagining social and religious identities themselves. *** Notes 1 For more, see Ali (1990). 2 For a more detailed discussion, please see Webb (2008, Vol. 19, Issue no. 2). 3 A political community in turn implies at least some common institutions and a single code of rights and duties for all the members of the community. It also suggests a defnite social space, a fairly well demarcated and bounded territory, with which the members they defned a nation as a community of people obeying the same laws and institutions within a given territory. This was very much what the philosophes had in mind when they defned a nation as a community of people obeying the same laws and institutions within a given territory. (Smith, 1991, p. 9) 4 Quoted in Pandey, G (2003). Pp. 29 5 Op. cit., Pandey, p. 30. 6 Ranabir Samaddar, Passive Revolution in West Bengal 1977–2011, (Sage India, 2003). 7 Ranabir Sammadar, “Eternal Bengal”, (Scienza and Politica, 2011), Vol. 23, no. 45, p. 64. 8 For a more detailed discussion, please see (Shuwajima, 2015, pp. 120–124). 9 Ashok Mitra, who critically traced the thought and action of Abul Hashim in 1940s, writes that “the aim in his heart was the rebuilding of a bridge of friendship with the Hindus”. For more see Mitra, A., 2009. 10 My intention here is to trace the birth of the modern nation to an underlying rupture or to use the phrase Habermas employs, a certain ‘diremption’ which insidiously permeated itself into the political, economic and social scene at a particular

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point in time in the West’s modern history. At the heart of modernity’s historical project was a certain fracture – the fracture of ‘nature and spirit, sensibility and understanding, understanding and reason, theoretical and practical reason, judgment and imagination, I and the non-I, fnite and infnite, knowledge and faith’ (Habermas, 1987, p.  21). This meant any attempt at self-representation at the social or the personal level – in other words, identity formation – was possible only within this fractured divide of modern political existence. 11 For a more detailed analysis of these two historical and political currents, see Arendt, H., 1973, pp. 149–150. 12 It was after 1857 that the reality of the British rule dropped the disguise that the Mughals were the center of power. Until then, ‘Muslims in general identifed with the Mughal dynasty, longed for its restoration and conceived of themselves as the former ruling class’. For more, please read (Lelyveld, 1978, p. 32). 13 In late colonial India, it is interesting to note that with the India’s growing disgust with the ‘foreign’ rule, the rubric of foreign also included sometimes the Muslims as we can see from the history of Hindu nationalist discourse as described by William Gould. Evocation of the Ram – Ravan confict demonised the foreigner and encouraged comments on political history. Discrediting the British sometimes led, by extension, to criticism of Muslim India. On occasion, this was simply a byproduct of the type of historical imagery being used in speeches. On 17 March a public meeting was held in Mirzapur to celebrate the birthday of Sivaji. One Sita Ram, speaking on the boycott of foreign goods, said that just as Sivaji had fought against the Muslims, so Indians should be ready to fght the government for independence. For more, please see (Gould, 2004, p. 73). 14 Abul Hashim, In Retrospection, Calcutta: (Subarna Publishers, 1974, p. 22). 15 Hashim perceived India not as a uniform country but a conglomeration of diferent countries – something like Europe. He therefore saw in the Lahore Resolution (that was subsequently adopted as the creed of the All India Muslim League the following year in the Party’s annual session in Madras) the frst possibility of viewing his own Muslim identity not as a minority in a large predominantly Hindu nation but rather an independent Muslim in a Muslim majority country – Bengal. For more, see Op. cit., (Hashim, 1974).

References Ali, A. (1990). The Spirit of Islam. New Delhi: Low Price Publications. Arendt, H. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Bayly, C. A. (1990). Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chatterjee, P. (1988). More on Modes of Power and the Peasantry. In R. Guha & G. C. Spivak, eds. Selected Subaltern Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gould, W. (2004). Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, J. (1987). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hashim, A. (1965). As I See It. Islamic Academy.

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Hashim, A. (1974). In Retrospection. Dhaka: Subarna Publishers. Hashim, A. (2006). Integration of Pakistan. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Khan, Y. (2007). The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lelyveld, D (1978). Aligarh’s First Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mitra, A. (2009). Abul Hashem Had a Point: The State of Permanent Insurgency Must be Overcome. Telegraph, Calcutta. https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/ abul-hashem-had-a-point-the-state-of-permanent-insurgency-must-be-overcome/ cid/620987 Morley, V. (1909) Indian Speeches 1907–9. London: MacMillan and Co Ltd. Nanda, B. R. (1989). Gandhi: Pan-Islamism, Imperialism and Nationalism in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pandey, G. (2003). Remembering Partition: Violence Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shah, M. (2002). Pan-Islamism in India and Bengal. Karachi, Pakistan: Royal Book Company. Sho Kuwajima, (1992) Post-war upsurge of freedom movement and 1946 provincial elections in India, (Osaka, 1992 Shuwajima, K. (2015). Muslims, Nation and the World: Life and Thought of Abul Hashim, Leader of the Bengal Muslim League. New Delhi: LG Publishers. Smith, A. (1991). National Identity. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press. Wasti, S. R. (1964). Lord Minto and the Indian National Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Webb, A. K. (2008). The Countermodern Moment: A World-Historical Perspective on the Thought of Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammad Iqbal, and Liang Shuming. Journal of World History, 19(2).

Chapter 6

Liberal Secularity and the Indian State Notes on the Sabrimala Judgement Vishnupad

In the current Indian Republic, the date 5th August has acquired a certain dense symbolic resonance. In 2019, on this day the juridico-political status of Jammu and Kashmir was radically altered, and in 2020, on the same day, the bhoomi-puja of Ayodhya temple was performed by the Indian prime minister. The media coverage of these events however left much to be desired. Both events gave rise to lively, albeit short-lived, debates, and this paper concerns itself with some of these that erupted following the second event – although the link between the two events can hardly be disavowed. In particular, it engages the public debate between Yogendra Yadav (2020a, 2020b) and Pratap Mehta (2020) as a segue into a conversation into the Indian secular. Yadav’s short article (2020a) rechristens the date and the day with the formal inauguration of the new majoritarian republic, reading the bhoomi-puja neither as sacred nor religious, but rather as a political one. Refusing to attribute the whole credit of this rechristening to the Hindutva brigade’s politics of over three decades, he holds the arrogance of the secularist elites as responsible for the loss of ‘battle of ideas’.1 The latter was inevitable almost given the decades of secularist refusal to meaningfully engage Indian traditions and religious sensibilities, and the consequent inability to rejuvenate a Hinduism that dialogued with the contemporary times. It talked down, he wagers, to those who spoke the vernacular idiom, and neglected the implications of its own myopic support of minority communalism for short-term electoral gains. Pratap Mehta in his response in turn concurs with some of the diagnoses, chiefly contorted leftist intellectual contrivances, elitist ‘politics of opportunism’, and ‘dynamic of competitive victimisation’. Contemptuously however he registers his dissonance with the ‘fashionable’ assertion that secularism refrained from a dialogic relation with Indian traditions, motifs, languages and cultural forms.2 Instead, with the exception of the convoluted imaginaries of the left, he argues Indian thought during the nationalist, anticolonial phase drew heavily from reinvented idioms of religion. However, on the other hand, a politicized religion resulted in Partition and the violence that ensued, and hence also the ambition of postcolonial nationalism to delimit the ‘stakes of politics’ by keeping religion out of it.3 Yadav in his return post agreed with DOI: 10.4324/9781003259930-7

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Mehta on most counts barring one: he insists on his original point that postcolonial secular votaries largely disengaged from the Indian traditions, and rather treated them with disdain. It is this disdain and arrogance that has returned to haunt it, and is where they lost the battle of ideas and minds.4 The motivation for invoking this public debate as a segue into this paper is to draw attention to the ways in which the question of the secular in Indian context has been articulated in recent times: what explains the dead-ends the Indian secular (and secularism generally in recent times) finds itself in? How do we explain its putative elitist disdain in light of the capacious vision of the Constitution for religious freedoms which the elites themselves crafted? This paper meditates on some of these conundrums of Indian secularism. To anticipate the trajectory of the paper, I argue that modern forms of secularism5 in liberal and postcolonial states (a) collude with, and affirm the ascendancy of, the political over the religious, and (b) frame the transactional relation between them – which includes across a continuum a relation of distance or intimacy, neutrality and non-discrimination, autonomy and publicity within the proscriptions set by political sovereignty. Within these parameters, secularism in India – and in particular juridical secularism which this paper hones in on – begins its trajectory in India with a promise of expansive religious freedom to soon however be curtailed by an avowed reformist urgency. While laying out this narrative of secularism in India, it engages the dissenting voice in the Sabrimala judgement (2018), and recognizes in it yet another searing questioning, if not dislocation of, the privileges of juridical hermeneutic in determining the core of any religious formation. The challenge proximates, without rigorously replicating or fleshing out, what in anthropological circuits, has been called the ‘restitution of intelligibility’ argument (Spivak, 2007). Any comprehension of and sincere engagement with religious imaginaries and sensibilities, the latter argues, demands an ethical recovery of its innate and immanent rhythms; this recovery subsequently however doesn’t imply submission to its putative religious imperatives as much as a normative and open-ended engagement. Coloniality, the Secular and Ascendancy of the Political The modern secular in India has colonialist origins.6 For an anxious colonial state devoid of enduring social legitimacy, and seeking to establish its political sovereignty secularism was an expedient doctrine; it ostensibly implied impartial engagement with various religious denominations, aside from frustrating the efforts of Christian missionaries. Sumit Sarkar aptly notes, As the rulers of a multireligious subcontinent, professing a creed moreover shared by a small minority of their subjects, it was both expedient and necessary for the British (as indeed was the case with most of their predecessors) to claim to be nondiscriminatory in matters of patronage,

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administration and state funded education: practices which by the early twentieth century coming to be loosely termed ‘secular’. (Sarkar: 32; emphasis mine) Further, ‘religion’, and not least Hinduism, acquired its contemporary shape within this context where the urgency of assertions of political sovereignty of colonial-modern state had become paramount. The rise to sovereignty of the political over other communitarian constellations – including the religious – in the modern European context is well established. The religious wars of the early modern period paradoxically atrophied their (of various ethno-religious communities) prowess relative to the emerging governmental state. The political in the form of the governmental statist apparatus, as Ingrid Creppell (2010, pp. 23–45) has documented, acquired ascendancy through its abilities and resources committed to maintaining peace and order in the context of internecine religious conflicts. The social legitimation it mobilized for itself as an entity and a set of practices, combined with capitalist processes and sociocultural secularization, released the social from the vice-like grip of religious cosmological imaginary, and over time established its hegemony. The spread of what Charles Taylor (2007, pp. 539–593) has referred to as the ‘immanent frame’ with its deistic, agnostic and atheistic orientation participates in secularist processes consolidating the fledgling hold of the political over the social. In this context, what comes to bear the signifier ‘Hinduism’ as the metadenominational category during the early 19th century through the colonial epistemic and juridical-governmental interventions, performatively mobilized within its ambit immensely variegated and regionally specific traditions and cultural forms. It is relevant to note that the definition of ‘Hinduism’ as a religion in the manner of Semitic religions is a vexed one. While many scholars have traced in certain ur-texts such as the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranic literature, the Epics, the definitive contours of Hinduism, others have insisted on a voracious multiplicity – diverse traditions, practices, rituals, cults, sects, divinities, folk religions, devotional groups, regionally specific articulations – that refuse an easy reference to these ur-texts as sources, or of primary essence; in the imagination of the latter, Hinduism is of recent, modern origin.7 However, the inflections and determinations that ensued following colonialist interventions and practices find a more ready acceptance amongst this otherwise divided scholarly community. Performatively, the colonial sociology of knowledge and practices of governance, subsumed and encompassed within the meta-signifier, Hinduism, this vast, amorphous and multiple ‘referent’ as apposite and adequate. Colonialist governmental investments in the form of civil and criminal jurisprudence drew inspiration from the preceding Muslim law of the Mughals; personal law too following the Mughals remained the domain of respective religions. The colonial rule however took up the task of translation, classification and codification of personal laws, and in the process, especially in

