Alternative Futures and the Present: Postcolonial Possibilities (Critiques and Alternatives to Capitalism) [1 ed.] 1032404817, 9781032404813

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Alternative Futures and the Present

This book explores the idea that alternatives to our present condition are available in the present, such that a search for alternatives must involve rigorous study of some of its central texts, events, and thinkers. Through engagement with selected modern thinkers, texts, and events, it imagines a different future from the position of the current postcolonial moment, indicating the possibilities that emerge from the present and which shape contemporary radical thinking. An invitation to imagine a possible future marked with alternative possibilities of conducting struggles, and living through contentions and social restructuring, it will appeal to scholars with interests in social and political theory, political philosophy, colonialism and postcolonialism, and historical materialism. Ranabir Samaddar is currently the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies, Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata, India. He belongs to the critical school of thinking and is considered one of the foremost theorists in the field of migration and forced migration studies. His writings on migration, forms of labour, urbanisation, and political struggles have signalled a new turn in postcolonial thinking. Among his influential works are: The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal (1999) and Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age (2018). His most recent publications are The Postcolonial Age of Migration (2020), and written in the background of the COVID pandemic, A Pandemic and the Politics of Life (2021).

Critiques and Alternatives to Capitalism Series editor: Marcello Musto, Professor of Sociological Theory, York University, Canada

This series publishes scholarly works on critiques and alternatives to capitalism, spanning a number of subject matters, political perspectives and geographical areas. It welcomes monographs and edited volumes in the fields of sociology, social and political theory and heterodox political economy, whose main areas of focus are the problems of capitalist society and its mode of production; alternatives to capitalism that address contemporary social issues; and 19th and 20th centuries anti-capitalist ideas and practical experiments. Welcoming new perspectives on a wide range of themes, it seeks to explore alternative social-economic systems, critical theories of capitalism, social classes and inequality, public/private ownership and new contours of ‘the commons’, economic and financial crises, ecology, globalization, migration and citizenship, gender oppression, alienation, and cultural critique. The result is an eclectic, but focused and informative, series that provides original investigations, inspires significant conversations for today, and appeals to a diverse international audience. For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Critiques-and-Alternatives-to-Capitalism/ book-series/CAATC Titles in this series Extractivism and Universality Inside an Uprising in the Amazon Japhy Wilson A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion Wealth, Suffering, Negation Werner Bonefeld Alternative Futures and the Present Postcolonial Possibilities Ranabir Samaddar

Alternative Futures and the Present Postcolonial Possibilities Ranabir Samaddar

First published 2023 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 © 2023 Ranabir Samaddar The right of Ranabir Samaddar to be identified as author of this work 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: 9781032404813 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032404806 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003353270 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003353270 Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Time, and the Politics and Poetics of Alternative

viii

1

SECTION ONE

Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation

17

1 Karl Marx: Colonialism, Nation Form, and Social Transformation

19

2 Home, World, and an Uncertain Nation

38

3 In the Time of Nations

57

SECTION TWO

The Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics

75

4 The Problem of Population: Recalling Marx’s Critique of Malthus

77

5 Populations and Populism as a Problematic in Transformative Politics

95

vi Contents SECTION THREE

Two Universalisms: Imperial Imaginary and Imaginary of the Oppressed

113

6 Hegel’s India and Imperial Imaginary of the Universal

115

7 Annihilation of Caste and Universalism of the Oppressed

132

SECTION FOUR

Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking

149

8 Charles Tilly’s Theorising of Contention

151

9 Genocide: A Most Contentious Word and Concept of Modern Time

167

SECTION FIVE

Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds

183

10 The Impossibility of Politics: Brecht, Manto and Two Acts of Literature

185

11 Memories of the Forgotten

200

SECTION SIX

Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities

211

12 Settling Account with the Point of Origin: Marx, Engels, and the Revolution of 1848

213

13 The Actuality of October Revolution as an Alternative in the Colonial and Postcolonial Time

231

14 Occupy College Street, 1967–​69

250

Contents  vii

15 Crisis, Biopolitics from Below, and a New Model of Public Power

265

16 Layers of Solidarity

282

Epilogue

298

Bibliography Index

300 317

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Acknowledgements

Originally written as engagements with the present, reflections on alternative futures were to be found in these tracts only in an incipient way. My debt is to Marcello Musto who noted these incipient reflections on alternative futures and pointed out the need to reread these writings and recast them to make the question of alternatives clear. Only, he gently cautioned me knowing my lifelong travels in the literature on Marx, remember this has to be a work on alternatives and not on Marx. Therefore, the entire idea of the present producing alternative futures has much to do with his exhortation. Of course, Marx remains very much in this book. How else you are going to write on alternatives without going through Marx? How can you bypass the question of revolution as the pathway to alternative societies? This explains the orientation of this book. The book is a gesture towards reading in a particular way the events and writings of some thinkers of our time who set up new problematic and themes that must be negotiated in course of reflecting on alternative futures. I am grateful to Marcello Musto and Neil Jordan of the Routledge for their encouragement to my approach. Some of the chapters were written as commentaries on specific occasions. The opening chapter reflecting on Marx’s ideas on the nation form takes off from an essay on Marx and colonialism jointly written by Sandro Mezzadra and me. I remain grateful to my dear friend Sandro Mezzadra. The deaths of Charles Tilly and Benedict Anderson made me think what will be the lasting value in their inquiries. The tributes I wrote form the basis of the third and sixth chapters. Likewise, the discussion on Marx’s critique of Malthus was occasioned by the 150th year of Capital’s publication. It has been now revised and extended as Chapter 4. Chapters 6 and 9 began as discussions of two books, and now the main lines of arguments have been given final shape on the basis of those reflections. Finally, Chapter 14 was occasioned by the fiftieth anniversary of Naxalbari uprising that had set off urban insurgency in Bengal in the latter half of the 1960s. Finally, I remain grateful to the Calcutta Research Group whose members would be often the first to listen to the raw thoughts composed as occasional papers and notes for internal presentations. Their comments and suggestions helped me a lot.

Introduction Time, and the Politics and Poetics of Alternative

I The chapters of this book are acts of interpretation. They attempt to decipher tracts, thoughts, and events of the present to get an idea of the possible trajectory of an alternative world. In this sense, the future is in the present. The spirit that drives such understanding is bequeathed to us by Karl Marx, who refused to draw details of a future on the basis of some designs coming out of brains of intellectuals and philosophers. Marx steadfastly held that it is not in the heads of famous philosophers and thinkers but in the struggles of the present that the basis of the future is laid. That same spirit is evident in the famous adage, philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.1 It does not mean that Marx stopped the interpretative exercise. In fact, the manuscripts of Theories of Surplus Value, unpublished before his death, are testimonies to a monumental exercise of interpretation and critique on the basis of which he wrote Capital. In those manuscripts, interpretation is in the form of critique –​critique of a mode of thought, of a world of wealth and destitution, and cruel realities and illusions, and what he called fetishism –​indeed, produced by the same realities. Thoughts are thus to be never taken at their face value. They are to be always considered in their links to the reality. They are the displaced realities. Interpretation in this way makes a return to the transformative exercise. The idea of social transformation sits at the core of our thoughts on alternatives. It directs us repeatedly to the site of present realities –​the struggles, successes, but more often failures, marking the real world. The dynamics of the present tell us of the possible pathways to an alternative future. This book is driven by such an understanding. The realities of colonialism and the postcolonial condition, the uncertain but the persistent presence of the nation form of collective political existence, the features of a contentious history, global spread of petty forms of production and migrant labour, calls for a just and dialogic world and an emphasis on social justice, the universalisms of the oppressed, new aesthetic forms that have opened our imagination to a possible world when conventional political understanding failed us, the renewed calls for care, protection, and solidarity in the wake of the Covid-​19 DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-1

2 Introduction pandemic, and many more facets of our time point out the pathways to an alternative future. Events are the congealed sites of these facets. They tell us of the likely paths to alternative thinking. The selection of the themes of this book is thus not arbitrary. It is driven by the necessity to decipher the present. It refuses the categorical wisdom of distinguishing the scientific from the utopian, which counsels us that defeats are so because they were driven by utopias and were not led by scientific understanding of situations. Such assessment will be only partly true, and our scientific understanding of society can be never adequate to social realities and the possibilities these realities throw up. Indeed, we gain our scientific understanding only through such “utopian” exercises. They are therefore the “necessary utopias.” In some ways, this is different from the desperate commentaries on the defeats that mark the history of the attempts to realise alternatives. Those commentaries ended many a time in producing a thought that had no horizon of future. Defeat produced dystopia. The late Benedict Anderson in a remarkable essay, “Radicalism after Communism,” commented on a new generation of radicals in Southeast Asia working in the background of a defeated past of the communist movement, It is perhaps here that our three Thai radical academics run into Pram and Pipit. In different ways, they write and write and write, by no means entirely for their fellow-​countrymen, to retrieve treasurable parts of the debris at the Angel’s retreating feet. The modern past, including the communism that was such a central part of it, must be profoundly re-​examined, interrogated, and where possible recuperated, as we listen, to borrow from Satyajit Ray, for the roll of distant thunder up ahead.2 I believe this contentious union of the present and the future problematises the idea of alternative. At times, alternatives may be realised in the present, and we may think that some of our practices are indeed alternatives to dominant reality. Yet we must stop and ask ourselves, what makes them alternatives, the possible futures? What forms of governing practices are enabled when certain problems are constructed and modes of addressing them are visualised? We can think of migration or the resurgent phenomenon of care and protection in the post-​COVID world as a problem as well as a mode of addressing it. Problematisation emerges, to repeat then, not from our heads but from practices. Political and social activists engaged in the work of social transformation not surprisingly therefore stress the present as the ground of the future. The world of speculative thinking is far removed from them. Their idea of an alternative future is a part of common sense. This book is an attempt to draw on that common sense. In this book, I have only tried to write down in a particular form what can be called the common sense of political and social activists engaged in the work of social transformation. If one were to write a history of thinking of alternative futures, one would need to first trace the saga of practical struggles in which the seeds of

Introduction  3 thinking of alternative futures lay. Utopias were there. These were the necessary utopias. The pull of the history of necessary utopias is one beyond intellectualism. The historiography of those thoughts can be written only through a recovery of discussions in society on what daily struggles have meant in terms of imagining a future. This also explains the selection of authors, texts, and events presented here. The selection is not guided by any test of eminence or exceptionality. The focus is on the problems and themes that seem to me relevant for reflections on possible futures and as indications of preparing such a history. Obviously, it is not an exhaustive selection. It only indicates a line of thinking, if you will a critical postcolonial line of thinking. Thus, in this book, the guide for selection is not some futures we desire, but the futures that the present is producing, albeit in faint contours. The book only attempts to clear the fog of immediacy around the alternatives that are emerging and present them in sharper relief. Yet the emergence of an alternative is an event. The event may be in the form of an incident or a political or social practice, or some writing, but it is an event in the wake of a pressing situation –​a chaos, a crisis, or a shock. The immediacy of the event sheds light on the alternative. This is precisely what happens in the wake of a revolutionary situation. The event is immediate but carries within it strategic signs of the future. How do we acknowledge this immediacy yet decipher the footprints of an alternative future? It may have taken in the last two centuries the form of a commune, a soviet, a cooperative movement, a new form of solidarity, or a new understanding of economy, or what a philosopher said, an “act of literature.”3 The period of decolonisation and anti-​imperialism produced innovative ideas. Such new thinking emerged in the wake of the First International, from 1865 onward it deepened with the Paris Commune, and with the emergence of the soviets in 1905 as an alternative form of political life it led finally to the revolution of 1917. Also, we cannot forget in this period the Mexican and Zapatista peasant revolution of 1905. Likewise, another period perhaps began in Baku in 1920 with the Congress of the Peoples of the East, which proposed a strategic alliance between the national liberation movements and the workers’ movements. The moment of the right of peoples to self-​determination and national independence arrived culminating with the Chinese revolution of 1949. The moment continued till the end of the seventies of the last century with independence struggle in Vietnam, the path of continental armed struggle proposed by Che Guevara in Latin America, the Algerian struggle for liberation, likewise the liberation of the Portuguese colonies and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa –​all these marking the time of decolonisation. This period like the earlier one produced many ideas and practices of alternatives, many visions of a desirable future. Both the periods posed to the world the fundamental question of revolution as a strategic alternative path that is to say, strategic question of social transformation and power as the alternative route. Many of the chapters of this book revolve around this question, the complications it entailed, and the

4 Introduction experiences it gave birth to. The question may be reformulated like this: Is the strategy of creating a party to conquer the state in order to change the society enough? After the experiences of nearly one century, the question is open today. To create a party to conquer the State is not enough; in fact it may be counter-​productive until such a strategy is complemented by strategies to build a new society. The autonomy of politics and the autonomy of society are two clashing principles none of which can be jettisoned. The autonomy of society is in relation to the State and the autonomy of politics is in relation to society. The very questioning of a given straight relation among state, politics, and society has opened up possibilities of new alternatives towards social transformation. Similarly, as the international was redefined in the post-​decolonisation period, the confrontation between the held beliefs of the present and the new realities created possibilities of new thinking. Thus, questions arose: The erstwhile subjugated states had their independence, but what about the limits of it? Nations have sought liberation, but will national liberation lead to an evolution of States beyond the form of nation states? These questions have deep relations with the continuing struggles for the emancipation of the peoples. A succession of crises has marked the world since 2008: a financial and debt crisis, popular upsurges since 2011, collapse of legitimacy of the liberal representative system of government, the rise of the populist left challenging the norms of the populist right, contest over policy responses to climate and ecological crisis, the Covid-​19 pandemic, and not the least, wars and the geopolitical crisis, with all these leading to massive migration and refugee flows. In short, the period of liberal peace that followed the end of the Second World War is over. The stability of industrial capitalism is largely a thing of the past, along with that the stability of old classes and social formations. As if we have entered a period of war. Our search for alternatives cannot be conducted anymore in the comfort of peaceful conditions. What does it mean then to search for alternatives in a time of acute conflicts and war? This book therefore repeatedly takes us back to contentious situations amidst which alternatives were thought. Michel Foucault commented in 1975, And beneath the lapses of memory, the illusions, and the lies that would have us believe that there is a ternary order, a pyramid of subordinations, beneath the lies that would have us believe that the social body is governed by either natural necessities or functional demands, we must rediscover the war that is still going on, war with all its accidents and incidents. Why do we have to rediscover war? Well, because this ancient war is a [...] permanent war. We really do have to become experts on battles, because the war has not ended, because preparations are still being made for the decisive battles, and because we have to win the decisive battle. In other words, the enemies who face us still pose a threat to us, and it is not some reconciliation or pacification that will allow us to bring the war to an end. It will end only to the extent that we really are the victors.4

Introduction  5

II Thinking of alternatives in a time of war is not of course new. There is a history to it. In the first decade of the twentieth century, capitalism was proving quite capable of adaptation and reform by absorbing resistance from below, adopting policies for internal liberal welfare measures, facilitating accumulation through more exports of capital, and by further colonial expansion and dispossession. Yet by the early years of the second decade, with monopolisation and export of capital, the inter-​imperialist rivalry exacerbated and finally exploded into a world war between the dominant powers. Many socialists felt helpless and hopeless. Lenin’s theory of imperialism emerged in this situation. It carried political sense across countries because it was not meant to be an explanation of war limited to scientific expositions of political economy. It conveyed, beyond that, an agenda of revolution as an answer to war and rivalries among imperial bourgeois powers. A theory of revolution became an alternative to the time of war, killings, plunder, and mass destitution. Rosa Luxemburg gave the call, “Socialism or barbarism.” Today, we have a similar situation. Neoliberalism, after one hundred years of the First World War, has again enabled capitalism to sustain with new modes of circulation of goods, new ways of expanding the world market, disintegrating old social formations, making chaos a part of governing strategy, spreading financial tentacles, playing credit-​debt games, and dispossessing peasant and working masses with renewed primitive mode of accumulation. This age too is witnessing violent conflicts and neo-​colonial wars. Instead of searching for alternatives, many radicals are looking towards Antonio Gramsci as the theorist of the failed revolutions and the need to build political and cultural hegemony. Gramsci in some sense has replaced Lenin as the most important political theorist of the time when the boundaries of defeats and alternatives are blurred. It is a strange situation, where passive revolution has replaced revolution as the bedrock of a search for alternatives, movement has replaced the party as a vanguard, masses have appeared as filling in the need of vanguard, movement has replaced organisation, society has replaced commune or soviet, and other forms of collective political power of the working masses, association has replaced nation, and voluntarism has replaced the state. This is the neoliberal condition. Strange as it may seem, it too is a reality that binds the thought of alternatives in this time. This book acknowledges the bind but argues for a need to come out of the bind and establish link with the forgotten history of the revolutionary search for alternatives. As such, the chapters of this book carry the marks of an in-​between situation. This is if you will the dialectics of the search for an alternative –​an alternative that is not yet an alternative but already in the process of taking the alternative form, a present that is already escaping the boundaries of the present, a condition that is essaying into an action, a reflection that is also a practice. Reflection in this condition has not abandoned the search for alternative, however, it has itself turned in a dialectical mode into a mechanism of double

6 Introduction action: Contemplation massively repressed hitherto by orthodoxy is restoring at the same stroke the revolutionary impulse of the search for alternative. The externality of consciousness to matter evolves into a restoration of spirit to nature. Reflection, the inverted form of revolutionary practice, transforms reality by revealing in it the result of the subject’s intervention. Thus, as Lenin noted in his study of Hegel’s Logic, reflection is “dialectic” itself.5 I have followed in this book the logic of a materialist inversion of thoughts, events, and ideas of thinkers, to suggest that alternative ideas and practices were born there, in the unannounced reflections and images of happenings of our time. Reflection on the present has the world assimilated in it in the form of a stream of future from which history and human practice cannot be expunged. This is the method of the book. The self-​reference of the present undergoes a reversal of perspective as we see within the anguish of the present the always-​already unity of the present and the alternative. The transition from the present to the alternative is thus in no way a transition from one definite stage to another or as usually understood a voluntarist leap from a condition, but rather a radical interrogation of the very notion of stage, a reversal of the parameters that define the criteria of a condition. From the disaster of a present to the great initiative of an alternative, the threshold is like a disappearing mediation. This is the reason why so many events, texts, and thoughts marking the colonial world and the postcolonial present are to be found in this book. As reflections of the present, they in their nature were already suggesting alternative futures. They were showing already paths yet untrodden by others, even if they brought difficulties and closures.6 In this way, three intersecting postulates determine this book: (a) association of revolution with search for alternatives, (b) reflection as the combination of the present and the future, and (c) the organisation of the search for alternative. It is this third postulate, the most interesting and the most difficult, yet following from the first two, to which we shall turn attention. Often, initiators of alternative ideas and futures without knowing or wishing them prepare for the time when the agents of change will take over the conditions and organise measures for the purpose of implementing and thus realising the alternative visions. Thus, based on experiences from colonialism to the neo-​colonial continuity we already know that there is no such boundary or limit to the present process of capitalist reproduction and in general, the process of an endless accumulation of capital, which would automatically lead to the collapse of capitalism. And, yet alternatives are being worked out in course of the desperate search for getting out of the endless continuity of capitalism or colonial world relations. Alternative is therefore not the application of a theory, or the theoretical justification of a new “system.” Thus, various forms –​small proprietors, informal labour, state capitalist, state socialist, self-​governing cooperative sectors, and typically many formations of “people” other than the ones we are familiar with from our acquaintance with liberal capitalist system –​tell us of the alternatives that

Introduction  7 address issues of the new organisational forms of production and politics.7 Earlier, the Left called this, “the non-​capitalist path.” But that conceptualisation was not only insufficient but also myopic as it never understood the range of the alternatives that capitalism was producing. The multi-​sector dimension of alternative vision was simply missing. I have tried to show in the last two chapters (Chapters 15–​16) and in the chapter (Chapter 5) on populism, how, besides and beyond state mediation, the already visible self-​governing and a cooperative mode of political life suggests the historical possibilities of a future built on direct participation of people in politics and management of life. These are, if we can invoke Lenin again –​“islands of socialism.” The significance of “biopolitics from below” and the experiments with “life as solidarity” is immense. These bio-​political practices of solidarity are collective institutions bred by capitalism, but in which vision of a new kind of socialism can be glimpsed. Such vision of alternative targets capitalism as a system and aims at gradual delinking of the emerging reality from the “capital system.” From this perspective, this book suggests no drastic, single alternative. It does not suggest any updated single edition of socialism or refurbish the formulae of self-​governing socialism. There is no permanent bad in the history of struggles. The culture of workers’ councils; peasant associations; forms of cooperatives leading to the self-​defence and self-​organisation of the working people; solidarity platforms of migrant and refugees; the continuing relevance of the nation form to defend the rights of the people against colonial and neo-​ colonial aggrandisement; indeed, imagination as the locus of a nation; state as agency of reconstruction of a society as the poorer sections of society takes over power; daily dialogue as a counter-​reality to a contentious history of mass murders, the visions of dialogic justice, and several other themes recalled in this book point to that variegated future of alternatives. As Chapter 14 shows on the basis of an analysis of insurgent resistance in the form of occupying a chunk of urban territory, how the street shows the germs of a new collective spirit –​alternative ideas of leading life. Frederick Engels noted how the Addresses of Marx to the International Workingmen’s Association on the Paris Commune clearly grasped the “character of the Commune, the import, and the necessary consequences of great historical events, at a time when these events are still in process before our eyes, or have only just taken place.”8 As we know, both Marx and Engels drew from the Commune lessons for an alternative society, as the event of the Commune was still unfolding, and precisely these lessons were recalled by Lenin in The State and Revolution nearly fifty years later to theorise the revolution of his time. Engels went further. He noted that the Commune had no pre-​given theory of social change. He said, The members of the Commune were divided into a majority of the Blanquists, who had also been predominant in the Central Committee of the National Guard; and a minority, members of the International

8 Introduction Working Men’s Association, chiefly consisting of adherents of the Proudhon school of socialism. The great majority of the Blanquists at that time were socialist only by revolutionary and proletarian instinct; only a few had attained greater clarity on the essential principles, through Vaillant, who was familiar with German scientific socialism. It is therefore comprehensible that in the economic sphere much was left undone which, according to our view today, the Commune ought to have done. The hardest thing to understand is certainly the holy awe with which they remained standing respectfully outside the gates of the Bank of France. This was also a serious political mistake. The bank in the hands of the Commune –​this would have been worth more than 10,000 hostages. It would have meant the pressure of the whole of the French bourgeoisie on the Versailles government in favour of peace with the Commune, but what is still more wonderful is the correctness of so much that was actually done by the Commune, composed as it was of Blanquists and Proudhonists. Naturally, the Proudhonists were chiefly responsible for the economic decrees of the Commune, both for their praiseworthy and their un-​praiseworthy aspects; as the Blanquists were for its political actions and omissions. And in both cases the irony of history willed –​as is usual when doctrinaires come to the helm –​that both did the opposite of what the doctrines of their school proscribed.9 Times of rebellion and revolution give birth to alternatives, some of which survive, some fade out. Yet these are, in today’s governmental language, the best practices of change –​to be studied, analysed, inculcated, and wherever needed adopted with necessary adjustments. Probably failures, more than successes, remain the necessary milestones in the search for alternatives. Admittedly, these are thus uncertain alternatives. In some cases, the present is only the uncertain form of an alternative –​alternative imagined as the future. Yet they are the islands of socialism. The organisation of society along the lines of alternative practices –​at times congealed in the form of event –​requires not only political change and new economic policies, but the organisation of the entire working masses in alternative social forms that will require long and unending cultural work, in short, a patient “gradual cultural revolution.” Alternatives often arrive first politically and economically. They immediately confront the society with the requirement of a cultural revolution for the fulfilment of the said political and economic possibilities. Some of the chapters are written in that spirit. They deal with questions of universalism and the uncertain form of the nation. They draw the attention of the readers to the power of the aesthetic. They show, aesthetic begins where politics fails in our search ahead. They deal with this dialectic of the politics and poetics of alternative. Likewise, some of the chapters will tell the readers of how a particular memory shapes our ideas of the future. The future may accordingly present itself as void, or as full with dazzling possibilities. Chapter 7 discusses B.R.

Introduction  9 Ambedkar’s call for annihilation of caste. The entire tract leading to that call based itself on castigating the present that the past history of inequality and injustice had made moribund. The past is thus never pure. Art critic John Berger wrote, Many of these assumptions…out of true with the present… obscure the past. They mystify rather than clarify. The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently, fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act. Cultural mystification of the past entails a double loss. Works of art are made unnecessarily remote. And the past offers us fewer conclusions to complete in action.10 To be sure then, the alternatives we are speaking of here are emerging in a historical time. These alternatives are not drawn across celestial time, which is not to say that alternatives cannot be drawn from early thoughts. Indeed, there is much to draw from them and actors of today do draw in this manner. Yet the historical question is, how and why do the actors of change draw certain inspirations from the past? This has been an important inquiry in the history of thinking. I wish this book had engaged in that discussion, but for reason of space that detailed inquiry had to be left out. Suffice it to note the importance of time in the emergence of alternatives. Both simultaneity and heterogeneity of time mark this history. I tried to address the question of time in some of the chapters from that perspective. Marx had noted, (Thus) events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-​philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-​historical.11

III So far I have noted the ambiguity produced around the idea of alternative due to two intersecting phenomena, namely, the dynamics of interpretation and the operation of time. Also, I have tried to explain, how the said intersection is historically produced. The practice of alternative is predicated on how we look at our past, how and when we latch on to the alternative practices presented to us as a legacy, and finally, how we think that in our working on the present we are building a new future. Critique is inherent in such exercise. To the same extent, failures and utopias are parts of this history of the search for alternatives. The future never appears as pure future that we cannot

10 Introduction decipher, alternative never as a pure change, the future is already and perhaps always in the present, and it is this ambiguity or messiness that marks our history of the search for alternatives. Strange as it may seem, defeat does not tell us of an impossible future, but possible future –​a future that the next attempt may achieve. Adorno had said once, intentionally or not, every judgement, even an analytical one, carries with it the claim to predicate something that is not simply identical with the mere concept of the subject. Being cannot be defined by itself alone.12 The present cannot be defined by revolutionaries, critical thinkers, and people engaged in social transformation as simply present. The present is never identical with itself. It can be defined only with something else –​in this case, the future. In this book, the postcolonial present appears as a preparation, a future embodied in the present, a present that can be read only as indication of an alternative. It is this third underlying theme of the book –​the postcolonial nature of my inquiry –​to which I want to draw my readers’ attention now. The postcolonial situation emerging out of these chapters does not tell us of a static condition, but of a conjuncture. Colonial rule, militant nationalist activities, struggles against caste and other forms of discrimination, women’s participation in political struggles, religious conflicts, partition, nationalism, emergence of autonomy a singular feature of political life, celebration of October Revolution in Russia as world’s own revolution, and other things happen in the colonial and postcolonial world not successively as if there is an order of phases in the growth of political consciousness, but all at a time. The postcolonial moment is one of conjuncture of several things happening, and producing powerful ideas of alternative –​alternative visions of a postcolonial society. There are thus ambiguities, clashes of visions –​as if what is at stake is not the colonial present but the future of a nation. Alternatives produced from conjunctures are thus uncertain. Yet that is the path that the developing parts of the world and the peoples are taking. Conjunctures are therefore crucial in the emergence of alternative thoughts. As said, it is not that colonial age or rule was not there, or that there was no structure of colonialism, or for that matter the rule of the national, comprador, or corporate bourgeoisie was not there in the age of decolonisation in the vast postcolonial world, and that landed interests did not exploit the people. The neo-​colonial domination has also been a structural feature of the global scenario, in as much as neoliberal capitalism now holds the world under its sway, making the lives of the millions upon millions precarious. The question is: Whence the alternative ideas and practices arise? What were the moments of conjunction when alternative, rebellious, non-​conformist ideas emerged? This is where we have to look for the cracks in the solid edifice of order wherefrom the rebellious thoughts made their appearance. The chapters on urban revolts taking a specific form, or ideas of justice, universalising certain claims, and thinking the unthinkable, speak of the fault lines that facilitated the alternative. The events tell us of a time of a paradoxical conjunction of the rule and expansion of capital, exhaustion of any accepted vocabulary with which

Introduction  11 to confront it, when non-​conformist thoughts and actions happen as extraordinary events. The situation makes the status of the alternative “uneven,” “incomplete,” and one of “conjuncture.” Thinking of alternative is a fundamentally situated mode of reflection around moments of conjuncture. Thus, in this book, the two chapters on Marx (Chapters 1 and 12) posit the historical conjuncture from which his thoughts on the nation form and the Revolution of 1848 emerged, and we can see that these reflections could only appear through and by means of the real, and the effects of the real could be felt through and by means of the reflections. In other words, the alternative in history is the detour through which the present reality works. The present has no more a “history of its own” than does the alternative. The only history is that of the conjuncture, the double-​natured presence of which we realise through the contemporary and the alternative appearing as the future. The conjuncture has two elements: The existing order and its operation through relations. And, the relations are cracks in the order necessitating reflections.13 Think of the time of Franz Fanon’s writing, The Wretched of the Earth. A universal manifesto of abolition of colonialism and race could be written in 1961 only in the background of a developing anti-​colonial war in Algeria, a developing militant race consciousness in the post Second World War time which we find first in 1952 in Black Skin, White Masks, and equally importantly, a new philosophy of resistance emerging in in 1958 as Year Five of the Algerian Revolution, subsequently known as Studies in a Dying Colonialism. At the time of writing the tract, Fanon had plunged himself deeper into the work of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale), taking a break from his psychiatric work to concentrate on his new position as ambassador to Africa for the provisional Algerian government based in Ghana. Year Five of the Algerian Revolution was an account of the profound changes taking place in Algeria. It was also a jolt to the French Left. The aim was to shake the latter it from its complacency and lethargy so that it could join forces with the Algerian people. The Wretched of the Earth is a permanent manifesto of a liberationist agenda of social transformation, because here the question of social alternative developing through the entire decade was hinged to a political question, namely, independence, Algerian independence. Likewise, by linking the political with the social, Annihilation of Caste (discussed in Chapter 7) attains its significance as an alternative that will beckon those who strive to deepen the social nature of national emancipation. Annihilation of Caste becomes a universal manifesto in the context of several contending developments: the monopolisation of the anti-​colonial forces by liberal nationalists and the establishment of upper caste hegemony over the nationalist world. At the same time, anti-​colonialism in India called for an appropriate formulation of the question of justice. It was the 1930s (beginning with the Poona Pact of 1931) that shaped India’s Dalit political representation, whose implications were to be felt for the following decades leading up to our time. At the heart of the controversy lay a fundamental difference in Gandhi’s and Ambedkar’s points of view. While Mahatma Gandhi saw caste

12 Introduction discrimination and untouchability as a social issue, Ambedkar regarded caste discrimination as a political one with implications for the question of political power. He demanded separate electorates for India’s vast population of “depressed classes” or “untouchables,” who are called scheduled castes (SC) today in Indian legal system. Hindu leaders had proposed a two-​tier system: A primary election where only Dalits would vote and a secondary election where everyone would be eligible. Ambedkar’s position was elementary: He wanted political power for the Dalit community. It was indispensible for the survival of the Dalits. The Poona Pact represented a clash of two ideas: justice and formal equality in the form of citizenship. Ambedkar insisted, for the first time in India’s modern history, that caste was a political question and couldn’t be addressed by social reforms only. He held that political democracy was meaningless if the so-​called depressed classes were not equal participants in it. In the ensuing disillusionment over Gandhi’s and upper caste homilies about caste injustice, Ambedkar gave the call to annihilate caste: Caste as a system, as a principle of discrimination, as a liberal deception, and all that we discuss in the relevant chapter. Readers will also note that I have grounded the discussion on bio-​politics from below (Chapter 15) in the same reality of conjuncture. I have shown how bio-​politics from below that demonstrates a conduct of life different from that of the propertied classes acquires its insurgent character only under certain historically predicated circumstances. An alternative emerges in public history only to leave the scene as the particular moment passes away. What challenges does this leave for a programme of social transformation or for our critical epistemology? Indeed, the theme of conjuncture marks almost all the entries under the section on events. As I see it, the theory of conjuncture brings back the question of revolutionary subjectivity in a manner that takes us beyond the objectivism of the history of alternatives. At the same time, the return of subjectivity generates antinomies that the discussion cannot solve. Fundamentally, the contradiction is within the history of social transformation and with which we have to live. The gulf exists between the way we ground the source of alternatives (in the real movement of the history of social transformation) and the way we ground its immediate source (in the formal accounts of thinkers and texts). Yet, from the perspective of social transformation, the overcoming of the gulf can only be the result of the historical movement of the contradiction immanent in the relation between events and thoughts. That is the historically specific form in which productive subjectivity develops –​subjectivity that produces the alternative, organises it. The time of the alternative is thus eternally unstable. At one level, it excludes all continuity. It narrates to us the given circle of the possible and the attempt to leave this circle and do what is impossible. It is thus not purely a history of the impossible, but certainly a departure from a comfortable middle space of possibility. As if it is an occasional, dazzling infraction of the logic of the opposites of possibility and impossibility. Structures do not take us to the streets where

Introduction  13 actions take place. Painful re-​examinations also serve little when we renew efforts at alternatives. There is no safety net at that hour. The problem with “alternative” has been a predominantly liberal understanding of the notion. Yet as the history of alternatives shows, and I have attempted to capture this history in a small way, a sort of “risky” understanding of the particular challenges of the time has been essential to the political practice of alternatives. Indeed, if this book has any one line summary to offer on alternatives, it is dangerous to be “of one’s time,” particularly when it is a contentious time.

IV Let me conclude these prefatory observations by way of introducing the chapters grouped in six sections. Section One titled “Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation” has three chapters. The first one discusses Marx’s engagement with the nation form. I show, how for Marx it was not a question of espousing the nation or criticising it, but engaging with the phenomenon of the nation from the standpoint of social transformation. The discussion continuing in Chapter 2 is on a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, Home and the World, where the triad of nation, women, and domesticity is introduced on an uncertain template. Chapter 3 discusses the time of the nation by way of analysing the implications of Benedict Anderson’s writings. These three chapters suggest an alternative way of looking at the nation form –​not from a categorical angle but from the angle of contingency and hence an uncertain but continuing existence. The salience of this section is in the question of the persistent relevance of the national question in the vast postcolonial world, where alternative is not one between having to live in the nation or transcending the nation, but what to do amidst its continuing but uncertain presence and how to enrich the principle of autonomy in political life. The nation is the commons over which forces are struggling with contending visions. Section Two, “The Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics,” has two chapters. The purpose of this section is to bring in the question of populations as essential to a discussion on social transformation. Chapter 4 appropriately refers to Marx’s critique of Malthus to situate the problematic of population in the age of capitalism. Chapter 5 links the discussion on populism with the problematic of population and probes the implications of this relation for transformative politics. Section Three, “Two Universalisms: Imperial Imaginary and Imaginary of the Oppressed” inquires the question of universalism with two contrasting instances of universal imaginaries. Chapter 6 discusses Hegel’s idea of India’s religious past and shows the weakness of his concept of universality. Chapter 7 shows with an analysis of B.R. Ambedkar’s celebrated manifesto, Annihilation of Caste, the emergence of what may be called a “concrete universal.” The discussion is important in the context of an alternative becoming a universal idea.