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the case of Hinduism, infused juridical edifice a bias towards brahmanical scriptures over varied customary norms.8 Similarly, the administrative census taking in the late 19th century consolidated the category of the ‘Hindu’.9 What is at stake here is the recognition of the fact that the political-statist address of the religious is not an innocuous practice; through this address, it mutates it, attributes it with a certain administrative and juridical direction and ‘objectivity’ which then has a consequence for how it circulates and constitutes sociality. The nationalist, anticolonial movement led by the Indian National Congress (INC), and in particular its top leadership, increasingly takes recourse to the category of secularism by the late 1930s as means of categorizing its version of nationalism,10 and as distinct from that of the Right across the religious divide of Hindus and Muslims. In this secularist-nationalist imaginary, secular was opposed not so much to the religious as much as from its pathological forms, that is, communalism.11 In its contested albeit relatively congealed form, the secular will come to entertain a certain proximity to ethical forms of the religious while simultaneously remaining anxious of its ethnopoliticized proclivities; the ominous anxieties around the latter will come to fruition with Partition and the violence that engulfed the Subcontinent. In this context, it is worth noting here that nationalist counter to colonialist characterization of Indian plurality as innately fissiparous, and by extension incapable of a nationalist-political cohesion, has been to track the essence of Indic civilization in its putatively inbuilt irenic and tolerant sensibilities that in its imagination has for long enabled a multiplicity of people and communities to co-exist and flourish in the Subcontinent. Across the ideological, epistemic and ethical divides, nationalists, thinkers and scholars as varying as Tagore, Vivekananda, Gandhi, Savarkar, Golwalkar, Nehru, Munshi and Patel held that as the key to Indian sociality, and to Hinduism. The slogan ‘unity in diversity’, as Chatterjee (2021, pp. 132–178) remarks, is recuperated and retrojected, through the nationalist movement, as the genius of Hinduism that formed the core of Indic civilization. Forbearance and tolerance of difference – the defining quality of the majoritarian religion – was to ground the nation-in-the-making. Nehruvian secularism, we might note, did not pose any challenge to these grandiose self-characterizations; on the contrary, a majoritarian scaffolding formed its primary background. Needless to say, minorities and marginalized communities found it difficult to align themselves to these mythic narratives (Tejani, 2007; Nigam, 2000).12 Indian Republic and Secularity By the time of ratification of the new Constitution in 1950, the secular, or secularism in the Indian context calls upon within its ambit a ‘grammar of concepts’ (to invoke Talal Asad, 2006) where it is not monologically or singularly related to the question of religion-as-other. Rather, secularism as a

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historically shifting, constellation of categories, ideas, valuations mobilizes and condenses around affiliate categories such as nation, modern state, citizenship, liberal democracy, universalism, individual and collective rights, difference as well the temporality of progress. It is in the midst of these multiple mediations the secular acquires its valence and meaning. Inevitably, even as it addresses the religious directly, it disperses over this (and other) constellation of concerns and categories13 including that of temple entry, conversion, gender and minority rights, personal laws, property inheritance, proprietary control over religious and educational institutions, hate speech, electioneering and public sphere, and the like. The resulting ambiguity, plurivocity and indeterminacy therefore is hardly surprising. Be as it may, from the inception, its tortuous fate was intimately tied to the fate of the political, and the assertion of sovereignty of the new postcolonial state. Liminality of the politics and political institutions in the pre-modern period has been remarked upon by scholars. Sudipta Kaviraj (2010a) in a much-read essay therefore puzzles over the extraordinary centrality – almost mystical enchantment – of the modern Indian state in the contemporary moment, so much so that he detects its ubiquitous spectral, ghostly presence in social life. The political over a period of 200 years, he argues, through the colonial and postcolonial phases, has become the very ground of sociality in India. Responses to the political however have been varied through these two centuries. For someone of the sensibilities of Gandhi, ‘swaraj’, or the sovereignty of the self will have no particular need for this modern notion of intrusive statehood and politics; at worst, it is a corruptible institution inextricably bound to violence, distracted individual’s attention to self and the present onto suspicious abstractions and projects, such as progress and the like (Uday Mehta, 2010b; Kaviraj, 2010a). Others such as Nehru and Ambedkar located in it the sine qua non of any possible egalitarianism, especially given the infested inequities within the social, and notwithstanding their measured critiques of statist limitations (Mehta, 2010a; Kaviraj; Chatterjee, 2021).14 The disproportionate investment in the political in postcolonial India assumes ambivalent as well as ominous signs, and in this context, Uday Mehta (2010a) has aptly traced the uncanny proximity of a Nehru to Hobbes. This adjacency, he remarks will have surprised Nehru (and Hobbes no less!). The ironic intimacy rests with the capacious opening the early liberal democrats nurtured for the political in the Indian context. Notwithstanding the impeccable democratic credentials of these liberal leaders, and radically contrary, if not opposed, solicitations of democratic and authoritarian orders, in attributing absolute primacy to the political, and especially in the form of statist sovereignty, at the limit, invites the haunting figure of the Hobbesian Leviathan into the liberal-democratic polities; several instances could be galvanized from the postcolonial Indian history, with Kashmir’s recent predicament being its most latest manifestation (to cite only one example amongst many). Drawing on Arendtian framework, Mehta notes, at the ur-moment of the formation of

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the Republic, India choose the French revolutionary version over the American one. While the latter refused in principle to submit the social to the ‘potential tyranny of the political’, fiercely guarding the autonomy of the social – the First Amendment being the classic instance of it – the French model framed the political as necessary for the redemption of the social, encouraging in the long run, large scale, putatively reformist, statist incursions. The Constitutional Assembly Debates (CAD) mandated such an imaginary for the political. The consequences were felt amongst other entities by the religious ones as well. The mandate emerging from CAD gave Indian secularism a specific orientation. While ascertaining the paramountcy of statist sovereignty, it promised religious freedoms, albeit within limits. Effectively, the secular meant (a) a non-theocratic state or non-allegiance, official or otherwise, to any particular religion, (b) permissibility of public religions, that is to say, the State as sovereign allows autonomy to different religions to articulate themselves and flourish in public life. This publicness also (a) presupposed a non-insistence on privatizing religion, or its projection onto, and confinement in, private lives of citizenry, (b) entailed by virtue of its publicness, statist right – owing to the fact that statist relation to maintaining public order was a primary, if not primal one – to intrude into and regulate religious practices,15 and by extension determine its substantive content and character, and (c) all of which consequently implied its ultimate submission to what Foucault had called the ‘reasons of the State’16 – that is to say, statist imperative to maintain public order, morality, health, and to unobtrusively pursue public purposes. It is this statist imperative that Mehta alerts us to in his meditation on the modern-liberal notion of the political; the proximity of the latter to Hobbesian Leviathan is more intimate than is readily admitted.17 Juridical Secularity The Indian Constitution sought to locate in its seminal provisions an impossible equilibrium and harmony between the demands of individualist rights (Art 14, 15, 17) with that of the communities (Art 25, 26). And soon enough the task of interpreting these contrary trajectories fell upon the judiciary. For the last seven decades now, the latter has been called upon to adjudge and determine a series of questions and themes around religion. For instance, what constitutes a ‘religion’: is religion about individualist conscience in relation to divinity, and/or a collective practice, is divinity essential to a religion, or can it be imagined otherwise, are scriptures essential or should rituals have primacy, does the temporality of rituals and scriptures matter? Further, what are the lines that separate the religious from the secular, and what are the limits of statist intervention in either domain? And most crucially, it is called upon to adjudicate on the constitutional legitimacy of these integral elements of a religion (do these contravene other Constitutional provisions, and if so, how might the relative valuation be performed, and under what parameters).

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Following independence, the Shirur Mutt case in 195418 laid the framing grammar for judiciary’s engagement with the questions of religious freedom. In this case the Supreme Court had to determine the legislative viability of the Madras Temple Entry Act of 1951. While upholding most of the directions of the said Act that submitted the religious institution to extensive statist intervention, the judgement crucially (a) expanded the definition of religion to include both established doctrines and religious rituals, and (b) reposed the onus of determination of essential religious practices solely with the community itself, and further allowed the community to practice these with freedom constrained only by concerns of public order, health and morality. On both these counts, the judgement was seen as an affirmation of the constitutionally sanctioned religious freedoms. Very soon however the trend changed, and the reformist drive of the court took precedence over other concerns. In the Devaru case (1958) the shift is most palpable: the court appropriated the right to decide on the essential practices of a religious community, and this line of thought has continued unabated ever since. While the Shirur case anchored the determination of ‘essential and integral practices’ of a religion with the religious community itself, subsequent judgements – beginning with the Devaru judgement19 – expanded the ambit of juridical intervention with significant and long-term consequences. In due course the prerogative of locution of essential practices shifted from communities to the courts; communities could appeal and plead, the courts adjudicated on their legal and normative plausibility. This dislocation, or shift, of locus of primary locution was attended with several accompanying prerogatives: determination of whether a religious denomination qualifies as a distinct one or not, titration of true religious values and practices from accretion of superstitions,20 and exegetical onus of accurate reading of scriptures amongst others. Sabrimala Judgement 21 Sabrimala temple is one of the more famous Hindu pilgrimage sites in South India that houses the hyper-masculine deity Ayyappan. Located in deep forests in Kerala, it is open only for a few days of a month. Several characteristics make the pilgrimage unique in its own ways. For one, the presiding deity is born of two male gods, Shiva and Vishnu (who is in his female Mohini form). Ayyappan is adopted in a royal family as the heir to the throne, but sacrifices the comfort of that life to become an ascetic following a series of adventures that reflected his heroism, masculinity and personal integrity. Two, the pilgrimage and the temple is traditionally inaccessible to menstruating women (between 10 and 50 years) putatively to ensure that the deity is not distracted from his avowed celibacy. This is ironic because amongst all the famous temple pilgrimages in India, this perhaps is one of the few that allows access to people of all religious faiths (including the permission to undertake the arduous forty-odd-day renunciatory pilgrimage).

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The case was filed as a Public Interest litigation by Indian Young Lawyers Association primarily challenging the constitutionality of Rule 3(b) of Kerala Hindu Places of Worship (Authorization of Entry) Rules, 1965 that debarred the entry of menstruating women; however, it also meditated on a slew of other attendant issues:22 that is if the the community of devotees congregating at Sabrimala constituted a religious denomination on its own, distinct from Hinduism (under Article 26 of the Constitution); if disallowing access to women of a certain age group was constitutive of ‘essential practices’ of the religion, and hence constitutionally protected; if debarring women on the grounds of pollution attracted the ‘Untouchability’ clause, and therefore contradicted the Section 3 of the Constitution. The judgement delivered in September 2018 by the five-judge bench decided largely in favour of the petitioners, with one judge (Malhotra J) dissenting with the majority position. Misra, CJI and Khanwilkar, J in their concurring judgement deemed that neither Lord Ayappa devotees constitute a distinct religious denomination, nor does the exclusion of women constitute an ‘essential practice’. The very fact that this temple drew not only Hindus across all social divisions but also people from other faiths and that women of all ages could access other temples of lord Ayappa provided sufficient evidence to refuse a separate denominational status. Further, the barring of entry of women of certain ages was not anchored in any scriptural claims, nor was it an ancient practice by any means (if anything origins of this practice can be traced to the recent past in the 1950s), and hence fails the rigours of the ‘essential practices’ test. Nariman J, on the other hand, granted the practice an essential practice character; he refuses them however the status of a separate denomination, which then effectively disallows barring entry to women. Concurring with the majority opinion, Chandrachud, J locates his discussion of women’s exclusion within a discourse critical of patriarchal Indian ethos, and within which context he ascribes the Constitution a transformative role. Articulating an anti-exclusionary stance, while admitting the celibacy of Lord Ayappa as a matter of concern, he refuses the exclusion of menstruating women as ‘essential’ to the religious practice. More emphatically he questions the plausibility of locating the onus of participating men’s celibacy on women’s presence; the displacement of onus, he suggests, is the very sign of patriarchy that contravenes the constitutional order. Further, recognizing the complexity of conversations on untouchability (Art 17) even during the CAD, he distillates the issue to the question of purity and pollution that is deeply constitutive of quotidian social practices including that of casteism. The nub of discussion around untouchability he surmises had as its primary target, the purity-pollution complex, and the hierarchical and constitutively deleterious effects thereof. Framed thus, the contaminating effects of menstruation, and menstruating women are read through the lens of the Untouchability clause, and their exclusion declared constitutionally untenable.

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Indu Malhotra, J’s dissent rested primarily on two planks. The first questions the locus standi of the intervening group (Young Lawyers Association) who as veritable outsiders to the community and the religious practice should ideally be debarred from interfering. Secondly, and this has been repeatedly pointed out by scholars in the last several decades, she refuses the juridical right (of even the Supreme Court) to determine the core principles and practices of a religious community; the constitutive intelligibility of these cannot be adjudicated upon from outside and should be the prerogative of the community itself. Malhotra, J amply recognizes the perils of imagining a community, religious or otherwise as homogeneous or as speaking in one voice. In other words, she recognizes the immanently heterogeneous character of any community, its built-in hierarchies, splits and marginalization. This internal articulation of plurality and its politics however, she argues, doesn’t necessarily solicit intervention from outside – unless visibly pernicious practices require regulation or erasure; rather dissenting voice(s) should emanate from within the community. In the absence of this internal voicing of protest, or of pernicious practices, the religious community should be left to itself and to its own devices (as the Constitution deems). Indu Malhotra J’s stance is a recent articulation of a line of argument that has had several proponents over a long postcolonial Indian history. Anchoring the hermeneutic privilege with the courts is misplaced, she has argued, not least because it reposes the latter with a task it is ill-prepared for, and it decisively impedes constitutionally sanctioned religious freedoms. Curiously enough, Malhotra J’s elaborate stand intuitively resembles – if not entirely replicates – the position of anthropologists and scholars from other disciplines23 who have questioned the ‘politics of apologetics’ (Spivak, 2007, p. 151) religion is unavoidably submitted to in the secular modern age. Religion is called upon in the ‘court of Reason’ to prove its good faith; inevitably the discourses and parameters of reason frame the conditions for consequent adjudication.24 This secular framing of religion – where it is called upon to defend itself within matrices alien to its self-articulation – these scholars suggest is neither owing to self-evidence of ethical superiority of the secular reason, nor inviolability of its epistemic claims;25 rather it is indexical of a geo-politically institutionalized form of power – nothing more, nothing less. What is called upon then is a ‘restitution of intelligibility’ (Spivak, 2007, p. 153) in these very religious-cultural traditions where their measure is drawn from within the immanent frameworks, thereby withdrawing the prerogatives of modern secular reason. Saba Mahmood (2003, 2005) in her exemplary ethnography of the Women’s Piety movement in Cairo for instance seeks precisely this form of restitution. Epistemic (and by extension, ethical) fidelity to the object of study consists, she shows, in drawing out the latter’s innate contours and rhythms. Women in the Piety movement refused the identitarian politics of either the secular-nationalist or the Islamist kind; identity politics in so far as these

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invoke and display signs and surface impoverish the substance of Islamic piety. Cultivation of pious self in Islam requires fealty to devotional disciplinary habits – such as praying, veiling, abstaining from injurious speech – that nurture and embed sacral sensibilities and ethos into the bodily selves. Sidestepping the Kantian deontic morality, as well as consequentialist schools of ethics26 that have held sway in modern times, she foregrounds an Aristotelian ethics that Islamic practices have long preserved that demands, iterative performance itself as a modality of entrenching and developing ethical selves. Noticeably, Mahmood in reconstituting the subjective imaginary of the Islamic pious self refuses to get drawn into the questions of interiority or self-reflexivity attributed to the modern subject in liberal as well communitarian philosophies (including feminist thoughts of various shades). Islamic piety in this women’s movement subsists, she discovers, in submission to one’s faith and to divinity, and cultivation of this submission consists in training of bodily dispositions and habits.27 Central to her claim is the sheer alterity of this form of piety to modern-secular thought, and the incapacity of the latter to engage or comprehend the former with any degree of care or empathy.28 Conclusion Perhaps an apposite way to conclude this chapter will be to return to the debate we began with. Mehta’s emphatic dissociation, one could argue, of arrogant secularist elitism and Hindu political assertion is surprising; the former he wagers did not ‘cause’ the latter, rather only provides the ‘pretext’ for it. However, perhaps the distinction between cause and pretext is a tenuous one; on occasions, one could overdetermine the other, as Yadav implicitly seems to be suggesting. Secularists disdained over forms, artifacts and practices that held the collective jouissance of the Hindus, and what permitted such an articulation is the unequal distribution of political-statist power in the first Republic. Juridical secularity, notwithstanding its relative equanimity in treatment of the question of religious freedom, was caught up in a reformist urgency that affirmed the will of an ascendant political. The task ahead however for the secularist settlements now seems to foreground its avowed fidelity to public religions and their freedom. A step up will be to displace the Hindutva ideology as the primary site of locution of Hinduism. Malhotra, J’s dissent moves in that direction; she rather intuitively restores intelligibility within the grammar of the religious tradition itself, thereby challenging the interpretive primacy of judiciary, on both the ethical and epistemic registers. Acknowledgement I wish to thank Vandana Swami for careful comments on the previous drafts.

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Notes   1 Yadav’s short article rehearses some of the common-place criticisms of Indian secularism. For one of the earliest articulation in academic circles, see Madan (1987); for Madan’s revised position on the secularism debates, see Madan (2010).   2 One could argue that the Indian secular emerges from the cauldron of politicized ethno-religious politics of 1930s–1940s as a response to the latter.   3 Mehta casts a distinction between ‘an idiom of politics suffused with religious language’ and respectful of Indian traditions and that which he refers to as politicization of religion – ‘religious themes brought into politics’; this distinction however is unclear. Generously perhaps we can extrapolate a Ashis Nandy (1995) like difference between religion as faith versus as ideology where in the former religion functions as an unconscious and lived hermeneutic that ethically as well as intellectually shapes the approach to politics, and the latter points towards a politics of modern conflictual ethnicities where the cultural identitarian forms including religion are mobilized merely as a sign, and instrumentally.   4 It should be remarked that Mehta fails to proffer his thoughts on the nature of postcolonial secularist elites engagement with matters of cultural traditions and religious sensibilities, beyond of course noting their misadventures (opportunistic electoral minorityism, leftist misreadings and the like).   5 In the Indian context, the debates are saturated; for representative positions, however, see Madan (1987), Nandy (1995), Chatterjee (1994).   6 For a succinct albeit schematic statement on Indian secularity tracking some of its genealogies, see Kaviraj (2013).   7 See for instance V. Dalmia & von Steitencron (ed., 2007, pp. 50–89; 2001, pp. 32– 53); see also D. N. Jha (2006). Vasudha Dalmia (2007), Aditya Malik (2001).   8 Brahmanical texts in Sanskrit were translated into English, and on the other hand, Muslim personal law was drawn and translated from Persian legal texts.   9 Kaviraj (2010b, pp. 167–209), Dalmia op cit.; Dirks (2001). 10 Nehru, for instance, as Partha Chatterjee has argued, increasingly resorts to the category during this period as a response to communalist politics of the right in both religions (Chatterjee, 2021, p. 153). 11 Gyanendra Pandey (1990) in his seminal text traces the consolidation of the oppositional dyad, nationalism–communalism in north India through the late 19th century to independence (needless to say, nationalism of INC was considered implicitly secularist, and was opposed to religious pathologies of the communalists). 12 This secularism of the anticolonial INC remained of an indeterminate character for different constituencies with stakes in it. Ambedkar as well the advocates of the Dravidan movement for instance pointed towards the Brahminical essence of the secular elites (see Viswanathan, 1998, pp. 211–39; Nigam, 2000), while for a broad Muslim leadership (not reducible to the Muslim League), it shaded into majoritarianism (Tejani, 2007). Many scholars on the other hand have shown that even if the mantle of ethical secularism were to be granted to the elite leadership of the INC, the ethno-majoritarian orientation, sensibilities and prejudices of the cadres immediately below them can hardly be overlooked or ignored (see Gould, 2004; Adcock, 2014). Upendra Baxi (1999) in his felicitous phrasing most appositely labelled it the ‘Hindu-Secular State’: while the state is non-denominational, it decidedly functions within the larger majoritarian penumbra. 13 See Rajan and Needham (eds) (2007) for a very fine introduction to conjunctures of the Indian secular with these inextricably tangled themes that constitute the ‘grammar of concepts’ within which it is finds its locution and meaning. 14 For Ambedkar’s complex, dilatory relation with the political and the modern state, see Kumar (2019).

Liberal Secularity and the Indian State 125 15 Terms such as intrusion and regulation suggest a coercive engagement which however will be untrue; state has regularly supported and funded religious institutions, and aided it a whole variety of ways, that also by extension questions the idea of separation as the classic marker of secularism. 16 For a congeries of practices and sensibilities congealing around ‘reasons of the state’ – way before the phrase acquired pejorative connotations – in early modern times in western Europe, see Foucault, 1991, p. 97). The phrase (and indeed the paragraph), it should be mentioned, is missing in the more established translation; see Foucault (2007). 17 Agamben (2005, pp. 1–32) has argued for the unexceptional nature of this proximity for modern, liberal states; more persuasively he has suggested that it is an imperative that the latter cultivate such a relationship for their very survival is predicated upon it. 18 See Commissioner, Hindu Religious Endowments v Sri Lakshimindra Thirtha Swamiar of Sri Shirur Mutt AIR 1954 SCA. 19 See Sri Venkatramana Devaru v. State of Mysore, AIR, 1958 SC 255. 20 In Durgah Committee v. Hussain Ali, AIR 1961 SC; see also Shastri Yagnapurushdasji. AIR (1966) SC. 21 For a fine ethnography on these themes, see Osella and Osella (2003). 22 In an earlier decision in 1991, it might be recalled, the Kerala High Court had upheld the entry-ban, reading it as non-violative of any constitutional provisions; see S Mahendran vs Secretary, Travancore, AIR (1993) Ker 42. 23 Saba Mahmood (2003, 2005). Mahmood’s work forms a part of a constellation of scholars including Asad (1993, 2003), Agrama (2012), Gole (1997), Hirschkind (2009) with similar scholarly orientation. In this context, also see Spivak (2007). 24 See also Keane (2013) for a more recent articulation of these self-assumptions of modernity, and secular reason (I am thankful to Atreyee Majumder for this reference). 25 Ashis Nandy in the Indian scene has been a formidable proponent of this view; on the secular question, see Nandy (1995). 26 Briefly, while the Kantian deontic ethics predicates itself upon moral actions that can be affirmed as universal law irrespective of the outcomes, for consequentialists ethical actions rest on the goodness it brings in its wake for humanity generally. 27 Needless to say, several questions are raised in this debate on appropriate ethical forms adequate to the conditions of social life in modern times that Mahmood’s work (2016) invokes; however, these are outside the purview of this essay. 28 For an obverse position that seeks to locate faith in the heart of the secular, see Atreyee Majumder’s intriguing ethnographic essay ‘Secularism and its Theological Interior’ in this volume.