14 Introduction Section Four, “Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking,” continues my overall argument against a seamless theorisation of the idea of alternative and perches it on the template of contentious history. Building on the idea of a historically situated notion of alternative, Chapter 8 recalls Charles Tilly’s theorisation of contention and the lessons we can draw from his inquires. How did alternatives emerge in the past? How did democracy or the modern state emerge as powerful alternatives to pre-​modern political ideals and institutions? Or, how does inequality persist in spite of professed ideas of equality? The insights of inquiries like these are extended in Chapter 9 to throw light on one of the most evident incongruities of an age that is known to us by theories and customs of civility, namely, genocide. What does contemporary scholarship of genocide tell us of its persistent history? Is genocide an exception to our time? Does it allow us to come up with any alternative else than a power to punish the perpetrators? And if not, how do we face the charge that identifying genocide is a right of the powerful and punishing perpetrators of genocide is ultimately victor’s justice? Section Five, “Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds,” occasions the culmination of the discussion on the contingent nature of our idea of alternative. Chapters 10 and 11 discuss a few texts of literature to bring out the poetics of alternative. Perhaps, the lesson is: Alternative begins where politics reaches its limits. Section Six, the last section, is titled “Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities.” This section has possibly the most direct relevance for the theme of the book. In five successive chapters (Chapters 12–​16), events are taken up not as narratives of incidents, which by itself is important, but as indices of new possibilities. Some of these possibilities will be realised, some will be unrealised, and some will remain half-​realised in history. Yet, why do we recall those events? In what way do these events leave traces on subsequent imaginations of a radical alternative? In the light of this inquiry, Chapters 15 and 16 ask: What is the significance of the bio-​political conduct of lower classes or the transient acts of solidarity in preparing for a new society? How do care and solidarity function as responses of the popular classes to entrenched power? When is society by itself imagined as commons? The answers do not give us a readymade plan for future social reorganisation. They do, however, tell us, if you like, the operating principle for any such transformation. In sum, this book on the alternative is led by three overlapping themes: the distinct time of the emergence of an alternative, postcolonial situation and social transformation as the alternative, and the uncertain, contentious nature of the alternative. Readers will note that I have avoided any formalist construction of theories. Rather, I have argued that the theme of alternative points to experimentation as a perspective. Alternatives as experiments mark the period of transformation. Political practice in this sense is an experimental terrain of alternatives –​experiment in order to grasp the possibility offered by a conjuncture of circumstances, in other words, an unparalleled

Introduction  15 condensation of contradictions. Recall Lenin, his theory of dual power represented a conception of an antagonistic practice of politics –​in a period of uncertainty, experimentation, and the emergence of an alternative.14 In the same way, the revolutionaries in that age had found political activity as an alternative to simple trade union activity. It was the ground for organisation of alternatives.15 All the instances I present in this book share a fundamental trait. It is an awareness of the gap between politics and the dominant understanding of reality around us; an awareness also of the political incapacity to respond to the dominant understanding. It is this double nature of politics that makes the search for alternatives full of anguish, uncertainty, and risk. Yet the promise of alternative will beckon us to new thinking, new political practices.

Notes 1 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) in Marx Engels Selected Works, Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), pp. 13–​15. 2 Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons (London: Verso, 1998), p. 298. 3 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1991). 4 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the College de France, 1975–​76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 51. 5 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Conspectus of Hegel’s Book, “The Science of Logic” (Book Two Essence), Section 1: Essence as Reflection Itself, Volume 38 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), pp. 129–​155. 6 Recall the confession by Machiavelli, “I have decided to take a path as yet untrodden by anyone, [even] if it brings me trouble and difficulty.” –​Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), p. 5. 7 On this see the discussion by Tamas Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Balint Bethlenfalvy with Mario Fenyo (New York: Monthly review Press, 2015), Chapter 8; see also by Krausz, “Lenin’s Socialism from the Perspective of the Future: Some Considerations” in A. Melegh (ed.), In Need of Alternatives. Problems and Issues of Non-​ capitalist Mixed Economies. (Budapest: Eszmélet Foundation, 2021), pp. 11–​24 –​https://​lefte​ast.org/​len​ins-​social​ism-​pers​pect​ive-​of-​ the-​fut​ure/​ (29 December 2021, accessed on 4 February 2022). 8 Frederick Engels, “1891 Introduction by Frederick Engels on the 20th Anniversary of the Paris Commune, Postscript” to Karl Marx’s Civil War in France (1871) –​www. marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1871/​civil-​war-​fra​nce/​pos​tscr​ipt.htm (accessed on 12 July 2022). 9 Ibid. (accessed on 12 July 2022). 10 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 11. 11 “Letter from Marx to the Editor of Otecestvenniye Zapisky” (1877) in Marx and Engels Correspondence (New York: International Publishers, 1978) –​www.marxi​ sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1877/​11/​rus​sia.htm (accessed on 11 July 2022). 12 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 71. 13 On this, see the discussion by Jason Read, The Micro-​Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).

16 Introduction 14 V.I. Lenin, “The Dual Power”, 9 April 1917, in Lenin Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), pp. 38–​41; also “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution” (known as the “April Theses”), 7 April 1917, in Lenin Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), pp. 19–​26. 15 I discussed the significance of the concept of dual power in Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), Chapter 7, “The Problematic of Dual Power”, pp. 175–​202.

Section One

Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation

1 Karl Marx Colonialism, Nation Form, and Social Transformation

I We shall keep to the promise of the title of this book, namely that the pathways to alternatives lie through the present –​through the struggles, thoughts, and events of our time. Accordingly, we shall begin this book with a series of discussion on one of the most contentious themes of contemporary age, namely the theme of the nation, the nation form. Cosmopolitans, Europeanists, universalists, post-​ Marxists, postmodernists, and many other dreamers think of a world without nations. That, to them, will be the alternative to the border-​ridden, war-​torn condition of this world. Yet we may ask, what is in the nation form that has allowed it to persist through the ages –​from the late medieval to the modern –​in different ways and contexts?1 Communities of various types, based on religion, caste, tribe, language, or some historical specificity like a particular territory, have thought of their existence in the modern time as nations. In the dreams of various “pre-​national” and “post-​ national” existences the nation is the ultimate being. Thus, Europe united is like a nation, the tribes are the “original” nations, races are nations, ethnicity is the core of a nation, and we can go on. Ultimately the world must be thought of as a nation, as one world. What does this word nation signify then? What is to be learnt from the universal appearance of this idea defying definitions, well-​measured and well-​explained constructions, and suiting a variety of contexts and concerns? What is there in the nation form to retain even when thinking of alternative pathways to political existence? This and the following two chapters will venture into this discussion. Expectedly, we cannot but begin with an investigation into the inter-​related dynamics of nation and class. And, for that, it will be good to go back to Marx’s ideas on colonialism, nation form, and social transformation.2

II Commenting on the destructive role of the colonial rule over India, Karl Marx had written in one of his despatches to the New York Daily Tribune, DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-3

20  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-​gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade.3 The concept of world market had led Marx to discuss the contradictions in the practice of free trade, and the theme of free trade had led him to discussions on colonialism. This is how in the beginning Marx had approached the question of colonialism –​from the point of world market. He did not write any systematic treatise on colonialism in India and elsewhere. However, in course of his vast political reflections, theoretical work on the genesis and the working of capitalism as a global process of accumulation, empirical investigations into pre-​capitalist pasts, and his journalistic writings, he repeatedly touched on and dealt with –​at times briefly, at times in some details –​issues like British colonial rule over India, the Indian mutiny (1857) against British rule, and India’s pre-​colonial past. While these analyses (also comments and notes) were inter-​related, these were occasioned either by specific events, or his need to take notes for further research, or by way of offering some clarifications to inquiries, or simply writing letters to Frederick Engels and others in course of his study, discussion, and correspondence. His writings on nations and nationalism were occasioned and influenced by the said responses to colonial wars, conquests, dominations, rule, and plunders. We can note the links between his writings on colonialism and nationalism as we go through his commentaries and notes on India, China, Ireland, Poland, racial exploitation in the United States, the US Civil war, and the famous analyses in Capital (volume one) on working day, primitive accumulation, etc. All we have to note at this stage is that Marx persisted with the idea of the nation –​in discussions on the class question in various contexts. It may have begun with the colonial question, but it did not stop there. Unfortunately, Marxologists have focused on the debate around “Eurocentrism” of Marx. Ironically, the concern regarding the supposed “Eurocentric” bias in Marx’s writings is found mostly among European and broadly Western scholars, while revolutionaries in the erstwhile colonised countries have looked to Marx for inspiration to struggle for social transformation. The national and the social transformational have combined more creatively than one could anticipate. This has been a feature of the entire twentieth-​century history continuing till this day. Hence we must ask, what makes Marx’s writings on colonialism and the national question of abiding value to national revolutionaries? In these writings, three elements combined in varying ways, depending on the immediate issue at hand: (a) colonial occupation and exploitation, (b) to form a nation as a country’s right that will facilitate democracy and enable the country to get out of feudal set-​up and external domination, and (c) finally, perhaps most importantly, social transformation. The final point is important, because with his evolving ideas on social transformation, he

Karl Marx  21 shed varying lights on the issue of national question. Thus, he abandoned his own arguments of 1850–​60s in the 1870s, particularly in his drafts for the letter to Vera Zasulich, where he said that both the primitive Germanic property form and the Indian-​type village commons belonging to pre-​capitalist social formations had been violently dealt with by the advent of capitalism, yet these “archaic” forms of communal property had shown in his words, “natural viability.”4 In this way, Marx increasingly espoused a heterogeneous view of social transformation as a result of his researches on the pre-​capitalist past and the origins of capitalism. Russia, he said, would have national rejuvenation only in the event of a revolution. His concluding words in the first draft of his letter to Zasulich were: You know perfectly well that today the very existence of the Russian commune has been jeopardised by a conspiracy of powerful interests; crushed by the direct extortions of the State, fraudulently exploited by the “capitalist” intruders, merchants, etc., and the land “owners”, it is undermined, into the bargain, by the village usurers, by conflicts of interests provoked in its very heart by the situation prepared for it. To expropriate the agricultural producers it is not necessary to chase them off their land, as was done in England and elsewhere; nor is it necessary to abolish communal property by a ukase. On the contrary: go and seize the product of their agricultural labour beyond a certain point and, despite all the gendarmes at your command, you will not succeed in keeping them on the land!... At the same time as the commune is bled dry and tortured, its land rendered barren and poor, the literary lackeys of the “new pillars of society” ironically depict the wounds inflicted on it as so many symptoms of its spontaneous decrepitude. They allege that it is dying a natural death and they would be doing a good job by shortening its agony… To save the Russian commune, a Russian revolution is needed... If revolution comes at the opportune moment, if it concentrates all its forces so as to allow the rural commune full scope, the latter will soon develop as an element of regeneration in Russian society and an element of superiority over the countries enslaved by the capitalist system.5 In a similar way, his views on the relation between capitalism and colonialism also evolved over time. The question of transition, for instance, from pre-​capitalism to capitalism therefore involved enormously nuanced discussions in his writings.6 Transition at the heart of which was the theme of social transformation helped his views on colonialism and the nation form take shape. The significant point is that, Marx’s attention to British rule in India, including in his despatches to the New York Daily Tribune, was mostly a kind of site where interrelations like the ones mentioned above were being explored. Thus, thoughts on issues like global trade (including inter-​colonial

22  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation trade, such as opium trade between India and China or bullion transfer from China to other countries7), differing and diverging trajectories of political and economic developments in Europe and the non-​European world, conquest of one country by another in Europe, and various other issues occasioned his thinking on colonialism and nationalism.8 The colony was, as if the alternative scenario, the foil, which served the purpose of clarifying what was happening in the fast industrialising parts of Europe, or more fundamentally, which would make a revolutionary think of the varying prospects of revolutions in Europe and elsewhere, for instance the relation between a revolution in the colonised country and revolution in the colonising country. In short, reflections on colonialism were part of his reflections on revolution and socialism. The possibility of transition to capitalism through colonialism was only one among several possible routes of transition. In this context we can also point out that for instance besides paying greater attention to India, Marx paid attention to colonial aggrandisement on China, while China was never fully colonised. It was “semi-​colonial.” Or, in discussions of British colonial control of Ireland, Marx viewed Irish economy as a peasant economy ruthlessly exploited by England and the big landlords of Ireland –​a situation that would come to be known later as “semi-​feudalism.” The national issue thus was not a straight corollary of the colonial question. The issue of transition made the theme of social transformation strategic in his understanding of the colonial-​national question. Yet it was a matter of the non-​European world returning again and again to his ideas. What made Marx’s idea of transformation distinct was the template of revolution. For national revolutionaries, revolution as practice emerged as the centrepiece of his ideas on the nation. Even though most of the time Marx linked revolution with class struggles (his references to the French Revolution of 1789–​94) and subsequently with workers’ seizure of power (his writings on the Paris Commune of 1871), and though he spoke of a Polish revolution in the background of national independence of Poland, the idea of revolution as practice, self-​emancipation of the oppressed, and as experience of a class survived epochal changes in capitalism and global power structure in the periods of colonialism, decolonisation, and neo-​colonialism. The nation in Marx’s ideas was associated with end of external domination, social transformation, and internationalism of the proletarian class. He wrote in 1870, Ireland is the bulwark of the English landed aristocracy. The exploitation of that country is not only one of the main sources of their material wealth; it is their greatest moral strength… If, on the other hand, the English army and police were to be withdrawn from Ireland tomorrow, you would at once have an agrarian revolution in Ireland. But the downfall of the English aristocracy in Ireland implies and has as a necessary consequence its downfall in England. And this would provide the preliminary condition for the proletarian revolution in

Karl Marx  23 England… in Ireland the land question has been up to now the exclusive form of the social question because it is a question of existence, of life and death, for the immense majority of the Irish people, and because it is at the same time inseparable from the national question… And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland… England, the metropolis of capital, the power which has up to now ruled the world market, is at present the most important country for the workers’ revolution, and moreover the only country in which the material conditions for this revolution have reached a certain degree of maturity. It is consequently the most important object of the International Working Men’s Association to hasten the social revolution in England. The sole means of hastening it is to make Ireland independent. Hence it is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland. It is the special task of the Central Council in London to make the English workers realise that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation. (Italics in the original)9 Perhaps this is the reason as to why Marx’s writings on the colonial-​ national issues have been studied again and again by political activists and political thinkers in colonised and postcolonial countries, even when his views and predictions were not borne out in reality. Thus, in the eighties of the last century there was a resurgence of interest in India, particularly in the Left, in Marx’s writings on British rule in India, and by extension pre-​capitalist formations, the “Asiatic mode” of production, the prospect of India’s transition to a modern capitalist economy, and an anti-​colonial revolution.10 Perhaps the victory of Chinese Revolution, the just concluded anti-​imperialist struggle in Vietnam, peasant struggles in India in the decades of sixties and seventies, and the vexing question of transition with which the theme of revolutionary alternative was and is integrally associated, occasioned interest among intellectuals and political activists in Marx’s historical writings

24  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation on the non-​Western world and the prospect of transition and revolution. Globalisation of capital, colonialism, and capitalist accumulation –​all these combined in Marx’s writings on colonialism and created interest among his readers in the postcolonial world, even though disputes remained among his academic readers as to his legacy in the postcolonial milieu.11 An important fact behind his nuanced understanding of the nation form is that, in discussing colonialism and national oppression (again we can take the instances of his writings on China, Ireland, or India), he did not posit capitalism as a system originating from the West and expanding to the periphery, but a dynamic complex of global relations that made capitalism a dominating global system. Primitive modes of accumulation made national inequalities and external domination over weaker nations inevitable. Europe was no longer the looking glass through which to study capitalism. Engagement with the theme of transition brought out in his writings international relations of domination even within Europe and the ways in which major ruptures occurred as world-​historical events under capitalism. We may refer to his discussion of the Irish Famine in the nineteenth century, which carried an eerie similarity with the Indian situation where too through the entire nineteenth century to the almost very end of the colonial rule in the fourth decade of the twentieth-​century famines persisted. Thus, the Bengal Famine of 1943 was analysed in a major way in a classical Marxist framework of capitalist accumulation, war making, and colonial oppression. The accounts of the expropriation of Irish subsistence farmers that led finally to the potato famine in the 1840s, when out of a population of 8 million, 1 million died and 3 million emigrated, reminded the readers of the expropriation of Indian peasants by the colonial rule. Marx’s observations in the first volume of Capital on the transformation of Ireland into an impoverished agricultural dependency of British capitalism were relevant. The prospect of an Irish revolution –​an agrarian revolution –​and its effect on European capitalism was a matter of relentless speculation and perhaps optimism of Marx. To him, independence of Ireland was the “lever” that must be applied hard on the question of social revolution in England.12 Lenin noted Marx’s analysis of Ireland in relation to England, as he developed his theory of the “weakest link,” for “link” was the word Marx had used for Ireland. With regard to China too, in his articles for the New York Daily Tribune (1853–​60) occasioned by the Taiping Rebellion and the Second Opium war, he discussed the possibility and limits to that possibility of a radical uprising in China. In any case this much we can say that revolution in the colonies was a significant theme in Marx’s ruminations on colonialism and independence from colonial rule.

III But revolution cannot be thought of, discussed, and practised without taking into account the class question. This made Marx’s ideas on the nation a constant companion of national revolutionaries in global South and became a

Karl Marx  25 reference point in the epoch of decolonisation following the Second World War. Imagining a radical nation form was impossible without an idea of the class composition of society and a programme of transforming class relations in favour of the common people. We can name the problematic in the familiar term of today, “nation and class.” For instance, Marx’s concern about social transformation in India brought him to the issue of pre-​colonial order, which he named “Asiatic,” and which had been overrun by colonialism. (We may leave aside here the debates around a historical category called the “Asiatic” mode of production.) Marx had to now focus on the question, wherefrom would the new forces of revolution and transformation come? India, Marx saw, had a structure of village communities as “the solid foundation of oriental despotism” and of the country’s “stagnation.” As a result, the urban centres stood isolated and contributed little to the social life of the country. He wrote of the British rule in India, The political unity of India, more consolidated, and extending farther than it ever did under the Great Moguls, was the first condition of its regeneration. That unity, imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph. The native army, organized and trained by the British drill-​sergeant, was the sine qua non of Indian self-​emancipation, and of India ceasing to be the prey of the first foreign intruder… The day is not far distant when, by a combination of railways and steam-​vessels, the distance between England and India, measured by time, will be shortened to eight days, and when that once fabulous country will thus be actually annexed to the Western world.13 The despatch to the New York Daily Tribune, “The Future Results of British Rule in India” (1853) from which we have quoted the above lines is sweeping in forecast and analysis. Historical researches into India’s role in the Indian Ocean trade or growth of trade and commerce in the pre-​colonial time have proved some of his views erroneous.14 However, it is necessary to recognise that Marx did not have any absolute and simplistic notion of an “Asiatic” system or mode of production. In later researches he took note of the varying fortunes of trading capital. However, for an appropriate analysis of classes in the colonial society, he had to have a grasp over the nature of “pre-​colonial,” and hence relations between despotism, surplus, commodity production, and exchange. The despot was “father of all the numerous lesser communities thus realising the common unity of all” and the surplus belonged to highest unity.15 And, further, Admitting… that the lands of India are private property, held by as good and strong a private title as land elsewhere, who shall be regarded as the real owners? There are two parties for whom this claim has been set up. One of these parties is the class known as zemindars and talookdars, who have been considered to occupy a position similar to that of the landed

26  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation nobility and gentry of Europe; to be, indeed, the real owners of the land, subject to a certain assessment due to the Government, and, as owners, to have the right of displacing at pleasure the actual cultivators, who, in this view of the case, are regarded as standing in the position of mere tenants at will, liable to any payment in the way of rent which the zemindars may see fit to impose... A more thorough study of the institutions of Hindostan, together with the inconveniences, both social and political, resulting from the Bengal settlement, has given currency to the opinion that by the original Hindoo institutions, the property of the land was in the village corporations, in which resided the power of allotting it out to individuals for cultivation, while the zemindars and taluqdars were in their origin nothing but officers of the Government, appointed to look after, to collect, and to pay over to the prince the assessment due from the village…The exclusive proprietary rights claimed by the talookdars and zemindars have been regarded as originating in usurpations at once against the Government and the Cultivators… In Oude, under the feeble reign of the native princes, these feudal landholders had gone very far in curtailing alike the claims of the Government and the rights of the cultivators; and when, upon the recent annexation of that kingdom this matter came under revision, the Commissioners charged with making the settlement soon got into a very acrimonious controversy with them as to the real extent of their rights. Hence resulted a state of discontent on their part which led them to make common cause with the revolted Sepoys.16 The famous historian of agrarian system in Mughal India, Irfan Habib, has noted the crucial implication of these observations, namely that, “the Asiatic state did not represent simply a single person or even only a simple ‘higher community’; it implied the existence of a definite social class that appropriated the surplus through the mechanism of the tax-​rent. Only out of such a class, in the process of a territorial dispersal of the claims to surplus, could develop local magnates…” –​who formed part of the anti-​colonial rebellion of 1857.17 Perhaps, in all these comments, fragmentary notes, addresses, and despatches on India, China, and Ireland, we find a faint theory of decolonisation –​a theory which would imply not only a transformation in the colony but also one that would have positive implications for social relations within the imperial country too. On one hand he would say as British historian Victor Kiernan pointed out in his discussion on Marx on India that “to be free at home, John Bull must enslave abroad”18; on the other hand his theory of capitalism as time went on included issues of race, brutality, violence, and oppression in the history of capitalism. If a ruling class re-​enacted in its colonies its own history of bloody suppression of peasant revolts, as the mass executions after the Indian Mutiny of 1857 reminded him of the Cromwellian reprisals after the Irish Rebellion, then independence of the colony must be the condition for social transformation in the oppressor nation. But while we

Karl Marx  27 find decolonisation in this formulation still anchored to the fate of bourgeois rule in Europe, the concern soon shifted to the future of the colony itself as Marx had to discuss more and more the pre-​capitalist past of the colony and its transformation. By the end of the 1860s, with the anti-​colonial uprising in India (1857), rebellions in China, and the Fenian Revolt in Ireland, he realised that the question of transition in the colonial country and its social transformation could not be delinked from the issue of independence –​irrespective of the fact as to whether there would be native bourgeois rule after independence or rule of the people. Marx was fully aware of the possible different trajectories of such transition in Ireland, China, India, and, as we have noted, even Russia. Perhaps with free trade, industrialised China might spell doom for industrial Europe.19 Considering today’s situation, what an uncanny forecast more than a century before! But to recognise transition in the colony and the emergence of a new nation as the subject of history required long and arduous labour and to a greater extent imagination, to visualise the colony emerging in its own right as a political actor on the global stage, producing sovereignties, territories, economies, and forms of rule. Indeed, imagining a future irreducible to given European history and yet a future that would be informed by class analysis and class angle was an immensely difficult exercise. Marx was the first Marxist to undertake that exercise. Remember, the maturing of his view on the nation form owed a lot to his increasing focus on the peasantry. Again this attention was in an episodic way, always in particular contexts –​essentially while trying to respond to the concern: What was at the core of the class question in a dominantly colonial-​rural milieu? As we know, Marx and Engels occasionally used the term “rural proletariat,” by which they meant small peasants and small tenant farmers, and agricultural labourers. It would perhaps cover all farmers and farm workers who were not prosperous farmers or landed aristocrats or “middlemen” in the tenant system. But he had never distinguished explicitly the rural classes. Only towards the end of their respective lives, with socialist movements making progress in France and Germany, Marx and Engels started thinking concretely of the peasants, of their relationship with the proletariat and proletarian politics, and the stand a proletarian state should take towards them. Perhaps here again, with further thinking of the colonial situation, their stand was clearer.20 How would one think of the villages in say colonial India with its own specific history of the relationship of the mass of rural population to the means of production such as land and other instruments of production, precisely at a time when colonial destruction was proceeding at a furious pace and a new type of land ownership had been recently introduced? Will the peasant class be identified more with poverty, working for wages, experiencing distance from the state, succumbing to famines and mass deaths, and less with a particular mode of production? Marx’s focus on the Indian land systems is noticeable for nowhere Marx refers to the lowest tier of peasantry as “rural proletarians.”

28  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation By the 1860s Marx was becoming more attentive to the general issue of class differentiation within the peasantry. The failure of the 1848 uprisings in Germany had drawn the attention of Marx and Engels to the peasant rebellions of the 1500s and the similarity in the situations of the 1500s and 1848–​49. The bourgeoisie had failed the people then, and now in 1848–​49 too, it had failed the people. Which would be the other classes to forge alliance and lead the people? The sixteenth-​century peasant wars were class conflicts as well, and not merely religious. Referring to the contemporary situation Engels wrote in 1870 in the preface to the second edition of The Peasant War in Germany, The small peasants (bigger peasants belong to the bourgeoisie) are not homogeneous. They are either in serfdom bound to their lords and masters… or they are tenants, whose situation is almost equal to that of the Irish. Rents are so high that even in times of normal crops the peasant and his family can hardly eke out a bare existence; when the crops are bad, he virtually starves. When he is unable to pay his rent, he is entirely at the mercy of the landlord. The bourgeoisie thinks of relief only under compulsion. Where, then, should the tenants look for relief outside of the workers? There is another group of peasants, those who own a small piece of land. In most cases they are so burdened with mortgages that their dependence upon the usurer is equal to the dependence of the tenant upon the landlord. What they earn is practically a meagre wage, which, since good and bad crops alternate, is highly uncertain. These people cannot have the least hope of getting anything out of the bourgeoisie, because it is the bourgeoisie, the capitalist usurers that squeeze the life-​ blood out of them. Still, the peasants cling to their property, though in reality it does not belong to them, but to the usurers... Wherever middle and large land ownership prevails, the wage-​workers of the land form the most numerous class. This is the case throughout the entire north and east of Germany, and it is here that the industrial workers of the city find their most numerous and natural allies.21 This was the seed of the classic theory of revolutionary nationalism based on worker-​peasant alliance. What is important for our purpose here is that with historical studies like this they were now looking more closely to the peasant question in theorising a transformative nation form. They had to find out, what was at stake in this grim historical battle between a bourgeois colonial power and the colonised country? It became extremely crucial for Marx to get out the aporia that issues of property such as ownership of land and other instruments of agrarian production presented before him. He could do this only by negotiating the supposed difference between the “Eastern peasant” and the “proletarian and the semi-​ proletarian of the West.” The Russian question and the colonial question

Karl Marx  29 both became the interlinked moments in new thinking. An absence of landed private property had distinguished the Asiatic form from the Western form. But if that absence had made no effect on the mission or the role of colonial power to regenerate social forces in the colony and if meanwhile only destruction was to be seen in the colonies, an eastern anti-​colonial revolution must be recognised as the moment to break the aporia. In a series of essays in New York Daily Tribune on the Sepoy Mutiny and the Taiping Rebellion in India and China, respectively, he lampooned the colonial army in the Indian mutiny and openly supported the cause of the Chinese rebels. In the mid-​ fifties of that century continuing up to the American Civil War, Marx began to pay attention to race and slavery. And on the top of all these issues, he was more and more concerned with Poland. Poland posed the question of revolution once again in a national context that served the purpose of a clarifying exercise regarding social transformation. Like in the cases of India, China, or Ireland, a democratic revolution in Poland would redefine the class question. From 1848 onwards the Polish issue had engaged Marx and Engels. Polish struggles for independence had periodically renewed their attention to the question of revolution as the defining motor of society. Way back in 1848, on the occasion of the second anniversary of the Krakow Uprising, Marx said in a lecture on “Communism, Revolution and a Free Poland,” There are striking analogies in history. The Jacobin of 1793 has become the communist of our day. When Russia, Austria, and Prussia partitioned Poland among themselves in 1793, the three powers relied on the Constitution of 1791 which they had unanimously condemned for its alleged Jacobin principles. And what did that Polish Constitution of 1791 proclaim? Nothing but a constitutional monarchy: legislative power in the hands of the representatives of the country; freedom of the press; freedom of conscience; open court proceedings; abolition of serfdom, etc. And all that was then called Jacobinism! ... The three powers marched with history. In 1846, when they incorporated Krakow into Austria and robbed the Poles of their last vestige of independence, they designated as communism what had previously been called Jacobinism. But, what did the communism of the Krakow revolution consist of ? Was it communist because it wanted to restore the Polish nationality? ...Or was the Krakow revolution communistic because it wanted to install a democratic government? ... Communism denies the necessity of the existence of classes; it wants to abolish all classes, all class distinctions. The Krakow revolution wanted to extirpate only the political distinctions among classes, it wanted to give equal rights to all classes.

30  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation So, in what respect, finally, was this Krakow revolution communistic? Perchance, because it wanted to break the chains of feudalism, liberate property from feudal obligations and transform it into modern property? ... Nobody will deny that in Poland the political question is tied up with the social one. For a long time they have been inseparable from each other…. The men at the head of the revolutionary movement in Krakow were most deeply convinced that only a democratic Poland could be independent, and that a Polish democracy was impossible without an abolition of feudal rights, without an agrarian movement that would transform the feudally obligated peasants into modern owners. The Krakow revolution has set all of Europe a glorious example, because it identified the question of nationalism with democracy and with the liberation of the oppressed class… (Italics mine) In the same year he wrote, “In Poland, they (the communists) support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.”22 Thus, if revolution was a clarifying event of history, so was the case with national uprisings. The focus on revolution never wavered. In the shifting light of class relations in the colonised societies the prospect of national revolutions seemed dim or bright. With democracy, independence from foreign subjugation, and social and economic reforms in the interest of the common people, the nation form will be an indispensable ally of the workers’ struggle for social transformation.

IV Through these interconnections between various elements of the colonial and the postcolonial time, the nation emerges as an uncertain subject of a radical history. Today the history of anti-​colonialism has been reduced down to one of nationalism owing to the erasure of the related issues of democracy and social transformation. The postcolonial order exhibits itself in a stark right-​ wing nationalist frame. At a time when speaking of working class, peasantry, democracy, injustice, and social transformation is a crime in many of the postcolonial countries, there is an urgent need to renew the engagement with the twin problematic of nation and class in terms of social transformation. In this context, Marx’s ideas on the nation form can be summed up in one sentence: The proletarian class cannot completely merge its destiny with the nation form as the bourgeoisie also inhabits the national space, but it cannot wish away the nation also. Today, many readers of Marx, however, have either done away with his dialectical and subtle observations on the nation form and have argued that, in this age of world trade and commerce, global flows of capital, commodity,

Karl Marx  31 and labour, and worldwide global credit and debt games, the nation form of political existence has no or very little role left in the struggle for social transformation. Neoliberalism combined with globalisation has exhausted the nation form of all its potentiality. The nation is irrelevant to the great question of transition. Or, these readers are nationalists who have thrown away from their thought the historical task of social transformation. Is this binary supported by the views of Marx? This chapter has attempted to get some sense of Marx’s dialectical views, which make the nation form an inevitable but uncertain subject of a radical history of social transformation. In short, Marx approached the question of nation in the background of the historical necessity of transformation of society. Marx and Engels said at the height of the revolutions of 1848: The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word. National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto… In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality…23 This is not identity politics. Here, the nation is a part of the international, indeed proletarian masses mostly existing in national forms and associations make the international. This nation is not necessarily a purveyor of “long distance nationalism” –​a phenomenon linked to world capitalism and the rise of identity politics.24 Integration of economy under capitalism and disintegration of countries and nations have gone in hand in the last three decades. The truth is that everywhere capital has provoked the community form of political organisation to surface as resistance. In this context, autonomy (of small nations, communities, cooperatives, minorities, gender, regional, etc.) has emerged as the parallel form to the nation form. Yet either these autonomies develop finally into a national form of existence or try to co-​exist in a federalised nation form. At the same time mass migrations within nations

32  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation and across the globe have problematised the nation form even more and given further push for democracy and justice. Everywhere the search is on for a dialogic form of political existence. This has become also a salient fact of our time. The identity story thus is not going unchallenged. Think of the ideas of Amilcar Cabral. Cabral spoke of a potential nation. The potential nation is a form of revolutionary collective subjectivity that mediates actual classes, sections, and communities into a “nation-​for-​itself.” This nation begins its journey to claim the right of every people to have their own history. Cabral located the foundations of this subjectivity in the resistance of the masses. As he saw, the “nation-​in-​itself ” was present in the daily lives of the African peoples, which would be transformed through social and political struggles into a “nation-​for-​itself.” The nation is thus in process. It is a transition from potentiality to actuality. Its basis is in the alliance and mass mobilisation of the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, the small working class, and the youth. For obvious reasons, the indigenous petty bourgeoisie acquires a greater consciousness of the totality in comparison to the other parts of colonised society. But Cabral had no illusion that an alliance between the small sections of the bourgeoisie and the toiling masses of peasants and urban labouring classes would sustain by itself in a postcolonial environment. In his words, To retain the power which national liberation puts in its hands, the petty bourgeoisie has only one path: to give free rein to its natural tendencies to become more bourgeois, to permit the development of a bureaucratic and intermediary bourgeoisie in the commercial cycle, in order to transform itself into a national pseudo-​bourgeoisie, that is to say in order to negate the revolution and necessarily ally. In order not to betray these objectives the petty bourgeoisie has only one choice: to strengthen its revolutionary consciousness, to reject the temptations of becoming more bourgeois and the natural concerns of its class mentality, to identify itself with the working classes and not to oppose the normal development of the process of revolution. This means that in order to truly fulfil the role in the national liberation struggle, the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing suicide as a class in order to be reborn as revolutionary workers, completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which they belong. This alternative —​to betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class —​constitutes the dilemma of the petty bourgeoisie in the general framework of the national liberation struggle...25 Before he was assassinated on 20 January 1973, he said: You know who is capable of taking control of the state apparatus after independence…. The African petty bourgeoisie has to be the inheritor of state power, although I wish I could be wrong. The moment national

Karl Marx  33 liberation comes and the petty bourgeoisie takes power, we enter, or rather return, to history and the internal contradictions break out again.26 Popular upsurges for security of life and livelihood are remaking nations in vast parts of the world. The rich countries tell these nations, do not cling to your nationalisms, because these rich countries can afford to be global. But poorer nations refuse such advice. They are obstinately engaged in finding new forms of democratic nation making. There is no place of immanence in the search for an answer to this contradiction. In fact, the stake is great in this struggle between a nation form that is hyper-​centralised, right wing, an exclusive identity-​based, and serving as the foothold of global capital, and a nation form that is federalised and dialogic, inheres autonomy, and offers space for continuous democratisation of relations, and respects other nations. A truly materialist history of the nation form will tell us of the conditions and conjunctions that produce the form, and the mutually opposing tendencies within the form –​one that can make it imperial, and conversely one that can make the nation form the celestial space of struggles for the transformation of collective life. The contradiction becomes a condition of the existence of the nation form itself. This is a basic contradiction –​between the imperatives of modern apparatuses of power that shape a collective existence called “national existence” and those of reshaping the collective life born through collective struggles for independence, transformation of social life, autonomy, and justice. The political is the link between the two destinies and is open ended. In fact, postcolonial experiences of popular politics of nation making have much to offer in terms of understanding the stake in this struggle. Indeed, the form of our future political existence will depend on the outcome of this struggle. Not unnaturally, the uncertainty of “national destiny” that is the destiny of the nation form, if there is anything like that, disturbs us. We are worried about this uncertainty, the ambiguity. We have to therefore probe a little more into the reflections on this phenomenon. The next two chapters will try to throw light on the said uncertainty, or we may say,ambiguity.

Notes 1 This question is posed somewhat in the way it was posed by Benedict Anderson in the essay, “The Goodness of Nations” in Anderson, Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998), Chapter 17, pp. 360–​368. 2 Parts of the analysis in the chapter are drawn from Sandro Mezzadra and Ranabir Samaddar, “Colonialism” in Marcello Musto (ed.), The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 247–​265. 3 “The British Rule in India”, New York Daily Tribune, 25 June 1853 –​www.marxi​sts. org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1853/​06/​25.htm (accessed on 10 April 2020).

34  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation 4 Karl Marx, “Drafts of a Reply: Marx-​Zasulich Correspondence”, February-​March 1818, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1955), later published in Teodor Shanin (ed.), Late Marx and the Russian Road, Marx and the “Peripheries of Capitalism” (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983) –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1881/​zasul​ich/​index. htm (accessed on 21 November 2021); see also, Tomonaga Tairako, “A Turning Point in Marx’s Theory on Pre-​Capitalist Societies: Marx’s Excerpt Notebooks on Maurer in MEGA IV/​18”, Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, Volume 47 (No. 1, pp. 1–​ 10), published by: Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, January 2016, p. 2; at the same time, it is also necessary to remember that Marx did not give any clear exposition of what he considered to be the “Asiatic mode of production” with the thoroughness with which he had expounded the capitalist mode of production. 5 Karl Marx, “First Draft of letter to Vera Zasulich”, 1881, Marx-​Engels Collected Works, Volume 24 (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1961), p. 346 –​http://​hiaw.org/​defc​on6/​works/​1881/​03/​zasuli​ch1.html (accessed on 21 December 2021). 6 We are leaving out of this chapter any proper discussion on Marx’s notion of the Asiatic mode of production and his discussions on pre-​capitalist formations, because they are subjects of separate, detailed study. 7 Marx wrote in “Revolution in China and in Europe” (New York Daily Tribune, 14 July 1853), Whatever be the social causes, and whatever religious, dynastic, or national shape they may assume, that have brought about the chronic rebellions subsisting in China for about ten years past, and now gathered together in one formidable revolution the occasion of this outbreak has unquestionably been afforded by the English cannon forcing upon China that soporific drug called opium. Before the British arms the authority of the Manchu dynasty fell to pieces; the superstitious faith in the eternity of the Celestial Empire broke down… and an opening was made for that intercourse which has since proceeded so rapidly under the golden attractions of California and Australia. At the same time the silver coin of the Empire, its lifeblood, began to be drained away to the British East Indies… Up to 1830, the balance of trade being continually in favour of the Chinese, there existed an uninterrupted importation of silver from India, Britain and the United States into China. Since 1833, and especially since 1840, the export of silver from China to India has become almost exhausting for the Celestial Empire. Hence the strong decrees of the Emperor against the opium trade, responded to by still stronger resistance to his measures. Besides this immediate economical consequence, the bribery connected with opium smuggling has entirely demoralized the Chinese State officers in the Southern provinces. Just as the Emperor was wont to be considered the father of all China, so his officers were looked upon as sustaining the paternal relation to their respective districts. But this patriarchal authority, the only moral link embracing the vast machinery of the State, has gradually been corroded by the corruption of those officers, who have made great gains by conniving at opium smuggling. This has occurred principally in the same Southern provinces where the rebellion commenced. It is almost needless to observe that, in the same measure in which opium has obtained the sovereignty over the Chinese, the Emperor and his staff of pedantic mandarins have become dispossessed of their own sovereignty.... (www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1853/​06/​14.htm (accessed on 8 April 2018))

Karl Marx  35 8 Marx and Engels noted the structural features of British colonialism that negated economic development in the colony as with the colonial entry began a process of de-​industrialisation and transformation of Asian economy into an appendage of the metropolitan economy. As a structural principle of such relation, Marx noted, Generally the railways gave of course an immense impulse to the development of foreign commerce, but the commerce in countries which export principally raw produce increased the misery of the masses. Not only that the new indebtedness, contracted by the government on account of the railways, increased the bulk of imposts weighing upon them, but from the moment every local production could be converted into cosmopolitan gold, many articles formerly cheap… such as fruit, wine, fish, deer, etc., became dear and were withdrawn from the consumption of the people, while on the other hand, the production itself, I mean the special sort of produce, was changed according to its greater or minor suitableness for exportation, while formerly it was principally adapted to its consumption in loco. Thus, for instance, in Schleswig-​Holstein agricultural land was converted into pasture, because the export of cattle was more profitable, but at the same time the agricultural population was driven away. All the changes very useful indeed for the great landed proprietor, the usurer, the merchant, the railways, the bankers and so forth, but very dismal for the real producer! (italics in the original) –​(Karl Marx to N. F. Danielson, 10 April, 1879 in Marx and Engels Selected Correspondence, New York: International Publishers, 1968) –​http://​marx​ism.halk​ceph​esi.net/​M&E/​1879/​lett​ers/​ 79_​04​_​10.htm (accessed on 2 April 2018) 9 Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt in New York, 9 April, 1970, London, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), pp. 222–​224. 10 On this see, for instance, Bipan Chandra, “Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule”, Review, Volume 5 (1), Summer 1981, pp. 13–​91. 11 For a summary of the various debates, Kolja Lindner, “Marx’s Eurocentrism: Postcolonial Studies and Marx Scholarship”, Radical Philosophy, 161, May–​June 2010, pp. 27–​41. 12 Marx wrote in a letter to Engels on 11 December 1869, As to the Irish question....The way I shall put forward the matter next Tuesday is this: that quite apart from all phrases about “international” and “humane” justice for Ireland-​-​which are to be taken for granted in the International Council-​-​it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working Glass to get rid of their present connection with Ireland. And this is my most complete conviction, and for reasons which in part I cannot tell the English workers themselves. For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy. I always expressed this point of view in the New York Tribune. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general. (italics in original) –​(www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​ marx/​works/​1869/​lett​ers/​69_​12​_​10-​abs.htm (accessed on 12 April 2018); on Marx’s comments and discussions on Ireland, Ralph Fox (ed.), Marx, and Engels, Lenin on Ireland (New York: International Publishers, 1940), also, Lev

36  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation Isaakovich. Golman and Valeria Kunina (eds.), Ireland and the Irish Question (New York: International Publishers, 1972); see also the discussion by John Rodden, “The Lever Must be Applied in Ireland”, The Review of Politics, Volume 70 (4), Fall 2008, pp. 609–​640; see also, Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-​Western Societies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 138–​153) 13 “The Future Results of British Rule in India”, New York Daily Tribune, 22 July 1853 –​ https://​marxi​sts.catb​ull.com/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1853/​07/​22.htm (accessed on 5 April 2018). 14 Ravi Arvind Palat, Making of an Indian Ocean World Economy, 1250–​1650: Princes, Paddy fields, and the Bazaars (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015); Palat shows the weak foundations of the traditional Western view of long-​term historical change by drawing upon the histories of societies based on wet-​rice cultivation to indicate an alternate pattern of social evolution and state formation. Making of an Indian Ocean World Economy traces linkages between the states of that time and the growth of commercialisation without necessarily leading to capitalism in the Indian Ocean World. 15 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 472. 16 “Lord Canning’s Proclamation and Land Tenure in India”, New York Daily Tribune, 7 June 1858 –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1858/​06/​07.htm (accessed on 14 April 2018). 17 Irfan Habib, “Marx’s Perception of India” in Iqbal Husain (ed.), Karl Marx on India: From the New York Daily Tribune (including Articles by Frederick Engels) and Extracts from Marx-​Engels Correspondence 1853–​1862 (New Delhi: Aligarh Historians Society and Tulika Books, 2006, pp. xix–​liv), p. xxvii. 18 Edward Victor Gordon Kiernan, “Marx and India”, Socialist Register, Volume 4, 1967 (pp. 159–​189), p. 179. 19 Victor Kiernan noted, On a larger view, Marx was very conscious during these years that his world was expanding, acquiring new dimensions -​California, Australia, the Far East, as if, he remarked, the sixteenth-​century age of exploration and discovery were happening over again. The old China was collapsing, he wrote in 1857, under Anglo-​French pressure and internal revolt, and this meant “the opening day of a new era for all Asia”… So far as can be seen, what he had in mind was not a further spread of Western imperialism but a proliferation of autonomous capitalism, such as he expected in India and did witness in north America. This would mark a new enough era for Asia, if not a socialist one. In 1894 Engels was to rejoice in the thought that defeat in the war with Japan must finally shake to pieces the old China and “the old economic system of small peasant agriculture, where the family also made its industrial products itself ”, and that industrialization must follow. With unquenchable optimism, forty years after he and Marx had first thought of it, he prophesied once more the ruin of Western capitalism, but now in a new way: Chinese industrial competition would be so overwhelming that Europe would be submerged by the deluge of Chinese goods. It was a bugbear of many Westerners by then, a new spectre haunting Europe. (Marx and India”, p. 183)

Karl Marx  37 20 Classic in this case is Frederick Engels, The Peasant Question in France and Germany (1894) –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​downl​oad/​Engles_​The_​ Peasant_​Que​stio​n_​in​_​Fra​nce_​and_​Germ​any.pdf (accessed on 19 march 2018); Engels there analysed various promises by the socialist parties in France, Denmark, and Germany, the different possibilities of peasant reforms, and discussed in these contexts the class alignments among the peasantry. 21 Frederick Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (New York: International Publishers, 1948), “Introduction”, pp. 8–​ 9 –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​ works/​downl​oad/​pdf/​peas​ant-​war-​germ​any.pdf (accessed on 12 April 2018); see also the discussion in John Rodden, “The Lever Must be Applied in Ireland”, pp. 638–​639. 22 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), trans. Samuel Moore (1888) –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1848/​ commun​ist-​manife​sto/​ch04.htm (accessed on 13 June 2022). 23 Ibid. 24 Benedict Anderson, “Long Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics”, The Wertheim Lecture, 1992, Centre for Asian Studies, Amsterdam, 1992. 25 Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory”, Address delivered to the first Tri-​ continental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Havana, January, 1966 –​www.marxi​sts.org/​subj​ect/​afr​ica/​cab​ral/​1966/​wea​pon-​the​ ory.htm (accessed on 12 January 2022). 26 Cited in Basil Davidson, The Liberation of Guine a: Aspects of an African Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 134.

2 Home, World, and an Uncertain Nation

I We continue with the theme of the uncertain space of nation. The story of social transition to modernity is always told in the frame of a transition from home to the world. Where does the nation stand in this global story of transition? Historians of course tell us of how the nation breached the wall of the home, encouraged, exhorted, and at times forced the home to face the world. The colonial world was featured not only by factories, labour, capital, and the advent of modern bureaucracy it was also one of peasant struggles, communal conflicts, alien rule, nationalist agitations, and community as a mode of nation-​being. All these reflected on home as an equally compelling idea like the nation. Where was the place of nation in this encounter of home and the world? Indeed, how was the transition mediated by an imaginary of the nation? Was it the imaginary of a nation that always functioned as an alternative to the closure of the home as well as an alternative to the undesirable conflicts marking the outside world? Was it an imaginary of an ethical space where all the seemingly ungovernable contentions of the home and the world could be finally managed in harmony? In this chapter, we shall recount a story on the problematic mentioned above, written by one of the greatest figures in world literature, a poet of colonial Bengal and a novelist. Perhaps we shall gain a deeper understanding of the uncertain but inevitable place of the nation form in the saga of the encounter of home and the world in our time. The idea of home and the world, which is home opposed to world, is quite modern, and made immortal in contemporary Indian annals of sensibility by Rabindranath Tagore. Of course from the late second half of the nineteenth century, nationalist thinkers had been wrestling with the issue of what has been called in recent literature the “women’s question,” and this was around three issues: the place of the woman in marriage, family, and family code; second, the place of marriage, family, and family code in public life; and third, participation of women in the larger world of the nation, public affairs, nationalist movement, and ultimately the achievement of citizenship by women. All these involved issues of polygamy, female chastity, women’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-4

Home, World, and an Uncertain Nation  39 education, age of consent, dowry, inter-​caste and inter-​community marriage, purdah, issues of reproductive health, birth control, and right to property. As the nationalist discourse kept on struggling with these issues, in the public mind there was always a home as distinct from the outside world of jobs, insecurity, and attending to hundred and one external tasks. But the division was not necessarily that simple. In the Indian imaginary, if ever there was anything standard as that, the village or the community at one level was the home of the self, at the same time it could also be the world for the self. At the level of imagination, universe was the world –​an inexhaustible milieu. To the mendicant, world was the home. However, by the time Rabindranath wrote in 1916 the novel, Ghare Baire (Home and the World),1 the wall between the home and the world as two modern metaphors had been erected and was solidly there for several decades. It was variously understood as domesticity/​ public-​ ness, internal/​ external, inward/​ outward, nation/​ the colonial world, philosophy/​ science, spirituality/​materiality, and so on. This division made nationalism, yet impeded it. Nationalist thinkers were aware of the closure of the situation, yet felt powerless in front of it. They tried to politically address it, yet political terms were ineffective in front of the wall that became solid in course of time and congealed in it many differences and fault lines. The issue was: What would be the device to find cracks on the wall? Rabindranath’s attempt to breach the wall was controversial and original. He turned a social question, as this chapter will argue, into an aesthetic problematic around the interrelation of home, nation, and a world waiting for resolution. While the originality of the attempt still resonates, its multi-​dimensional criticality still baffles the reader. There are two excellent sets of recent studies on the novel and its times2; they tell us in historical details various aspects relating to the novel. Here the discussion will revolve around the uncertain space of the relation of home, world, and the nation that Ghare Baire managed to throw light on.

II The novel Ghare Baire is around Bimala, the wife of a liberal modern landlord Nikhilesh. The story is in part a narrative of paternalistic landlordism and modernity, in part a commentary of false progress sought to be achieved through independence but by unfair and crooked means, and more centrally a commentary on a woman caught in the whirlpool of divides –​between devotion to family and extra-​marital love (offered to Sandip, the unethical nationalist agitator), reasoned attitude and attraction for the romance of an unknown thing called the nationalist public sphere of agitations, and between deliberation and the autonomy of a restless spirit. The novel is neither a simple story of love, nor a straightforward story of nationalism, but a story of relations predicated on several divides marking the anti-​colonial world. That for Rabindranath the woman was the figure of division and the partition of sensibilities was evident from his early writings.3 As an unknown

40  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation seventeen-​ year-​ old boy in 1878–​ 79, he sent home letters from Europe –​ mainly from England –​which were published serially in the family journal Bharati (published as Europe Prabasir Patra, later translated in English as Letters from a Sojourner in Europe). Of all the things he noted in England, the most troubling for him was the position of women in English society. Were they independent? Were they out only to attract men? What did romance and love mean in that context? In a context dominated by the need for women to appear as dressed, beautiful, and smart, what happened to those who were not blessed with physical beauty? In speculating on these issues and with his mind back home comparing with his own native situation, he made comments –​at one “level full of wit and swagger of juvenile sophistication” –​that created consternation and controversy at home, so much so that the editor (possibly his elder brother) had to publish a public reply to the “immature” thoughts of the young boy unreasonably overwhelmed with admiration for the West. If the issue was how to achieve gender equality and ensure women’s participation in public affairs, the editor reasoned, there were other ways than the British ones marked by what the editor considered false equality, sacrifice of modesty, and inculcation of baser instincts of enjoyment. Rabindranath was cautioned; he should retain his senses. Rabindranath’s reply was evasive. Though in later years he thought that his replies sent at that young age was immature, clearly we have in those replies the first indication of his aesthetic style, his way of deploying the method of partition of sensibilities: embracing modernity, appreciating love, youth, and romance, yet returning to the source of virtue. Sixty years later, he also wrote in a letter to Charu Chandra Dutt that while those letters by then should be considered part of history to be duly forgotten, their value lay in the literary style in which he wrote, “the first Bengali book to be written in colloquial language.” In those letters, he also wrote a lot on the phenomenon of “Ingo-​Bongo” (half English-​half Bengali) –​a new race/​breed of Bengalis settled in England who wanted to be English in appearance and sensibilities. As if race was the other fault line acting as a mirror in which the gender issue could be seen. The modern, Rabindranath was thus suggesting at an early age, had to be virtuous also. It is equally interesting, as his biographer notes, that possibly all the letters written from Europe in that visit and stay were addressed to Kadambari, wife of Jyotirindranath Tagore, his elder brother. His eldest brother Dwijendranath was the editor of Bharati.4 Rabindranath wrote Ghare Baire when he was past fifty. The internationalist phase of his life began around this time –​the award of the Nobel Prize and his journeys to England, the United States, and Japan and the horror with which he witnessed the murderous events of the First World War. Around this time, he also returned to intensive travels to Shilaidaha, his village base on the bank of river Padma.5 By the same time, the aesthetic tools he had developed in the first four decades of his life had equipped him to address in an unprecedented manner and original spirit the formidable issues of life and society. Also with his father’s death in 1905, as one of his biographers points out, he became free of his conservative father’s influence on him.6 His critique of

Home, World, and an Uncertain Nation  41 nationalism began around this time. Gora, the famous novel, had come out just few years earlier, and he felt an urgent need to communicate with outside world, the West in particular, whom he now subjected to increasing criticism. Also this was the time, precisely in 1914, when he became closely associated with the publication of the avant garde journal, Sabuj Patra (Green Leaves), edited by Pramatha Chaudhury, his relative and friend. He decided to serialise the novel Ghare Baire in Sabuj Patra in 1915–​16. The self-​consciously innovative ways became apparent in poet’s life. He used the chalit bhasa (spoken language) in the novel. He also increased the deployment of the figure of the woman in addressing the questions that nationalism threw up incessantly. He wrote Streer Patra (Wife’s Letters) just before he began writing Ghare Baire; and around the same time, he wrote another novel Chaturanga made remarkable by the figure of Damini. Unlike in Chokher Bali, published thirteen years earlier, in which Rabindranath allowed fulfilment of the heroine Binodini’s life by making her renounce happiness, in Chaturanga the poet found out a different path. Damini a young, lively, beautiful widow rebels against an unjust social order, which had deprived her of her natural right to love and happiness. Damini dies but only after she has found happiness in marriage with Sachish whom she has loved, and who after Damini’s death, returns to humanitarian mission. With all these stories and novels, Sabuj Patra, purposely forward looking and jolting the readers, became the occasion for the development and deployment of the power of the aesthetic. In Ghare Baire Rabindranath as the aesthetic subject is the creator. As creator, he passed on his sovereign power to Bimala who would now use all her sensitivities and sensibilities to breach the wall between the home and the world. The colonised subject, shorn of all powers and agency, regains her sovereign power through reclaiming aesthetic possibilities of exploring all options and deadlocks of colonial life. If there were no Bimala in real life,7 Rabindranath would have invented her as the congealed figure of all the conflicts of his time. What happens in Ghare Baire? It is a confessional novel written in autobiographical style with its three major characters –​Nikhilesh, Bimala, and Sandip –​taking turns to narrate his/​her part of the story. Let us briefly summarise this complex piece of literature –​an almost impossible task –​to see what Rabindranath attempted.

III The novel’s setting is early twentieth-​ century colonial Bengal when the Swadeshi movement took place as part of the nationalist awakening. The movement was in response to the Partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon in 1905. In the movement against partition, people of Bengal were exhorted to boycott British goods in order to foster national identity. Set against this time, Ghare Baire tells us not only of struggles and contentions of the time and personal struggles of the three main characters, but also details of the family structure and traditional Hindu Bengali households. In the novel, Bimala

42  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation starts off as a traditional, obedient housewife who is faithful to her husband and even forces herself to be respectful towards her nagging sister-​in-​law. “I would cautiously and silently get up and take the dust of my husband’s feet without waking him, how at such moments I could feel the vermilion mark upon my forehead shining out like the morning star.”8 However, as she falls in love with Sandip, she slowly moves away from her role of a devoted wife. She becomes daring, confidently brushes off her sister-​in-​law’s criticisms, crosses the barrier that separates the outside from the inner quarter –​women’s quarter of the house, and begins to converse with another man, Sandip, with the encouragement of her husband Nikhilesh, friend of Sandip. Nikhilesh, the zaminder, has married Bimala, a woman of a lower status and darker complexion. Their love is idyllic and both are dedicated to one another. Nikhilesh is the ever enlightened husband trying to tutor the wife in modern modes of reason and life, until the appearance of his friend and radical revolutionist, Sandip. Sandip is a passionate and active man not averse to taking to unscrupulous means to gain his end. His charismatic speech in support of the Swadeshi garners support from local population. While Sandip visits the estate of Nikhilesh, Sandip’s influential nature easily attracts the innocent and unsuspecting Bimala, and she suggests he make her and Nikhilesh’s house his headquarters. Once Sandip settles in the inside world of the house, Bimala, who till now knew only her husband and home, becomes engaged with the outside world, taking part in the movement by working with Sandip. Bimala is increasingly drawn to Sandip’s passion. The mutual attraction becomes inevitable to the extent that Bimala begins to question her marriage with Nikhilesh and finds in Sandip what she thinks she has always sought: a man with zeal, ambition, and carrying with him a sense of adventure and therefore danger. She helps Sandip by stealing money from her husband’s treasury, convinced that if it is not her money, at least it belongs to the nation. She claims that her national duty is the motivation behind her act; however, her true intention is to please Sandip. Nikhilesh the modern enlightened husband discovers their actions but concedes Bimala the freedom to grow up and choose her path in life. Meanwhile, Bimala experiences love for the first time, which ultimately helps her understand that it is indeed her husband Nikhilesh who really loves her. The novel ends with a riot, resulting in Sandip fleeing the estate. Nikhilesh is mortally wounded in the head. Amulya, a young follower of Sandip’s movement and who considered Bimala his sister and whom Bimala (the childless woman) had thought of as her son, dies by a bullet through his heart. To get a sense of the complications that remake in a nationalist milieu the home and the world, we have to take note of one further dimension to this barest of the outline. The Swadeshi movement was heavily influenced by the ideals of Hindu nationalism. Bengali Hindu landlords were basically opposed to Bengal Partition, implemented by the British to break the backbone of an emerging militant nationalism and rationalise the colonial administrative structure. The boycott campaign and other modes of mobilisation

Home, World, and an Uncertain Nation  43 were imposed on Muslim and low caste peasants to force them to fall in line. This was heavily resented by the latter. Rabindranath a central cultural figure of the anti-​partition agitation was one of the first to realise the limits of the Swadeshi. He was struck by the alienation of the Muslims and the low caste peasantry. He noticed the lack of organic solidity of the nationalist movement. As soon as he understood that Muslims and low caste groups were suspicious of the hegemonic ambitions of upper caste Hindus in opposing the partition, he started reasoning that the Swadeshi movement with such divide could not effectively articulate the objective of nationhood. The movement had the duty to recognise that the Muslims and low caste Hindus saw in the Swadeshi and the boycott campaign an insidious attempt to take away the limited opportunities that they had gained under colonial rule. If nationhood contained truth, then it must widen the concept of humanity. If it encouraged divisions and monopolisation of power by a select group, then it was not representative of human truth, and therefore that path had to be discarded. In his inimitable style based on moral-​aesthetic-​political elements, he argued that people must realise the roots of the weakness that had allowed the alien rulers in the first place to make use of that weakness, and whither the path of remedy lay. He said, Who can divide us if the roots of relations are spread deep between the west and the east (of Bengal, now to stand divided)? If power from outside wants to break us, the force of love will protect. And then, he went on to say, Where we are strong, we shall remain resolute. Where it is our duty, we shall remain aware and be responsible for it. Where we have our soul mates (kinsfolk, in Bengali atmiya), we shall place our faith and reliance (on them). Never shall we be unhappy or dejected. Never shall we say that with one act of the government our all-​round doom has been scripted. If that were to be so, then we shall be never saved with acts of cleverness or opportunities got through providence or government mercy…9 He further wrote, “We have demanded brotherhood and closeness from them without ever trying to be close to them...We imagine that the Mother has become real for the whole country through songs and emotional ecstasy alone.” How could the nation allow this we (caste educated Hindus)/​they (Muslims and Namasudras) division, when truth disallows such split? As he famously declared, “Satan cannot enter till he finds a flaw.”10 Sandip, the fiery nationalist agitator, was unscrupulous because he was not mindful of the plural composition of people and was ready to adopt all means (including charming a woman, stealing, coercing others) regardless of ethical consequences. Communal riots were a result of such politics.11 In the story, these complications appear as a problem of nationalism but soon acquire an ethical dimension. It is Nikhilesh who brings his wife Bimala to a political rally to persuade her to join the outside world. Though Bimala

44  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation has heard of Sandip earlier and has a negative opinion of him, this is the first time she hears Sandip speak. The effect is electrifying. Recalling the incident, she says, “I was no longer the queen in the King’s house, but the sole representative of Bengal’s womanhood. I returned home that evening radiant with a new pride and joy.”12 Returning home, Bimala tells Nikhilesh to invite Sandip to their home for dinner. The fatal step has been taken. Yet, this crossover from home to the world is never complete. When Sandip convinces Bimala to steal Nikhilesh’s money, during the act of stealing she realises the crime she is committing, “I could not think of my house as separate from my country: I had robbed my house, I had robbed my country. For this sin my house had ceased to be mine, my country also was estranged from me.”13 The nation, the country, is transcendent. It is thus everywhere. It mediates even the most secret act. But who is Nikhilesh, whose moderate and reasoned existence and whose belief in the value of autonomy of others and autonomous awakening of others see him through the impending tragedy –​the tragedy of the nation, of his own life,14 the institution called family, breakdown of public sphere, women’s autonomy, indeed of Bimala as a person, as a woman –​a scripted all-​round doom? Who is Nikhilesh, at once the figure of reason, calm confidence, and helplessness in face of an unfolding tragedy –​a figure whom Rabindranath drew with care and tender obviously to see him last even when the reader had finished reading the novel? Who is this figure of brittle modernity? In the novel, Nikhilesh is depicted as an educated and gentle man, so much so that at one level Ghare Baire is a narrative around him. The story is as if from his point of view. His words are poetic. He is an aristocrat, who is a liberal. He is different from his family tradition because he marries not only a woman from a family of lesser means, but also someone not attractive. Yet he loves the wife. He buys her European style clothes, educates her on the world outside with the help of Ms. Gilby, and tries to bring her out from the traditional life of confinement at home. Yet he thinks he cannot “empower” women –​from outside, artificially. They must empower themselves, autonomously. Therefore, with his gentle and soft nature, he can only watch helplessly the unfolding relation between his wife and his friend Sandip. He also does not join the nationalist agitation because he does not like populism and the policy of coercing others into joining the movement. He is Nikhil (the Bengali meaning of), the “universe” made of sagacity and harmony. He is also Nikhilesh (the Bengali meaning of), “the lord of that universe.” As against Nikhilesh there is Sandip, his friend, at one level the figure completing a love triangle.15 Sandip is a guest in the home of the former. His extremist ideas and speeches impress Bimala. He is a skilled orator. While Nikhilesh is measured and calm, Sandip is impassioned and stirs the emotions not only of Bimala, but also people around. “Swadeshi” means using goods made locally and boycotting British goods. He espouses Swadeshi. He thinks end justifies means. He is ready to even deceive people with his oratory. He believes freedom must be achieved no matter the cost and cites Bhagavad

Home, World, and an Uncertain Nation  45 Gita, which tells of Lord Krishna advising Arjuna the warrior to perform his duty as a warrior regardless of consequences.16 To Nikhilesh, this is due to his (Sandip’s) male ego, coercive disposition, and thus he finds in his friend a person of gross nature, at times lustful, dishonest.17 He is hurt, agonised, but perhaps not surprised that Sandip is trying to impress his wife Bimala and seduce her. He is of course surprised, but reconciles to the fact, that Bimala has fallen in love with Sandip. Sandip’s extremist and intolerant speeches create riots. But Sandip does not face the consequences of his actions. He flees the place and the novel. Perhaps then at a fundamental level, Sandip is the foil helping the deeper questions of nation and ethics unfold. Into this world of male protagonists representing the virtues and vices of nationalism, enlightenment, passion, sagacity, trust, and cleverness Bimala graduates. She loves her husband and is devoted to him. She has no intention of entering the outside world even with persuasion from her husband. But all these change rapidly with the advent of the nationalist –​the Swadeshi –​ movement and with it, her meeting Sandip. She becomes romantic, shameless, and impetuous. Nikhilesh notes the change, but believes, Bimala is free to make decisions regarding her life. Caught between her devotion to her husband mixed with a dislike of his unwillingness to participate in patriotic actions and her attraction for Sandip, she has to find by herself her feet in the world. Nothing seems enough to give her agency, her vitality. With nationalism along with its bold, careless, adventurous, and unscrupulous modes breaching the wall and destroying home, Bimala seems to be able to finally decide what she wants in life. But, is this autonomy realised through the expulsion of the messy public sphere from her world of virtues? Does she realise and regain her devotion for Nikhilesh through the expulsion of passion from life? Or, is virtue to be attained only after we have cleaned ourselves of the corrupt practices of the self ? Is this what we call autonomy? On the other hand, is it not true that autonomy is gained only through a series of interventions from outside, the world? We can now see the immense complications that the poet had set in store for his characters. But possibly the most difficult question Ghare Baire throws on our face: Why on earth Bimala has to stand for all these examinations of life? Why does only Bimala have to evolve, why does she have to account for her vitality, and not the two male protagonists who cannot or will not change? Perhaps these male protagonists are simply two side casts to enable Bimala to evolve. Or, it is the woman who symbolises the murderous contradictions of the nation. Hence, who else but Bimala? The future may be thus imperfect and uncertain, but there will be some principle as certainty to life –​the principle that will guide relations. The quest for autonomy requires that if Bimala needs autonomy, she has to traverse the path of discovery of the principle of life, which will make her an autonomous subject. The process of discovery must allow and acknowledge the reality of cruelty, power, vice, anger, and other maladies of public life. Autonomy is not ideal. Therefore, Bimala not only gathers the sudden courage to ask

46  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation rhetorically on her husband’s face, has there been any nation, which has not traversed the path of fury and evil to gain independence? Has there been any nation that has not stolen from others and from the resources of its own people in order to emerge?18 And then in the course of the discussion between Nikhilesh, Bimala, and Sandip on issues of nationhood, Sandip recites what the seer had said, O Vice, come, o thou beautiful! Let the fire and wine of your kiss roam through my blood Let the conch shell of the ill blow, Let disgrace adorn my forehead O terrifying Goddess, mark on my breast The shameless pitch dark prints of vice.19

IV Surely, this is not what Kant would have called a categorical imperative. The source of Kantian autonomy remains mysterious, reason determines the origin and nature of autonomy. In that sense reason is a priori. However, in Ghare Baire, Bimala has to face the real worlds of nationalism, public life, the dialectics of means and end, limits of the institution of family, family devotion, and family obedience. The colonised woman had to face all these even under the best of circumstances. That is why the liberalism of a wealthy landlord Nikhilesh becomes all the more ironic. Bimala has to face also the limits of affection and love –​love of the husband, love for the husband, extra-​ marital love, and love for the country. Her emancipation, a much debated issue in the public nationalist sphere when Rabindranath was writing, signified something more than a simple programme of women’s emancipation through social reforms. As if Ghare Baire was saying, emancipation is ensured neither through reforms brought by an enlightened gentry (Hindu or Brahmo), nor through her simply stepping outside the home –​because for her awaits the contentious politics of the world that sucks in its vortex even the hitherto pure home. To be autonomous, she will have to fight out the various contentions in the world and the contention between the world and the home. It is not even like what Michel Foucault would call many decades later care of the self, for she does not aim to nourish herself. She realises herself only through relating. Virtue lies in correctly relating. Ghare Baire is therefore not simply an ethical tract on the nation. Or, we can say that the ethical lesson is a reflection of a fundamental dynamics around a woman caught in a vortex of contending forces. She finds her agency through engaging with the contentions and surviving. There could have been several solutions to the closure of that contentious situation. Rabindranath eschewed all of them. Bimala could have left home and become a nationalist agitator leaving Sandip aside for his unethical ways; she could have reformed Nikhilesh

Home, World, and an Uncertain Nation  47 and brought him around to her views; Nikhilesh could have achieved Hindu-​ Muslim unity, stopped the riot, and come back home to re-​unite with Bimala; or Sandip and Bimala could have united in their tempestuous love and perhaps worked for the country. But in the novel the resolution of the closure is a minor note. Any such resolution would have hardly appeared to the reader as restoration of virtue. Nor would it have saved Rabindranath from the criticisms of his contemporaries, who indeed saw in the novel the work of a degenerate Hindu trying to corrupt the women of Bengal, a petty work of triangular love, and a denigration of nationalism.20 Rabindranath also virtually abandoned all efforts to provide a resolution. The resolution if any would be found by Bimala, Bimala alone. Rabindranath does not allow also any resolution of the nationalist problematic, even though the entire novel moves around the Swadeshi movement. Swadeshi constitutes the world where Bimala’s struggle with her identity takes place. She is a part of the country, but only knows the home. This home is a mix of many values. Rabindranath could have easily portrayed the nation as the home and the cosmopolitan as the world. This would have put many later day theorists of postcolonialism at ease. He closes that route too. The contradictory views of Nikhil and Sandip have set up the story, thereby constructing a cruel dilemma for Bimala. Agony is in store for her. The birth of illusions becomes the major recurring theme. Sandip creates illusions for his followers including Bimala and the nation. Nikhilesh has the illusion that Bimala can become modern without paying the necessary price. Nikhilesh pays also the price for harbouring illusion. As he says in the novel, he magnified the fact that Bimala had come to her; but he had not understood that she had come to his house, not to him. He had provided her such a large place. He had been engrossed with decorating her, dressing her, educating her, and moving round her day and night; forgetting how great was humanity and precious was human life. Infatuation makes one lose sight of truth, and thereby freedom. In his words, Marital life is something that is my inner part; it is not simply a way of leading domestic life. That is why I have not been able to coerce her from outside… Perhaps I am strange. That is why I have been deceived…. I have taken the discipleship of truth that creates the outside from the inside. Hence I had to tear away the bonds of outside. I shall bleed my heart and get freedom… I am getting the taste of that freedom... even if the dream around that Bimala who is made of illusion goes away, I shall not lose…21 Bimala too has illusions. She has the illusion that women are the future, they are the chosen path to salvation; they are the nation. She was enthused by Sandip with this idea. She builds another illusion that she is the reason for the communal conflict. She has only to blame herself, for she has not been wise.