References Adcock, C. S. (2014). The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and Limits of Religious Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. Agamben, G. (2005). State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Agrama, H. A. (2012). Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Asad, T. (1993). Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University. Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

126 Vishnupad Asad, T. (2006). Trying to Understand French Secularism. In H. de Vries & L. E. Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in Post-Secular World. New York: Fordham University Press, 494–526. Baxi, U. (1999). The Constitutional Discourse on Secularism. In U. Baxi, A. Jacob & J. Singh, eds. Reconstructing the Republic. New Delhi: Har- Anand Publications, 211–233. Chatterjee, P. (1994, July 9). Secularism and Toleration. Economic and Political Weekly, 29(28). Chatterjee, P. (2021). The Truths and Lies of Nationalism. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Commissioner, Hindu Religious Endowments v Sri Lakshimindra Thirtha Swamiar of Sri Shirur Mutt 1954 SCA. Creppell, I. (2010). Secularisation: Religion and the Roots of Innovation in Political Sphere. In I. Katznelson & G. S. Jones, eds. Religion and Political Imagination. New York: Cambridge University Press, 23–45. Dalmia, V. (2007). Introduction. In V. Dalmia & H. von Steitencron, eds. The Oxford India Hinduism Reader. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1–26. Dirks, N. B. (2001). Castes of Mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Durgah Committee v. Hussain Ali, AIR 1961 SC. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In C. Gordon, et al., eds. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 87–104. Foucault, M. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France 1997–1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gole, N. (1997). The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Gould, W. (2004). Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hirschkind, C. (2009). The Ethical Soundscape; Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Jha, D. N. (2006). Looking for a Hindu Identity. Presidential Address, 66th Session of Indian History Congress. www.sacw.net/India_History/dnj_Jan06.pdf Kaviraj, S. (2010a). On Enchantment of the Indian State. In Trajectories of the Indian State: Politics and Ideas. Delhi: Permanent Black, 40–77. Kaviraj, S. (2010b). Imaginary Institution of India. In The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas. New York: Columbia University Press, 167–209. Kaviraj, S. (2013). Languages of Secularity. Economic and Political Weekly, XLVIII(50), 93–103. Keane, W. (2013). Secularism as a Moral Narrative of Modernity. Transit: Europäische Revue, 43, 159–170. Kumar, A. (2019). Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi and the Risk of Democracy. Delhi: Navayana. Madan, T. N. (1987). Secularism in Its Place. The Journal of Asian Studies, 46(4), 747–759. Madan, T. N. (2010). Indian Secularism: A Religio-Secular Ideal. In L. E. Cady & E. S. Hurd, eds. Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 181–196. Mahmood, S. (2003). Ethical Formations and Politics of Individual Autonomy in Contemporary Egypt. Social Research, 70(3), Fall.

Liberal Secularity and the Indian State 127 Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mahmood, S. (2016). Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Malik, A. (2001). Hinduism or Three Thousand Three Hundred and Six Ways to Invoke a Construct. In G.-D. Sonthemier & H. Kulke, eds. Hinduism Reconsidered. Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 10–31. Mehta, P. (2020, August 11). Post-Mortem of Secularism. Indian Express. https:// indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/secularism-pratap-bhanu-mehta-yogendra-yadav-ayodhya-ram-temple-babri-masjid-6549335/ Mehta, U. (2010a). On Constitutionalism. In N. G. Jayal & P. B. Mehta, eds. The Oxford Companion to Politics in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mehta, U. (2010b). Gandhi on Democracy, Politics and the Ethics of Everyday Life. Modern Intellectual History, 7(2), 355–371. Nandy, A. (1995). An Anti-Secularist Manifesto. India International Centre Quarterly, 22(1), 35–64. Nigam, A. (2000). Secularism, Modernity, Nation: Epistemology of the Dalit Critique. Economic and Political Weekly, 35(48), (November 25–December 1), 4256–4268. Osella, F. & Osella, C. (2003). ‘Ayappan Saranam’: Masculinity and the Sabrimala Pilgrimage in Kerala. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9(4) (December), 729–754. Pandey, G. (1990). The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rajan, R. S. & Needham, A. D. (2007). Introduction. In R. S. Rajan & A. D. Needham, eds. The Crisis of Secularism in India. Delhi: Permanent Black, 1–42. Shastri Yagnapurushdasji v Muldas Bhundardas AIR 1966 SC. S Mahendran vs Secretary, Travancore, AIR, 1993 Ker 42. Spivak, G. C. (2007). Religion, Politics Theology: A Conversation with Achille Mbembe. boundary 2, 34(2), 149–170. Sri Venkatramana Devaru v. State of Mysore, AIR, 1958 SC 255. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1896039/ Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tejani, S. (2007). Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History 1890–1950. Delhi: Permanent Black. Viswanathan, G. (1998). Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. von Steitencron, H. (2001). Hinduism: On the Proper Use of a Deceptive Term. In G.-D. Sonthemier & H. Kulke, eds. Hinduism Reconsidered. Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 32–53. Yadav, Y. (2020a, August 5). Secularism Gave up the Language of Religion. The Print. https://theprint.in/opinion/secularism-language-religion-ayodhya-bhoomi-pujanram-mandir-kashmir/475307/ Yadav, Y. (2020b, August 19). A New Freedom Struggle for India. The Print. https:// theprint.in/opinion/new-freedom-struggle-for-india-must-be-based-on-new-nationalism/484849/

Chapter 7

Secularism and Its Theological Interior An Anthropologist’s Demand on Faith Atreyee Majumder 1

Introduction What does the anthropology of secularism look like? To think about secularism, most anthropologists go to its conceptual opposite, to worlds of faith. I am immersed in a similar project as well. In 2019, I embarked on an ethnographic project in Vrindavan – the sacred geography of the Bhakti tradition of Krishna worship – to think about the competing sovereignties between Krishna and the nation-state. I was also, at this time, starting to practice in some liminal ways, the Vaishnava faith. In so doing, I began an investigation of the internality of my liberal secular persona, one that had lent a deep habitus to the ethical and political life that I was wont to lead. While this ongoing research project looks into the practice of Bhakti and the accompanying politics that surround it in the sacred geography of Braj in and around Vrindavan, this article is an out-take from that larger canvas of the research. In this article, I provide an autoethnography trying to show certain aporias surrounding the self-conscious journey of a secular person towards the realm of faith. I investigate the liberal secular persona, and its ‘theological interior’ (Furani, 2015, p. 8). I unpack how secularism’s mystical or theological interior became available to me, as I travelled (spatially and discursively) towards the domain of faith. In so doing, I demand of religion that open some dialogic windows for secular reasons to engage with it. This article ofers some refections on the nature of liberal secular personhood, and its interior landscapes. It does not provide a trenchant critique of political secularism of the kind we get from Ashis Nandy (1995) or Talal Asad (2003). I ran into various dilemmas at my immersion in the feld of religion – that being the site of Vrindavan and discourses on Bhakti that I read – while I retained my tether in the emotional home of secular reason. Religion is for religious people, said a voice in my head as I roamed around Vrindavan. Religious people are often duped or manipulated by the machinations of faith, I often thought, while conducting feldwork in Vrindavan. I deliver here an account and some analyses of my own journey on a tightrope from secularism’s peculiar rational interiority towards immersion in the public of Bhakti. I ofer here some refections

DOI: 10.4324/9781003259930-8

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informed by my travels in the Vrindavan region to ask a few questions of faith, all the while tethered to a secular emotional home. I invoke here an original secularism – one that contemplates earthly fnitude (originating from the term ‘saeculum’) (see Furani, 2015, pp. 10–11) – to investigate my secular ‘theological interior’ and separate the word from its current use in the political sociological sense of distinguishing the domain of the state and the domain of faith. In the next three sections, I provide ethnographic vignettes from Vrindavan that serve as examples of a didactic religion that interpellated believers and followers as obedient subjects of the leaders of faith such as temple priests. In each vignette, I unpack my spontaneous response in the situation of ‘being there’ and in asking certain questions of organized religion. In the last substantive section, I unravel my own secular persona using Charles Taylor’s theses on secularism. I end the article reiterating the questions I wish to ask of organized religion that are not about mutual tolerance, or rejection or embrace of secularism at the cost of faith but stem from asking about whether religion can open up possibilities for fnding emancipation from the rigid confnes of worldly, practical reason. Secularism in the Original Sense Khaled Furani invokes in his genealogy of ‘postsecularism’ the need for investigating ‘theological interior’ of the secular itself, rather than looking for religion as a constitutive other of the secular. Furani writes (2015, p. 10): Questioning the secular requires looking into, not beyond it. Such a conceptual relocation would surely shift vocabulary. For example, it becomes important to distinguish not so much between the religious and the secular or the political, or perception (as does Blond) and secular, but to ask about the extent to which, for example, a mode of secularity (worldliness) is theistically or atheistically invested. The logic of opening the secular to its theological interior could also lead to insisting that the crucial distinction is not between, on the one hand, reason, knowledge, nature, secularity, and the profane and, on the other, faith, belief, supernatural, spirituality, and the sacred, but rather as between faith and doubt, certainty and uncertainty, reason and revelation, the seen and the unseen, and the eternal and the transient. As an afterthought from reading Furani’s formulations, I fnd my journey to be an investigation of the theological interiority of my own internal ‘secularism’. Furani (2015) shows a six-ringed genealogy of the word ‘secular’ wherein the frst ring consisted of secularism’s origin in the Roman conception of ‘saeculum’ meaning human fnitude. Furani writes (2015, p. 11): In ancient eschaton- Latin and early Christian sediments, the concept had a robust elasticity that allowed it to evoke the fnite, referring to transience in both temporal and spatial terms.

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It is in the time of early and late modernity, that Furani shows through Weber and others, a casting of the ‘secular’ into the realm of the scientifc, and the utterly practical, materialistic conceptions of the world, that maintained a clear public/private divide and a clear break with the possibility of contemplating other worlds while living in this one. Instead of launching into a fruitless exercise of overhauling of the ‘secular’ and condemnation of its bastardized break from the theological sensorium, Furani rather recommends: What else could the secular mean? (Furani, 2015, p. 14) In this context, I try to reassemble a human sensorium in choosing an investigation of my own secular persona in demanding of religion, a conversation with my theological interiority rather than reduce me to a numb, obedient follower. Religion, in the register of Krishna worship in the sacred geography of Vrindavan, unfolds as I saw it, a routine practical reason, where faith operates through a social and economic infrastructure. This ofends the theological sensorium that stems from my secular appreciation of the domain of faith. I ask of religion: when and how might it lead me to a place unyoked from the practical rationalities that sustain organized religion?2 I see the secular protest against religion as actually a protest against faith’s actual descent into practical ordinariness rather than a rejection of the sensorium that lends body to one’s yearning for an Other-worldly presence in this world. I orchestrated a conversation with organized religion in this journey. In so doing, I turned inward to investigate my own internal practice of secularism while also bringing a larger, utopian faith to bear on religion’s orthodoxy. I realize, while writing this paper, that in taking this journey, I deserted much of the anthropological distance and non-judgement that is wont of ethnographers to perform and practice in the course of an ethnographic encounter. In this article, I will not spend too much time unpacking the deviations from the traditional method here; that will be dealt with on another occasion. I simply want to assert here, in the autoethnographic mode, that my investigation of the internality of my own secularism, with a sort of love-hate attitude, led me to the search for an ethical social formation determined by the presence of the divine. I continue to engage with the tradition of Bhakti and the religious geography of Vrindavan through a kind of secular critique, demanding of religion a register of contemplation of the transcendent, the eternal, the unseen, not otherwise tarnished by the pettiness of my worldly existence. Fellowship of Believers In the evening, Radhakanta, the e-rcikshawwallah (driver of a three-wheeled, motored vehicle popular for short-distance travel in small towns and villages) suggested I watch the arati or evening ofering to Yamunaji – the Yamuna river – at sunset. We arrived at a point where the e-rickshaw could not go any further. I walked the rest of the way on stone-paved ghats along the murky river to reach the ghat where the preparation for arati had already begun. I sat precariously on

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the steps huddling against my clothbag because I had been warned my belongings may be attacked by monkeys. I was asked by one of the men to go and join the line of women who were sitting at the edge of the ghat ready to ofer fowers to the river. I said I didn’t want to go right down to the edge because it would be too cold there. The real reason was that I was afraid to look down at the river from the precarious perch on the ghat – a kind of vertigo. The women sitting at the edge, in their saris and exposed bellies, did not seem bothered by the cold. They were taking instructions from the patriarch priest sitting at their centre. The priest had his hair tied in a bun on top of his head. He wore a down jacket and a white dhoti. He looked severe. The mantra-chanting and fower-ofering went on simultaneously. They lined up behind the priest afterwards – I joined the queue – and we threw pieces of kneaded four dough into the waters. Then, the grand brass lamp was lit – it had many levels – each level contained a number of diyas or small lamps. The senior women were given small lampholders, which were still elaborate ones. Other women, me and a Caucasian woman included, were given metal plates with one lamp each. The priest slowly started dancing with the massive lamp. Another man, who looked like an important person, stepped forth and took the lampholder from him. He held the obviously heavy and hot object with an orange cloth and continued the dance. It was a show of masculine power and resilience. These men were entitled to lift this massive brass lampholder in ofering homage to Shri Yamunaji or the Yamuna river. Stuck to the walls of the ghat, there was a massive poster that declared solidarity towards Indian CRPF soldiers who died in the terrorist attack in Pulwama the day before. It was Valentine’s Day in the rest of India. This scene was flled with material provocation for the senses – fre, camphor, fowers, water. This assembly was ofering respect to a much ecologically damaged river. This sensory provocation was simultaneously declaring sovereignty over a religious community and nation-state. Sensory provocation seemed to be at the core of faith. A huge poster was stuck by the side of the ghat declaring allegiance to the Hindu fght for nationhood. Sovereignty was displayed here in the name of Shri Krishna – also known as Kanhaiyya, Govardhanji, Giridharji, Banke Bihariji.3 This was Vrindavan. The sacred territory of Lord Krishna. This is where he is believed to have been raised simply among a community of cowherds – the Yadavs (Hawley, 1983). He is worshipped by various sects here in a parental capacity. The devotees take on the mantle of being his parents – Nanda and Yashoda – or parental fgures helping raise a mischievous, butter-stealing Kanhaiyya. They chanted • ‘hathi, ghoda, palki, jai kanhaiyya lal ki’. • Elephants, horses, and sedans, glory to the child Krishna. This territory belonged to Krishna and his devotees. I entered this space in fear and anticipation.

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Krishna Danced Here as a Peacock Krishna is indeed the carrier and declarer of sovereign authority to this day in the sacred territory of Braj – Vrindavan, Mathura, Gokul, Barsana, Nandgaon. In Krishna’s name, this land was bestowed with the imagination of an innocent, mischievous child amidst a cowherd community, and leela between the adult Krishna and his beloved Radha, surrounded by gopis. Leela is a kind of jouissance – Krishna’s play (David Haberman (1994) calls it ‘purposeless play’) where he purposefully makes himself an innocent child or young cowherd to play with his subject population. His mother Yashoda and his primary lover Radha assert power over him. Thus, they too are interpellated in the Vaishnav pantheon in these temples strewn all over the Braj region. The animation of play and acting in various capacities to the baby or young Krishna (where the devotee imagines himself to be a parent or a lover) forms the core of worship here. A priest at the Banke Behari temple tells me we don’t follow very rigid procedures for puja or worship. We simply enact bhava (essence or mood). We take care of the deity as we would a little child. We pull the curtains over the deity from time to time, just as we would a little child. We wouldn’t want everyone to stare at the child. It would bring him nazar. The worship thrives in anthropomorphisation of divinity to a point of extreme detail. The devotee exercises several roles of extreme gentleness and care – as a parent, villager, neighbour, cousin, lover to Krishna. The same devotee protects the right of Krishna to rule over his territory in a warlike afect. This warlike, defensive afect weds with the outft of the political right that wears the garb of Hindutva. Krishna survives in all his glory, oscillating between a butter-stealing, mischievous baby and a warrior and statesman. In the cosmology of Bhakti, the deity comes to occupy prana (life) at the point of the devotee’s locking of eyes with the Godhead. The priests of the Banke Behari temple construct a daily relationship of parent-child or familial theatricality around the deity. They look at the deity with specifc afects meant for evoking specifc kinds of faith. This ritual practice interpellates the deity into the folds of the intimate lives of the devotee. It conjures presence by performance. Krishna is at once god as he is lover, son, mischievous cowherd, a character whose demand for care and love among his devotees makes his enormous, non-human presence (declared explicitly in the Gita) domesticable in its human form. This landscape was revealing some elements of a daily conversation with the Godhead, where he occupied not another, but this very world. Storytelling brings alive the presence of the Godhead amidst this mundane landscape of the Braj small towns and villages – Mathura, Vrindavan, Nandgaon, Gokul, Barsana. It makes possible the enchantment of the entire

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region with the presence of the Godhead, not confned only to the physical materiality of the deity in the temple. A priest in Gokul points to the gardens surrounding a temple and says, ‘This is where Krishna danced in the form of a peacock on the request of his followers’. I was amused. Of course, I didn’t believe that Krishna danced here dressed as a peacock. But I believed Krishna is here, was here, will be here. I detected his presence everywhere. A sensorium was activated that made possible the intuition of Krishna’s earthly presence, in a way that didn’t violate my secularism. Why then did the stories told my priests and other religious leaders evoke in me such suspicion? My secular ‘theological interior’ intervened to unsettle the seeming obedience with which my fellow believers absorbed the story of Krishna’s dancing in Gokul as a peacock. It wasn’t so much the story of Krishna dancing in the garb of a peacock that violated the interior landscape of my secular persona. I started asking of faith a set of questions that were not expected to be asked of faith. The priest who told this story expected obedience and allegiance to his own personality, that lent him power and prestige in the evocation of the name of the Godhead. He further reserved the power of telling the myth in a manner as to expect an audience to be subdued by his aura. I should clarify here that this is not a clear utterance of dissent against human leadership structures through which religions sustain themselves. My secular critique lay in the automatic expectation of allegiance and obedience at the utterance of a powerful mythical initiation of the Godhead’s presence upon the earth. I was attempting a sensory continuum that lifted my life, entrenched in the drudgery of practical reason, into one of an intuitive connection with the transcendent. While that was happening in some sense, it was coupled with the demands of social obedience, which dragged the moment back into the calculations of earthly power and again, those of practical reason. Scepticism I travelled to Gokul in an auto rickshaw from Vrindavan. I was told this was old Gokul. I walked through a maze of old, cobbled alleys, with little shrines on both sides, and brightly coloured, multi-paneled, ancient-looking doors and windows. My impulse was to take photographs of these doors and windows. I was hesitant because I had been told monkeys could snatch your phone. I ended up at the entrance of a temple called Panchayati Mandir Shri Nanda Bhavan. There were forists waiting outside. I bought ten rupees worth of fowers. I went in with a big group of devotees. They were being instructed about conduct inside in the inner quarters as I reached. The instructor had instructed everyone to enter crawling – literally on all fours. We crawled in, uncomfortably shufing into a spot where the deity would be in our line of vision. We sat in a low stone quarter, facing the deity. A man spoke in Hindi in the mic. His words were not legible to me. Except for the intermittent chant of

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‘pa pa paiyyan/Chalein kanhaiyya’, ‘hathi ghoda palki/jai kanhaiyya lal ki’.4 Intermittently, people were asked to throw their hands in the air and laugh (to display that they had no worries in the house of god). Then they declared that people could contribute Gau-dan (gift of cow) of INR 1155. He kept saying, ‘there is no pressure, give the gift only if it pleases, if it causes you any fnancial or other difculty don’t give’. Despite that, there was subtle pressure on everyone. After they put up their hands to ofer a gift, the instructor came over to them and asked them their name, their father’s, mother’s, wife’s, older son’s name and calls out these names loudly. They were then given agya (permission) to visit the four pilgrimage sites – char dhyam – Badrinath, Nathdwara, Puri and Rameshwaram. The assumption, of course, was that every adult was married and has children. I sat in discomfort. I had come to immerse myself in the world of religion. But now religion was exposing itself in a mundane economic logic. Most of the group around me were from Bhilwara, Rajasthan. They were given safron bands to wear around their necks as recognition of their having given the gift of gau-dan. As the curtains before the deity were pulled, people were given prasad (sweetmeats and other edibles ofered to the Godhead) and were given a chance to pull the handle of the cradle in which baby Krishna was laid. They got up and moved away after this. The devotees sitting behind them moved up in order, but in the sitting condition. One must not be seen standing in the viewing line of the deity. I moved away feeling a bit annoyed at this bid to pay money from people who were obviously from humble economic backgrounds. Why did the avenue of worship have to demand a high economic price whatever might the ritual be? Why wasn’t it a place of pure worship and invocation of the Godhead? Why was the gau-dan subtly forced on the Bhilwara villagers? An auto took me to Naya Gokul – a new part of the town. The auto stopped where a whole maze of cobbled streets heavily laden with cow dung began. Here I stumbled upon another temple which turned out to be a temple of Nanda and Yashoda, Krishna’s foster parents. The story goes that from jail in Mathura, where he was born, he was brought here in Gokul. The family in front of me was being subjected to the same drill as I saw in the other temple – of giving a considerable amount towards gau-dan. When my turn came, he asked me to contribute 1300 INR. I was irritated and said I did not have cash. He said they would readily accept cards. I was trapped. I had to pay. I agreed. He asked me to consider a gau-dan which would be towards welfare of all my ancestors. I resisted. He asked me to pull the handle of the cradle. I was ofered prasad (sweetmeats ofered to the Godhead), two bright pink cloth bands and as I walked out to pay with my card, he got up to show me a stone with engravings of feet. He asked me to put my head to the feet engravings for blessings. I did so and he put sandalwood marks on my forehead. As I got up, he asked me what I did for a living and wished that my next visit would be with a son – a little kanhaiyya. This interpellation by

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the priest as a heterosexual woman whose only plea to God at a certain age could be for progeny irritated me further. In fact, that day I came back feeling quite upset with the same religious establishment which had provided me with extreme feelings of love and devotion. Here, I unpack the nature of this contradictory emotion. Secular Theological Interior Secularism and its anchoring of my personhood provide an explanation. Secularism remained an emotional home in this strange tightrope of walking towards religion as a way to detect divine presence in my everyday life. Religion gave me a set of tools. Why would poor families from Bhilwara readily submit to priestly pressure and give large sums of money for gau-dan? Surely, they too were negotiating a relationship with the Godhead, which is why they came to the sacred geography. This negotiation became necessarily routed through the leadership of the priest whose job it turned out was to earn more money for the temple to sustain itself. This banality irked me. The families could have politely resisted and still remained attached to the Godhead like I was trying to do, thought I. But they did not fnd it in themselves to dispute the priests’ suggestion. They perhaps had their internal critiques of the power exerted by the priestly class in their lives. But I discovered something else through this event: that religion was indeed an economy of practical reason, encased carefully in some signposts of talking of the transcendent. But the material ambitions of life – jobs, childbirth, marriage, pain-pleasure balance – was the obvious set of logics through which even the priestly class approached devotees as their subjects. It was not expected that a common devotee – urban or rural, rich or poor – would have more-than-material considerations in their journey towards divinity. Religion emerged as an elliptical route to realization of practical goals and aspirations, ones that had a slightly higher precarity attached to their materialization. I was looking to immerse myself in contemplation of the Godhead without the messy hierarchical realities of organized religion; I was hoping for a pure space of release from the pressures of practical reason. The secular ‘theological interior’ had lent me a register for contemplation of own existence as an example of precarious fnitude. I wanted to encase thought of such fnitude within a fold of imaginative infnitude lent by religion. But this dance of dialogue between the lived fnitude and the imaginative infnitude did not occur. Religion unfolded, in the ultimate occasion, another register lived fnitude, calculations of earthly power, albeit drawing on the name and signage of the Godhead. Religious publics seemed to assemble in an enchanting, almost euphoric sensory universe of Vrindavan, all the while counting pennies that they would have to give at temples, counting on the extent of blessing to be had in return, performing a strategic obedience before strategically powerful persons in this peculiar economy.