48  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation Rabindranath of course does not say if the following words of Bimala carry the illusion to utmost: I now fear nothing –​neither myself, nor anybody else. I have passed through fire. What was inflammable has been burnt to ashes; what is left is deathless. I have dedicated myself to the feet of him, who has received all my sin into the depths of his own pain. Even though we do read in the novel, Better, surely, to laugh away the world than flood it with tears. That is, in fact, how the world gets on. We relish our food and rest, only because we can dismiss, as so many empty shadows, the sorrows scattered everywhere, both in the home and in the outer world. If we took them as true even for a moment, where would be our appetite, our sleep?22 Does nationalism pose then the question of truth as opposed to illusions? And, is Rabindranath pointing out in this context the procedure of truth? Is he suggesting the respective places of religion, spirituality, ethicality, and autonomy in this procedure, but places that will not be settled once and for all? Whatever he is suggesting, one thing is clear, truth is being determined historically, contingently. Bimala’s question is the greatest historical question. So are of historical importance the questions of modernity, liberalism, autonomy. Virtue will arrive in the process of the historical determination. And, to repeat, Bimala and only Bimala can represent the closure and the exit from the conflictive world of the nation. Bimala will stand on the margin, on the dividing line between home and the world. She will be a marginal figure in the contest between home and the world. She wanted to migrate from one domain to another. The travel of hope proves dear, yet proves essential in the context of the imperative of autonomy. At times it seems that Ghare Baire is suggesting a larger truth beyond the nationalist time. After all, we read in the novel, “There are more things in life than the union or separation of man and woman. The great world stretches far beyond, and one can truly measure one’s joys and sorrows when standing in its midst.” If colonised subjectivity resolves in this way the nationalist problematic –​as the novel suggests, by critiquing it, side-​stepping it, individualising it, historicising it, and transforming the principle of autonomy into a question of relation with agonies of the world –​what happens to the right to desire? Will not the colonised desire? Will Bimala desire only at her own peril? Ghare Baire probably tells us that grossness, savagery, cruelty, and loss of balance and equanimity are against the world of senses and sensibilities. But here was a problem. If desire was dangerous, as Bimala’s trajectory showed and as the fate of the societies of the West showed,23 Rabindranath was at a loss to explain the role of desire in his cherished world of the senses.

Home, World, and an Uncertain Nation  49 Was he going to partition even this–​dangerous desires and healthy desires? If masculinity was the kernel of desire, and therefore, desire made masculinity gross –​exactly that was what Nikhilesh thought of his friend Sandip –​then why had Bimala to suffer for her desires, because she was earlier quite content with her home? Was then Rabindranath trying to suggest that Bimala erred not in desiring for the outside, but in breaking the harmony –​a value that Rabindranath desired and cherished most all through his life? Tagore realised in particular through the First World War that harmonious nation was an illusion.24 In Western philosophy, we know, Hegel had argued that desire, love, and work formed the basis of the notion of the family, the fundamental unit of ethical life. Desire was partly a trope for him. In Phenomenology of Mind (1807) he said, The beautiful, the holy, the eternal, religion, love –​these are the bait required to waken the desire to bite: not the notion, but ecstasy, not the march of cold necessity in the subject-​matter, but ferment and enthusiasm –​these are to be the ways by which the wealth of the concrete substance is to be stored and increasingly extended.25 Desire was thus necessary for the emergence of subjectivity. Hegel claimed that natural desire was transformed into love with the appearance of the concept of work. Work freed the woman from being an object of desire, which was for Hegel inherently masculine. Through shared work, the woman came into her own, ceased to be an object of his desire, and thus she became “human” for the man. Mutual recognition was mixed with “natural relation and with feeling” and therefore was not a purely ethical relation. Marriage relationship was natural and therefore not fully universal. It still remained contaminated with natural desire. The ethical had to purify it, or it had to be predicated on the ethical. Rabindranath came dangerously close to such position, but he managed to avoid it. Partly the reason lies in his notion of desire which produces vitality, or to be truthful to Tagore’s women at least in the Sabuj Patra period, they could desire because they had vitality.26 The right to desire is thus in a tantalising position in the novel. The right to desire was dangerous for a colonised subject. But if nationalist awakening had to have some meaning, the woman had to be an autonomous subject, who would have the right to desire. Tagore inched gradually to where he arrived in 1916 –​a journey he had started with the famous story Nashtanir (1902) through Streer Patra (1914) to Ghare Baire (1916), even though Tagore’s Bimala is reprimanded for her desire. But as the final product of an aesthetic imagination she is not made out as a rational animal alone, though the criticism aimed at her is not that she is not rational enough, or that she is desirous, but she ignored the ethical aspect of human actions. Yet ethics does not appear in Ghare Baire on its own strength, ethics can be invoked only by aesthetic means. Recall Tagore’s journey of espousing

50  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation an ethical construct of community –​from Atmoshakti (1898) and Swadeshi Samaj (1905) to Kalantar (1937). Yet, it is through the aesthetic route that he gathered the courage of discussing desire, which to be sure must not cause death and destruction but lead towards political participation for a just and better world. In short, the women’s question was not solved, because there was no possibility of a nationalist resolution of the women’s question. Rabindranath did not solve but dissolved the issue in the general fate of the nationalist question. But the national question was never resolved, that is to say, nationalist resolutions of great questions of life and society –​such as women’s autonomy, emancipation from caste oppression, the question of gaining economic independence, independence from global power regime, or achieving as nation’s subject an organically cohesive people. The resolutions proved abortive. In other words, the solution to the problem of the nation –​citizenship, national freedom, and democracy –​remained unrealised and unrealisable in the answer offered in the framework of nation. Yet it is true and even Ghare Baire admits that the constituent power driving the society towards national emancipation based on a resolution of these problems can only originate from within the nation. What it is then that drives the emancipative force beyond the nation –​a solution that will resolve the nationalist problematic only by breaking the shell of the nation form? Caught in this aporia where a solution to a problem becomes impossible in terms of the problem itself, the nationalist question undergoes a metamorphosis. The differential trajectories of nationhood in China, India, Algeria, and other countries bear testimony to the heterogeneous mutations of the nation form. The greatness of the ideas of anti-​colonial thinkers shows the way in which the supplement has worked in the dynamics of the search for a resolution of the nationalist problem. This is the situation where the woman appears as crossing the boundaries, types, and paying the price. In Aparichita (1914), the inscrutable woman who refuses to abide by the custom of gift and dowry as part of marriage and turns to social work and service to the nation remains the elusive and sought after figure to the possible bridegroom whose family had once demanded huge dowry. The story ends with the male character (on realising the degradation he had caused to the woman several years ago, and realising at the same time that she will never marry him even while being kind to him), saying, Do you think I hope ever to marry her? No, never. What sustains me is the melodious promise of an unknown voice of a single night: There is room here. Room there must be, where else shall I go? Thus, years roll by, but I am still here. I see her, I hear her voice, and I help her in some way where I can, and there my heart says, this is the room I desired. O my unknown woman, I have not yet known all there is to know of you; I never will. But I am fortunate; I have found my room after all.27

Home, World, and an Uncertain Nation  51 The dynamics of desire runs along the opposite line here. Yet, the lesson is the same. Desire alone does not take you far. You must know how to temper it in order to arrive at truth –​the truth of the nation, of humanism, of autonomy that will make you not a slave of desire, yet will give you the ability to sublimate your desire with your critical judgement. In Ghare Baire Bimala desired blindly only to realise its folly. In Aparichita, the male character (story written in first person account) finally develops a desire for a woman but learns that to desire is not the only thing, to be able to realise what this desire signifies is more important. The “right to desire” made famous by Hegel fell short of Rabindranath’s aesthetic taste and disposition. Indeed in his long life, he had never understood the liberal language of right. Desire culminating into deliberation becomes crucial in the emergence of emancipative subjectivity. Caught in conflicts, producing conflicts, desire prods the woman to rise over the present –​misfortune as presence. Therefore in Ghare Baire, institutions are more complicated. Home is not only family (an institution), but space also. Home is complicated, so is the world. In the novel, not only colonised subjectivity is problematised along with woman’s subjectivity, but also both the ideas of home and world are turned into problems calling for further predications. Of course, desire is located in family here; but the urge to break out of family is also a form of desire. In Streer Patra (1914) desire turns into resolve. In few pages, Rabindranath tells the story of Mrinal a dejected wife writing a letter to her convention bound husband that she will never go back to her husband’s house and urges him to consider that in so far as far as she is a “wife,” she is dead. Then we arrive at the most intriguing part of the story. Mrinal says, even though she will not burn herself to death as others have done in similar circumstances, and she will take up other vocations to continue with the life for which she owes nothing to anyone except God, but she is not afraid to die. Male oppression and oppression of customs cannot take away her sovereignty, if and when she chooses to die. In death sovereignty is reaffirmed. Twice in the story, sovereignty is affirmed and on both occasions sovereignty is located outside the family, outside the public sphere also. Mrinal says early in the letter, I had one thing outside the pale of domesticity, which none of you ever knew. I used to write poems secretly. Trash or ash, whatever it was, the walls of women’s quarters had not encompassed it. There I found freedom, there I was myself. Whatever qualities in me overshadowed the stereotype of a mejobou (in English, the wife of the second brother in the house) you never liked, nor did you recognise it. That I was a poet you could not discover in fifteen years.28 And, then, referring to a girl, Bindu by name (cousin of the wife of the eldest brother), who had sought shelter in her (Mrinal’s) husband’s house from the oppression of her own home, and was refused, turned away, and eventually had to commit suicide, Mrinal writes,

52  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation Apart from that, it was my perception that as a woman that she was, Bindu was not abandoned by God. Whatever the extent of your dominance over her, there was a limit: she was grander than her miserable life on earth. Your feet were not long enough to forever trample her life underfoot with your customs. Death proved superior to you. In death lies her greatness. There Bindu is no mere Bengali girl, no mere sister to cousins, and no mere cheated wife of an unknown, insane husband. There Bindu is infinite.29 A paragraph later, But the flute of death continued to jeer: where are thy walls of brick and mortar? Where is thy spiked fencing of domestic regimentation? With what suffering, what humiliation can they imprison human beings? Look there! Death is waving the triumphal flag of life! ... The darkness of your habits and customs had shrouded me all over. In the brief while Bindu came, she had caught sight of me through the pores of that shroud. That very girl with her death tore that shroud apart. Today having come out free, I find myself brimming over with glory. The one, that Beauteous One, in whose eyes lies this neglected beauty of mine, is beholding me through the whole sky. Now at last, the second daughter-​ in-​law is dead.30 In death, woman becomes immortal. In Ghare Baire, Bimala thinks that her death, and only her death, can purify and cure the society of all conflicts.31 But Bimala does not die. Amulya dies, perhaps Nikhilesh also dies. With self-​sacrifices increasing in the stormy nationalist decades, death became the leitmotif in the emergence of a radical anti-​colonial subjectivity in Bengal. Death, Rabindranath was showing, did not mean subtraction; death added immortality to life. Individuality of the woman caught like a merciless victim in the conflicts of colonial world attains immortality through sacrifice, death, self-​questioning while relating at the same time to home, world, nation, and her own undying desires. Perhaps, only in the mirror of a harmonious world the women’s question was to be resolved. In it lay all the connections with his thoughts on nationalism, communal unity, public sphere, etc. There could be no resolution of the women’s question within the nationalist framework. Nothing –​family, civil society, public –​nothing was enough to address the problem of desire, which lay at the heart of the question of autonomy. It was again for this reason that any singular concept of right was alien to Tagore. The specificity of an aesthetic subjectivity shaped by colonial contradictions and predilections lay here. There is no pre-​determined destiny of the nation or the individual. The varying destiny of the individual –​individual as the woman (and therefore the three women, in the three stories mentioned in this chapter, Ghare Baire, Aparichita, and Streer Patra are childless, they are women and not to be confused with being mothers) –​puts in disarray any previously determined schema of institutions linked to and relevant to woman’s life as autonomous

Home, World, and an Uncertain Nation  53 subject. Greater was the consciousness of colonial domination, bigger was the ambition to emerge as an emancipated subject. Exactly twenty-​five years after writing the novel Ghare Baire and few months before he died, an exasperated Rabindranath said in third person that as a figure in public history he was merely a subject of the British Empire; but as a creator, he was sovereign, answerable to none.32 In the same vein he went on to say on his death bed, There is no doubt that the rural scenes surveyed by the poet in those days were affected by the conflicts of political history. However, thanks to his creativity, what came to be reflected…was not the image of a feudal order or indeed any political order at all but the history of the weal and woe of human life.33 The novelist’s signature is in declining any single resolution amidst the conflicts of life. By placing the woman on the borders of the divides, Ghare Baire not only makes various kinds of resolution possible including attaining immortality, but it also suggests that any resemblance, sympathy, analogy, and correspondence is not sufficient to draw the figure of the woman as one of transcendence. She is not crossing boundaries, she is transcending. Therefore Ghare Baire does not invite any resemblance or analogy or correspondence with a real life situation. Resemblances with the Bengali society in the early part of the last century and the Swadeshi politics one finds in Ghare Baire are only signs –​signs in the production of virtue. Virtue not as valour or as part of ethics but virtue is in the power of transcendence. Bimala was Rabindranath’s signature. She was also the signature of an uncertain nation that demanded sacrifices of subjects who gained autonomy through enduring conflicts, sacrifice, and transcending the divides marking the colonial world. Tagore never espoused the view that home needed to be swept away by the winds of outside. He spoke of harmony. He thought that conflict was not necessarily a virtuous component of life, but an obligatory one. Therefore, he had to look at these issues with aesthetic means and the power of his language took him to newer and newer horizons of possibility. Ghare Baire stands at that juncture when aesthetic sense prised open situations where politics was failing; philosophy proved powerless. Ghare Baire stands on the margin of the two epochs of his life; it also stands on the margin separating ethics and aesthetics. Likewise, it stands on the margins of sexuality and control, passion and order, “masses” and “fear of the masses,” nation and individual, resolution and transcendence. As an outcome of its liminal position, it has significant implications for philosophy and politics, indeed for the subjectivity of the colonised, now the postcolonial self. Not the least therefore, notwithstanding his intense dislike of the nationalist ideology in the later part of his life, Rabindranath is held by the Indian nation not as anti-​national, but a beacon to a nation we desire, and hold as the cherished site of an ethical public life that will not destroy homes. Nor will this nation destroy other nations. This nation will be internationalist.34

54  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation There is probably then some goodness of the nation form –​not necessarily in the way Benedict Anderson has invoked the idea.35 Nations may invoke “my country right or wrong,” but equally importantly they may also invoke the ethicality that Ghare Baire recounts for us. There is no transcendental goodness of nations. It is contingent on historically determined factors and trends. The collision of these factors and trends produce the goodness of the nation form –​albeit uncertainly, epiphenomenally, but producing in the process the myth of an eternal goodness. Recall Antonio Gramsci’s method of using the idea of immanence historically as distinct from speculatively.36

Notes 1 Rabindra Rachanabali (hereafter RR), Volume, 9 (Kolkata: Government of West Bengal, 1368 B.S.), pp. 405–​550; translated in English, The Home and the World by Surendranath Tagore, 1919 (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1985). 2 Pradip Kumar Datta (ed.), Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World: A Critical Companion (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2002) and Saswati Sengupta, Shampa Roy, and Sharmila Purkayastha (eds.), Towards Freedom –​Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire /​Home and the World. (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2007). 3 The phrase, “division and the partition of sensibilities” evidently recalls Jacques Ranciere’s famous formulation of “distribution of the sensible.” Ranciere wrote, I call the distribution (partition, partage) of the sensible the system of self-​ evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one, and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution. (Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. G. Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 12) 4 These letters appeared in Bharati between Baisakh 1286 B.S. and Sravan 1287 B.S. Some think that of the 13 letters only 4 were addressed to Kadambari. In 1881 these were published as Europe Prabasir Patra. Translated in English as Letters from a Sojourner in Europe by Manjari Chakravarty (Santiniketan: Visva Bharati, 2008); see for details the “introduction” to the Letters and Rabindranath’s letter to Charu Chandra translated and appended at the end of the book. 5 On this period marked by his visits to Selaidaha and participating in the planning of Sabujpatra, see Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Rabindrajibani, Volume 2 (reprint, Kolkata: Visva Bharati, 1383 B.S.), pp. 455–​468, 509–​549. 6 Krishna Kripalani makes this point in his Rabindranath Tagore –​A Biography (Kolkata: Visva Bharati, 1980), p. 263. 7 Sumit Sarkar gives reference to the Snehalata case (1914) –​in which the girl Snehalata burnt herself to death two weeks before her marriage, apparently because she had realised that her parents would be ruined by the excessive dowry

Home, World, and an Uncertain Nation  55 imposed on them by the groom’s family. The Snehalata case may have impacted on Tagore and made him even more sensitive to the women’s question. See Sumit Sarkar, “Ghare Baire in its Time” in Pradip Kumar Datta (ed.), Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World, pp. 143–​173. 8 RR, p. 408. 9 “Bangabibhag”, reprinted in Rathin Chakraborty (ed.), Bangabhanga Pratirodh Andolan –​Satabarsha Smarak Sangraha (Kolkata: Natyachinta, 2006), pp. 74–​75 (translation mine). 10 Cited from Sumit Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–​ 1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), p. 81 –​readers willing to know the background of the novel and the details of the Swadeshi must read this book. For Tagore’s participation in the Swadeshi movement, pp. 53–​85. 11 On the Namasudra and Muslim peasant characters in the novel, see two essays in Towards Freedom –​Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire /​Home and the World, which are crucial to understand how Rabindranath used contemporary history to set up the problem of the story: Sumanta Banerjee, “The Peasant in Ghare Baire” (pp. 137–​ 162) and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, “Understanding Panchu: Swadeshi, Ghare Baire, and the Lower Caste Peasants of Eastern Bengal” (pp. 163–​181). 12 RR, p. 420. 13 RR, p. 507. 14 Nikhilesh is wounded in the riot, we do not know if he dies. The silence in the novel as to whether Nikhilesh dies, who kills/​injures him, and who kills Amulya is significant. 15 There is of course a major dispute in the history of the interpretations of this novel. Many simply say that this is not a love triangle story. 16 Rabindranath invokes the same thought in Char Adhyay (Four Chapters) through the militant revolutionary organizer Indranath –​see RR, pp. 887–​891. 17 RR, p. 429. 18 RR, pp. 425–​426. 19 RR, pp. 424–​427 (translation mine); two things to note –​(a) in Bengali original the word is “kabi,” which is literally poet, but it means also seer. Nihar Ranjan Ray said that when Rabindranath said that he was a poet, he meant both (See, Nihar Ranjan Ray, Rabindra Sahityer Bhumika [1940]; English translation by Saswati Sengupta, Shampa Roy, and Sharmila Purkayastha and included as the introductory essay in Towards Freedom –​Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire /​Home and the World); (b) and second, it is significant that this verse does not appear in Sandip’s autobiographical sections, or even Nikhilesh’s, but in Bimala’s section. Therein we get the implication of the relation between fury and autonomy. The same idea appears in Sandip’s autobiographical section. In Sandip’s own words, The incapable tell and the weak give credence, namely, that whatever has come to me naturally as my lot is mine. The lesson of the world is, what you can take by force is truly yours… It is not my country because I am born in this country. Only that day when I shall be able to forcibly take it, it will be mine. (RR, p. 431) 20 Rabindrajibani, p. 547.

56  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation 21 RR, p. 519. 22 RR, p. 547. 23 On this see in particular what is known as his last testament, Rabindranath Tagore, Sabhayatar Sankat (Kolkata: Visva Bharati, 1348 B.S.), also published in English in the same year as The Crisis of Civilisation (Mumbai: International Book House, 1941). 24 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London: MacMillan & Co., 1917). 25 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie (1931; New York: Dover Publications, 2003), “Preface”, p. 5. 26 Krishna Kripalani notes this point while discussing the last phase of Tagore’s life in his Rabindranath Tagore –​A Biography. 27 Citation from English translation of the story, titled as “The Inscrutable Woman” in Rabindranath Tagore, Streer Patra and Other Stories –​Selections from Galpaguccha, III, trans. Ratan K. Chattopadhyay (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2010), p. 128. 28 “The Wife’s Letter” (English translation of “Streer Patra”) in Streer Patra and Other Stories –​Selections from Galpaguchcha, III p. 148. 29 Ibid., p. 160; translator’s note here –​“The English equivalent of Bindu is point; thus the Bengali translates to: here the point is infinite. An obvious epigram” –​ p. 162, n 9. 30 Ibid., p. 161. 31 RR, p. 549. 32 RR, Volume 14, pp. 536–​538; the actual words, “In his own field of creativity Rabindranath has been entirely alone and tied to no public by history. Where history was public, he was there merely as a British subject but not as Rabindranath himself.” p. 537 –​translation by Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 96. 33 Ibid., p. 538; translation by Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History, p. 99. 34 Rabindranath’s massive work on pedagogy and education, his artistic outpourings, and essays in the later phase of his life are evidence of an idea of nation that transcends into the global. 35 Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998), Chapter 17, “The Goodness of Nations”, pp. 360–​368. 36 Gramsci speaks of the “new concept of immanence”; see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (London: Elecbook, 1999), pp. 739–​740.

3 In the Time of Nations

I The time of nations discussed in this chapter is not the time of “seventy nations” –​all of mankind surrounding a country in the ancient times although split up by differences that group men into nations, all claiming Holy History.1 It is also not “the time of the breaking of nations,” which a poet recorded with horror as the First World War destroyed lives recalling in contrast the timeless presence of daily life.2 The time of nations we want to deliberate on here is the time, when nations have co-​existed with enmities and friendships, transformed millions of human lives through the greater part of the world, and have produced a generality that has succeeded transcending many of the divisions of the world (while producing some) in last one and a half century. In this period, few countries, if any, have been able to produce a form of political existence that is not national or in the long run has not been nationalised. In this respect, classic is the instance of the United States. Again, some may have tried to invent and claim that theirs was a “new nation form.” We can think of the early dreams behind the creation of the USSR. With an internationalist outlook, Lenin and other Bolshevik revolutionaries promoted patriotism as a sentiment of the toiling classes and differentiated socialist patriotism from bourgeois nationalism. They advocated the right of all nations to self-​determination and the right to unity of all workers of these nations and condemned chauvinism as the ugly expression of national pride. Lenin denounced conventional Russian nationalism as “Great Russian Chauvinism.” The Russian revolutionaries aimed to create a state structure that would transform the earlier imperial structure of Russia which was a “prison house” of nations and peoples into a multinational political structure.3 The way forward was to accommodate the country’s multiple national groups by creating distinct republics of them and other units with autonomy and protection from Russian domination. Even the leadership of the country had to have representation of these nationalities. Yet we know that Russian nationalism and Soviet patriotism overlapped, the latter could not cancel out the former. Indeed, the former increasingly defined the latter.4 DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-5

58  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation We can also recall the regional awakenings (such as Arab nationalism) that helped nations within that region to grow on a strong regional template.5 But they were all in the time of nations that still continues. And of course there have been nations which had been colonial powers and inhered their imperial pasts in their nation form. The simultaneous existence of nations in the same global time makes us sit up and wonder, what is this time when the nation form has proved essential against domination while the same nation in imperial mode has facilitated the said domination? What is left for the impoverished peoples in face of global neoliberal domination today other than to take respective “national” paths of resistance and reconstruction of respective societies? Our idea of alternatives must include the possibility of an alternative growing from within the existing form –​in this case the nation form. We owe to Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson, simply known as Benedict Anderson, for the awareness that it is the time of nations.

II Benedict Anderson’s fame as the theorist of nationalism rests solidly and safely with an original analysis of nationalism in his book first published in 1983, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.6 His thesis, namely that nationalism is largely a modern concept rooted in language and literacy, modes of public communication, and modern ways of archiving the past, was hotly debated but admired. His erudition, flair, wit, and breath taking generalizations were based on his knowledge of Southeast Asian languages besides major European ones, which gave him rare insights into Indonesian, Thai, and Philippines’ political culture and history. He read history creatively, against the grain, by mobilizing every ounce of intellectual courage and energy to look at politics in new and critical ways. Possibly his extraordinary command over languages, vast travels, and a graceful writing style and a scholarship that never sat heavily on him enabled him to produce compelling ideas on the time of nations, such as “imagined communities,” “long distance nationalism,” “political astronomy,” “spectre of comparisons,” “hard to imagine” (in studies of imagination), “print capitalism,” and “political time,” and transcend challenges to those ideas. He enabled us to move onto a different sphere of thinking and conceptual exercise. Ideas like the ones mentioned above lead us beyond the banal task of deciding whether they are right or wrong. We begin to ask, why do these ideas capture our minds? And, if they are engrossing not because they are right or wrong, then we must ask, because of what? What lends force to the sweep of his formulations? How do these ideas encourage us to think of our present history in alternative ways? While writing seminal studies on language and politics of the large, dispersed, staggeringly diverse, and often troubled nation known as Indonesia, he moved towards a fascinating coverage of entire Southeast Asia. Through

In the Time of Nations  59 his engagement with other nations in that region and with his universalist flair, he broke new grounds in comparative exercise. Yet it was not traditional comparison based on structural or structural-​functionalist assumptions. Not how you compare, but what makes things comparable? What makes a phenomenon universal –​in other words what kind of concrete studies lead to knowledge of connectedness? Take his most influential work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Puzzled by the rise of nationalisms across the world, he sought to first explain what a nation was and then to trace the rise of different nationalisms. He did not resort to banal comparisons. Rather, following the method of abstract and conceptual exercise, he argued that the nation was an imagined political community. He wrote in the opening pages of Imagined Communities, In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community –​and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign… It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-​members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion… The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind… It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-​ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm…. Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings…7 The emergence of nation as a product of print capitalism, which produced publications in various vernacular languages allowing for a sameness and diffusion of ideas linked to the nation, proved enduring. Nations are more than simple by-​products of different identities. In this way, Benedict Anderson studied several histories of nations and nationalisms without ever falling into a comparativist’s trap. Why? One of the reasons is that he could combine particular histories with “global studies” that rested on certain general principles and categories –​in this case, time, language, and power. Probably for him, the most important of these was the category of time, though critics and readers hold that language (and therefore print capitalism) was the most important analytic element. In his works, the method of generalization depended on a delicate combination of two considerations: time and particular developments he specified, concretised, compared, generalised.

60  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation Speaking of method, language was one of his tools with which he ventured into concrete studies of language and nationalism. Yet precisely because the idea and the concept of language was a concrete universal, he could escape banal comparisons while actually engaging in comparing and juxtaposing different experiences. In this sense, he had already anticipated the idea of assemblage, which would animate global studies two decades later. He repeatedly commented while working on the Philippines that there was a need to see the Philippines in world historical terms. If asked, why the Philippines, he would have replied, why not? The Philippines, a country in the “outer periphery,” was interesting in its own right. This he sought to establish by returning to the 1890s and the global history of that time. In some ways, his initiative to put the Philippines on the world intellectual map mirrored that of his hero Jose Rizal. As one Filipino scholar, Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr., commented, while many in the Philippines saw José Rizal’s execution in ordinary ways, (Benedict Anderson in Under Three Flags8) completely recast it as more than simply a Philippine event. Five months after Rizal’s execution on 30 December 1896, the Italy-​born Michele Angiolillo attended a huge demonstration in London’s Trafalgar Square, where he heard a call to avenge the death of Rizal and other victims of the regime of Spain’s Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo. On August 8, 1897, Angiolillo assassinated Cánovas, which led to the fall of “cacique democracy” in Spain and of Valeriano Weyler’s brutal governorship in Cuba. In making these connections, Benedict Anderson made us realize that, even without digital communication technologies, Rizal’s execution was world news and had global ramifications.9 To reinforce his arguments of Creole nationalism and the larger question of anti-​colonial nationalism operating in the same time-​space, Anderson returned to Rizal –​his novels –​and wrote a small book, Why Counting Counts: A Study of Forms of Consciousness and Problems of Language in Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo (In English respectively, “cease from holding on to me” and “the reign of greed”).10 A technical study, this was significant in terms of his theorisation of the time of the nations that impacted the language question in the making of a national consciousness. He wrote, Still, it is well worth thinking about the implications of an El Filibusterismo composed in French. In 1891, probably only few hundred of’ Rizal’s compatriots would have been able to read it. On the other hand, we should also recognize that no nationalism exists by itself; each always desires recognition by the collectivity of other nations. Since all nationalists want to tell the rest of the world about themselves, the idea of a French Fili simply shows the permanent cosmopolitan side of any nationalism.11

In the Time of Nations  61 And, then he closed his analysis with these words, In all these cases, the Philippines, Spanish America, and Indonesia, we can thus see the structural reasons for the historical progression from an early cultural and emotional identification with place (Rizal’s patria adorada ) –​initially a familiar hometown or region, later, in Europe, with the extension of the metropole’s geography of contempt, a ‘home-​ country’ –​towards a solidarity between persons from within the abstract, mapped space of the colony. This is the progression from local patriotism to modern nationalism, from geographical sentiment to political program. I believe we can take the Noli me tangere of 1887 as a milestone on this highway for the Philippines. It is an enormously powerful evocation of an abused patria and pueblo (words in which geography still reverberates more insistently than anthropology). The anthropological-​ political nacion is there only in sparse and scattered places, while the fully political nacionalismo is still absent. But one feels, as one reads, that it is waiting, just over the novel’s horizon.12 Anderson’s method is noteworthy. He examined Jose Rizal’s great novels with a quantitative analysis of the scope and evolution of their political and social vocabulary and gave special attention to the characters (including the narrator), who were using specific terms and languages and to their respective frequency. In this way, he sought to throw new light on Rizal’s evolving political consciousness as reflected in Rizal’s changing deployment of language and words. The important questions concerned the shifting nature of Rizal’s intended readership, the geographical location of the birth of a Filipino identity in the modern sense, the odd concealment of the Chinese mestizos combined with a growing hostility to the Chinese as an alien race, and the complex relation between the colonial-​international aspects of Spanish and the ethnic-​nationalist claims of Tagalog, and the emergence of a democratic cross-​class lingua franca, especially in Manila. A reviewer drew the following lessons from Why Counting Counts: We need to do our reading; think global; see the world with a different lens and go against the grain and ask odd, difficult questions; keep on reading; do not stop; embrace multiplicity; reread; and then do the dirty work by raising odd questions, and so read language closely; be a demonio as Anderson was when he counted words with a perspicacity that found demonic comparisons between Rizal’s two novels; and one last lesson, the most important, namely, we must exercise empathy. Empathy, as he taught, is a hugely underrated cognitive skill.13 In a delicate essay, “Hard to Imagine,” he went back to the question of the method of knowing the early nationalism of our time and offered a complicated answered on the basis of his study of the translation in English of the novel Rizal had written, Noli Me Tangere (1887).14 He showed how the English translation of Rizal’s novel on the occasion of his birth centenary in 1961 had replaced the original flair of the anti-​colonial ideas, style, and

62  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation mode of expression of early nationalists with a standard product that would be acceptable to Anglo-​American readership. He discussed the dynamics of translation to make a larger observation, which consisted in this case of the following points: de-​modernisation (as if the early nationalists had to be non-​ modern), exclusion of the reader (as if the question of local readers which Rizal had in mind had to be excluded from consideration when translating), exclusion of the local language (in this case Tagalog), bowdlerisation (in this case expurgation of certain passages of the original novel), de-​localisation (taking out the local context, geography, etc.), de-​ Europeanization (no Europe for the classic orient), and getting rid of anachronisms (to make the orient unproblematic). Anderson concluded the essay by commenting on the passage of the political time, indeed what made a political time, by situating early anti-​ colonialism –​complex, anachronistic, paradoxical, in contrast with the official, elite ideology of a legitimating nationalism with the arrival of the nation state in the Philippines. Anderson said: the early anti-​colonial nationalists appeared to the “post-​independence establishment with its precarious, domestic, and international prestige” as both amigo (friend, familiar, one of us) and enimigo (enigmatic), Rizal as the “general guarantor of the truth of Philippine nationalism –​in a certain sense even as its alibi… but also upsetting if not subversive.”15 He candidly stated that even this lesson in terms of the metamorphosis of the political time was not convincing enough if we did not go into the details of American occupation and its strategies, and the inter-​war years when the Japanese turned the Philippines into ruins. The local was dug deeper and deeper with all its connections. Was it then a specific idea of time that allowed Benedict Anderson a distinct way to think of connections, imagine alternative scenarios, and make comparisons? What was the idea when he was comparing the two times of nationalism (early nationalism and the moment of arrival of a successful nationalism in the form of nation state) to make a general point, namely that we cannot avoid the path of the nation form but must be aware of the tragic denouement this path leads to and thus take corrective or anticipatory measures? Probably he would have said that we have to live with this dialectic and cope with it with a sort of daily plebiscite. Perhaps, the lesson is that only by playing with time one can compare, else comparison is meaningless. Was he then at the end only a qualified follower of a theory of relativity for as he said in the introduction to Under Three Flags that the influence of anarchism over anti-​colonial nationalism was due to the gravitational force of anarchism between militant nationalisms on opposite sides of the planet? In that book, recall, Anderson had asked us to consider his book as “a black-​and-​white film or a novel manqué,”16 which would tell the readers a curious history of anti-​colonial resistance in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, to argue that Rizal’s life and works demonstrated the globalisation of anti-​ colonial movements. Ease of transport and communication meant Filipinos could draw inspiration from revolutionaries of Cuba on the other side of the

In the Time of Nations  63 world. Anti-​colonial revolutionaries met and conspired in Europe, the glue being the anarchist thought, before returning home to sagas of tragedies and triumphs. Anderson said that tracing the journey of early nationalism across three continents was as an experiment in political astronomy. Nations are like stars seemingly stationary in a “hot and humid sky,” but we know that they are continuously pulling towards each other, “in perpetual frantic motion, impelled hither and yon by the invisible power of the gravitational fields of which they were active ineluctable parts.” The gravitational pull of nations made the global time that Anderson was discussing. Under Three Flags takes us along the uncertain flight paths of anti-​colonial imagination from the Philippines in South China Sea to the Caribbean and to pre-​World War imperial Europe that included the Catalan anarchists. Anderson went on to explain, (Anarchism was) just as hostile to imperialism, it had no theoretical prejudices against ‘small’ and ‘ahistorical’ nationalisms, including those in the colonial world. Anarchists were also quicker to capitalise on the vast transoceanic migrations of the era. Malatesta spent four years in Buenos Aires… Mayday celebrates the memory of immigrant anarchists –​not Marxists –​executed in the United States in 1886… The near simultaneity of the last nationalist insurrection in the New World (Cuba, 1895) and the first in Asia (the Philippines, 1896) was no serendipity. Natives of the last important remnants of the fabled Spanish global empire, Cubans (as well as Puerto Ricans and Dominicans) and Filpinos did not merely read about each other, but had crucial personal connections, and up to a point, coordinated their actions –​the first time in world history that such transglobal coordination became possible. Both were eventually crushed, within a few years of each other, by the same brutish would be world hegemon. But the coordination did not take place directly between the broken hill-​country of Oriente and Cavite, but was mediated through ‘representatives’ above all in Paris and secondarily in Hong Kong, London, and New York. Newspaper-​reading Chinese nationalists eagerly followed events in Cuba and the Philippines… Filipnos also studied –​to learn how to ‘do’ revolution, anti-​colonialism, and anti-​imperialism… Such is the general proscenium on which the main actors in this book (that is militant anarchist anti-​colonialists) played their various nomadic parts. One could put this point more vividly, perhaps by saying that the reader will encounter Italians in Argentina, New Jersey, France, and the Basque homeland; Puerto Ricans and Cubans in Haiti, the United States, France, and the Philippines; Spaniards in Cuba, France, Belgium, and the Philippines; Russians in Paris; Filipinos in Belgium; Japanese in Mexico, san Francisco, and Manila; Germans in London and Oceania; Chinese in the Philippines and Japan; Frenchmen in Argentina, Spain, and Ethiopia, and so on.17

64  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation Anderson’s method some would say was a blend of Eisenstein’s montage and the thrilling uncertainties of an unfolding novel that revels in cliff-​ hangers. How should one explain the “near-​simultaneity” of the events he was narrating? It was a time of globalisation with its new technology, such as the invention of the telegram, widening postal systems, and railway networks that drew the ends of the earth closer, thus making a wide range of events, conditions, and consequences from scientific discoveries, movement of capital and profit, military conquests, annexations, colonisation, and defeats possible. This was we may say a time of conjuncture. Time flattens out to make things simultaneous, yet time is relative to make comparison possible. That is why perhaps even after studying for a life time three countries –​Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines –​he never compared them in a banal way. In Under Three Flags, Anderson alluded to numerous comparisons between the life and the works of Jose Rizal and Jose Martí (the Cuban nationalist revolutionary), yet never seriously discussed the comparison in any detail, for instance stating only, “the comparison with Martí is illuminating.”18 Perhaps Anderson knew that comparison had limits, and the global interconnections of the anti-​colonial thinkers and forces he was describing in the book had structural constraints.19 Part of the constraints had to do with the late nineteenth-​century imperial universe (in this case Spanish) that placed structural limits on those connections. One reviewer therefore has remarked “the links in Anderson’s global chain often seem in danger of coming apart.”20 Anderson’s method was explicit in his address, “Western Nationalism and Eastern Nationalism: Is there a Difference that Matters?”21 Expectedly he argued that there was no substantive difference between the two except the claims made on crass racist lines, and the more a nation could go back in the past the greater was its legitimacy. Interesting in this address was the way he built up his arguments pertinent to comparison and generalisation. Comparison was not for contrasting but for generalising. The scale was time and time-​bound places. He commented, In Imagined Communities, I tried to illuminate the nature of this change by comparing it to the difficulties we face when we are shown photographs of ourselves taken as babies. These are difficulties which only industrial memory, in the shape of photographs, produces. Our parents assure us that these babies are us, but we ourselves have no memory of being photographed, cannot imagine what it was like to be ourselves as one year old, and would not recognize ourselves without our parents’ assistance. What has happened in effect is that though there are countless traces of the past around us —​monuments, temples, written records, tombs, artefacts, and so on —​this past is increasingly inaccessible, external to us. At the same time, for all kinds of reasons, we feel we need it, if only as some sort of anchor. But this means that our relationship to the past is today far more political, ideological, contested, fragmentary, and even opportunistic than in ages gone by.22

In the Time of Nations  65 The double take was in this way Anderson’s classic technique. He was pointing out the apparatuses which produce our identity as historical event. The process necessarily involves comparison. Alternatives, changes, and the like are exercises in comparison, which are historical acts. It also means, when we are looking at an object with familiar eyes, we are actually seeing it from afar, in some cases from the eyes of a distant culture –​this is the spectre of comparisons. We then realize after looking at the familiar object just how strange and constructed it is. It is a process of estrangement, the world made strange. Thus, the census, the newspaper, national flag, map, the act of voting, the idea of minorities –​these are the apparatuses that make familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar a familiar part of our life. Of course he could have shown the simultaneous existence of contrasts in the same time-​space. The answer would be that in the map of Western and Eastern nationalisms the categories of nationalism –​Creole nationalism, official nationalism, linguistic nationalism, etc. –​can co-​exist as elements of an assemblage. It is assemblage, it does not permit contrast. In a sense, this was then the way in which Benedict Anderson rose to the implicit challenge of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). One need not dichotomise the West and the East to demonstrate the inadequacy of a Euro-​centric world view and the Euro-​centric dynamics of knowing the “other” but take the “other,” the East, seriously and investigate it in terms of the modular features so as to understand it and the world it features. Anderson not only avoided dichotomy but also showed how within a global regime of power anti-​colonial and anti-​feudal nationalisms were making their presence felt. Yet it is noticeable that he never made the distinction between imperial nationalism and anti-​colonial nationalism and/​or postcolonial nationalism the subject of his study. From this point of view, one may say that his complaint against Marxism, namely that it had not investigated nationalism seriously, was misplaced for two reasons: First, Marxists were more concerned with imperialism and colonialism than nationalism, and second, Marxists made distinctions between various forms of nationalisms on the yardstick of the interests of the working people. Marxists therefore focused on the nation form and not nationalism per se, because the latter investigation was bound to reach a dead end. Nation form discusses power, nationalism discusses ideology.