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Demands on Faith Let me take a step back at this point and try to unpack the underpinnings of my journey as a secular, liberal anthropologist trying to engage religious faith in personal and professional registers, and conduct feldwork in the sacred geography in and around Vrindavan. The Indian secular project has derived, as Rajeev Bhargava (1998) and others have pointed out, from an equidistant state which stand at equal, ‘principled’ distance from religion, and not, unlike the European model, the clean break between the church and the state. Ashis Nandy (1995) has eloquently pointed out the faws of Indian secularism and showed within the originary germs of the rise of the Hindu right. Moving away from the conversations on the nature of secularism of the Indian state and polity, I want to ponder on the internalized secularism of the liberal person. I particularly want to use the word ‘secular’ in the sense that contains a ‘theological interior’ as I have described earlier, pursuing the scholarship of Khaled Furani. But stepping ahead of it to an extent, let me pontifcate a bit on religion as a matter of choice contained within the vicissitudes of the liberal person. Liberal personhood emerges on the strong pillars of individual choice and the public/private divide. Liberal persons, not unlike me, know the rules of critical-rational debate (to use Habermas’ phraseology) to argue with other citizens and the state about our point of view and our entitlements. Liberal persons are also emotionally attached to the ethos of liberalism and secularism. What is this ethos? Charles Taylor, in his seminal work, A Secular Age, tries to get at the bottom of this. Taylor shows the existence of three arcs of secularity in modern society. Secularity was brought about through the evacuation of the public sphere of all religiosity and religious signs and the suspension of religious logics for rational ones. But the third arc is the most provocative. Taylor writes (Taylor, 2007, p. 3): Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives. And this will also likely mean that at least in certain milieux, it may be hard to sustain one’s faith. There will be people who feel bound to give it up, even though they mourn its loss. This has been a recognizable experience in our societies, at least since the mid-nineteenth century. There will be many others to whom faith never even seems an eligible possibility. There are certainly millions today of whom this is true. As an elaboration of the third arc of secularity, Taylor shows that in the modern age, religion becomes a matter of choice for many. In a time before modern secularism, there wasn’t a clear option available to bring the presence of God within one’s life, or reject such option. I learnt a fair bit about my own religiosity in reading Taylor’s unpacking of this third arc of secularity. I was,

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indeed fghting a certain stodgy secularism in afrming my faith in Vrindavan, but my personhood was entirely tethered to the notion of choice. I did not practise the absolute surrender to forces of God, especially in the surrender of scepticism, that other fellow believers may have practised. They were asked to gift money-gifts at temples by the priests, and they never thought, unlike me, to question the good faith of that request. I was immersed in the secular act of choosing faith and seeking a private conversation with the Godhead in Vrindavan. I was simultaneously being sceptical of large numbers of people who keep religious institutions ticking with money and care. Large numbers of people keep Vrindavan going, in the business of teaching common people how to practice. Some are fulltime practitioners such as sadhus in the various mathas. Others are guides to temples and sweetshop-owners who will tell you a bit about the Bhakti faith while you buy fowers and sweets. To be one with this mass of humanity that crowded the Banke Behari temple every morning and evening, was difcult. The embrace of the tight grip of a community bound by the power associated with faith, also implies simultaneously distancing oneself from persons of another faith, those who don’t share in the fundamental truths that are held sacred in one’s faith-bound community. So, very delicately put, I wanted, in Vrindavan, the choice of embracing the Godhead, without the concomitant burden of welcoming all his followers (gathered as the convulsing masses of Vrindavan) into my life. There was elitism involved here, I admit. There was also a distancing the from complex economy of practical reason practiced by believers of varying designations who pulled and pushed the signage and nomenclature of the Godhead. I write elsewhere about the difculty of doing ethnography while trying to practice the same faith that becomes the object of the ethnographic gaze. I write about the impossible simultaneity of consuming a truth and watching others consume it in their own way. The doing and the watching would deliver divergent ethnographies, I argue. But for the purposes of this article, the ethnographic site is no longer the singing and dancing masses of Vrindavan, or the priest who asks for the gift of gau-dan, or the priest who points out to the place where Krishna danced as a peacock. The ethnographic site, here, is my liberal secular personhood and the investigation of its interiority, I realized well into my (ongoing) research stint in Vrindavan. Taylor mentions that the current secular arrangement of power carries in it sediments of a diferent time, that ‘modernity’ is accounted for by a ‘subtraction’ logic. Disenchantment means minus something called ‘enchantment’. He writes (Taylor, 2007, p. 29): In other words, our sense of where we are is crucially defned in part by a story of how we got there. In that sense, there is an inescapable (though often negative) God-reference in the very nature of our secular age. And just because we describe where we are in relating the journey, we

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can misdescribe it grievously by misidentifying the itinerary. This is what the ‘subtraction’ accounts of modernity have in fact done. To get straight where we are, we have to go back and tell the story properly. Our past is sedimented in our present, and we are doomed to misidentify ourselves, as long as we can’t do justice to where we come from. Religion is very much alive and well, and India provides a good testimony to that fact. Has secularism failed? Maybe not, but the three arcs of secularism that Taylor proposed were not meant to work in comparable pace and strength. The third arc – a matter of choice in religiosity – to decide whether or not one will wear the hijab, or whether or not one wants to convert to a diferent religion from the one of their birth – is the one that seems to be the most at play. Large numbers of people are choosing religion. Perhaps, Saba Mahmood’s (2005) description of the women in the Islamic Revivalist Movement in Cairo was also choosing a certain religiosity, in a perfectly secular move, at least in Taylor’s conception. Elsewhere, Taylor (2007) considers the popular approach to secularism as an institutional arrangement that separates church and state, and Rajeev Bhargava’s commendation of ‘principled distance’ between religion and the state (Bhargava, 1998). Taylor describes the use that early secular states had of what he calls ‘good religion’, one that promotes an amenable social order and doesn’t assert its authority against the modern state. Any kind of fundamentalism, or fanaticism must, therefore be quelled immediately, as it wouldn’t qualify as ‘good religion’. Regardless, the internal and external governance of religion proceeds as yet another concern of mundane power and rational calculations, albeit with a component of awe and uncertainty (it is not certain whether in one’s negotiating stance, one can actually make the Godhead negotiate with his earthly subjects). Taylor, writes in A Secular Age, about a certain ‘fullness’ of life that the umbrella of religion (namely, Latin Christendom) used to yield in a pre-modern time, and between 1500 and 2000 – a time span of fve hundred years – a massive change occurred at least in western societies, where people started to consider the possibility that this ‘fullness’ might be achieved without the intervention of anything beyond-the-human. Taylor writes further (Taylor, 2007, p. 15): we have moved from a world in which the place of fullness was understood as unproblematically outside of or ‘beyond’ human life, to a conficted age in which this construal is challenged by others which place it (in a wide range of diferent ways) ‘within’ human life. And further, (Taylor, 2007, p. 18): I would like to claim that the coming of modern secularity in my sense has been coterminous with the rise of a society in which for the frst time

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in history a purely self-sufcient humanism came to be a widely available option. I mean by this a humanism accepting no fnal goals beyond human fourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this fourishing. Of no previous society was this true. Taking my own liberal secular personhood, as a point of analysis, I noticed as I entered the temple towns in and around Vrindavan, an immediate injection of a certain feeling of caution. God was great, I thought, but not so, the people who might be out to dupe me in His name. It is this suspicion that I want to relate to Taylor’s argument of ‘fullness’. I was walking into Vrindavan, without the emotion of needing God for any purpose in my life, rather I was choosing God. This is what set apart my optional religiosity to that of Bhilwara villagers who contributed readily towards gau-dan on the priest’s request. Secularism: Moral Narrative of Modernity This suspicion may be considered natural given the common occurrence of petty corruption and cheating in Indian religious sites. Here, let me transition into Webb Keane’s (2013) response to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Webb Keane considers secularism to be ‘moral narrative of modernity’. Keane writes (Keane, 2013, p. 159): It is not merely that the world has, somehow, become secular. Rather, secularity often presents itself in compulsory terms, even as an ethical demand. People in a wide range of societies fnd that they ought to be secular. The compulsory nature of this demand can go beyond the expectations of citizenship and legality, into more emotional and subjective dimensions of personhood. In Keane’s terms, I had internalised the imperative of secularism. I was keen to lose my tether to my secular emotional home, but I was simultaneously, also anxious not to lose my modernity, not to be subdued by routine structures of social power that took the nomenclature of religion. This anxiety was enacted in ways that transcended my scepticism about the money-making that took place at temples. I noticed that people were acting under the dominant assumption that their route to the Godhead must necessarily be through a priest or a guru, a human person who flled the space of a legitimate spokesperson of the Godhead. It is here that I found religion following the popular diktats of practical reason – of power and its concomitant negotiation. Most devotees found ways to negotiate this power that the priest or the guru had over themselves and their families. Submission to the Godhead meant some sort of simultaneous submission to the authority of certain religious leaders. Keane writes (Keane, 2013, p. 160): If, in the past, humans were in thrall to illegitimate rulers such as kings, rigid traditions such as those given in scriptures, and unreal fetishes such

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as their religious rituals and relics, as they become modern they realize the true character of human agency. According to this moral narrative, modernity is a story of human liberation from a host of false beliefs and fetishisms that undermine freedom. Conversely, those people who seem to persist in displacing their own agency onto such rules, traditions, or fetishes (including sacred texts) are out of step with the times. They are morally and politically troubling anachronisms, pre-moderns or anti-moderns. In step with Webb Keane, I emerged as a self-governed individual person, free to choose a strand of faith in my life that remained an addition and in no way unsettling for the mainstay of liberal personhood that practiced. I don’t write this as a means of self-fagellation, but simply looking inward into a possibility of practising liberal politics and ethics while retaining a continuum with the realm of faith or emotions that contemplate the transcendent. While I agree with Webb Keane that secularism is a moral narrative of modernity, I live within and practice secularism as a demand on faith to do something more, something that my practice of secularism can’t account for. But, in venturing into the worlds of faith in Vrindavan, I fnd that faith descends into worlds of ordinariness (with exceptional moments, of course) that are not very diferent from realms of practice of practical and instrumental reason. Large numbers of devotees fnd faith as a modality of collective social support, they submit to the banal authority of the priestly class in the apprehension of not being excluded from the emotional and ritual benefts of practising faith – the promise of a better life, being an example of an obvious drive-force behind the practice of faith. Keane also disagrees with Taylor’s blunt periodization between the premodern (where people apparently were willingly religious) and shows that there were always been dissenters and heretics, within the large fold of the pre-modern (Keane, 2013, p. 167). While this may be true through empirical research yielded by history and anthropology, it doesn’t completely invalidate Taylor’s demonstration of a defnite break in attitudes towards one’s maker, the Supreme Power, or God between 1500 and 2000. While heretics are well-placed in that long history of faith and the slow triumph of reason over blind faith, it cannot be denied that the growth of a generalised attitude that God is matter of choice is defnitely a recent one, be it the West or the non-west. Through my own journey towards the Bhakti world, I learnt that optional belief is a feature of the liberal secular persona, and cannot be easily unlearnt. It is common for historians and anthropologists to say that there is continuity and rupture across the boundary between two historical periods. While I recognize the merit of such arguments against the possibility of sweeping claims, I believe, Taylor is pointing towards a largescale change in attitudes towards the presence of God in one’s immediacy or the need for the transcendent in achieving ‘fullness’ in one’s life.

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Conclusion In conclusion, let me say that Charles Taylor provoked me to think about the secular underpinnings of my embrace and critique of faith – where the Godhead was embraced, but the ways and means of large numbers of fellow believers were not only rejected, but seen as an example of the banal practice of instrumental reason (a vocabulary of secularism in its original sense, as drawn out by Khaled Furani). While I recognize that secular modernity is guarded in the secular institutional arrangement of power that dominates and erases other forms of living with the transcendent, I write here in consonance with Khaled Furani’s term ‘theological interior’ of the secular to maintain an original sense of the secular as a register of contemplate of human fnitude. In so doing, I travelled into the sacred geography of the Bhakti faith – the realm of Krishna worship in Vrindavan – demanding a conduit between the worlds of fnitude and infnitude, and simultaneously, between ones of practical reason and its intuitive outside. But faith revealed itself as a register of yet another form of practical reason that was steeped mundane negotiations of social and economic power – one that albeit used the nomenclature and signage of the Godhead. I am not dissociating from the dialogue with faith on this count, in my research or personal trajectories. But I continue to demand of faith an answer to my question of when and how faith might lead me to a place unyoked from the practical rationalities that keep organized religion sustained. I maintain that secularism’s (in this sense) protest against faith is ultimately a critique of its descent into ordinary negotiations of social and economic power through the use of practical reason. What did I learn further? That, as Taylor’s third arc would have it, belief/faith could be an option. At a certain juncture in my life, I chose belief/faith. But following the path that Bhakti dictated proved to be more complicated than just joining the assembly with folded hands at the Banke Behari or the Radha Raman temple, or chanting the names of the Godhead. The discomfiture with the ways of the mass of fellow believers was the hook that was pulling me back towards my inward investigation of my secular persona. Thus, this article is less about the priest who claimed that Krishna danced as a peacock at a certain spot or that good believers must contribute sums of money to temples as examples of practical reason immersed in the banal negotiation of social and ritual power. This article stems from an internal secularism wanting to maintain a conduit with the world of faith through a dialogue between finitude and infinitude and failing to do this ethical and philosophical work. Organized religion, I maintain, must be called upon to deliver to this demand of opening up windows of such dialogue, ones that are not ultimately rerouted into the concerns of worldly power and its negotiation through practical reason.

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Notes 1 Fieldwork for this book chapter was supported by a Faculty Research Grant of the O P Jindal Global University. This article has been enriched by comments from Partha Chatterjee and Tapati Guha Thakurta when I presented an earlier draft of the essay at a seminar at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in April 2021. It beneftted immensely from conversations with Sandeep Banerjee and R. Krishnaswamy. 2 As I write this, I am particularly infuenced by the thought of Kabir’s theistic stance, having read a recent biography of Kabir (Agrawal, 2021). One of the most interesting things Purushottam Agrawal shows is Kabir’s ferce preference of solitude – signs of a deeply individualistic, non-sectarian journey towards the divine. The other signifcant attribute in this portrait is Kabir’s insistence on a constant dialogue between the internal spiritual journey and the need for voluble protest against the injustices in the external world – between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. We fnd in Agrawal’s book a clear explication of the philosophy of non-sectarian, nonhierarchical religiosity, coupled with the even more difcult edict – that of bringing about a seamless balance of dharma (morality), artha (material resourcefulness), kama (desire) and moksha (eventual liberation). 3 Otherwise, spelt as Krsna. In the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Hinduism, Krsna is defned thus by Tracy Coleman (2007): Krsna is depicted in three major forms throughout his long and diverse history in Indian religions: (I) as the warrior prince, Vasudeva and Madhava, advisor to the Papdavas in the Mahabharara battle and benevolent ruler of Dviiraku; (2) as the playful child and adolescent lover Gopala and Govinda in the Sanskrit Puranas and vernacular poetry, celebrated throughout India in popular expressions of devotion; and (3) as the Supreme Lord, Narayana, Visnu and Bhagavan, who creates the entire cosmos and grants moksa (liberation) to those devotees who unconditionally adore him. 4 Translated: Look at the baby Krishna walking in baby steps.

References Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bhargava, R. (1998). Introduction. In Secularism and its Critics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–25. Coleman, T. (2007). Krsna. In D. Cush, C. Robinson & M. York, eds. Encyclopedia of Hinduism. New York, London: Routledge, 425–434. Furani, K. (2015). Is there a Postsecular? Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 83, 1–26. Haberman, D. (1994). Journey Through Twelve Forests: An Encounter with Krishna. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawley, J. S. (1983). Krishna, The Butter- Thief. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Keane, W. (2013). Secularism as a Moral Narrative of Modernity. Transit: Europäische Revue, 43, 159–170. Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nandy, A. (1995). An Anti-Secular Manifesto. India International Centre Quarterly, 22(1) (Spring), 35–64. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Index

absolutism 24 active service 65, 67 Advaita Vedanta 30, 86, 90–92 aesthetic identity 98, 100–107, 110–111 afrmative engaged action 63 Agamben, Giorgio 5, 51, 88 ahimsavadi 66–67 AIML 102 Ali, Ameer 97 All Bengal Muslim Conference 102 Ambedkar, B. R. 5–6, 14, 25, 41–42, 45–48, 53–54, 118 Anaximander 69 Anderson, Benedict 108 anthropologists 14, 122, 128, 140 anticolonial movement 117 anti-juridical knowledge 51 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 7 Aristotelian ethics 123 Aristotle 59 askesis 59, 67, 70; meaning of 68 Aurangzeb 43 Aurobindo 22 Austin, John 7 authoritarian 53, 118 autonomous agent 62 autonomy 11–12, 32, 115, 119 avidya 90–91 Ayappa, Lord 121; see also Sabarimala temple, judgement Ayodhya temple, bhoomi-puja of 114 Backward Classes 14 Balagangadhara, S.N. 3, 76, 81, 88 balance of power 109 Banerjee, Prathama 24 Banerjee, Sukanya 11 Bangalistaan 100, 111

Banke Behari temple 132, 137, 141 Basavanna 92 Battle of Panipat 2 Battle of Plassey 2 Battle of Raichur 2 Bayly, Christopher 22–23, 26, 29, 31 belief/faith 12, 29, 33, 51–52, 122–123, 128–133, 136–137, 140–141 Bengal 28, 32, 97–98, 110; aesthetic identity for 100–107; identity construction in 107 Bengal Congress 98, 101 Bengali: bhadralok 11–12; Hindus 28, 100; Muslims 100–101 Bengal Muslim League 98–99 Bengal Provincial Muslim League (BPML) 98, 100–102, 106, 110 Bengal Tenancy (Amendment) Bill 102 bhadralok identity, Hindu 101 Bhagavad-Gita 58, 65 Bhakti tradition 91–92, 128, 130, 132, 137, 140–141 Bhargava, Rajeev 26, 136, 138 Bhattacharya, Krishna Chandra 26 Blaufarb, Rafe 20 BonJour 76 Bose, Sarat 98, 100, 111 Bose, Sugata 21 Boulainvilliers 48–51 Bourdieu, Pierre 23 Brahman 92; atman as 65 Brahmins 79, 105 Brahmo Samaj 11 British Colonialism in India 81–83 British in India 2 Buddhism 81–83 Buddhists 1, 104

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Index

Burke, Edmund 11 Burton, Antoinette 21 capitalism 4, 50–54, 89, 108; dematerialised 52; market 11; as religion 51 capitalist: caste/class 50; infnity 49–52 casteism 121 caste system 5, 14, 49–50, 58, 82, 97, 100, 107 Central National Mohammadan Association 101 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 28 Chandrachud, J 121 Charulata (1964), Ray 10 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra 22 Chatterjee, Partha 20, 28, 117 Choudhury, Nawab Ali 101 Christianity 3, 79, 81–82, 88, 100; theology 76, 79, 82, 87, 91–92 Christians 43, 51, 76, 78–79, 81, 92 Chundrigarh 105 citizens 59, 89–90, 136; cosmopolitan 8 citizenship 11–12, 22, 118, 139 Clark, George Kitson 30 Cohn, Bernard 110 collective: consciousness 1–2; justice 38 colonialism 3, 21, 26–27, 64, 77, 80–82, 108 Coloniality 115–117 Common laws 7, 111 communalism 102, 104, 117; minority 114 communism 89 Communist Party 103 communitarian constellations 116 comparative philosophy 19 compatibilist scholars 25 conceptual confict 63 Congress Party 41–42, 58, 106 constitution, making of 37 Constitutional Assembly Debates (CAD) 119, 121 cosmopolitanism 8, 98 counterrevolutionary, tradition 40–42 creation 86 cultural identity 104 Dalits 14, 79–80, 92; see also caste system darsanas 90 decolonization 2, 12

Derrida, Jacques 7 Descartes 63, 80 de Souza, Peter Ronald 27 determinism 74, 83, 87 Duiker, William J. 30, 90 Dumont, Louis 21 East Pakistan 105 education 13, 46, 64, 68, 78, 81, 101 education (paideia) 68; English 64; internationalisation of 77 egalitarianism 30, 46, 50, 118 electoral system 45–47 elites 11, 27, 115 epistemes 63–64, 70–71, 79, 83, 88, 117, 122 equality 5, 13–14, 22, 38, 40, 54, 98, 104, 109 essentialism 76–77, 79–80, 82 ‘essentialist unities’ 81 ethical invasion 70 ethnicity 2, 39, 100 Europe 9, 12, 24, 26, 88, 102, 104, 109, 111; intellectual tradition 87 evil 63, 66, 86, 92; see also sin, origin of Fa-Hien 77 fanaticism 138 farmer’s protest 52 feminism 74, 79, 83; liberal 84 Fernandes, Leena 14 fnancialization 51 Forster, E. M. 9 Foucault, Michel 5, 7, 31, 48–50, 68, 70, 85, 91, 119; Boulainvilliers 53; condensation 49 fraternity 38, 40 freedom 85, 90; barbaric 51; historical 45–50, 53; individual 54, 70, 88–89 (see also individualism); problematisation of 74, 88, 92; questions of 74, 88, 90, 92; right to 14, 60, 88 freedom fghters 4 free will 74–75, 83–84, 86–90, 92 free-willing human actor 85 French Communist Party 77 French Revolution 20, 38, 40, 100, 119 Freud 77 ‘fullness’ 138, 140; Taylor on 139 fundamentalism 138 Furani, Khaled 128–130, 136, 141

Index Gandhi, M.K. 4, 6, 25–26, 58–59, 64, 68, 70, 77, 97–98, 106, 117–118; Hind-Swaraj 67; ideas of political engagement 63; mission of 65; and salvation 65; self-care practices 67; self-restraint 65–67, 71; self-sacrifce 66; spiritual self-generation 67; tapas 66; vows 66 Gau-dan (gift of cow) 134–135, 137, 139; see also Krishna worship; Vrindavan Germanic-capitalist freedom 50 Germanicity 50 Geuss, Raymond 25 Ghalib 55 gigantomachy 53 Gilmartin, D. 3 Global South 27 Godhead 132–135, 137–139; chanting names of 141 God/Supreme Power 2, 45, 51, 55, 64, 79, 81–82, 85–87, 91–92, 136–137, 139–140 Gokhale, G. K. 22 Gokul 132–134; see also Vrindavan Golwalkar 117 ‘good religion’ 138 government 109 Graeco-Romans 79, 81; gods 81; traditions 86 Gramscian 4 The Great Demarcation, Blaufarb 20 ‘Greatness of a Nation’ Hasim 102–103 Great War 30 Green, T. H. 33 Hadley, Elaine 29 Hartz, Louis 20 Hashim, Abul 2, 98–99, 101–107, 110–111 Hatcher, Brian 30 Hegel 4, 32 Hinduism 44, 81–82, 114, 116–117, 121, 123 Hindu Law 82 Hindu Mahasabha 42, 45, 47 Hindu “mass” (Hindudom) 44 Hindu-Muslim: divide 102, 107, 109–110; identities 2; relations 14, 97, 109–110

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Hindus 1, 5, 9–10, 42–46, 78, 82, 101, 103, 106–109, 117, 121, 123; identity 108; knowledge 47; massline 44–45; polity 44; right 136; unity 109 Hindustan 42–43 Hindustani 45 Hindutva 44, 47, 132; brigade’s politics 114 Hobbes 88, 118 Hobhouse, L. T. 33 Hofmeyr, Isabel 21 humanism, self-sufcient 139 human rights 70, 85, 108 humans 67, 84–87, 89, 107, 139; evolution 90; free will 89; liberation 140 ‘I’ (aham/ahankara) 92 identitarian consciousness 110 identity 2, 6, 39, 70–71, 97, 101, 107, 109; questions of 6 imperialism 4, 29, 110 Ince, Onur Ulas 23 India 41–42; Constitution of 44, 119; history 4, 22, 25, 44; intellectual traditions 4, 79, 81–82, 90–92; mythology 86 Indian Moslem Association in Bengal 101 Indian National Congress (INC) 32, 98, 105 Indian National Movement 41 Indic civilization 117 individualism 30, 71 individualization 29–30 individual rights 24, 88, 119 Industrial Revolution 80 Intellectual/intellectuals 21, 23, 30, 80; history 7, 19, 21, 27, 80; movements 5–6; nationalism 78; problems 74, 84, 87; system 84; traditions 4, 69, 74–85, 90, 92, 107 Iqbal, Muhammad 97–98 Islam 81, 98, 100, 102, 104, 111, 123 Islamic Revivalist Movement, Cairo 138 Islamisation 97 Jainism 81 Jains 1, 104 Jammu and Kashmir, juridico-political status of 114