III But let us go back to the question of time with which he made sense of the co-​existence of the nation form and the global. Time was the great plank on which Benedict Anderson demonstrated his command of world history, juggled his cases (the above mentioned lecture, “Western Nationalism and Eastern Nationalism: Is there a Difference that Matters?” referred to forty-​ eight nationalisms in a space of eleven pages of New Left Review), and bewildered us.

66  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation His understanding of nationalism rested on Walter Benjamin’s notion of “homogenous empty time.” In his thesis “On the Concept of History” (1940), Walter Benjamin had introduced the concept of homogenous empty time to indicate the phenomenon of historicism, particularly historicist positivism, which universalized and flattened the idea of progress, and expelled every inconsistency out of it. Benjamin opposed this kind of historical sense with a historical materialist sense, which allowed for breaks, and moved for zero hours in history. In his words, “History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-​and-​now.” Benjamin wrote, historicism justifiably culminates in universal history.23 What makes time in the bourgeois epoch homogenous? Evidently, through the ideology of capitalism and bourgeois modernity and progress, but more importantly this becomes possible with machines and the mechanical reproduction of forms and images that create and allow universality. Anderson carried this insight to explain the simultaneity of nationalisms (and by inference nation forms) in different parts of the world. Time became secular in the sense it had displaced (not replaced) religion and transcendence presupposed by religion. The imagined community is made possible through this secular mode of thought, which makes the imagination of time as homogeneous and empty. It is homogeneous because it is not affected by particular events and imagined as one by all of its subjects. It is empty because any number of events can be put inside it (by logic, any number of discrepant events can be also taken out of it so that it remains empty). Yet the fact is that nationalist and anti-​colonial revolutions did not occur in empty or homogenous time. As Benjamin noted, transformations in history occur in moments of immediacy, blasting particular moments out of the linear sequence. Anti-​colonial revolutions that gave birth to the nation form or facilitated its spread were heterogeneous in many ways but made time as one of nations. To be fair to Anderson, he never argued for linearity, but for simultaneity. Yet he knew the problem at stake, namely how to account for heterogeneity while explaining simultaneity? The Spectre of Comparisons is an attempt to come to terms with the riddle. In a path breaking essay, “Radicalism after Communism,” he surveyed the divergent trajectories of communist movements in Thailand and Indonesia, the varying impact of the respective economic and social history of these two countries on their communist movements in 1950s–​70s, with the same destiny if you like –​communist movements destroyed and succeeded by radical thoughts.24 Anderson locates the moments of confirmed defeats of the movements, the elements making up those moments. The movement and its defeat he says are the “modern past” of the nations which must be closely examined.25 For him, thus the challenge was perpetual, with all these particular histories how can we say that time is homogenous? How are we to account then for global-​local relations? The symmetry between identical time and nationalism strikes artificial and contrived after a point. Perhaps we have misunderstood Walter Benjamin

In the Time of Nations  67 when we say that nations are parallel communities in homogenous empty time. On the other hand, asymmetries in global time were results of colonial practices –​greatly calibrated, so that hierarchical self-​assertion was the norm of many nations (European and Asian both) in place of horizontal comradeship. Thus in many cases, there was a foundational link between nation and race with one mediating the other.26 Likewise a foundational link between nation and religion is also a fact of modern history. Perhaps then we need to pay closer attention to Benjamin and focus more on anti-​colonial revolutions than on nationalism per se. After all, Walter Benjamin was saying that the pretence of time is homogenous and empty, whereas time is laid bare by revolutions, dramatic ruptures, by/​at zero hours. Therefore, we need to stress almost to an indeterminate extent the subjectivity of the nation, its strength and weaknesses, and its desperate existence in our age of rampant capitalism virulent in neoliberal form. Impoverished nation form? Perhaps yes, as impoverished as its people, but almost everywhere the nation form remains an important weapon of the weak. It is a remarkable fact of our time that weak nations have repeatedly tried to create a non-​racist world of nations as in 1950–​60s, the efforts of which left their imprint on the Asian-​ African Conference in Bandung (1955),27 the All African People’s Conference in Accra (1958 followed by the second conference in Tunis, 1960; and the third at Cairo, 1961),28 and Tricontinental Conference of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in Havana (1966) in which about 500 delegates from 82 countries participated.29 Nations knew their weaknesses and strove for alternatives. The paradox of vitality and atrophy –​looking ahead while internally the spirit of an egalitarian solidarity is drying out –​has marked the life of the nation form. Benedict Anderson struggled to balance his mode of working on interconnections and simultaneity to explain a “global” phenomenon with a renewed focus on particular events, phenomena and their metamorphosis. Though, this never solved the paradox. Indeed, the paradox is in life, which the politics of the future will have to live with, unless such politics wishes its own death by reducing its own existence to a margin. The acknowledgement of the paradox made Anderson’s method even more subtle and complex. For instance, in The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand, his description of the development and persistence of the wat (a Buddhist sacred precinct with quarters for monks, a temple, an edifice housing a large image of Buddha, and a structure for lessons) reflected not only the living legend of rural struggle but also challenged us to reconsider what we understand today as Thailand’s rurality –​in author’s words, “investigating this rural hell within its local and wider contexts.”30 Monkhood, schooling, travelling, the exploitation of rural cheap labour, and the engaging of oneself with capitalists and big people in politics as reflected in the course of an abbot’s life were all rural strategies of aspiring to be part of modern bourgeois Thailand. Once again we have in this slim volume the juxtaposition of multiple powers in one place. In fact, modern rural community becomes a productive space where villagers through the political economy of folk art

68  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation production engage with the state, capitalists, NGOs, local powers, tourists, politicians, monks, and even supernatural entities, to produce rural Thailand. The temple, like the rural community, becomes a reflection of the unclear distinction between the co-​existing local, national, and international features. There is no glorification of pre-​bourgeois past, but a remorseless investigation into what constitutes connectedness in late capitalist age and the meaning of desire and asceticism in our time. What then is the central question in making time in place of structure the most crucial aspect of studying the nation form? Anderson drew from Benjamin’s injunctions and then went on his own way –​specifically to understand the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth-​century world, the phenomenon of simultaneity. Yet, as he looked deep into the nationalist abyss of the developing world heterogeneity struck him as an equally compelling phenomenon. In this way he unearthed several aspects of the colonial and postcolonial nation form. Take for instance his work on Thailand, Exploration and Irony in Studies of Siam over Forty Years.31 It deals with the politics of Thailand. Originally written as essays from late 1970s to the early 1990s, Anderson undertook a path breaking study of the state of Thai studies, and more importantly the nature of the October Coup (1976), radicalism and communism in Thailand, and murders and progress. In “Withdrawal Symptoms: Social and Cultural Aspects of the October 6 Coup,” he wrote, The consequences of October 6 point therefore in two different but related directions. On the one hand, the coup has obviously accelerated the secular demystification of Thai politics. Direct and open attacks on the monarchy loom imminently. Sizeable groups, both liberal and radical, have come to understand that they have no place in the Bangkok order, and so, in unprecedented numbers, have left for exile or the maquis (dense shrub lands; rural guerrilla bands moving in dense shrub lands –​note by RS). On the other hand, the political conceptions and symbols of the once hegemonic right have become self-​conscious slogans with an increasingly specific social constituency. In the 1950s and1960s, it was possible for many Thai conservatives to view the Thai Left quite sincerely as a kind of alien minority (“really” Vietnamese, Chinese, or whatever), and the anti-​communist struggle as a loftily national crusade. Today, such ideas have become less and less plausible even to the right. The events of October 6 have served to speed up the process whereby the right gradually concedes, almost without being aware of it, that it is engaged in civil war. In the long run, this change is likely to prove decisive, for modern history shows very clearly that with the exception of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, no revolutionary movement succeeds unless it has won or been conceded the nationalist accolade.32 Written in the wake of the American defeat in Vietnam and political unrest in the neighbouring country of Thailand, Anderson explored nation’s destiny

In the Time of Nations  69 in the global South as no one else had done before him. It is clear therefore that he knew what particularity meant and that no country was like the next one, or that particularity meant particular forms, and thus transform. Therefore, the question perhaps is not aroundr heterogeneity versus homogeneity, but simultaneity that lent the image of the homogenous. Homogeneity was being invoked only to describe simultaneity. The question to be asked then is: How does one explain the mutation of form, in this case the change of the nation form? How does one situate time with the form? The main challenge is coming to terms with the dynamics of the nation form within a history of simultaneous existences. Thus, we may ask for instance: Why did the Cuban anti-​ colonial revolution take the socialist path while in India it did not? Why did the early nationalist dream of say Rizal end with Marcos’ dictatorship? In the 1991 revised edition of the Imagined Communities, Anderson noted that what while changing perceptions of time was being regarded as a significantly new contribution to thinking about nationalism, it lacked its necessary coordinate: changing perceptions of space. He added therefore discussion on maps, etc. Yet inadequate attention to the dynamics in the relation between time and space remained a critical lack. Therefore, he began to discuss the relation of time, space, and virtual community formation in the Internet or through other new technologies.33 A combination of deeply local studies –​in his case of Southeast Asia –​and global observations and conclusions aimed at addressing two of the cotemporary great questions on the fate of the nations, and he struggled with them till his death. Both are relevant to understand the time of nations. a The first is a political problem concerning the conduct of the nations in the post -​ Second World War era with several nations becoming nation states on attaining independence. The nation question instead of being resolved seems to have flared up again. In the decades following the Second World War, the communists talked of national revolution, national democracy, new democracy, and the perspective of a new path for independent nations to escape dependence, backwardness, stagnation, neo-​colonial control, and take a steady route to self-​reliance and development with international socialist help. The dependency theorists talked of neo-​colonialism and core-​periphery structure of the world in which these nations are bound. The Western liberal and behavioural commentators strategized how these nations could be incorporated in the capitalist world. In the late 1960s, if the economist Gunnar Myrdal spoke of Asian Drama, the communists replied with Asian Dilemma.34 In this context, Benedict Anderson’s dramatic intervention arguing for the salience of the nation form has left a lasting impact on our thinking. b The second is a philosophical problem of time and subjectivity. Perhaps, in the worldwide militant anti-​imperialist years, particularly in Southeast Asia, growing up as a scholar influenced his idea of time. If it is true, we must then investigate the fundamental question of the specificity of the

70  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation time that makes our thinking of simultaneity philosophically possible. But this poses a problem. If his deep involvement in Southeast Asian studies led Anderson to think of the spread of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it must have also made him realise the emptiness of the nations in face of globalisation, worldwide corporate control of the MNCs, and the spiritual corruption and poverty of the same nations that had everywhere originated with figures like Rizal. Increasingly the nation has been dissociated from the popular. Thus, if Sukarno could be replaced by Suharto or Rizal in less than a century by Marcos (or as Anderson narrated the symptoms of withdrawal of existing forces including US forces from Vietnam in Thailand and a zero situation from which sprang right wing forces of military coup), how does one explain the homogeneity of time? How can the subject –​the nation –​look at itself as the object, a possibility and impossibility both? How can the nation then self-​reflect, that is to say reflect on its own changing conditions, when it exists only as a reproduction of certain mechanical forms, and thus always a copy, a shadow, an illusion, a religion, or existing in emptiness? In other words, the problematic of imagination is linked to that of time. The capacity or the lack of self-​reflection enriches or impoverishes our power of imagination. We may wonder at the existence of fellow members of communities distant in space. But we still withdraw when we consider how images and imagination shape face-​to-​face interactions, cheek and jowl, so to say, of communities. Thus simultaneous existences never imply peaceful co-​existence. Nationalist imagination may mean almost by an ineluctable logic one of warring nations. Such imagination also at times turns a world comprising discrete, disconnected territories into one comprising people brought together through the shared space of empires, hence contingent on space. Time is here determined by the particularity of space. In short, the mode of loosely joining episodes and phenomena in a historically comparativist frame gives us insight into why a phenomenon becomes lasting –​in this case, how the nation form emerged and how it spread across the world. Thus, nations are “imagined communities”; but do not forget, real in their fictiveness. Nation takes the congealed form of a community at a particular historical moment, through mechanisms of real life, such as “print capitalism.” This new worldview –​nation looking at itself through looking at the world and looking at the world through looking at itself –​morphs and adapts to multiple new contexts. It is not enough to say that the imagining of community is a real act; we have to note at the same time that it is a reformulation of space and time relations. Like Marx said, the capitalist is nothing but the bearer of something called capital (a relation), nations are abstract bearers of repeated forms of an imagination. The narrative of the nation is one of a historical process, described –​in lieu of being analysed –​in the striking conceptual formulations he offered. Nations, he could have said echoing Marx

In the Time of Nations  71 changing his words a little: time is everything, nation is nothing; nation is at most a carcass of time.35 Yet, the closure Anderson faced and struggled with cannot erase the continuing salience of the nation form. It is a form that has evolved and is still evolving with all its contradictory possibilities. We cannot run away from the paradox. Amidst the gathering storm of neoliberalism over the poorer nations and in these days of cruelty, massacres, wars, and plunders, it is easy to say that nations are failing. It is difficult to understand how they are coping with changing time.36 Empathy and a sense of connectedness can go a long way in making us resilient. Are we all not Andersonians in some sense and on certain occasions?

IV Today, the global connectedness of nations raises three questions with respect to the continuing relevance of the nation form: a Incessant refugee and migration flows particularly in the neoliberal time have created massive marginal populations –​marginal to the countries they leave, the countries they enter and seek shelter and means of leading lives. The global phenomenon of immigrant labour puts a big question mark around the by now naturalised reality of the nation form. Indeed, the nationalist history of our time has had always as companion the shadowy history of migrant labour.37 b Nations have produced citizenship, and citizenship has in turn produced statelessness.38 c Finally, the space of the nation form is heterogeneous not only socially, but also in a more fundamental sense, that is territorially. Data economy is producing new circuits. Infrastructure is remaking the national space, as if the logistical world of infrastructure, software, and labour is subsuming the nation form. Zones and corridors are cutting apart the national space and re-​joining it in newer configurations.39 Zoning practices if only have increased in the Covid-​19 time. Nationalist imagination is hollowed out in face of these three realities. Everywhere the effort is on: Is it possible to delink from the state the nation form so that the imagination of a nation will not be submerged in the reality of state? Can the idea of the nation exceed the current form of the nation? To repeat, it is a paradox, which nations will have to endure. In many corners of the world, the life practices of immigrant groups of labouring populations resemble a borderland existence –​almost a non-​national one. Their search for security and protection is incessant. Their experiences tell us of a possibility where nations may be moving. These experiences also help us understand various trajectories of national political and economic developments.40

72  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation Utopia and dystopia are never completely separated. Their overlapping existences tell us of the contours of the search for alternatives to our time.

Notes 1 Emmanuel Levinas, In the Time of the Nations, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: The Athlone Press, 1994). 2 Thomas Hardy, “In ‘Time of the Breaking of Nations’ ” (1915–​16) in Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems (London: Palgrave, 2001) –​www.poetr​yfou​ndat​ion. org/​poems/​57320/​in-​time-​of-​break​ing-​of-​nati​ons (accessed on 27 June 2022). 3 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-​Determination” (1915) in Lenin Collected Works, Volume 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), pp. 407–​414; also Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-​ Determination, 1914, in Lenin Collected Works, Volume 20 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), pp. 393–​454. 4 David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–​1956 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2002). 5 See for instance, Ranabir Samaddar, Whose Asia is it Anyway? Region and the Nation in South Asia (Kolkata: Pearl Publishers and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, 1996). 6 Benedict R. O’G. Anderson (hereafter Benedict Anderson), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised and extended edition (London: Verso, 1991). 7 Ibid., pp. 5–​7. 8 Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and Anti-​Colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005). 9 Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr., “Benedict Anderson and the Philippines’ Place in the World”, Rappler, 19 December 2015–​www.rapp​ler.com/​thou​ght-​lead​ers/​116​448-​ bened​ict-​ander​son-​phil​ippi​nes-​place-​world (accessed on 29 December 2021). 10 Benedict Anderson, Why Counting Counts: A Study of Forms of Consciousness and Problems of Language in Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009). 11 Ibid., p. 29. 12 Ibid., p. 37. 13 Gina Apostol, “Why Benedict Anderson Counts: Lessons on Writing, Culture, and José Rizal”, Los Angeles Review of Books, 4 March 2014–​https://​lare​view​ ofbo​oks.org/​arti​cle/​bened​ict-​ander​son-​cou​nts-​less​ons-​writ​ing-​cult​ure-​jose-​rizal/​ (accessed on 12 June 2022); the writer of this book is not competent to comment on the technical aspect of the book. 14 Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998), Chapter 11, pp. 235–​262. 15 Ibid., p. 252. 16 A novel that may disappoint readers with its unproductive consequences, therefore a deformed text that violates an unwritten contract with the readers; manqué refers to a person who has failed to live up to a specific expectation or ambition. 17 Under Three Flags, pp. 1–​4. 18 Under Three Flags, p. 131.

In the Time of Nations  73 19 On this, Koichi Hagimoto, “Between the Empires: Marti, Rizal, and the Limits of Global Resistance”, Ph. D thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2010–​http://​d-​scho​ lars​hip.pitt.edu/​6678/​1/​Hagimo​to_​e​td_​2​010.pdf (accessed on 15 December 2015); Hagimoto notes the limits of simultaneity and points out, Situating themselves in the same city (New York) Marti and Rizal never meet each other in person. Only their patriotic and ante-​imperial ideas traverse and interact in a peculiar way, connecting the Caribbean and Asia in the late nineteenth century metropolitan city, which would soon become the hub of a modern US empire. (pp. 146–​147) 20 Sunil S. Amrith, “Gazing at the Stars”, review of Benedict Anderson’s “Under Three Flags: Anarchism and Anti-​ Colonial Imagination”, History Workshop Journal, Volume 66, 2008,pp. 227–​236, p. 230. 21 Benedict Anderson, “Western Nationalism and Eastern Nationalism: Is there a Difference that Matters?”, New Left Review, Volume 9, May–​June 2001, pp. 31–​42. 22 Ibid., p. 38. 23 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), Sections 14 and 17–​ www.marxi​sts.org/​refere​nce/​arch​ive/​benja​min/​1940/​hist​ory.htm (accessed on 28 December 2021). 24 Spectre of Comparisons, Chapter 13, “Radicalism after Communism”, pp. 285–​298. 25 Ibid., p. 298. 26 Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991),Chapter 3, pp. 37–​68. 27 The core principles of the Bandung Conference were political self-​determination, mutual respect for sovereignty, non-​aggression, non-​interference in internal affairs, and equality. Countries emerging from colonial rule sponsored and participated in the Bandung Conference. The conference built upon the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, worked out in negotiations between India and China in 1954, and declared building solidarity among recently independent nations as its aim. 28 The Accra Conference denounced the policy of racial discrimination by colonialist and race-​conscious minorities in South and East and Central Africa and demanded the abolition of racial domination in South Africa, it proclaimed among others the absolute necessity of coordinating and uniting the forces of all the Africans, and equality of rights for all the citizens of the free countries of Africa and the close association of the peoples of all African nations to build up a free and prosperous Africa. 29 The Havana Conference deliberated on racial discrimination both within the United States and in developing nations, civil rights movements, and models of economic development. The Tricontinental Conference re-​imagined a world that would be characterised by cooperation and solidarity across the emerging nations of the South. 30 Benedict Anderson, The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand (Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2012), p. 11. 31 Benedict Anderson, Exploration and Irony in Studies of Siam over Forty Years (Ithaca: Cornell University South East Asia Program Publications, 2014).

74  Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation 32 Benedict Anderson, “Withdrawal Symptoms”, first published in Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Volume 9 (3),July–​September 1977, pp. 13–​30, p. 24; also republished in The Spectre of Comparisons, Chapter 7 (pp. 139–​173), p. 173. 33 For instance, “A Talk with Benedict Anderson: When the Virtual Becomes Real” –​originally appeared in NIRA Review (National Institute of Research Advancement), Spring 1996–​ www.nett​ime.org/​Lists-​Archi​ves/​nett​ime-​l-​9711/​ msg00​019.html (accessed on 20 June 2022); see also, Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons, Chapter 3, “Long Distance Nationalism”, pp. 58–​76. 34 Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Enquiry into the Poverty of Nations (London: Allen Lane Penguin, 1968); R.A. Ulianovskii, Asian Dilemma: A Soviet View and Myrdal’s Concept (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973). 35 Marx’s actual words, “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most the carcass of time” –​Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955), p. 22. 36 The venerable newspaper The Washington Post carried a brief on how nations of Latin America are one after another (Colombia, Peru, and again possibly Brazil) taking a “new” left path –​distinct from one taken by the Left of earlier decades (in Cuba, Venezuela, and Brazil), and noted the remarkable similarity of nations’ behaviour in the present conundrum. –​Samantha Schmidt, “As Latin America Embraces a New Left, the U.S. could take a Back Seat”, The Washington Post, 20 June 2022 –​ www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/​world/​2022/​06/​20/​petro-​latin-​amer​ ica-​left/​?utm_​c​ampa​ign=​wp_​po​st_​m​ost&utm​_​med​ium=​email&utm​_​sou​rce=​ new​slet​ter&wpi​src=​nl_​m​ost&carta-​url=​https%3A%2F%2Fs2.was​hing​tonp​ost. com%2Fcar-​ln-​tr%2F3728​7ed%2F6​2b1e​7cdc​fe8a​2160​1b7c​fbd%2F6​0b1e​38fa​ de4e​2105​851f​0fe%2F13%2F72%2F6​2b1e​7cdc​fe8a​2160​1b7c​fbd&wp_​cu=​6ce18​ 0f1c​eaff​732e​61bb​5ad5​b1a9​452%7CC3735​0956​BC32​1F6E​0530​1000​07F9​B92 (accessed on 25 June 2022). 37 See on this Ranabir Samaddar, The Postcolonial Age of Migration (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), particularly Chapter 3, “Migrants in an Earlier Age of Globalisation”, pp. 43–​60. 38 Ibid., Chapter 9, “Statelessness and the Lost World of Citizenship”, pp. 167–​190. 39 Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter, and Ranabir Samaddar (eds.), Logistical Asia: The Labour of Making a World Region (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 40 In the “Introduction” to The Spectre of Comparisons, Benedict Anderson discusses the impact of “the ‘Chinese’ as Southeast Asian labourers and capitalists” on countries of the region (pp. 12–​16). He returns to the same problematic in his discussion on the histories of communist movements (1940s–​90s) in Thailand and Indonesia (pp. 285–​298).

Section Two

The Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics

4 The Problem of Population Recalling Marx’s Critique of Malthus

I In this section we shall move from the problematic of nation to that of population. This and the following chapter will discuss the question of population in conceptualising alternative economy and politics. Any serious engagement with capitalism under neoliberal conditions towards imagining alternatives must grapple with the increasingly acute problematic of the relation between classes, people, and population as interlinked political-​economic categories. With major modifications of earlier production and circulation structure and the operations of finance capital combined with the phenomenon of extractive capitalism, old class formations too have undergone significant changes. In some cases these old formations weakened or disintegrated in last thirty years. Stable classes, particularly productive classes like the working class, saw changes from within. Informal workers the world over multiplied several times in this period. Peasants became part workers, petty forms of production proliferated, self-​owning businesses at lower levels increased, women joined labour force in various modes, and these developments have impacted on politics and social structures. What makes a people today in such condition –​people as a collective noun? What makes a population under the techno-​administrative and governing regimes in this neoliberal world? These questions have to be faced by anyone engaged in transformative thinking today. This and the following chapter attempt to find direction to a fruitful enquiry. The enquiry begins by recalling in this chapter Marx’s discussion of the population question under capitalism. His critique of Malthus forms the specific background of this discussion. Hitherto Marxists focused on two formulations: relative surplus population and reserve army of labour. Yet the Malthusian problem of productive and unproductive labour has not died, instead resurfaced in the neoliberal age through invention of neo-​Malthusianism. How are populations categorised today? How does neoliberalism address the issue of “productive population”? How is population managed when the flux in population configuration has assumed unprecedented dimension and forms? How do issues of DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-7

78  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics migrant population groups relate to population management? It seems that the neoliberal task of creating a market-​enabled society increasingly depends on population management. Governing population has become the key to governing labour. Any serious inquiry into the problematic of population will have great stake in the search for alternative ways of governing society on the basis of cooperation, where the society becomes a commons.

II We begin with people and population in Capital (Volume I) and in that context Marx’s engagement with Thomas Robert Malthus.1 Marx’s Capital, as everyone knows, is about capital: capital as relation, capital as commodity, capital as progenitor of wage labour, capital as crystallisation of labour, and capital as realisation of surplus labour. The category of capital indicates several borders it must cross in its own history in the forms of several exchanges to function as capital, suggesting thereby the borders labour would have to cross in order to become capital. Capital is thus a double story –​of labour and capital –​in which we find the story of transition to a capitalist mode of production, of how labour in order to be socially relevant has become wage labour, and finally the social and political struggles that have marked this transition. All these make the book also an account of how capital turns the society into one of working population subject to laws of capital. Till Marx, the subject was associated with one or another kind of spirituality. It was not thought of in terms of the historical thrust of existence as an embodiment of material conditions of life, conflicts, and struggles. Hence the ambiguous position these two categories –​people and population –​occupy in the book, because the book does not share the given postulates of these two terms. Recall the phrase, “The Machiavellian moment” made famous by J. Pocock, which rejoiced over the rise of the “people’s” moment in the wake of the advance of republicanism in the Euro-​American world.2 However, the “Machiavellian moment” was actualised as the age of new governance, because rulers also learnt to govern people by turning the latter into administrative categories. How did these categorisations and the double operation become possible –​the rise of “people” and the concurrent emergence of “population” as a social-​administrative category? We have to go back to Marx to get an idea of this transformation. But Marx did not engage with these two categories (people and population) independently. If these were matters of rule, sovereignty, and political and social management, these were also essentially ordained by class relations and class dynamics of the society. The question then: What causes the division of people into fundamental categories? Marx’s answer: classes are fundamental; they add up to a “people” under certain conditions. Therefore the enquiry has to be what is labour when defined as an element of production, social subsistence, and social reproduction. Likewise, what is meant if a section of society is made of

The Problem of Population  79 say rent-​seeking aristocrats? The same inquiry must persist, for instance, into the division of people into artisans, mill hands, wandering bands of construction labour, agrarian labour, part agrarian part artisanal labour, or idle labour dependant on social subsidies, and employed labour. In short, we must shed light on the dynamics of social relations that make categorisation of people into population groups possible. In Grundrisse, Marx analysed “The Method of political Economy.” He said, When we consider a given country politico-​economically, we begin with its population, its distribution among classes, town, country, the coast, the different branches of production, export and import, annual production and consumption, commodity prices etc…. However…population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. He said, if we were to leave out exchange, division of labour, prices, wage, value, money, capital, labour, etc., and “begin with population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole.” We have to move analytically towards thinner abstractions until we arrive at the simplest determinations, then retracing our journey until we have finally arrived at population again, “but this time as… a rich totality of many determinations and relations.” This does not mean that population is not a concrete thing, or is only an administrative category. “Even the simplest economic category, say exchange value, presupposes population, moreover a population producing in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc.” In our analytical method also, “the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition.”3 Thus there is thus a certain kind of dialectic in the presence of population as an active category in our social and economic understanding. It is fundamental, yet it is not. In this context, Marx’s battle with Malthus was no less acute than it was with Adam Smith or David Ricardo. Probably, because with Malthus the battle was over the entire idea of production: hence how labour had to be productive, or only when labour could be considered productive, how to view the question of shortage of food, how to view “over production,” etc., indeed over the way Malthus had inscribed a certain kind of biological fundamentalism into the notion of production. Malthus had written, No limits whatever are placed to the productions of the earth; they may increase for ever and be greater than any assignable quantity. Yet still the power of population being a power of a superior order, the increase of the human species can only be kept commensurate to the increase of the means of subsistence by the constant operation of the strong law of necessity acting as a check upon the greater power.4

80  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics In this Malthusian moment as opposed to the Machiavellian moment of rejoice over the emergence of people as an autonomous force on earth, Marx started thinking of population that had to be a working population. But working population in capitalism had to be “productive population.” Marx had to contend with the idea of the productive worker and the productive population. Before writing Capital (Volume I), he wrote in his notes on surplus value that productive labour was defined from the standpoint of capitalist production, and the critical differentiation between productive and unproductive labour as made out by Malthus was the basis of all bourgeois political economy. Productive labour was labour which was directly exchanged with capital; thus the crucial role of exchange through which the conditions of production of labour power were first transformed into capital and labour transformed into wage-​labour in its scientific meaning. Marx wrote, This also establishes absolutely what unproductive labour is. It is labour which is not exchanged with capital, but directly with revenue, that is, with wages or profit (including of course the various categories of those who share as co-​partners in the capitalist’s profit, such as interest and rent)… These definitions are therefore not derived from the material characteristics of labour (neither from the nature of its product nor from the particular character of the labour as concrete labour), but from the definite social form, the social relations of production, within which the labour is realised… Productive and unproductive labour is here throughout conceived from the standpoint of the possessor of money, from the standpoint of the capitalist, not from that of the workman …5 Marx further noted that Malthus’s theory of value gave rise to the doctrine of the necessity for continually rising unproductive consumption. Malthus’s theory of overpopulation due to shortage of available food was unscientific. In dealing with Malthus, Marx said, we must make a distinction… One section of capitalists produce goods which are directly consumed by the workers; another section produce either goods which are only indirectly consumed by them, insofar, for example, as they are part of the capital required for the production of necessaries, as raw materials, machinery, etc., or commodities which are not consumed by the workers at all, entering only into the revenue of the non-​workers.6 Marx further noted the argument of Malthus that revenue was expended for immediate support and enjoyment, and capital expended with a view to profit. Thus a labourer and a menial servant were two instruments used for purposes distinctly different.7 Continuing through to Volume Three of Capital Marx noted how the ever-​ changing but always present, boundaries of commodity production, money,

The Problem of Population  81 circulation, and again commodity production, ordained the dynamics of reproduction of capital and the necessary reproduction of labour –​a process that produced the division of the “productive” and the “non-​productive.” Through this analysis Marx brought out from the obscurity of biologism the question of population and pointed towards the need to study the way capitalism created laws of population in different epochs. From the preparatory manuscripts of the Grundrisse, through the manuscripts of Theories of Surplus Value to Capital, one of his main targets of criticism was Malthus’ claim to have formulated a general law of population and overpopulation for mankind based on a simple relation between natural reproduction of men and women and social reproduction of means of subsistence. For Marx, the natural reproduction of men and women was always a social reproduction of a population predicated by the historical process of a particular social formation. In this explanation, two concepts were crucial for him: production and surplus. Population became relatively surplus as accumulation proceeded apace: The production of a relative surplus population, or the setting free of labourers, goes on… more rapidly than the technical revolution of the process of production that accompanies, and is accelerated by, the advance of accumulation; and more rapidly than the corresponding diminution of the variable part of capital as compared with the constant. If the means of production, as they increase in extent and effective power, become to a less extent means of employment of labourers, this state of things is again modified by the fact that in proportion as the productiveness of labour increases, capital increases its supply of labour more quickly than its demand for labourers. The overwork of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on the former, forces these to submit to overwork and to subjugation under the dictates of capital. The condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the overwork of the other part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists, and accelerates at the same time the production of the industrial reserve army on a scale corresponding with the advance of social accumulation.8 In this way, Marx foresaw the capitalist task of population management. In Sections 3–​4 of Chapter 25 in Capital (Volume I) he discussed the phenomenon of relative surplus population and its different forms; in Section 5 he discussed the nomad population, whom he described as a class of people whose origin was agricultural, but whose occupation was in great part industrial. They were the light infantry of capital, thrown by it, according to its needs, now to this point, now to that. When they were not on the march, they camped. Chapter 25 of Capital identifies the foundational elements of population question –​primitive accumulation, production of relative surplus populations, violence, and government of market economy.