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Index

Jinnah 103 Judaism 81 Judgement Day 91 jurisprudence 42, 116 justice, theories of 61–62 Kabir 92 Kant 64–65, 70 Kaviraj, Sudipta 118 Keane, Webb 139–140 kenosis 71 Kerala Hindu Places of Worship 121 Khanwilkar, J 121 Khilafat 98 King, Martin Luther 77 knowledge 19, 27, 52, 77, 80, 82, 116, 129; as τέχνη [techne] 69 Koselleck, Reinhard 31 Krishak Mazdoor Raj 106 Krishna worship 13, 128, 130–132, 141 Kumar, Aishwary 48 labour 27, 80, 83, 90 Lacan, Jacques 7 Lahore Resolution 102 language 6–9, 11, 13–14, 39, 45, 50, 53, 59, 64–65, 99–101, 104, 110, 114 LeGof, J. 88 Lenin 77 Lévinas, Emmanuel 25 liberal/liberals 8, 22–24, 26, 28, 32, 60; democracies 89, 118; ideas 19, 23–24, 29; individuation 30; secular personhood 128, 137, 139; state 14, 46, 85, 88, 99; theory 1–4, 6, 14, 25; theory of modern 3; thinking 48 liberalism: European 11; failures of 22–23; habitation of 9–12; Indian 5, 14–15, 20, 23–24, 27–28, 31; ‘Liberty’ in 87; in Postcolony 12–14 liberalization, economic 23 ‘liberal language’ 28 The Liberal Tradition in America, Hartz 20 liberation 27; see also freedom liberty 30, 37–38, 40–41, 54, 74, 85, 87–89, 98; in liberalism 74, 87 “life and freedom” 54

linguistic 45; concerns 6–7; strategy 42–43; sub-nationality 9 literary movements, modern 9 Louis XIV 49 Macaulay, T. B. 21 MacIntyre, Alisdair 25 Madras Temple Entry Act 120 Mahadevi, Akka 92 Mahajan, Gurpreet 21–22, 25 Mahmood, Saba 122–123, 138 Maine, Henry 11, 21 The Making of the Modern World, Baily 29 Malhotra, Indu, J. 121–123 Manjapra, Kris 21 Mantena, Karuna 11, 21, 27–28 Mao 77 Marxism 4, 74, 77, 80, 89–90 Marxists 4, 20–21, 60, 90; feminism 84; utopia 89 materiality 28–29, 49, 54 Mathura 132, 134 Mazzini 32 Mehta, Pratap 114–115 Mehta, Uday S. 10, 118 Mehta, V. R. 21, 25–26 Meyers, Karin L. 83 Mignolo, Walter 26–27 military caste 49–50 Miller, David 60 Mill, J. S. 21, 24, 32 Mirza Ghalib 1954, by Sohrab Modi 54 Misra, CJI 121 mithya 91–92 Mitra, Samarpita 28 modernity 2, 9, 11, 21, 26, 28–29, 31, 70, 80, 88, 107–108, 130, 137–140 Modi, Sohrab 53–54 Mofat, Chris 29 moksha/nirvana 65, 90–91 money, dematerialization of 51 moral: categories 63–64; perception 63; philosophy 79, 84; responsibility 87–88 Morley-Minto Reforms 98 Mountbatten 103 Mughals 108–109, 116 Mulji, Karsandas 30 multi-nationalism 106 Munshi 117

Index Muslim-Hindu relations 111; see also Hindu-Muslim relation Muslim League 41–42, 45–46, 97–98, 105–106; in Bengal 103; in Punjab 103 Muslims 43, 45, 78, 97–98, 104, 106, 109–110, 117; identity 101–102, 107–108; minority 46–47; personal law 12, 111, 116 Nair, Rukmini Bhaya 28 Nandy, Ashis 128, 136 Nariman J 121 Nashtanirh (The Broken Nest), Tagore 10 Nastika traditions 90 national consciousness 109 nationalism 2, 108–110, 117; aesthetic 99; Bengal Islamic 97; civic 99–100; Dravidian 101; ethnic 99–101; Hindu 42, 44–45, 78, 97, 102; and modernity 107–110; postcolonial 114 nationalists 20, 22, 24, 29, 114, 117 national life 41–45 nationhood 108, 131 “nations” 47, 49 nation-state 41, 70, 77–78, 97, 100, 107, 109–110, 128, 131; separate sovereign 46 natural sciences 84 Nazimuddin, Khwaja 105 Nehru, Jawaharlal 4, 25, 117–118 Nehru, Motilal 22 New Constitution of India 106 Nirvana Shatakam 86, 91 non-violence (ahimsa) 25, 64–67, 71 Nyaya 76, 80, 90 Nyayikas 80 oligarchy, new global 53 “one man one vote” 46 open-ended conversation 97 “organic life” 44–45 Oriental despotism 24 Orientalism 21, 87 Orientalism, Said 87 Osterhammel, Jürgen 31 “Other” 14, 55, 85, 88, 130–131; construction of 107–110

147

Pakistan 1, 41, 45–48, 54, 103, 105–106; demand for 42, 53 Pakistan/Bangalistan 98 Pal, Bipin Chandra 22, 31–33 Panchayati Mandir Shri Nanda Bhavan 133 Pan-Islamism 97 Parekh, Bhikhu 20 partition 1–2, 98, 105–106, 114, 117; of Bengal 97, 105; Curzon’s scheme to 97 A Passage to India, Foster 9, 12 passive states 63, 69 Patel, Sardar 117 philosophical comparatism 19 plurality 64, 117, 122 polarization 97 political: citizenship 44; community 59, 100; constitution 40, 48; democracy modern 70; ideas 19–21, 27, 59; imagination 110; institutions 59, 118; movements 14, 79; philosophy 19, 21, 60, 84; realities 5, 24, 33, 60; sovereignty 12, 115–116; theorists 19, 22, 26–27, 30, 58; theory 3, 6, 20–21, 25–29, 48, 59–63, 68–69 politics: of apologetics 122; modern 38, 40; of power 58, 105 pollution 121 postcolonial theory 2–4; see also nationalism, postcolonial Postmodernism 80 Primary Education Bill 102 primitive communism 90 properties 12, 20, 30, 49, 75, 81–82, 88–89 public education system 100 Punjab League 103 punyabhoomi (Holy Land) 44 purity 66, 121 qualities 39–40, 50–51, 55 Quijano, Aníbal 27 Quit India Movement 102 Quran 82, 98 race 39, 50, 101, 104 Radha Raman temple 141 Rahman, Abdur 105 Rai, Lala Lajpat 22, 29

148

Index

‘rajanical thought’ (rajaniti), Gray on 25 Ramarajya 64 Rathore, Aakash Singh 3, 26–27 Ray, Satyajit 10 Reform Act of 1832 30 religion 4–5, 7, 39, 46, 48, 82–83, 100–101, 103–105, 109–110, 114, 119–122, 128–130, 133–136, 138–139; cosmological imaginary 116; freedom 115, 120, 123; identities 99, 104, 107, 111; for materialization 135; traditions 81, 123 Renaissance 76, 79 ‘restitution of intelligibility’ 13, 115, 122 revolution 41, 53; see also French Revolution; Russian Revolution revolutionary 40, 54; anti-state 53; constitutional process 38; principles 38, 41 right-wing politics 78; see also Hindutva Rihanna 52–53 rituals 91, 100, 116, 119, 134; benefts 140; practices 82; religious 120, 140 Robertson, Bruce Carlisle 30 Rorty, Richard 7 Roy, Rammohan 11, 22, 30 Ruskin 58 Russian Revolution 77 Sabarimala temple; entry case 14; judgement 13, 114–115, 120–123; see also women, menstruation saeculum, meaning of 129 Said, Edward 87 Samaddar, Ranabir 103 samsara 86, 90, 92 Sar, Saloth (Pol Por) 77 Sarkar, B. K. 23 Sarkar, Sumit 115 Sartori, Andrew 11, 21, 23, 26–28, 30 satyagraha 6, 58–59, 64–69, 71; meaning of 63 Śauca (purity of mind and body) 66 Savarkar, V.D. 5, 42–47, 53, 117; Hindutva Hindu 44 scepticism 133–135, 137, 139 Scott, David 31 Scott, J. Barton 26, 30

secular: modernity 141; ‘theological interior’ 129, 133, 135–139 A Secular Age, Taylor 136, 138 secularisation 79 secularism 13, 30, 114, 123, 130, 133; anthropology of 128; juridical 12, 115; Keane on 139; moral narrative of modernity 139–140; Nandy on 136; Nehruvian 117; political 128; Taylor on 138 secularity 129, 136, 139; Indian Republic and 117–119; juridical 119–120, 123 Selected Subaltern Studies 104 Self 91–92; in Indian traditions 91; presupposes 71 self-determination 46, 54, 99 self-discipline 32, 59, 65 self-fagellation 140 self-interest 89–90 self-purifcation 67 Semitic: religions 81–82, 86, 116; traditions 87 Sen, Nabinchandra 28 Sen, Sucharita 2 sensory provocation 131 Sepoy’s Mutiny (1857) 2 Shah, Mohammad 101 Shankara 80, 91 Shankaracharya 86 Sharma, Vivek S. 22 Shintoism 81 Shirur Mutt case 120 Shuddhi movement 102 Shuwajima’s biography 106 Sikhs 10, 104 Simon Commission 24 sin, origin of 87 “situated negativity” 40, 52 Smiles, Samuel 30 Smith, Anthony 99–100 sociability 28–29, 31, 55 social environments 19, 21 sociality 7, 117–118 social media 52–53 social modernization 29 socio-cultural secularization 116 Socrates 68–69; idea of self-care 69; selfcultivation and 69 sovereignty 14, 25, 48, 109, 116, 118, 131 Spencer, Herbert 30

Index Spinner-Halev, Jef 8 spirituality 58, 129 spiritual traditions 90 state-citizen conversation 13 statist sovereignty 118–119 Stead, W. T. 32 Strauss, Leo 59 subaltern traditions 81, 83–84, 92 Suhrawardy, H. S. 98, 100, 105–106, 111 Sultan, Tipu 43 swadheenatā 32–33 swarāj/moksha 32, 58, 64–65, 67, 118 Tagore, Abanindranath 25 Tagore, Debendranath 22 Tagore, Rabindranath 4, 10, 25, 117 Taine, Hyppolyte 32 tapasya 66, 68 Taylor, Charles 116, 129, 136–138, 140–141 Thales 69 theological sensorium 130 thinkers 4, 6, 10, 23, 59, 61, 117 Thoreau 58 thoughts 38, 41, 47, 52–55; axioms of 40; counterrevolutionary 42 tolerance 7, 12, 32, 71, 99, 117 Tolstoy 58 total commodifcation 51 traditions 1, 3–4, 21, 23–24, 40–41, 74, 76, 80, 83, 85–86, 99–100, 116, 139–140; overlaps in 79; as parampara 81 transcendent 86, 130, 133, 135, 140–141 Trump, Donald 53 truth/satya 39, 41, 62, 63–66, 71, 74–93, 137; see also Gandhi, M.K.; satyagraha Twitter 52–53

149

United Bengal 98–100, 102, 104–105, 107, 110 United Bengal Movement 2, 100, 111 universalism 118 untouchability clause 121; see also caste system Upanishads 86, 116 Us/Them binary 78 Vaishnava faith 128, 132 Vajpeyi, Ananya 25 Vedas 90, 116 Vernon, James 29–30 violence 6, 64, 66, 88, 106, 111, 114, 117–118 Vivekananda 117 vows (vrata) 66, 68, 70 Vrindavan 13, 128–133, 135–137, 139–141 war 47–50, 53, 80 Weliver, Phyllis 29 West Bengal Muslim League Parliamentary Party 105 Western: epistemology 80; intellectual tradition 3, 58, 74–75, 79–80, 83–85, 92; liberal tradition 88; political tradition 3, 90; tradition 3, 79, 82, 86 Wilson, J.E. 21 women 14, 23, 29, 59–60, 78–79, 92, 121–122, 131, 138; exclusion 121; menstruating 120–121; see also Sabarimala judgement Women’s Piety movement, Cairo 122 Yadav, Yogendra 114, 123, 131 yoga 90–91 Zastoupil, Lynn 11, 22 Zene, Cosimo 25–26 Zeus 86