82  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics This was how Marx read Malthus and built his own arguments of peasant dispossession and primitive accumulation, relative surplus population, industrial reserve army, and the wandering army of labour. If this was the way in which the society would become a society of working population, today this is also the process of appearance and reappearance of destitution and the emergence of ecologically marginal population groups (ravaged by wars, famines, and floods).9 Policies of managing and stabilising destitute population groups such as setting up the African Development Fund in 1972–​74 or the UN Millennium Goals (2015–​30) this century emerged in this context. In brief, Marx noted that Malthus had banked on the distinctions between “productive” and “unproductive,” “work” and “leisure,” and “labourer and servant.” These distinctions were important for Malthus in suggesting how wealth was created, and asking: Who among the people were crucial for production of surplus so that wealth was augmented? And, who being irrelevant for production would become surplus? Making distinctions among population groups and among property forms was crucial to Malthus’ population-​centric outlook. Others were speaking of labour. Malthus was pointing towards population, which would supply labour and which could be productive or non-​productive. In this way production was predicated on population that supplied labour. Malthus in a way was thus arguing that life (its nature, structure, dynamics) was crucial to understand what was labour. Marx engaged him with the question of the life of labour, more exactly life as labour, what life as labour meant, how it was the key to production of wealth, and therefore what was living labour, what was congealed labour, what was the life cycle of labour, and therefore, what reproduction of life meant under specific conditions. Marx’s analysis intended to shed light on the interrelations of labour, life, and formation and composition of population. We need to re-​engage with the question of the relation between capitalism and population in this background. Capitalism is once again producing a new law of population spread on a global scale, creating once more the “human masses” that capital will exploit for its reproduction, the “relative surplus” population on a global scale with clearly discernible but fluctuating boundaries between the necessary working population and the relative surplus population, the “unproductive” ones. There is no doubt that after long struggles by the labouring people to escape, defy, and destroy capitalist conditions of productive labour, the importance of linking the arguments of life with arguments of labour is significant more than ever. In one sense, on the correct handling of the relation between the two rests the historical task of the emancipation of labouring classes in the postcolonial countries. In this sense the postcolonial condition symbolises the link between these two aspects of capitalist accumulation: life and labour. Conceptually how can we link these two sets of problems around life and labour? How can we bring back the issue of labour process in the inquiry into the conditions of life as labour?

The Problem of Population  83 Marx’s formulations on conditions of life when it has been reduced to the minimum, the labourer has been stripped of all assets save his/​her own labour power so that s/​he can produce capital are highly relevant in order to show the original conditions of the emergence of a distinct type of power over life. We must note that in vast areas of the postcolonial world primitive and the most advanced forms of accumulation have combined in installing and deepening the capitalist mode of production. The needs of accumulation have made management of populations an imperative of our age. Population management is the context of social governance –​marked by rule of experts –​that aims to ensure reproduction of labouring life as value producing power, at the same time maintaining a pool of non-​productive labour. As a technology of rule social governance has to ensure: a b c d e

The management of labouring population; Turning non-​productive into productive labour; Pacifying the restless, non-​productive, idle labour; Managing labour market needs and uncertainties; Producing skills, which the capitalist production requires on an increasing scale, among the productive population; and f Generally maintaining conditions of reproduction by regulating the atmosphere of social war.

This situation links more than ever the art of governing and managing people’s lives with economy, though we must not ignore the vast amount of force –​still required at various stages to set the process of accumulation –​ often clothed in developmental discourse.

III Application of force to manage unorganised sections of labouring masses is necessary in as much as social governance is necessary for neoliberal governance to manage the entire society. The problem is: If the business of governing or governmentality is defined as a ratio where coercion is going down and non-​coercive form of power is gaining ascendancy, in other words primitive form of accumulation is declining and more and more advanced and virtual form of accumulation is correspondingly becoming dominant, what are we to make of the pattern of biopolitics of our age when population management shows marks of deployment of both brutal power and advanced governmental techniques? In other words, the return of primitive accumulation as a capitalist phenomenon in large parts of the non-​Western world makes the naturally assumed relation between governmentality, biopower, and modern economy based on advanced forms of accumulation a problem. The crisis of the theory of sovereignty as “modality or organizing schema” of power has emerged in this context.10 The task now is to invent the right technologies of discipline for “fabrication” of individuals, of docile and useful bodies,

84  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics through the “system of subjection” to a new political economy. At the same time, biopolitics addresses through its “regulatory” devices the entire life of man-​as-​species, as it is represented in populations. The main problem at stake is the modality of intertwining and articulating disciplinary “individualizing” and bio-​political “massifying” power devices. Recall the way Marx had analysed the factory form of production with mass of labouring bodies as the subject, at the same time making the individual labouring body docile. In the postcolonial condition we have besides the factory form other forms –​ dispersed, informal, and unorganised –​with labouring subjects moving from one site to another. We need to study as to how this dispersed labouring population is managed under postcolonial capitalism. And in this, we have still to learn from Marx to make sense of this transitory state of labour, and the combination of a dispersed state of power and centralised state power, in other words, a new form of power. For neoliberal rule the task then is to devise appropriate modes of governing the labouring bodies so that the latter can be transformed into resilient subjects. It means finding ways of combining force with market mechanisms that is to say combining primitive and virtual modes of accumulation, the postcolonial and neoliberal, maintaining global conditions for reproduction and the local forms that make accumulation of capital possible. In this milieu postcolonial labour appears as dispersed, immaterial to higher forms of accumulation and growth, need-​centric in place of being market-​ centric, and amenable to complete deregulation. Living labour appears as ever more fragmented, differentiated, and heterogeneous. Crucial for a vision of transformation of labour in a post-​capitalist society is ironically the historical point Marx had made, namely, how does labour as power emerge in history? How does the owner of this power become aware of it with which from now on s/​he has to survive in this world? What is the historical moment when two modes of power confront each other –​power of capital and power of labour? From this point, Marx’s analysis is an account of the process when labour is reduced to its bareness. The ways in which surplus value is realised as profit, average profit emerges as a crucial category in the functioning of capitalist economy, and profit is distributed among revenue-​ consuming classes, ensure that labour will have only a spectral presence in the formal accounts of production and circulation. Therefore, we must attend to the specific transient forms of labour in as much we attend to the specific forms in which capital can produce profit. Biopower emerges in the context of the simultaneity of various circuits of capital –​the coordination and management of which requires governance –​though such governance periodically collapses. In short, then, biopower is the equivalent of the function of modern market in terms of social governance. Yet such power as the power to manage populations is severely circumscribed because of contradictory compulsions described above even though this occupies the centre stage of politics under neoliberalism. Neoliberalism argues that through governmental promotion

The Problem of Population  85 of market mechanisms the poorest can enter the market, and through governance of the market the governance of society will be ensured. Given this paradox, a dialectical understanding will allow us to understand the interplay of the insecurity of labour with the way security has functioned as the major rationale of liberal rule and the subjection of population groups to liberal governmental order. Insecure labour (that is insecurity of labour) will be made not only to secure for reproduction of capital (that is security of capital), but also to borrow a phrase from Julian Reid and others, bio-​ politically “resilient” amidst conditions of insecurity to face those conditions of insecurity.11 Labour cannot be secured without completely destroying it –​ that is to say by minimising it in the production process to a vanishing point. The only alternative then, at least it seems so, is that the capacity of labour will be made ready to use through reduction of human labour to a condition of dependency on state’s welfare functions. The more we witness the return of primitive accumulation in this era of globalisation, the more we see social governance in operation.

IV Producing social surplus yet reducing and abolishing labour exploitation is one of the most difficult issues confronted by critical thinking on social transformation. Crucial in this is the notion of socially necessary labour time. Marx had used the notion of socially necessary labour time to historically explain how a population marked with all kinds of singularities and fault lines could be tuned by capitalism into a deployable mass of labourers. With the concept of socially necessary labour time, Marx was able to question the given categories of employment and unemployment, and thus the notion of “human masses” to be fed and clothed by society as an employable element for capital’s reproduction but yet unemployed. Indeed with various characteristics of global capitalism today, labour time is increasingly socially determined –​perhaps more in the post-​colony. Briefly speaking, to understand what the phrase “socially necessary” means we have get back to the difference Marx made between abstract and concrete labour. While concrete labour would indicate activities towards producing some use value, that is to say concrete labour important for creation of value, but this has to be a social use-​value, in other words under capitalism necessary labour will have to be exchangeable qua commodities, so that the use value is realised. In other words, labour that conveys value is to be carried out in a manner that is socially defined. After Marx, we cannot have any more a notion of human labour irrespective of time, place, and history, but one that is conditioned by historical forces. With social determination of necessary labour, wages fluctuate according to all manner of things including struggles between labourers and capitalists. Value tied to labour time will fluctuate with these fluctuations now. For the capitalist expropriation of surplus-​value, there must be therefore

86  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics mediating devices, including structured population groups; otherwise there will be no possibility of wages, markets, or accumulation. Indeed, with the interface of neoliberalism and postcolonial dynamics of accumulation, the insights of Marx are now clearer than ever. It is important therefore that we treat the question of population under capitalism dialectically –​as abstracts of labouring groups as well as historically possible totality of human masses always ready to be used for capital’s accumulation. This takes us directly to the issue of economic management of society. To take up the instance of India: In the first two decades of the country’s decolonisation, with emphasis on planning and industrialisation massive displacements and dispossession took place.12 Yet with state drive for industrialisation, strengthening of the big bourgeoisie, and expansion of public sector (steel, coal, railways, oil, and later banking being five important industries), the number of workers grew, while the state from the third decade of independence started giving attention to the stability of peasant economy so that agrarian crisis and peasant revolts would not jeopardise national stability and drive for industrialisation.13 It was in this way that the peasant economy was formally subsumed in the capitalist economy of India. Today with uncertain market of food grains and on the other hand spiralling commodity markets in land and minerals such as iron ore, uranium, or sand mining, plus spurt in financial investment, rental growth, care services, infrastructural growth, growth of extractive activities towards accumulation that include among others a range of waste recycling forms, and the destruction of self-​ subsistence economy, we find dispossession of peasant labour proceeding at a furious pace. The stake in the concept of surplus labour is therefore strategic. To understand the problem of population, we have to examine the concept of surplus –​mainly surplus labour, and associated with other forms of surplus, such as surplus population, surplus humanity, surplus time, surplus stock, surplus money, surplus credit, surplus land, etc. –​because in calculations of profit the surplus unrealised as profit is waste. Surplus is idle. Surplus is non-​productive unless this surplus is ready at hand to be redeployed in production. Any analysis of capitalism, or for that matter wealth, wrestles with the notion of surplus. Economy wrestles with how to situate the surplus, which will otherwise appear to the former as superfluous. Therefore, in the creation of surplus-​value it does not in the least matter, whether the labour appropriated by the capitalist is simple unskilled labour of average quality or more complicated skilled labour. On the other hand, in every process of creating value, the reduction of skilled labour to average social labour, e.g., one day of skilled to six days of unskilled labour, is unavoidable.14 While capital does not invent surplus labour, crucial for our understanding is that in capitalism the surplus is hidden in the essential. In postcolonial capitalism surplus labour is socially realised in an even more enigmatic form. In elaborating the idea of a relative surplus population under capitalist production system, Marx said,

The Problem of Population  87 it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e., a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorisation and is therefore a surplus population.15 The concepts of want, need, necessity, subsistence, and surplus –​all are based in reality. However, they also create a fetish in the form of a binary of employment and non-​employment, and accumulation and need. Capitalist economy produced social welfare state that was to guarantee “full employment.”16 There could not be any natural surplus population. In order to make the society the site of working population unemployment had to be governed. Factory legislations and recognition of trade unions were already parts of the task of governing unemployment, more so because socialist appeals increasingly found audience in a new form of collective identity called the “unemployed.” People without work or needing more work became crucial in the context of governing the labour market. Social insurance developed in this context.17 Thus, today there are strategies of transforming a population from an idle one to a working one through improving specially earmarked localities, groups of people, institutions, training modes, etc. Offering a new deal is thus a permanent feature of the capitalist management of population. This task has become one of the concerns of global neoliberal economy. The concern is: At what point surplus becomes “surplus capital” that is waste, and “surplus labour” becomes “human waste”? To get an insight on the dilemma, recall Marx’s discussion on the way labour involved in the life span of a machine (a productive commodity or any other productive commodity) produces the surplus, so that the mutually constituting relation between the productive and waste is laid bare. This was how Marx waged battle against Malthus and the extreme biologism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the social Darwinism of that time. Malthus in Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent (London, 1815, p. 48) had argued that “corn and labour” could be hardly separated for long time, and the constant demands of the “labouring classes” due to high prices and fall in wages may be most admirable as temporary relief; but the effects would be like when the “population of a country is pushed to the very extreme limits of its food.” Marx wrote in a footnote in Capital (Volume I), All honour to Malthus that he lays stress on the lengthening of the hours of labour, a fact to which he elsewhere in his pamphlet draws attention, while Ricardo and others, in face of the most notorious facts, make invariability in the length of the working day the groundwork of all their investigations. But the conservative interests, which Malthus served, prevented him from seeing that an unlimited prolongation of the working day, combined with an extraordinary development of machinery, and the exploitation of women and children, must inevitably have made a great

88  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics portion of the working-​class “supernumerary,”… It was, of course, far more convenient, and much more in conformity with the interests of the ruling classes, whom Malthus adored like a true priest, to explain this “over-​population” by the eternal laws of Nature, rather than by the historical laws of capitalist production.18 The twin problematic of surplus population and reserve army of labour is increasingly complicated today. While there is no doubt that increasing peasant dispossession and devastation of some sections of the middle classes and self-​employed groups of population is a secular feature of global economy, the resilience of peasant, small holding based, and primary crop dominated economy is not over.19 Indeed as crises of food grains market repeatedly pulverise global agriculture, ex-​colonial countries increasingly seek to ensure “food security” that implies at least partial sustenance to the vast majority of their populations. This feature not only reflects on the question of transition, but it also tells us how the disposition of entire population groups will be negotiated by neoliberal capitalism. This is the reality, the ground, which cannot be ignored by critical thinking on alternatives. Footloose labour, extractive capitalism, dispersed labour forms, the co-​existence of primitive and virtual modes of accumulation are only a few of the features of modern disposition of labour that inhere in them the crucial issue of population and labouring life. We thus require a new historical understanding of our life. Transformation of conditions of labour as the other of transformation of the condition of life is not a fancy thought but a range of practices, which aim to change the existing conditions of life and labour, and without which no social transformation can be realised. The place of informal and dispersed labour occupies a crucial place in a discussion on alternative strategies to change the conditions of life.

V Five observations relevant to above discussion are in order –​all pointing to the contradictory nature of the population question under capitalism: First, in the background of globalisation where neoliberalism has combined with postcolonial capitalism, “population” is no longer seen as an unmixed burden. While four decades ago, population was seen as a burden in postcolonial countries, today as we are told that the “mass” of young, educated to some extent, employable population is a gift. Given that migrant workers are needed throughout the globe as farm workers, contract labour in construction industry, service workers in education, care, and entertainment industry, IT workers, waste reprocessing workers, and labour in several other sectors of economy such as the gig workers, migration has become today an inbuilt feature of the population question. The fate of global capitalism will depend on the flow of labour. Much of the disposition of this labour will be in the

The Problem of Population  89 form of informal arrangements with roving bands of labour reminding one of the nineteenth century. It will be also conditioned by strategies of zoning and creating corridors, requiring immigrant labour deployment in a flexible manner. No wonder, postcolonial economies more and more look forward to inward remittances to augment the country’s total profit stock couched in the language of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Population question today is hence a global question. Indeed, migration management becomes the core of population management and population control.20 Second neoliberalism has taught the society that the latter has to be market enabled. Thus everyone –​the poor, disabled, the refugee, or the child –​theoretically everyone can and has to be a market-​enabled actor in one way or another. It will begin from home, which can become a site of production for the market. This is the education by social governance. Technology is an intrinsic part of the social management of population, it now shapes population. Yet in this case too, the globalisation of access to market runs along with a contradictory phenomenon of capitalism, namely the increasingly skewed nature of the market of commodities, such as foodstuff and other essentials of life. If the emergence of a country, say China, betokens a redistribution of the cake among its eaters, not without reason bourgeois politicians of the capitalist world are worried today over the total availability of food and a consequent rise in food prices. The concern of bourgeois politicians like Hillary Clinton with right policy solutions on issues like biotechnology and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) like food, climate change, animal rights, use of antibiotics for farm animals for non-​therapeutic reasons, guaranteeing farm subsidies, food safety, and enacting immigration reforms towards ensuring a steady supply of agricultural labour in the United States should not surprise us.21 They all reflect on the vexed relation between technology and population. They also collectively act as the other scene of a similarly vexed relation between climate change and population management. In the late nineteenth century, Mike Davis showed how El Nino famines and large-​ scale peasant dispossessions combined to produce what he called the “late Victorian holocausts.”22 These disasters of past ages are inscribed in the historical memory of bourgeois society. Third, with the re-​emergence of primitive accumulation (through various forms and regimes of dispossession23) and a large army of labour, the breakdown of subsistence agriculture does not lead to any Malthusian scenario. From “plough to pick” –​from tilling to artisanal mining –​there is now a range of labour forms serving the dynamics of capital accumulation taking place through extractive modes.24 Entire life is now subject to labouring needs of capital, and this transformation is taking place under democratic functioning, which means the democratic right to join the labour market. Democracy had never been so capital-​friendly. A mix of social governance, welfarism, and state role in expanding the market and weathering adverse effects of market contraction has become now crucial in making the population capital-​friendly.25 Yet populations cannot be capital-​friendly across

90  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics the range in the same manner, because technologies of population control produce racial, gender, and other divisions in the form of identifying groups as targets of these technologies. Fourth, as hereditary and accumulated wealth becomes crucial for the expansion of capital in form of rent, interest, social capital, etc., capital’s expansion tries to avoid the albatross of a population hanging around its neck.26 Idle bourgeoisie, idle towns, idle assets, and idle countries may become a big feature of global capitalism.27 Coupled with the re-​emergence of a bourgeoisie wallowing in interest and rent produced wealth, there is a rise in penal populations everywhere sought to be confined to islands, penal colonies, and at times entire countries marked as penal lands such as parts of Africa, Central America, and the Middle East. Again they remind us of a nineteenth-​ century history of penal colonies such as Penang, Malacca, or the Andaman. These penal lands are also lands whose millions of people have been punished through war (Libya, Iraq, or Afghanistan). In fact, reappearing as the other side of wealth, war periodically rearranges population groups for global labour market –​a fact underplayed by demographers and economists.28 The consequent re-​ordering of space in its relation to population results in distinct spaces of war, deluge, and exclusion, and other spaces of production, consumption, and wealth. How will the expansion of the democratic right of all population groups for access to market succeed in this context? The unbearable tension as consequence of these contradictions is evident in the form of repeated crises we are seeing in the last two decades. The situation can result in a strategic breakdown at any point of time. Neoliberalism is trying desperately to defuse the possibilities of such breakdown with its new found arsenal of making populations resilient. Finally, the global reserve army of labour today has among its ranks refugees, internally displaced, dispossessed peasants, convicts, child labour, workers under new forms of servitude, ecologically marginal groups, and all those who are at the receiving end of what Michel Foucault would have perhaps called “just measure of punishment” –​punishment according to the requirements of the bourgeois society. Yet, by the same token, it is not only the punitive policy under capitalism that contributes to the growth in penal populations; it is machines and technologies that work to an increasing extent as the “measure of men.” Thinkers of social transformation underestimate the significance and difficulties posed by the interlinked problematic of labour and population in the global search for alternatives to capitalism. A simple answer in the form of equality to the conundrum is not enough. For, without generating surplus no society can survive and develop, and the challenge therefore is: How to remould our politics, economy, and society in a way that will produce surplus yet be able to avoid the crises and breakdowns, ensure development of common working people, and claim that the economy has done justice to the life of labour?

The Problem of Population  91 For long, liberal ideology celebrated the role of people, welfare state, and rule of law, while populations in many parts of the world remained shadowy inhabitants of this celebrated world. Now, populations composed of disparate groups and disenfranchised classes are coming forward to claim their stake in politics. In the process, do they become the people or how do they assert that they are the people, that they are the key subject of any programme of social transformation? In this context, the role of populations in contemporary politics calls for rigorous attention. The next chapter therefore moves on to discuss the phenomenon of population producing a new kind of politics in the neoliberal time.

Notes 1 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990). 2 John Greville Agard Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); also Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 3 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (1857–​ 58; London: Penguin Books, 1993), “Introduction”, pp. 100–​101. 4 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population: An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. (London, 1798; Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, 1998), p. 8 –​www.esp.org/​books/​malt​hus/​ pop​ulat​ion/​malt​hus.pdf (accessed on 1 November 2017). 5 Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value (1861–​ 63), Chapter 4, Section 3, “The Duality in Smith’s Conception of Productive Labour: His First Explanation –​the View of Productive Labour as Labour Exchanged for Capital” –​www.marxi​sts. org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1863/​theor​ies-​surp​lus-​value/​ch04.htm (accessed on 18 December 2021). 6 Ibid., Chapter 19, Section 11, “Over-​ Production, ‘Unproductive Consumers’, etc.” –​ www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1863/​theor​ies-​surp​lus-​value/​ch19. htm (accessed on 18 December 2021). 7 Ibid., Chapter 19, Section 8, “Malthus on Productive Labour and Accumulation” –​ www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1863/​theor​ies-​surp​lus-​ value/​ch19.htm (accessed on 18 December 2021). 8 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), c­ hapter 25, Section 3,: “Progressive Production of a Relative Surplus Population or Industrial Reserve Army”, p. 446. 9 On this see the collection of studies, Andrew Baldwin and Giovanni Bettini (eds.), Life Adrift: Climate Change, Migration, Critique (London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).

92  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics 10 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended, Lectures at College de France, 1975–​ 76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 249. 11 Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously (London: Polity Press, 2014); also David Chandler and Julian Reid, The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). 12 The literature on this is vast. Most prominent among the research is the work of Walter Fernandes whose decades-​long investigation has brought this dimension of the Indian economy to public attention. Among his works, Walter Fernandes, “Development Induced Displacement in Eastern India,” in Shyama Charan Dube (ed.), Antiquity to Modernity in Tribal India: Volume I: Continuity and Change among Indian Tribes (New Delhi: Inter India Publications, 1998), pp. 217–​300; Fernandes, “The National Draft Policy for Rehabilitation: Principles of the NGO Alternative” in Hari Mohan Mathur and David Marsden (eds.), Development Projects and Establishment Risks: Resettling Project Affected People in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 255–​276; Fernandes, “Singur and the Displacement Scenario”, Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 42 (3), 20 January 2007, pp. 203–​206; see also Michael Cernea, “Public Policy Responses to Development Induced Population Displacements”, Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 31 (24), 15 June 1996, pp. 1515–​1523; see also, Samir Kumar das, Paula Banerjee, and Madhuresh Kumar, “People on the Move: How Governments Manage Moving Populations”, Policies and Practices, 1, Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata, 2004 –​www.mcrg.ac.in/​pp1.pdf (accessed on 4 May 2022). 13 This is a well-​documented history. Interested readers may see Wolf Ladejinsky, Agrarian Reforms as Unfinished Business: The Selected Papers of Wolf Ladejinsky, (ed.), Louis J. Walinsky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Francine R. Frankel, India’s Political Economy: The Gradual Revolution, 1947–​ 1975 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); also India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs, 1971 (reprint, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). On bank nationalisation in India in the same period, Suhit K. Sen, “The Politics of Bank Nationalisation in India” in Iman Kumar Mitra, Ranabir Samaddar, and Samita Sen (eds.), Accumulation in Post-​Colonial Capitalism (Singapore: Springer, 2017), Chapter 7, pp. 125–​145. Reservation for the small-​scale sector was first introduced in 1967, and gradually the number of reserved items was increased. Besides bank nationalisation and reforms in setting agricultural prices, during the same period Clause 5B in the Industrial Disputes Act was introduced in 1976 making difficult for larger firms to close down. During this era coal mines were nationalised. Finally in 1985 the Sick Industrial Companies Act came and the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) was set up. Attempts to stabilise the small holdings are to be seen in this background. 14 Capital, Volume 1 (Penguin edition), p. 306. 15 Ibid., p. 782. 16 William Beveridge’s book, Full Employment in a Free Society (1944) argued that because individual employers were incapable of ensuring full employment, the state must come forward to make it possible. Full employment meant a condition where there were slightly more vacant jobs than there are available workers, so people who lost jobs could find new ones immediately. He argued that the upward

The Problem of Population  93 pressure on wages, due to the increased bargaining strength of labour, would be eased by rising productivity, and kept in check by a system of wage arbitration. The cooperation of workers would be secured by the common interest in the ideal of full employment. Pre-​war unemployment, beginning with the Great Depression, was due to ineffective demand for industrial products, imperfect labour mobility and general labour market disorganisation. Instead, the economy should be planned, so that demand is socialised, and supply is maintained at all times. Fiscal policies should be accordingly framed, and the budget should encourage increased spending. The Social Security proposals known as the Beveridge Report reflected these ideas. One could see how on one hand war and pre-​war unemployment with attending misery were ghosts stalking the capitalist order, and on the other hand, the bourgeois experts refused to admit that unemployment was a natural state of things, and it was a condition which could be and had to be rectified. 17 On this one of the insightful discussions, William Walters, Unemployment and Government: Genealogies of the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 18 Capital, Volume 1 (Penguin edition), Chapter 17, “Changes of magnitude in the Price of Labour Power and in Surplus Value”, p. 666. 19 On the historical significance of this feature, Ravi Palat, The Making of an Indian Ocean World-​Economy, 1250–​1650: Princes, Paddy Fields, and Bazaars (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). 20 See the discussion, Ranabir Samaddar, “Globalisation, Migrant Labour, and Capitalism” in Marcello Musto (ed.), Rethinking Alternatives with Marx –​Economy, Ecology, and Migration (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2021). 21 “Election 2016: Hillary Clinton Could Continue Food Policy Progress” –​www. foodd​ive.com/​news/​elect​ion-​clin​ton-​food-​pol​icy/​428​930/​ (accessed on 1 November 2017); see also, www.pre​side​ncy.ucsb.edu/​ws/​index.php?pid=​115​944 (accessed on 1 November 2017). 22 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002). 23 On regimes of dispossession, see Michael Levien, “From Primitive Accumulation to Regimes of Dispossession: Six Theses on India’s Land Question”, 2015 –​http://​ krie​ger.jhu.edu/​arri​ghi/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​sites/​29/​2015/​03/​The​ses-​on-​Ind​ias-​ Land-​Quest​ion-​3.4.pdf (accessed on 12 October 2017). 24 Kuntala Lahiri-​Dutta (ed.), Between the Plough and the Pick: Informal, Artisanal and Small-​ Scale Mining in the Contemporary World (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2018). 25 The idea of basic income flows from this. It brings back the idea of full employment by another door. The assumption that basic income can be an improvement on the status quo is contingent on several factors. As has been pointed out, income support was provided to keep the dangerous classes in check, and income support was provided from time to time at levels low enough to maintain a supply of the worst paid workers. Neoliberalism intensifies the effort to ensure a plentiful supply of low-​paid and precarious workers. Basic income not only avoids struggle for better wages, but it is a regressive model at one level for the poor people outside of the workforce, and at another level, for the lowest paid workers. In effect it may become a subsidy to employers paid for out of the tax revenues and financed by cuts to broader public services. See on this –​http://​socia​list​proj​ect.ca/​bul​let/​1494. php#conti​nue

94  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics 26 In the seminal work on rent and hereditary wealth as crucial factors in the growth of capitalism by Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) the question of population unfortunately remains largely out of the picture. 27 This is the context in which one has to read Marx’s analysis in Section 3 of Chapter 24 of Capital, titled, “Separation of Surplus-​Value into Capital and Revenue: The Abstinence Theory”. 28 The question of war in this context is brought out by among others Partha Chatterjee, “Land and the Political Management of Primitive Accumulation” in Anthony P. D’Costa and Achin Chakraborty (eds.), The Land Question in India: State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 1–​15.

5 Populations and Populism as a Problematic in Transformative Politics

I The question emanating from the analysis in the previous chapter was: What is the role of populations in the transformative politics of our time? We do not have many analyses on this question to fall back on or to begin with. We have, for good or bad, Michel Foucault’s writings speculating on this. In the famous Tanner Lecture, “Omnes et Singulatim” (1979), Foucault argued that the age of “people” and “sovereignty” was over; in its place had arrived the age of “population” and “government.” This transformation needed centuries and did not happen suddenly. Referring to the evolution of the concept of population, he argued, the Middle Ages were marked with “a long series of struggles whose object was pastoral power.” Population was to be understood as a group of live individuals belonging to the same species, living side by side, so that they presented mortality and fecundity rates, were subject to things like epidemics and overpopulation, and presented a certain type of territorial distribution. The art of government developed also as a way to manage population in a particular territory. Thus government of men by men –​whether they form small or large groups, whether it is power exerted by men over women or by adults over children, or by one class over another, or by a bureaucracy over a population –​involves a certain type of rationality. People as a political subject have very little place in this map of rule. Population created and structured by government replaces the people. This roughly is the journey of political rationality. Political reason aims to achieve a rule that will not rely on violence but on rational methods of government. This was the motto of liberalism, and this was how liberalism became durable in political thought with neoliberalism advancing on that basis. How do we then proceed? How will a transformative politics of our time then move forward? From Michel Foucault’s point of view what is called for is no less than a critique of political rationality itself. But what is political rationality? In this address, the term “political rationality” is not clarified. Foucault says that DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-8

96  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics its inevitable effects are both individualisation and totalisation. Liberation can come only from attacking not just one of these two effects but political rationality’s very roots. Is the term “political rationality” then used in this address in an abstract sense, even when allowing for its historical heterogeneity, or in a determined sense of a particular rationality? Foucault notes that, when engaging with “reason of the state” we must “pin down the specific type of political rationality the state produced.” In the realm of political practice, it is not “reason in general that is implemented, but always a very specific type of rationality.” Power relations must be therefore examined at the level of concrete political tactics that will tell us of the close intersections of government and rationality: thus, how government is practiced, and how these practices are elaborated in discourse, thought, historical documents. The State not only structures governmental reasoning, but it also functions as an objective of political reason. The two understandings of governmental rationality are inseparable: the form of reasoning from which governing techniques take shape and the specific techniques of government producing a particular reason.1 Clearly, without reckoning with population as a fundamental theme of politics today, we cannot proceed. People gave to political thought the idea of citizenship. Population has given to political thought of our time populism. Roughly translated in today’s political language, the problem of populism is the problem of population in politics. As a form of politics it is beyond the holy canons of citizenship, sovereignty, popular democracy, and representative governance. It is a tactical response to governmental modes of rule, also a reflection of a mode of political existence that is shaped by these governmental modes. However, while the idea of population is linked to the evolution of the idea of government, government means governing labouring classes and groups marked by internal divisions, and stratifications. With the neoliberal turn in global economy, as was discussed earlier, stability of classes is dwindling. Unstable class formation, in particular formation of the labouring classes, is becoming prevalent as a global phenomenon. This is the context in which population in its specific mode of existence becomes an active category in politics. It challenges the liberal order by taking the political form of populism. Populism thus tells more of a situation, a condition, than of a specific ideology. Like nationalism it can be appropriated by more than one agency. By itself it is neither purely good nor bad. It is we may say post-​liberal. It indicates new ways of creating the “people” –​this time not by revolution or by constitutionalists –​but by population groups, often in diverse and amorphous state, who will claim, “We are the people.” This “new” problem –​a population queering the standard idea of the people –​was of course there when the bourgeois mode of representative rule commenced some four hundred years ago. Then too, disparate and amorphous groups assembled and said, we do not want to depend on the will of our rulers to be ruled, and we want to control ways of making our representation possible, and therefore we must have a say in politics. This was the way in which

Populations and Populism  97 the “motley crowd” addressed the asymmetric relations between the powerful and powerlessness.2 The situation required the “motley crowd” to gather in public life and give vent to their distrust of rule. This was “liberty before liberalism” –​the first advent of populism in the modern time.3 Today, in the neoliberal milieu, thinkers are anxious: How can transformative politics engage with the phenomenon of populism? This chapter engages with this question beginning with a close study of a writing that aims to address it.

II Chantal Mouffe’s For a Left Populism is a slim book of ninety-​three pages.4 Yet it has drawn attention of political readers because it addresses the theme of populism at a time when many Leftist thinkers especially of the European continent have been avoiding discussing it in public. Though, we can be sure that they all discuss the question in private whenever they deliberate on the contemporary political situation and patterns of political movements. The question is namely this: What should the Left do with respect to what they regard as populist movements? Should the Left adjust itself, or redefine itself along those lines? Or should they criticise the “populist movements,” expose what they think to be their shortcomings and deficiencies, make its position clearly apart from it, and struggle against the latter? Such a question involves first an examination of the notion of populism itself, before the scrutiny moves on to the issue of the Left and its engagement with the former. We need not enter for the hundredth time into a disputation over the thesis of “populism as reason” made famous by late Ernesto Laclau5 from whom Mouffe draws inspiration for this book and with whom she co-​authored some of her political writings. In some sense she represents, let us say the left variety of what at one point of time was known as “Euro-​communism,” a brand of politics that was based on an idea of a special condition of Europe and made huge notions out of the reality of liberal parliamentary democracy in Europe. For a Left Populism is based once again on such an idea. In this book by Mouffe there is no reference to the vast postcolonial world where in many countries populist movements appear and thrive notwithstanding periodic reversals. The book is premised on the liberal conditions of Europe. Yet we have to read the book closely because she comes out unambiguously with an answer, namely that, in the condition of liberalism and weakening of the parliamentary structure of rule including the structure of welfare and rights, populism in Europe has come to stay. The Left has to redefine itself in this light. Simply said, the Left will have to be the populists. They will be the left-​ wing populists. To be fair to her, she avoids the sterile quarrel that keeps Leftist thinkers busy, namely that populism may be of left or right variety, but anyway in the long run it leads to fascism, and therefore we first need an anatomy

98  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics of populism. She seems to accept the material condition and configuration of populism. Yet, paradoxically, she cannot keep herself away from ideological notions and discussions. She begins by saying that she has no interest in theoretical-​ideological debates, in her words “the sterile academic debate about the ‘true nature’ of populism.”6 But throughout the book she propounds a theory of populism as a democratic possibility, and does not for once examine the material organisation of populism as politics. We are reminded of Deleuze and Guattari, who said “the concept of ideology is an execrable concept that hides the real problems, which are always of an organisational nature.”7 Hence the always present possibility in the book of a discussion of populism as an ensemble of political practices never materialises. She seems to suggest that populism is a form of contentious politics (her phrase is “agonism”), which at times will render democratic theory problematic (because populism can grow in both authoritarian polities and democracies). Yet she recoils from pushing further the logic of contention towards a transformative strategy. In recent time populism as a concept has drawn attention though it was with us for long. In the ongoing crisis of liberal democracy, new forms of popular protest and discontent have emerged. In the same measure right-​wing politics too has invented new forms to garner political support and legitimacy through what is termed as “populist” gestures. Liberal political commentators have often reformulated populism as “proto-​fascism.” They have equated mass anger with the failure of liberal state and parliamentary democracy with inclination towards and espousal of fascist politics. Some have interpreted anti-​migrant sentiments as the core of populist politics. To them, xenophobia sits at the heart of populism. Chantal Mouffe avoids such formulation. Recall, after the experiences of Peronism in Argentina, Ernesto Laclau had formulated a thesis of populist reason: populism represented a specific form of reason –​neither right, nor left. In Latin America his thesis attracted widespread following, and it seemed at least a few years back, that with experiences of Brazil, Bolivia, Nicaragua, then in Spain and Greece, Laclau’s thesis on populism as a distinct form of non-​class politics was coming true. Now after Laclau’s death, his long-​time collaborator Chantal Mouffe reformulates the thesis and writes of left-​wing populism. It is of course a different matter that in the process, she forgets and declines to draw lessons from Marx’s engagement with Russian populists in the last decade of his life and Lenin’s lifelong engagement with populists, among whose ranks was his brother, hanged by the Tsar in 1887. In the introduction Mouffe writes that the central argument of her book is, to intervene in the hegemonic crisis it is necessary to establish a political frontier and that left populism, understood as a discursive strategy of construction of the political frontier between ‘the people’ and ‘the oligarchy’, constitutes, in the present conjuncture, the type of politics needed to recover and deepen democracy.

Populations and Populism  99 She further asserts, “Everything will depend on which political forces will succeed in hegmonising the current democratic demands and the kind of populism that emerges victorious from the struggle against post-​politics.”8 The present “populist moment” is a conjuncture of several factors or events, such as the failure of liberal democracy, specifically the disjunction between liberal institutions and democracy, the emergence of oligarchies ruling Western democratic countries, alliance of traditional social democratic parties in these countries with neoliberalism, emergence of right-​wing populism especially after the global financial crash of 2007–​08, and an acute need for a “properly political answer through a left populist movement that will federate all the democratic struggles against post-​democracy.”9 Mouffe reminds us that we cannot underestimate the power of right-​wing populism and exclude people who associate with it. Thus, To learn from Thatcherism means realizing that in the present conjuncture, the decisive move is to establish a political frontier that breaks with the post-​political consensus between centre-​right and centre-​left. Without defining an adversary, no hegemonic offensive can be launched. However, this is precisely the step that social-​democratic parties, converted to neo-​ liberalism, are unable to make. This is because they believe that democracy should aim at reaching consensus and that it is possible to have a politics without an adversary. A left populist strategy needs to challenge such a view .... During the years of neoliberal hegemony, many of the social-​democratic advances have been dismantled. And we find ourselves in the paradoxical situation of having to defend various welfare state institutions that we criticized earlier for not being radical enough.10 Therefore her argument is for a politics of radicalising democracy. Yet, she thinks, this politics has to be taken forward in a measured manner. While direct struggles for democracy will strengthen the spirit of representation, we must not be carried away with these struggles –​as if they will do away with the need for a representative system. We cannot do away with representation in the name of radicalising democracy. Pluralism also requires to be integrated in democratic imagination. Any plan to radicalise democracy cannot be a conflict-​free process. A pluralist democratic society does not envisage pluralism in a harmonious anti-​political form. With an ever-​present possibility of antagonism, representation has to feature pluralist democracy, because representation will contain the consequences of excessive antagonism. We may ask what then remains of populism as a distinct form of politics? Thus, on the crucial question of the construction of a people as the core of a left-​wing populist project, the liberal democratic homilies return. The “people” in the book, For a Left Populism, is not a crowd, or a mass, or an assembly, or a collective noun for governed subjects or the dispersed labouring population groups trying to make sense of politics, or even a popular coalition, this “people” is a sanitised category, a purified collective. She says,

100  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics I would like to emphasize that a “chain of equivalence” is not a simple coalition of existing political subjects .... The people and the political frontier that defines its adversary are constructed through political struggle, and they are always susceptible to re-​articulation through counter-​hegemonic interventions. The democratic demands that a left populist strategy seeks to articulate are heterogeneous and this is why they need to be articulated in a chain of equivalence.11 The phrase “chain of equivalence” invokes the idea of populism as reason –​a specific type of reason. Its use is not intended to examine the concrete dynamics of dialogic politics and the new kinds of trust networks that go into making of the “people” as a formation. As we know Mao had termed this issue as the politics of the united front. Mao had studied the concrete conditions of classes and political forces and the interlinked issues of united front of these popular classes and leadership of this front.12 It had nothing to do with the liberal idea of citizenship. But the pull of the idea of citizenship proves too strong for Mouffe. She eschews the path of inquiring about the dynamics of dialogic politics or the politics of a front, and instead presents her idea of citizenship. In the process she ignores the present crisis of the notion of citizenship in the wake of globalisation, neoliberalism and proliferation of borders, statelessness, labour mobility, migration, and statelessness. Yet it is this crisis of the notion of citizenship that in the first place gave rise to populist movements. She says, Conceiving citizenship as a political ‘grammar of conduct’ shows that it is possible to be part of a ‘people’ identified with a radical democratic project, while being at the same time inscribed in a plurality of other social relations with their specific ‘subjectivities’. To act qua citizen at the political level to radicalize democracy does not mean discarding other forms of identification and is perfectly compatible with being involved in democratic struggles of a more punctual nature. Indeed, a radical democratic citizenship encourages such a plurality of engagements.13 What will happen then to this noble idea of the people when the “people” refuse to fall in a correct political line even as the “populist moment” arrives? Chantal Mouffe’s “populist moment” is therefore too much of a conflict-​free scenario. She acknowledges the need to take into account the variety of heterogeneous struggles, is worried about envisaging the collective political subject exclusively in terms of “class,” and finally the “Left” view boils down to the construction of a collective will as an articulation of democratic demands. It seems that the populist moment has arrived to offer the opportunity for the radicalisation of institutionalised democracy. With this excessive hope on “democracy” and faith in the possibility of re-​energising democracy with populist medicine, the result is an inadequate attention to the contradictions within democracy. This is the problem when

Populations and Populism  101 we see populism as a specific reason, and refuse to put populism under the scanner of class analysis –​not to castigate populist politics but to draw appropriate tactical formulations for class struggle. It is the same old problem of not rigorously analysing the relation between “class” and “people” under concrete historical situations. The result is an idealistic portrayal of what is termed as “left wing populism,” and inadequate analysis of actual left-​wing populist movements, say Syriza in Greece14 or Podemos in Spain or the challenges and the possibility of the Labour Party in United Kingdom under its erstwhile leader Jeremy Corbyn, or closer to the postcolonial world –​the Krishak Praja Party in Bengal in the colonial time,15 or the global stories of the failures and re-​emergence of agrarian populism,16 and the new forms of populism in which agrarian and urban claims, and military and civilian sentiments have merged.17

III Aware of the contentious process of politics, Chantal Mouffe writes of the issue of hegemony as a crucial factor in breaking the shackles of liberal political system and order. But to work out our understanding of hegemony in the context of populist surge we need to consider hard the global experiences of populism and “Left populism” in particular in Latin American countries, many postcolonial countries in Asia and Africa, and populist movements in Europe. The emerging political question staring us is: How do we reconcile the two principles of hegemony and contradiction (and contention) while acknowledging that they need to be combined in any strategy to create alternative politics? Gramscian Mouffe’s explanation on this conundrum borders on a neo-​ Gramscian outlook, which perhaps not deliberately turns hegemony into a cultural enterprise, and ignores the life and death contentions embedded in political struggles. Before Gramsci, Russian revolutionaries had deliberated on the concept of hegemony,18 and as we mentioned little earlier, Mao had thought of the problematic in terms of the twin strategies of united front and leadership. Hegemony as a strategy is a contentious process. Populism as a political platform of disorganised labouring groups of many occupations and social orientations working simultaneously within the acknowledged modes of representative democracy (like party, elections, etc.) and outside these modes by practising street politics (direct mobilisations, ignoring elected representatives, parliaments, etc., taking recourse to manifestos for actions in place of the constitution, contesting the established legal form of the people in order to claim that the populists, the agitators, are the people, etc.) poses a challenge for any orderly vision of transformation under the hegemony of a class, a politics, or a state. In any case, if the definition of a constitution involves decisions about defining the people, the relation between constitutionalism and populism is

102  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics then a matter of original quarrel. The primary issue has been always around the definition of the specific character of a people that will legally distinguish it from other peoples and alternative self-​understandings. Such a quarrel involves the interpretation of the history of the people. The advent of populism poses a threat to the legitimacy of a constitution because it indicates a conflict over the character of its understanding.19 The problem is clearly set by contemporary popular politics throughout the world. There is no easy way out. Left populism must wrestle with the dual problematic of hegemony and contention. The tension in the duality is productive. This is because the challenge of establishing hegemony is not only one of long term strategy, but also one of seizing the time. Too often analysts miss the stake time as conjuncture has in the political history of populism. They only note that populism is a political movement which seeks to mobilise the people against a state considered too powerful and controlled by vested interests. Yet, time as conjuncture dramatically exhibits itself in the way and form in which available coercive means against the State are deployed by coalitions of established members of the polity, groups of intellectuals, likewise groups of disorganised masses, students and youth, and radical challengers. The total effect of these coalitions may fall short of revolution, but these coalitions when active protect and facilitate those whose principles offer the greatest challenge to the existing distribution of power and the repressive forces such as the police or the army.20 In other words, populist politics does not proceed strategically. It responds to and is a product of a conjuncture: economic distress, high taxation, a new oppressive measure by the government, a grossly corrupt act of a representative, a social urge for unity of all militant and non-​ militant popular forces, a parliament appearing cruel, unsympathetic, and non-​responsive to the crisis of life of the common people, a sudden act of coercion by the government that shocks the people, etc. How to achieve a durable gain for transformative politics out of these conjunctures that witness populist surge and massive populist formations both in constitutional and non-​constitutional ways? Because of the nature of the time when populism gathers political force, its conceptual history shows that its own meaning has floated from one signification to another, and has denoted diverse phenomena. Born within democracy, it has challenged every established accepted norm of democracy.21 Any work on alternatives to the politics of capitalism will have to reckon with the challenge posed by the phenomenon of populism. The economic vision of such an alternative will be crucial as only such a vision can appeal to the unorganised masses of the dis-​propertied, petty proprietors and footloose population groups who are robbed by the incessant assault of neoliberalism.22 The populist economic outlook and policies are not reconstructive, they are mostly defensive. The subaltern classes are always defending. To recall Gramsci, they subject themselves to the initiative of dominant classes, even when they rebel. As in Venezuela, Greece, India, or in Paris and other cities in France during the Yellow Vests uprising, or Britain in Jeremy Corbyn’s

Populations and Populism  103 time –​they are forever in a state of defence. Populism is thus a “history of itself and its opposite,” history of “the disintegration and the episodic character of the lower classes” and the efforts of these classes “at unifying themselves in a higher moment.” In this sense, as against the historical unity of ruling classes found in the organic relations between State, or the political society, and the propertied and semi-​propertied sections of the people and their institutions, the civil society, the subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unify themselves.23 Yet the subaltern classes gradually realise their historical burden of disunity and begin appropriating the identity of the people as a way to get over the burden of disunity. Populists thereby disturb the old straightforward theory of hegemony, because they unsettle forever the distinction between “we” and “they” and reconstitute this distinction again and again. In any case, in India and many other countries in this postcolonial age, populism has arrived in daily discourses of politics, media, government, scholarly treatises, commentaries, and in even text books of politics, sociology, and history –​so much so that it is impossible today to speak of democracy, government, people, rights, etc., without referring to populism. Is populism then a soft concept, meaning everything to everybody, a concept that has no rigour? The elasticity of the term is noticeable globally as well as in India. Is it then un-​definable as is its associate word, “people”? Or, must we then fall back on Laclau’s notion that it is a specific form of reason, even if the idea of a specific form of reason fails to clear the fog? There is however a silent shift from Laclau’s notion of “reason” to Mouffe’s notion of “moment.” In “reason,” you search for a structure and logic. In “moment” there is the notion of conjuncture; the idea of the moment carries an impression of the ephemeral, a fleeting, specific time that came and will pass into another. In short, populism is a feature of modern politics, but its specific arrival and passing away will be an equally immanent feature. The implication of this shift in terms of strategy and tactics is immense and theoretically significant. Any strategic understanding of popular politics will call for further interrogation of the concept of “moment.” In the light of the experiences of postcolonial democracy, we can then ask: a Is there something specific to democracy that leads politics towards new forms of claim making, new sense of rights, and new forms of governance that are collectively given the name (often in a negative way) “populism”? b Is there something contingent in the nature of its emergence –​a combination of circumstances, such as globalisation, primitive accumulation and the informal turn in economy, failure of classical liberalism and welfare state, decline of old party structure, urbanisation, widespread phenomenon of “surplus population,” etc. –​that produces new forms of popular politics, which we describe as populism? c At the same time, given the almost universal failure of the Left to adequately come to terms with this feature of modern politics, should

104  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics the enquiry be into the ways in which relations between “classes” and “masses” are articulated in specific historical situations? Allied with this another question, can we think of the popular and the people without the third, the populist? d And as indicated earlier, should we then argue that populism is less a matter of ideology, or of reason, but more a set of specific political practices –​popular and contentious, and historically contingent, which tell also of the institutionalisation of collective claim makings and their reflection in the business of governing? Possibly, part of the reason as to why we shy away from this interrogation is because we assume that the phenomenon of Left populism is specific to Euro-​American world. We ignore the fact that in the vast postcolonial world populism arrived in the colonial time. It now grows through daily skirmishes with postcolonial democracy. Without a postcolonial perspective the contemporary emergence of populism on a global scale is incomprehensible. With the spread of populist governmental practices, populism has emerged as a specific form of postcolonial governance –​at the core of which lies a combination of new modes of articulation of popular politics and a governmental mode that addresses these new political concerns within the confines of existing institutional structure of democracy. This new phenomenon challenges the old “left” and “right” formulations and specifically asks the Left to formulate appropriate responses to the populist phenomenon. Herein is the specific relevance of Mouffe’s enquiry, also its pertinence to this chapter. Also relevant is the main massage of the tiny book, namely, not orthodoxy, but innovation will enable interventions in the existing order of things. An understanding of conjuncture that makes the populist moment of our time will enable such innovation in politics.

IV If moment implies ephemeral life, in other words inevitable eclipse of a populist movement, what are the implications for a hegemonic strategy? We may mention three such implications: “First, the crisis and the hollow time that populism wants to address will be filled up with organised, ruthless, power –​power of a new state, a mighty and strong corporate class. History bears abundant witness to such a result –​in Italy, pre-​War Eastern Europe, countries of South Asia, Argentina, etc.” Second, the unrest and the rebellious conduct of the lower classes will be put down firmly, and illegalisms will be brought under control.24 One fundamental feature of this emerging model of power will be a process that will aim

Populations and Populism  105 to govern from a distance the entire organisation and functioning of the penal system towards disciplining the recalcitrant components of society. Illegalism will be the target of the institutions of rule. The populist opposition will be branded as the social enemy, even though authorities of law, who themselves practise it in abundant measure will not be able to root out illegalisms. As witnessed in several instances, illegal groupings and mobilisations will continue, which rulers will attempt to break up. Supplementary codes will be put in place, such as the model codes of conduct in, invocation of the anti-​sedition laws, etc. Their duty will be to complement law to browbeat the opposition. The demoralisation of the people will be the goal. The goal is also to break economic and political illegalism ranging from common law crime, economic offence, delinquency, to political insubordination. Finally, since the stakes for the lower classes which were supporting a populist movement are high, will they rally back? Will populism be able to reinvent itself ? If the history of Peronism in Argentina is any guide, its return can be in the form of compromise with right-​wing policies and ideologies, though it need not be necessarily so.25 However, in the face of the new model of authoritarian power populism may find its internal resources inadequate. Much will depend on the conduct of the Left, but more fundamentally on the way the social war continues, while the illegitimate actions of the lower classes will act as the deux ex machina of this war. A crucial determinant will be the question as to whether populism is able to invent new slogans and counter-​hegemonic ideas to confront the hegemonic strategies of the propertied and powerful. Ironically, then, the fate of populism will depend more on the capability and the capacity of leadership. Sadly though, we may say in parenthesis that the class basis of populism may make that already difficult task even more difficult. In a situation where populists represent the various sections of labouring classes and petty and disorganised groups, the task of leadership calls for innovations and alternative visions. The unrelenting assault of neoliberalism makes the need for innovations urgent. The problem, to repeat, is clearly spelt out by the situation: How to combine the social and political realities and implications of the populist surge with the need for a modern prince, who will represent autonomy of a society, its collective will, and effectively make the state a faithful agency of society? We have to remember that the theory of hegemony with which the modern prince was associated in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks was preceded by his engagements with the problematic of the united front (1921–​24). The problematic of the united front was discussed repeatedly by the Third International from 1920 onwards as the latter wrestled with the issue of establishing leadership over the entire society by a minority group of revolutionaries. The focus on superstructures was in this context. Gramsci wrote, The determination, which in Russia was direct and drove the masses onto the streets for a revolutionary uprising, in central and western Europe is complicated by all these political superstructures, created by the greater

106  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics development of capitalism. This makes the action of the masses slower and more prudent, and therefore requires of the revolutionary party a strategy and tactics altogether more complex and long-​term than those which were necessary for the Bolsheviks in the period between March and November 1917.26 Hegemony –​the concept used by Russian revolutionaries and the Third International –​as a strategy was Gramsci’s answer. Yet the strategy known as hegemony could not unlock the bind. On one side, the state was to be considered as “hegemony fortified by coercion”, on the other side hegemony also presented in Gramscian thought a moment in which the philosophy and practice of society were in equilibrium or had fused. The concept was perhaps “overloaded.” It was interpreted as an order in which a certain way of life and thought was dominant. It would inform society’s morality, customs, religious and political principles, and intellectual connotations. As revolutionary attempts in Central and Eastern Europe failed, and worker-​peasant alliance in Russia was under serious strain, Gramsci saw the principle of hegemony as the connecting thread that could unify the revolutionary process across the divide between the East and West.. Whether Gramsci willed it or not, hegemony came to be interpreted as a gradualist strategy focusing on cultural transformation as the strategic road to power. We know the consequence. It led to reformism and an unbound commitment to parliamentarianism. The result is that today the Left is unable to make sense of new developments, present moments of possibilities, and forge new strategies. In this context, populism has returned to the political scene. It calls for new tactics to combine the state and the people, and the prince and the united front –​in other words, lending a new meaning to hegemony. Populism signifies the moment of new thinking on the question of power and transformation. The populist surge in politics as experienced in scores of countries today indicates the new ways power will be seized towards transformation. It is easy to deride the experiences –​big and small –​in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere, if we particularly recall the immediate years of decolonisation in Africa and Arab countries when militant anti-​colonialism, nationalism, and populism fused with each other. But any reality check will tell us that this was the historically determined path and the greater part of the world did not show any other way or possibility towards transformation. In country after country in an almost predictable mode, nationalism, sovereignty, socialistic ideas of heavy industrialisation, and anti-​colonialism came together in contradictory ways, achieving forms of independence while reproducing forms of dependency at the same time.27 On one hand this indicated the intractable issue of the peasant mode of production and small production units, and on the other hand the weak hold of the working class and even the national bourgeoisie in these decolonised societies.

Populations and Populism  107 Theorists like Franz Fanon or Ali Shariati attempted to work towards an exit from the closure that the moment of decolonisation had brought in. The basic problem however persisted, namely, how to escape the global clutches of capitalism and develop the national economies on the basis of a social reality that reflects the stubborn existence of petty production and informal production modes including peasant production. Neoliberalism has exacerbated the situation. With expansion of logistical economy marked by extraction activities and a return to primitive modes of accumulation, labour has assumed diversified forms.28 In any case, the old socialists in the fifties to seventies of the last century understood the problem much better than today’s post-​ Marxist theorists of hegemony. Only, the old socialists could not theorise it as the novel arrival of the people –​peasants and the unorganised labouring classes –​in the form of a politics of populism. It is important therefore to think of the genealogy of people conjuring themselves up through various traditions and temporalities. Thinkers and strategists now confront a cardinal lesson on power in the postcolonial time, namely, how “people” will be won over to the cause of transformation will depend on how “people” won power. The experiences of populism raise for us the question: It is the same question that drove Antonio Gramsci to seek answer in Machiavelli, who will be the modern prince today, who can avoid the tragic fate of Savonarola –​ the modern prince who will represent the collective will, the multitude, rule sagaciously and firmly, and give the multitude a new collective identity and a sense of autonomy, and at the same time a sense of representation? If the party cannot, at least the traditional parliamentary form of the Left parties, then can a popular movement give rise to such a leading organ? Can it inhere some of the features of a party and develop such leadership? Can it give birth to a new Prince? Make no mistake this is the matrix of the struggles of power today. Societies are being restructured and reconstituted over the corpse of the populist movements. Populists, who refuse to surrender to institutionalised majoritarian interests in politics, or defend the interests of small property owners and unorganised petty labourers, or conduct politics on the basis of various illegalities, will be marked, excluded, and confined. Populists who do not rectify will be punished. In France hundreds of Yellow Vests were beaten up and confined and made to languish in jails. In Greece the Syriza government in 2015 was threatened that they would be driven to penury and expelled from Europe. In Venezuela it is a question of sheer survival from one day to the next. Others are learning. But if for the populists this is a life and death issue, it is also a defining moment for the nation. Neither neoliberalism will be over, nor will challenges to the neoliberal order cease appearing. Unrelenting assault of neoliberalism will scatter productive classes. Circulation will be the the ever more crucial condition of production. Precarious work condition marks the popular segments of society. Defending small producing classes, labour engaged in extraction and circulation, and the disintegrating peasant

108  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics masses against massive burdens of debt and precarious life condition is the demand of the popular forces. This demand, the yearning for security of life, facilitates populist politics. Populism is produced from a crisis. It in turn produces a crisis of rule. New forms of collective action surface, targeting issues unanticipated by rulers, for instance an innocuous tax reform as in France. Associations, clubs, societies, groups, etc. start playing an important part. The ascendency of populist politics is a period of transformation and of growth of the means of collective action reminiscent of some of the earlier periods of contentious politics.29 Therefore, any discussion of alternatives to capitalism must engage with the question of political actors on the street because they are indispensable to any collective politics towards transformation. Such an engagement requires a fundamental theorisation of the phenomenon of collective action as a mass initiative capable of throwing up liberationist ideas. These collective actions facilitate the political articulation of subaltern classes. They also build class power within the society.30

Notes 1 Cited lines, words, and phrases in these two paragraphs are from Michel Foucault, “ ‘Omnes et Singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Stanford University, 10 and 16 October 1979, included in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–​1984, Vol. 3: Power, trans. Robert Hurley and others, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 298–​325. 2 Adapted from “motley crew” –​a phrase that occupies an important position in the chronicle by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Reprint, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2013), Chapter 7, “A Motley Crew in the American Revolution”; In an interview Marcus Rediker has explained the term: Out of (this) search for new concepts came the ‘motley crew’, a phrase that usually referred to the multi-​ethnic workers aboard a ship but had a much broader application, especially in Atlantic port cities, where workers of all nations congregated. ‘Motley crew’ makes it possible to think the heterogeneity of the social subject in a way not determined by the nation-​ state. The ‘motley crew’ represented a new kind of mobile collectivity that contained its own social force. ‘Motley crew’ is a useful concept for our times. In the eighteenth century, the ‘motley crew’ referred to a work group, a collective of people whose cooperation was essential to accomplish a particular task. That task could be sailing a ship, unloading a ship, or producing tobacco, rice or sugar on a plantation. The ‘motley crew’ was an informal work group and a fundamental constituent part, an atom, so to speak, of class organisation. It was a temporary work group, frequently disbanded after its task had been completed. The collective of sailors who completed a voyage dispersed into taverns on the waterfront. But motley crew also operated at a second level, which was social and political. Various groups of working people came together in what was called a motley mob

Populations and Populism  109 or a revolutionary crowd, a source of considerable power in eighteenth-​ century port cities … . (“A Motley Crew for our Times? Multiracial Mobs, History from below and the Memory of Struggle”, Radical Philosophy, Spring 2020 –​www.radica​lphi​loso​phy.com/​interv​iew/​a-​mot​ley-​crew-​for-​our-​times (accessed on 21 May 2022)) 3 The phrase taken from the title of Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 4 Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018). 5 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2007); see also, Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society (London: Verso, 2014). 6 For a Left Populism, p. 9. 7 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-​Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 344. 8 For a Left Populism, pp. 5–​7. 9 Ibid., p. 22. 10 Ibid., p. 36. 11 Ibid., p. 63. 12 Of his several writings on this, see, for instance, “The Question of Independence and Initiative within the United Front” (1938) in Selected Works of Mao Tse Tung, Volume 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1978) –​www.marxi​sts.org/​refere​nce/​ arch​ive/​mao/​selec​ted-​works/​vol​ume-​2/​mswv2​_​11.htm (accessed on 21 May 2022); Volume 2 has several other writings on the topic of the united front. 13 For a Left Populism, p. 67. 14 For commentaries on the populist dimension of the Syriza experiment in Greece, see, for instance, Ranabir Samaddar, A Postcolonial Enquiry into Europe’s Debt and Migration Crisis (Singapore: Springer, 2016), Chapter 1, pp. 1–​26; Stathis Gourgouris, “The Syriza Problem: Radical Democracy and Left Governmentality in Greece”, The Bullet, E-​ bulletin 1157 –​ www.socia​list​proj​ect.ca/​bul​let/​1152. php#conti​nue (accessed on 9 August 2015); Louis Jargow, “Greece: The New Euro zone Colony”, Dissident Voice, 9 November 2013 –​http://​dis​side​ntvo​ice.org/​ (accessed on 13 August 2015). 15 On popular politics around the agrarian question in colonial Bengal, Partha Chatterjee, Bengal, 1920–​1947: The Land Question (Kolkata: K.P. Bagchi, 1984); however in this rigorously worked out account in class terms, even when discussing the interface of agrarian discontent and communalism Chatterjee does not use in his analysis the term agrarian populism; same with Ranabir Samaddar, Paradoxes of the Nationalist Time: Political Essays on Bangladesh (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 2002), Chapter 2, pp. 31–​72); Samaddar discusses the making of the “publics” in an agrarian context and the role of utopias in the making of the nationalist public, yet he does not use the term populism. 16 A few of such readings: On Russian populism, Andrzej Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), Section 3, “Populism and Marxism”, pp. 132–​194; see also Walicki, A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-​ Rusiecka (Stanford,

110  Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics CA: Stanford University Press, 1979); also by Walicki, “Russia” in Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner (eds.), Populism: Its meanings and National Characteristics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), Chapter 3, pp. 62–​96; On agrarian populism in the US, Anna Rochester, The Populist Movement in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1943); also in the historical context, the well-​ known collection of essays by Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 17 Classic is the cases of such fusion in Latin America; Rafael Sanchez, Dancing Jacobins: A Venezuelan Genealogy of Latin American Populism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 18 On this see the discussion by Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci”, New Left Review, Volume 1 (100), November–​ December 1976, (pp. 5–​ 78), pp. 14–​ 18; Christine Buci-​ Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), pp. 171 ff and 175. 19 See for this the collection of reflections in Telos, 195 (Summer 2021), Global Perspectives on Constitutionalism and Populism; also Martin Krygier, Adam Czarnota, and Wojciech Sadurski, Anti-​Constitutional Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). 20 Charles Tilly, From Mobilisation to Revolution (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 210. 21 On this, Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 22 The experience of Yellow Vests uprising in France is a pointer to the inadequacy of our understanding. See on this, Richard Greeman, “Yellow Vests Struggle to Reinvent Democracy”, The Bullet, 17 April 2019 –​https://​socia​list​proj​ect.ca/​2019/​ 04/​yel​low-​vests-​strug​gle-​to-​reinv​ent-​democr​acy/​#more (accessed on 28 December 2019); Ranabir Samaddar, “Popular Uprising in Paris and Left’s Fear of Populism”, Alternatives, January2019 –​www.alt​erin​ter.org/​?Popu​lar-​Upris​ing-​in-​ Paris-​and-​Left-​s-​Fear-​of-​Popul​ism and www.eur​ope-​solida​ire.org/​spip.php?artic​ le47​236 (accessed on 10 March 2019). 23 Cited words are from Antonio Gramsci, “Notes on Italian History” in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1996), pp. 52–​55; for a political reading of Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, Anne Showstack Sassoon, Gramsci’s Politics (London: Croom Helm, 1980), Part III, Chapters 2–​ 8, pp. 109–​161. 24 For the concept and use of the word, “illegalism”, Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society, Lectures at the College de France, 1972–​1973, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2015). 25 Guido di Tella, Argentina under Peron, 1973–​76: The Nation’s Experience with a Labour-​based Government (London: MacMillan, 1983). 26 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings 1921–​26 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), p. 200. 27 See in this context, Sara Salem, “ ‘Stretching’ Marxism in the Postcolonial World: Egyptian Decolonisation and the Contradictions of National Sovereignty”, Historical Materialism, Volume 27 (4), December 2019, pp. 3–​28.

Populations and Populism  111 28 Ned Rossiter, Software, Infrastructure, Labour: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmare (New York: Routledge, 2016); also the series of studies –​Brett Neison and Ned Rossiter (eds.), Logistical Worlds: Infrastructure, Software, Labour (London: Open Humanities Press, 2021); Gay Hawkins and Ned Rossiter (eds.), Contagion, Labour, Economy, Habits, Data (London: Open Humanities Press, 2021); and Tsvetelina Hristova, Brett Neison, and Ned Rossiter (eds.), Data Farms: Circuits, Labour, Territory (London: Open Humanities Press, 2021). 29 Tilly, From Mobilisation to Revolution, p. 241. 30 For details in populism as an alternative to neoliberal order, see, R. Samaddar, Imprints of the Populist Time (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2022).

Section Three

Two Universalisms Imperial Imaginary and Imaginary of the Oppressed

6 Hegel’s India and Imperial Imaginary of the Universal

I In discussions on existing ideas as pathways to alternatives, one of the major challenges is to deal with the problematic of universal imagination of our journey. In this context, this chapter seeks to engage with Hegel’s writings on Indian philosophy to get a sense of the universalist assumptions in the imperial imaginary. This chapter poses the question: In what particular ways did the non-​European world (in this case ancient Indian thought) feature In Hegel’s idea of the universal in human journey? Is it enough to explain Hegel’s engagement with Indian thought with the customary bifurcation of “western” and “oriental” thoughts? Aakash Singh Rathore and Rimina Mohapatra have put the issue of Hegel’s interpretation of early Indian philosophy beyond the orientalist debates and divides.1 They do so by pointing out among others the similarities between Hegel’s own philosophy and his writings related to Indian philosophy. Perhaps these Indian texts which Hegel studied helped him to clarify his ideas and method, while his writings and notes on Indian philosophy shed new light on the Indian texts. These excerpts and fragments formed part of Hegel’s larger inquiries. They suggest that India formed an essential part of his broader formulations on philosophy, world history, aesthetics, religion, and of course logic. The relation was dialectical. We can begin with an instance: Hegel’s long commentary on the Bhagavad Gita showed his struggles with the distinctions between the ideas and images of the Gita and those of his own philosophy. One of his aims was to criticise the contemporary German Romantics by stressing what he thought to be deficiencies in the text. His engagement however went beyond the poem. It opened up on the themes of disinterested action, moral dilemma, and more importantly, pantheism. Also, the contrast he posed between a principle of ethics of freedom and one of ethics of caste opened new lines of enquiry. Was he aware that in this interface of two different ethics there could be the question of differential freedom? We do not know. If freedom was predicated by caste in early Indian philosophy, ethics of freedom could be similarly predicated by other forms of social hierarchy and domination, including DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-10

116  Two Universalisms racial, national, gender, or religious. In a similar manner, his writings prod interrogation of the complex relation of the universal, general, and abstract with the particular, specific, and concrete. Thus, if for Hegel Spirit was to be fully itself, mediated by history and the understanding of freedom, then the analysis of early Indian philosophy raised a problem intrinsic to West also. Beyond vacuous invocation of reason and freedom, history presented insurmountable challenge to the journey of the Spirit, which by nature should be a global journey. Why was it different in different cases? We have to see how Hegel tried to answer this point. This engagement also tells us how the Bhagavad Gita in its reception in Germany and the West in general in the nineteenth century became synonymous with Indian philosophy –​philosophy’s pure statement –​through translations and discussions by Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich and August Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and G.W.F. Hegel. The Gita came to acquire a Bible-​like status for Hindus, something that Gita never actually held in India. The received status of Gita has an overwhelming presence in Hegel’s discussion of early Indian philosophy. In fact, the evolution of the Gita in Indian spiritual and religious consciousness through ages is by itself a matter of controversy. Nonetheless Hegel managed to escape the daunting load of the “Indian Bible” and enter into a serious discussion of the Gita’s contents. The German Gita loses its religious garb to a considerable extent and becomes a philosophical text.2 We may ponder over this interesting fact. Hegel himself would have seen this conundrum in the way he had remarked in the preface to Phenomenology of Mind that the principle of dialectical evolution marking the philosophy of history could be applied to the history of philosophy also. And, this required that the diversity of philosophies or more correctly philosophical systems be seen as the progressive evolution of truth, and the ceaseless activity of their own respective natures making them at the same time moments of an organic unity. This further meant that the diversity and the difference be treated as necessary –​“one is as necessary as the other” –​ and thus the equal necessity of all moments “constituting… the life of the whole.” In Hegel’s words, Moreover, because philosophy has its being essentially in the element of that universality which encloses the particular within it, the end or final result seems, in the case of philosophy more than in that of other sciences, to have absolutely expressed the complete fact itself in its very nature… In the same way too, by determining the relation which a philosophical work professes to have to other treatises on the same subject, an extraneous interest is introduced, and obscurity is thrown over the point at issue in the knowledge of the truth. The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed

Hegel’s India and Imperial Imaginary of the Universal  117 to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety… But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole.3 How much of this sense of evolution, growth, and interdependence of various philosophies contributed to Hegel’s particular understanding of early Indian philosophy has been a matter of discussion among philosophers. In any case, Hegel’s idea of dialectics (as a system and method, and hence different from dialectic that is as the nature of a specific moment) was crucial in this understanding –​both in the sense of misperceptions and throwing new light on the texts he was studying. In short, the question will be: How much of the dialectic between two philosophies helps us to understand the inner dialectic within one philosophy? In that age when the Gita had become the Bible of India, Hegel had to engage with the theme of religion and philosophy, the genre of religious philosophy. Hegel had propounded Christianity as the thought of God. Yet, his investigations differed from Christian theology. They seemed to eschew all religious content. As if he was saying that in religion and religious philosophy there was too much of God, and proper philosophy had to expunge God, that is to say philosophy would become “atheist.” This problematic led him to discuss at length the issue of pantheism, the three headed divinity, and Being (that should ideally lead to freedom of the subject). The Homeric could be merged with the Biblical myth and thus the problematic of the origins and continuing relevance of Greek philosophy could be squared. But how this would be accomplished in case of early Indian philosophy? One way was to study the tradition of interpretation and argumentation through ages. But Hegel was unaware of later interpretations and had probably no or not much clue to the Nyaya doctrine or philosophy and Navyanyaya. He was blissfully ignorant of the riches of interpretation, argumentations, and the non-​religious mode of doing philosophy in India. To him, dialectics in Indian philosophy was stalled. Indian philosophy had not attained the knowledge of freedom of the subject. It could only say, “One who departs from the body while remembering Me, the Supreme Personality, and chanting the syllable Om, will attain the supreme goal.”4 This pushed him to a position where he had to labour over the burden of explaining if Indian philosophy was free from the operation of dialectics. Hegel came up with a novel answer, namely that Indian philosophy –​both Sankhya and Yoga –​ascends from religious formation to higher level and

118  Two Universalisms attains the most exalted depth, where knowledge absolves activity, the non-​ sensuous detached from the sensuous, universality from empirical multiplicity, and the sublime nature of thought from consciousness.5 Given the fact that Hegel’s history of philosophy and philosophy of history were bound by shared problematic –​the fundamental problematic of Spirit and its unfolding –​ we can see why Hegel chose to intervene in a specific way in discussions in Germany and elsewhere in Europe on early Indian philosophy. Hegel’s philosophy of history had emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century from the overwhelming presence of a primitive world view dominated by religion where being was created out of nothing and leading rapidly to a new millennium of thought. Yet the presence of religious authority proved too much. He took a path different from the Biblical views; he held said that the historical process of world cultures was moved by the “Absolute Sprit” and whatever was overtaken in the dialectical process of its moments was forever exiled in the “past.” The exiled past of India lay embroiled in caste philosophy and thoughts of the Supreme Being –​both enveloped by religious excursus. Thus, the exalted past was a moment in the development of philosophy that was over and never to come back. The moral consciousness as reflected in Krishna spoke of an inherent principle of individual self-​existence. But it is in the person of Arjuna that the principle was epitomised. It thus negated the self –​but only as individual self, and not as nature independent with laws of its own and holding man as captive. Nature reigned. The moral consciousness failed to become absolute spirit and thus become universal. This was Hegel’s verdict on early Indian philosophy. In this way, Hegel wrestled with his own doctrine to make sense of early Indian philosophy –​a negation of his views or laws expounded by him, and of which he remained a victim. His dialectics trapped him. The moment of engagement with early Indian philosophy became a moment in the development of philosophical thought, displaced and superseded by later philosophical events. He could not realise the limits of the dialectics which he had propounded, and limits that would finally ensnare him. This is because he could not answer: If the event of manifestation of absolute Spirit within its one-​dimensional structure, closed in time and space in one moral unit, limited the philosophical potential of Krishna-​Arjuna dialogue, would it not be true of his own system? Probably his answer was, in India the closure came due to two reasons: (a) limits of caste to divine scriptures and divinity, and (b) the absolute dissociation of the Being from concrete, particular events, or phenomena. Being was Spirit, Being was culture, and hence the impasse in Indian culture, as the latter progressively exhausted itself of philosophy and was mired in religious principles, customs, and a lower form of representations through art. Hegel was of course aware of the Buddhist idea of the correspondence of Being/​Non-​Being, yet his principle of “sublation” was not carried beyond his limited invocations. Indeed the invocation was dogmatic. Reason became “absolute Idea,” the “logical Idea,” the “Spirit” consciously aware of itself as its own world and the world as itself. This was dangerously

Hegel’s India and Imperial Imaginary of the Universal  119 close to Krishna’s invocation of the being in the Gita. Recall what Hegel wrote and the similarity with what Krishna said in the Gita, In the nature of existence as thus described − to be its own notion and being in one − consists logical necessity in general. This alone is what is rational, the rhythm of the organic whole: it is as much knowledge of content as that content is notion and essential nature. In other words, this alone is the sphere and element of speculative thought. The concrete shape of the content is resolved by its’ own inherent process into a simple determinate quality. Thereby it is raised to logical form, and its being and essence coincide; its concrete existence is merely this process that takes place… It is therefore needless to apply a formal scheme to the concrete content in an external fashion; the content is in its very nature a transition into a formal shape, which, however, ceases to be formalism of an external kind, because the form is the indwelling process of the concrete content itself. 6 The closure that Hegel faced and thought he had identified in the early Indian philosophy was pointed out by commentators like K.C. Bhattacharyya who wrote on alternative systems with indefinite boundaries in opposition to Hegel’s singular system that admitted no alternative system.7 But more importantly, Bhattacharyya and others spoke of subject and object in a new way. Subjectivity can be understood only in reference to object that is it is the consciousness of the object. “Consciousness prima facie thus stands for what can be roughly called the subject, in other words negatively characterised as being different from the object in the epistemic situation.” That is to say, “consciousness or subject is no object at all”… On the other hand, the “object is a meant entity and is different from subject… Pure consciousness is different from any metaphysical notion of the self.”8 In this way, a phenomenological problem was negotiated as an epistemological issue. This was possible because the closure called for an epistemological approach. We may note how Hegel had got himself into a corner with his sterile dialectic: God is commonly described as a Being, who is omniscient, omnipotent, and so forth. Hegel had said that this was already a mistake. If God was to be truly infinite, and unlimited, then God could not be a being, because a being, that is, one among others, was already limited by its relations to the others. It was not A, not B; and thus, it was not something that depended only on itself to make it what it was, and something would evidently be more fully itself without any need of reference. For Hegel, thus it was important for God to be infinite, as only with infinity God would be more himself or more fully real. A higher degree of reality that went with being self-​determining would mean achieving greater self-​determination. God was thus the fullest reality, achieved through the self-​determination. We can see the subject/​object duality had not been resolved by Hegel but only managed with cunning of logic.

120  Two Universalisms

II In the context of the Gita crucial therefore was a theory of being. In their concluding note in Hegel’s India, Rathore and Mohapatra refer to the preface to Phenomenology, where Hegel says, The true form in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of it. To contribute to this end, that philosophy might come closer to the form of science –​the goal being that might be able to relinquish the name of love of knowledge and be actual knowledge − that is what I have resolved to try.9 Here the problem is, how does one situate a theory of knowledge with a theory of Being or the subject, which is to say a theory of existence? Hegel’s answer in the words of Hippolyte, “It is necessary to… start straight off with the absolute identity of the subjective and the objective in knowledge. The knowledge of this identity is primary and it constitutes the basis of all true philosophic knowledge.”10 Yet when Hegel found the likely result in the idealism of the Indian texts beating his own idealist philosophy, he recoiled. The complete devouring of knowledge by existence (Because I exist I know) was a negation he was not prepared to accept. That relationship was important for him. For, as Aakash Singh Rathore and Rimina Mohapatra point out, in Science of Logic Hegel had argued that the “relationship between substance (being, the one, infinite, essence) and change (becoming, determinateness, finite, accidental, perishable, non-​essential) is not fully expressed in pantheistic systems.”11 Pantheism makes the finite dangerously close to be accepted as the main plank of being, and the knowledge of becoming always makes the being conditional, relative. The question for Hegel was: If the Indian thought had been able to philosophise to a great extent the issue of knowledge and identity, how could it sacrifice the notion of freedom –​freedom of the Spirit, of the self, the subject? Perhaps for him, the answer was that caste was against invocation of freedom and the presence of caste ruled out the negation of the particular.12 In this connection, we have to remember that Hegel had always invoked a certain kind of social spirit (culture, nation, freedom, etc.) in appreciating the development of philosophy. He had said, But men do not at certain epochs, merely philosophize in general, for there is a definite Philosophy which arises among a people, and the definite character of the standpoint of thought is the same character which permeates all the other historical sides of the spirit of the people that is most intimately related to them, and constitutes their foundation. The particular form of a Philosophy is thus contemporaneous with a particular constitution of the people amongst whom it makes its appearance, with their institutions and forms of government, their morality, their

Hegel’s India and Imperial Imaginary of the Universal  121 social life and the capabilities, customs and enjoyments of the same; it is so with their attempts and achievements in art and science, with their religions, war fares and external relationships, likewise with the decadence of the States in which this particular principle and form had maintained its supremacy, and with the origination and progress of new States in which a higher principle finds its manifestation and development. Mind in each case has elaborated and expanded in the whole domain of its manifold nature the principle of the particular stage of self-​consciousness to which it has attained. … Philosophy is one form of these many aspects. And which is it? It is the fullest blossom, the Notion of Mind in its entire form, the consciousness and spiritual essence of all things, the spirit of the time as spirit present in itself…13 Freedom is the essence of social spirit. Hence Hegel went on to say further, Philosophy begins where the universal is comprehended as the all-​ embracing existence, or where the existent is laid hold of in a universal form, and where thinking about thought first commences. Where, then, has this occurred? Where did it begin? That is a question of history. Thought must be for itself, must come into existence in its freedom, liberate itself from nature and come out of its immersion in mere sense-​perception; it must as free, enter within itself and thus arrive at the consciousness of freedom. Philosophy is properly to be commenced where the Absolute is no more in the form of ordinary conception, and free thought not merely thinks the Absolute but grasps its Idea… Thought, this universal determination which sets forth itself is an abstract determinateness; it is the beginning of Philosophy, but this beginning is at the same time in history, the concrete form taken by a people, the principle of which constitutes what we have stated above. If we say that the consciousness of freedom is connected with the appearance of Philosophy, this principle must be a fundamental one with those with whom Philosophy begins…14 Freedom one may say is the “mediating sublation” through which the inherent formal logic of Spirit unfolds (or the dialectic through which the Absolute is achieved), as well as the medium through which the goal in concrete is pursued,15 in short, freedom untarnished by vacuous abstraction and actualised by mediation and concretion.16 Yet one may ask, what explains the different degrees of the operation of the freedom principle? Hegel’s is closed circle because finally it resorts to a sociological explanation. Hegel would have perhaps said that this was the relation of philosophy to history. But we need to push the point further as to why Hegel had to resort to a social explanation. None of three principles Hegel deduced from the early Indian philosophy, namely, (a) dharma via ethical action, (b) yoga, spiritual practice, and (c) and Brahman, the crux of divinity, was inherently dependent on caste as a factor in acquiring knowledge.

122  Two Universalisms Indeed, they could be said to explain caste. For instance, duty or obligation would follow from dharma; the ability of the particular or the determinate to unite with the Absolute would flow from yoga; and divinity that had the character of trinity (giving birth to, caring and rearing, and destroying so as to unite again) would follow from Brahman. The early Indian philosophy must have baffled Hegel with its tightly closed system, beating Hegel’s at its own game. Hegel tried to find fissure in the symbolic practices, such as fantastic symbolism in fine arts, where he found confused intermingling of the Absolute and its externally envisaged existence. Hegel realised that there was cleavage between the world of fantasy and that of the Absolute. As if there was a separation of existences: Leave to God what is His, but in the world of fantasy do not ask for full correspondence. This was not the message of the Gita, and Hegel was left wandering how to explain the fantastic symbolism in terms of his understanding of the Gita or his own philosophy.17 Once again dialectics as the master key of phenomenological understanding was left wanting. Its form proved sterile and fruitless. Aakash Singh Rathore and Rimina Mohapatra cite Hegel who commented in exasperation in the Philosophy of the Fine Art, the spiritual is throughout rooted in (perceptual) sense, the meanest objects are placed on the same plane as the highest, true definition is wrecked, the Sublime is lowered to the conception of mere immeasurability, and that is which is the original material of mythos for the most part vanishes before our eyes in the fantastic dreams of a restless and inquisitive imaginative power, and modes of shaping the same devoid of all intelligent purpose.18 To Hegel, the root of this anarchy in India then lay in the specific way religion functioned. Divinity and worldliness came together resulting in an irrational combination of the sacred and the profane. Indian art in attempting to capture the universality of the Absolute resorted to a measureless extension of images, with divine and human attributions running into each other backward and forward in a continuous confusion.19 And finally, in the vast plurality of divinities based on personifications and representations, and in such finite and specific determinations, it was difficult to see how the absolute quality of the infinite could be preserved. Hegel made a double judgment. Endless particularities derived from Nature and pantheism as symbolised in art made the latter after a point meaningless from the point of consciousness. They remained fantasy. On the other hand, a religion that produced only endless symbols and failed to negate them in the process of abstraction and reaching the Absolute failed to become a religion that would produce philosophy. It could not disconnect from the world. Hegel wrote, Now if the religious man considers external ends and the externality of the whole matter in accordance with which these things are profitable for

Hegel’s India and Imperial Imaginary of the Universal  123 an Other, the natural determinateness, which is the point of departure, appears indeed to be only for an Other. But this, more closely considered, is its own relation, its own nature, the immanent nature of what is related, its necessity, in short. Thus it is that the actual transition to the other side, which was formerly designated as the moment of selfness, comes about for ordinary religious thought. Religious feeling, accordingly, is forced to abandon its argumentative process; and now that a beginning has once been made with thought, and with the relations of thought, it becomes necessary, above all things to be thought, to demand and to look for that which belongs to itself namely, first of all consistency and necessity, and to place itself in opposition to that standpoint of contingency. And with this, the principle of selfness at once develops itself completely. “I,” as simple, universal, as thought, am really relation since I am for myself, am self-​consciousness; the relations too are to be for me. To the thoughts, ideas which I make my own, I give the character which I myself am. I am this simple point, and that which is for me I seek to apprehend in this unity.20 In short, at one level, his complaint was that divinity was completely detached from the particulars in early Indian thought, and hence abstraction was incomplete. At another level, the complaint was that the particularities were too many, too much, too overwhelming, preventing in the process the formation of religious consciousness that would severe from worldly consciousness. The dialectics of Spirit was not functioning properly, and Nature was able to dominate thought. And yet curiously, notwithstanding all these, he had to say to defend his thesis that the operation of the principle of abstraction was present in ancient time. He said, We cannot… consider the subject merely according to its finiteness, to its contingent life, but in as much as it has the infinite absolute object as its content… God, in like manner, must not be considered for Himself, for man only knows of God in relation to consciousness; and thus the unity and inseparability of the two determinations —​of the knowledge of God and self-​consciousness —​even presupposes what is expressed in identity, and that dreaded identity itself is contained in it.21 Hegel’s disparate writings do not make a clear case of what and how he thought of early Indian philosophy, till he got a chance at a developed stage of his thought to study and write, The Episode of the Mahabharata Known by the name Bhagavad-​Gita (1827).22 The importance of this long essay in Hegel’s writings on India is not only because it is detailed and stands on its own and not as part of a general exposition but also because it comes quite late in his life when his system is already developed. Hegel’s other writings on India are as fragments, parts of his famous analyses. We may say that while his commentaries on India as parts of these writings contributed to the development

124  Two Universalisms of his views, The Episode of the Mahabharata Known by the name Bhagavad-​ Gita by Wilhelm Von Humboldt is a result of this development, where the full range of his theory is brought to bear upon early Indian philosophy.

III We have to look closely in the way history and philosophy related in Hegel’s understanding of the Gita. He found in the Gita a question to be asked, namely, was there any divine instruction, and hence was there any sense, in war and destruction? He had to find an answer in the perspective of the relation between man and history, and thus it was be a problem of all the time. Time was important for Hegel in the enquiry into Gita, because he too had to answer in the Napoleonic (and post-​Napoleonic) age, was there any sense in the destruction of civilisation made by man himself ? Why does man have to destroy his own creation in course of his own history? As we know, this was the famous question in the Gita, and this was the question raised by Hegel also. The difference in response seems to stem from the fact that while the Supreme Being in the Gita stands outside the universe, above the universe, to Hegel the Spirit is in the universe and history, indeed embodying the totality of life functions of this world. In the Gita, the lower aspect of the Absolute is united with the world, the higher aspect is transcendent.23 As Charles Taylor explained, for Hegel, identity in the Spirit cannot exist without the world, and yet it is also its opposition, for the world as externality represents dispersal. The Spirit has to overcome it.24 The difference then is that in Hegel the Absolute -​through creation and man’s history -​becomes conscious of Itself and attains self-​knowledge; in Gita, God through the individual being, only returns to Himself by overcoming history and the present. Self-​knowledge is attained beyond history and beyond the process of becoming in the world.25 To Hegel, awareness meant that man is I, a subject, confronting the material world as objects. The highest stage of this awareness, now better called consciousness, is Reason, which is higher than understanding, the lower form. This can be summarised as, Man as spirit is the unity of soul and consciousness. The characteristics of spirit in man are knowing, thinking, and willing. The aim of knowing and thinking is to acknowledge and to realize that all objects are the expression of the spirit.26 The difference is in the way the relation to history is conceived. In Hegel, one can notice, history is however only the sign name of politics. Thus in Hegel’s theory of history the State does not refer to a certain state. The State is the state of his ideal. What comes at the end of history is not community as such, but a community, a state, which for the first time is fully adequate to the concept, to freedom, and to reason. In the State, the spirit progresses through history. And, the state as community embodying reason has to be lived as an

Hegel’s India and Imperial Imaginary of the Universal  125 organic whole; it cannot be seen simply as an aggregation of its elements, be these groups or individuals. The role of the estates is to achieve the essential goal of uniting private individuals to the state, to make the former identify with and participate in the power of the State. It is to bring private will and consciousness focused on the whole and its ends. But contrast this with early Indian philosophy, say in Arthashastra, where the king is divine; he represents the Absolute. His duty is not to do his own will but to preserve dharma. The political duties are accordingly formulated. Dharma enunciates duties, and thus the warrior caste must fight wars to maintain dharma in the society. But dharma is not exactly the ideal state, but first, conformity of individual actions with the higher principle of order,27 and second, the community, which represents dharma, but which by itself may not be important. The community to which the individuals should unite themselves is for the Gita the castes to which each individual belongs. With some exaggeration, we can say then that politics has no place in the unfolding of the Absolute. Dharma is post-​political; it has left politics and thus history by the wayside. But Hegel’s Spirit cannot abjure politics and history. That is the medium through which the State will become the embodiment of reason and virtue. Crucial it seems in this confusing, comparing, and overlapping discussion of Spirit (in Hegel’s philosophy) and the Absolute (the Brahman, in the Gita) is the issue of abstraction –​its principle, necessity, operation, and reach. Hegel’s observations on the specific operation of the principle of abstraction in the Gita clarify his own theory, but perhaps too late in the day. Thus, he said that in Gita the issue of contemplative meditation produced from abstraction was in itself the “momentum of negation,” which is to say, abstraction producing its negation.28 Therefore, the “creative power is that of contemplation,” which produces “longing in thought” and “dwells in heart through reason,” recognised as the “connection of being and non-​being.”29 Contemplative meditation aims to unite with the Brahman, to become Bramhan (which is probably deification), and this then is the disappearance of objectivity. Explaining contemplative meditation in this way Hegel had to strive throughout the long essay as to how abstraction was a negation, yet not a negation that kills objectivity. Abstraction in the Gita with a promise of high philosophy finally fails because the subject that emerges through this process will not have any relation with the object. Therefore, Hegel commented, “Pure Being is rather because of its abstract character, a finite category only.”30 To Hegel, this monotheism is actually pantheism, because the creature is not being distinguished from creator, and with the Being of beings immanent and identical with them and thus having an undefined identity, the whole philosophy of Gita marks the imperfection of the category of substance. The substance is not substantial at all, it is without subjectivity, it is therefore not concrete, not the Spirit. The individual subject is an empty form, mere personification. It is an objectless determination –​an enormous abstraction to the point of absurdity. Having introduced the theme of contemplative meditation (yoga), Hegel had to try to link it with reason (Sankhya) and face the whole question of abstraction.

126  Two Universalisms He was uneasy in his explanations because he found that Gita presented to him another kind of abstraction, contradicting his own notion of the same. Clearly he had not realised that abstraction too could be subject to dialectical realities. Transcendence could become a rotten apple, an empty gesture, at best an “inferior perfection.”31 Finally, Hegel noted that this kind of transcendence implied, and the Gita had emphasised, an indifference to the results of action, and thus had an element of moral intention. Yet, he found, this was too general, and this unspecified generality was of a formal and dubious nature. The moral dimension had no Spirit to invoke, no Spirit emerged out of the actions; hence there was no development of man. By asking this, Hegel was asking, and we are repeating the question: Why should man destroy through war his own society, his own creation? What was the higher purpose in the East behind killings and slaughters? Where was the Napoleon of the East, the spirit of the age, creating anew through destruction? This was an illusory poser. In Gita, he found divinity and yet the end of man. He found the Absolute and yet an abstraction as its basis that cancelled all realities. He found war and politics, but with no purpose except the duty to fight war as a station in life. He found action, but only as phantom acts ordained by the Absolute and thus action to be followed by renunciation. He found morals but only as obligation and not access to freedom. He found community, but it was community in the form of caste that could never be the spirit of God (purusha). He found history but completely bypassed. And, all these he found dangerously close to what he had theorised of the history of the man in the West in terms of abstraction, spirit, ethics, negation, and the rest. Either his analysis of the Gita had to take him to the “generic man,” “man as species being”32 or as this chapter has tried to show, the engagement had to end in deadlock. In this case it was the second outcome.

IV We may ask: Is there then something living and something dead in Hegel –​ a question that his engagement with the Gita brings to life?33 It is difficult to think of Hegel’s treatment of India outside of the Orientalist critique. One can randomly choose any theme –​for instance, in the Philosophy of Right his dismissal of a religion for what he thought to be its one sidedness,34 or his remarks on the victory of Clive in India.35 Violence reflected the necessary stages of the journey which the Spirit passes through to realise its higher forms, and Napoleonic violence for him reflected the superiority of the French republican state and its correspondence to the Spirit over other European state forms. The Gita was thus a-​historical to him. The Absolute was not mediated by history and absolved any responsibility of violence, as Krishna absolved Arjuna of any responsibility for the violence in war. In India, the history that featured war and violence did not count in man’s realisation of the Supreme.36

Hegel’s India and Imperial Imaginary of the Universal  127 Yet history has its way of catching up and making fool of one. Thus in less than hundred years of Hegel’s writing on Gita, the holy book exploded on the face of the colonial rulers in India. Bombs were hurled, mutinies were organised, and in the name of the book, nationalist revolutionaries went to gallows. To destroy the evil, patriots were born. Disinterested action transformed into a theory for highly motivated actions. Discussion was carried out in anti-​colonial journals such as the Jugantar (1906–​08) on the relevance of the epic battle of the Mahabharata and the Gita. Within two decades of that, Dalit or low caste voices started clamouring for justice and refused to accept the caste centric anchor of Gita. Equally instructive for us, Gandhi, later to be called the father of the nation, refused to accept that Gita was any historical narrative of a war and argued that it was essentially a gospel of selfless action (anasaktiyoga), and precisely in this way turned Gita into a text of actions whose fruits the actors must not be greedy for and must be ready to renounce.37 In the midst of the debates over the use of violence in anti-​colonial struggle, this is how Gandhi made sense of the Gita, while the nationalist revolutionaries turned to the same Gita in defence of their revolutionary heroism. Yet, something else happened few decades later. While, independent India’s constitution recognised indirectly the autonomy of social life under the political guardianship of a centralised state, battles started within this “social life” over democratising life. Politics was dragged in; the state was embroiled in the conflicts. Hegel need not have feared; social life in India had not turned its back on history. Finally, if the philosophical choice was between an adventurous spirit exemplifying the mission of man (with politics thus included in the global journey of spirit) and surrender to the Absolute through contemplative meditation and thus realisation of the Absolute through the negation of the material world, it involved then a choice of life. The choice was around the responsibility of action. Hegel’s commentary suggests, contra Gita philosophy was this choice –​the choice of a certain form of existence featured by actions, through which Spirit progressed. Philosophy is thus the surface of a present reality, screening of this reality, and a suggestion of a distinct way of understanding the implications of this reality. Yet a philosopher reflecting on philosophy cannot avoid disputing, negating, interpreting, etc., in short taking recourse to rhetoric. Hegel’s philosophical commentaries on India thus combine philosophy and rhetoric. But philosophy is different from rhetoric, which is precisely an art to be deployed independent of the audience. Rhetoric progresses by alternating between good and evil, just and unjust, in other words by establishing differences. Hegel perfected this mode, even though the iron law of the dialectic of philosophy and rhetoric bound him and his claims to philosophical truth. His constant hesitation in making judgments was evidence of his subjection to the dialectics of philosophy and rhetoric. It shows how he failed in his task of making “philosophy as critique of a domain of illusion, which challenges it to constitute itself as a true discourse.”38 If philosophy was a

128  Two Universalisms mode of the constitution of the subject by him/​herself, Hegel had got himself into a bind by linking Indian history with world history or making early Indian philosophy a part of the world journey of Spirit. If he had said that India had no history or no philosophy, or at any rate not a part of global history or philosophy, he would have escaped the bind. However, in that case, he needed to admit that world history was unable to cover many parts of the world such as India, or only certain specific philosophical practices could give us glimpses of the Spirit, which meant in turn that certain philosophical practices had excluded the divine, the spirit. The claim of the Spirit to be global would have become spurious. Either way Hegel was caught in a paradox. If this was the fate of an imperial imaginary of the universal, were there other imaginaries of the universal? Is there a different way to achieve universality of a thought? We move on to the universals of the oppressed.

Notes 1 Aakash Singh Rathore and RiminaMohapatra, Hegel’s India: A Reinterpretation, with Texts (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017). 2 Name adopted from Bradley L. Herling, The German Gita: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German Reception of Indian Thought, 1778–​1831 (London: Routledge, 2006). 3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), trans. James Black Baillie (New York: MacMillan, 1910), “Preface”, Para 2 –​www.nat​ural​thin​ ker.net/​trl/​texts/​Hegel,G.W.F/​Hegel,_​G.W.F._​-​_​Th​e_​Ph​enom​enol​ogy_​Of_​M​ind. pdf (accessed on 25 June 2017), p. 2. 4 Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God (with commentary by Swami Mukundananda), Chapter 8, Verse 13 –​ www.holy-​bhaga​vad-​gita.org/​chap​ter/​8 (accessed on 24 March 2021). 5 This is noted by Bhikkhu Nanajivako, “Hegel and Indian Philosophy”, Synthesis Philosophica, Volume2 (3), 1987, pp. 203–​224. 6 The Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 21–​22. 7 Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya, Studies in Philosophy, Volume II (Kolkata: Progressive Publishers, 1958). 8 K.L. Sharma, “The Problem of Meaning and K.C. Bhattacharyya”, Indian Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 8 (4), 1981, (pp. 457–​463), p. 457 –​www.unip​ une.ac.in/​snc/​cssh/​ipq/​engl​ish/​IPQ/​6-​10%20volu​mes/​08%2004/​PDF/​8-​4-​3.pdf (accessed on 28 June 2017). 9 Hegel’s India: A Reinterpretation with Texts, p. 79; Baillie’s translation: The systematic development of truth in scientific form can alone be the true shape in which truth exists. To help to bring philosophy nearer to the form of science − that goal where it can lay aside the name of love of knowledge and be actual knowledge − that is what I have set before me. The inner necessity that knowledge should be science lies in its very nature; and the adequate and sufficient explanation for this lies simply and solely in the systematic exposition of philosophy itself. (The Phenomenology of Mind, p. 4)

Hegel’s India and Imperial Imaginary of the Universal  129 10 Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1946), trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 5. 11 Hegel’s India, p. 75. 12 Ibid., p. 4. 13 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1833–​36), trans. Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Book Edition, 1995), Section B, Chapter 1 (c), “Philosophy as the Thought of Its Time” –​www. marxi​sts.org/​refere​nce/​arch​ive/​hegel/​works/​hp/​hpint​rob.htm#B1c (accessed on 10 June 2017). 14 Ibid., Section B, Chapter 3 (a), “Freedom of Thought as a First Condition” –​www. marxi​sts.org/​refere​nce/​arch​ive/​hegel/​works/​hp/​hpintr​ob3.htm#B3a (accessed on 10 June 2017). 15 Hegel’s India, p. 8. 16 Ibid., p. 11. 17 Hegel thought, … the sensuous element itself has here no expression which could not be that of the spiritual element, just as, conversely, sculpture can represent no spiritual content which does not admit throughout of being adequately presented to perception in bodily form. Sculpture should place the spirit before us in its bodily form and in immediate unity therewith at rest and in peace; and the form should be animated by the content of spiritual individuality. And so the external sensuous matter is here no longer manipulated, either in conformity with its mechanical quality alone, as a mass possessing weight, nor in shapes belonging to the inorganic world, nor as indifferent to colour, etc.; but it is wrought in ideal forms of the human figure, and, it must be remarked, in all three spatial dimensions. (The Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. and ed. Bernard Bosanquet (London: Kegan Paul, 1886), Project Gutenberg E-​book, Chapter 5, Section 4 b, p. 162 –​www.gutenb​erg.org/​files/​46330/​ 46330-​h/​46330-​h.htm#Page_​133 (accessed on 11 June 2017)) 18 Hegel’s India, p. 35. 19 In Hegel’s words, Art creates the world as spiritual and as open to view. It is the Indian Bacchus  –​ not the clear self-​knowing spirit but the inspired spirit which envelops itself in sensation and image, wherein the fearful is hidden. Its element is vision –​but vision is the immediacy, which is not mediated. This element is therefore not adequate to the spirit. Art can therefore give its forms only a limited spirit. (The Philosophy of Spirit(Jena Lectures, 1805–​06), Part III C, “Art, Religion, and Science” –​www.marxi​sts.org/​refere​nce/​arch​ive/​hegel/​ works/​jl/​ch03c.htm (accessed on 29 June 2017)) 20 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. Ebenezer Brown Speirs and Burdon Sanderson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1895), “Introduction to the Philosophy of religion”, A I, “The Severance of Religion from the Free, Worldly Consciousness” –​www.marxi​sts.org/​refere​nce/​ arch​ive/​hegel/​works/​re/​parta.htm (accessed on 12 June 2017).

130  Two Universalisms 21 Ibid., A III, “The Relation of the Philosophy of Religion to the Current Principles of the Religious Consciousness”, Section 3, “Philosophy and Immediate Knowledge”. 22 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, On the Episode of the Mahabharata Known by the Name Bhagavad Gita by Wilhelm Von Humboldt (hereafter On the Episode of the Mahabharata), trans. and ed. Herbert Herring (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 1995), reprinted in Section “Texts” in Hegel’s India (pp. 87–​139). 23 In contrast, in all these theorisations of Hegel the real historical figure of Napoleon played a crucial role. Napoleon became the figure of the Spirit. Alexandre Kojeve wrote, By understanding himself through the understanding of the totality of the anthropogenetic historical process, which ends with Napoleon and his contemporaries, and by understanding this process through his understanding of himself, Hegel caused the completed whole of the universal real process to penetrate into his individual consciousness, and then he penetrated this consciousness. (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols [Cornell, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980], p. 35) 24 Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 104. 25 Bhagavad Gita, Chapter II, verse 16, “There is no becoming from the non-​existent, nor any un-​becoming from the existent. The boundary between these two has been perceived by those who see the basic principles”. There are different translations of this verse. For instance one translation renders it in the following way: “The unreal has no being; there is no non-​being of the Real; the truth about both these has been seen by the Knowers of the Truth (or the Seers of the Essence)” –​ Swami Chinmayananda, “Vedanta’s Definition of the Real and Unreal: Srimad Bhagawad Gita” (n.d.) –​https://​shlo​kam.org/​bhaga​vad-​gita/​2-​16/​ (accessed on 2 January 2022). 26 S. Reksosusilo, “Man and History in the Bhagavad Gita and Hegel: A Comparative Study”, Studia Philosophica et Theologica,Volume 5 (1), March 2005, (pp. 1–​ 21), p. 8. 27 Thus the Gita, Chapter III, verse 15, would say, “Know that action arises from the Vedas, and the Vedas from the Imperishable. Therefore, the all pervading Vedas ever rest in sacrifice.” 28 On the Episode of the Mahabharata, p. 135. 29 Ibid., p. 134. 30 Ibid., p. 129. 31 Ibid., p. 102. 32 Recall Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), p. 31. 33 Question raised by George Armstrong Kelly in his review of Charles Taylor’s Hegel, Political Theory, Volume 4 (3), August 1976, (pp. 377–​381), p. 378. 34 Hegel remarked, Negative freedom, or freedom of the understanding, is one-​sided, yet as this one-​sidedness contains an essential feature, it is not to be discarded. But the defect of the understanding is that it exalts its one-​sidedness to the sole highest

Hegel’s India and Imperial Imaginary of the Universal  131 place. This form of freedom frequently occurs in history. By the Hindus, e.g., the highest freedom is declared to be persistence in the consciousness of one’s simple identity with himself, to abide in the empty space of one’s own inner being, like the colourless light of pure intuition, and to renounce every, activity of life, every purpose and every idea. In this way man becomes Brahma; there is no longer any distinction between finite man and Brahma, every difference having been swallowed up in this universality. A more concrete manifestation of this freedom is fanaticism of political and religious life. Of this nature was the terrible epoch of the French Revolution, by which all distinctions in talent and authority were to have been superseded. In this time of upheaval and commotion any specific thing was intolerable. Fanaticism wills an abstraction and not an articulate association. It finds all distinctions antagonistic to its indefiniteness, and supersedes them. Hence in the French Revolution the people abolished the institutions which they themselves had set up, since every institution is inimical to the abstract self-​consciousness of equality. (Philosophy of Right (1820), trans. Thomas Malcolm Knox (London: Clarendon Press, 1952), “Introduction”, Section 5, p. 15) 35 Alluding to Clive’s victory in Bengal in 1757 Hegel said, The true courage of civilised nations is readiness for sacrifice in the service of the state, so that the individual counts as only one amongst many. The important thing here is not personal mettle but aligning oneself with the universal. In India five hundred men conquered twenty thousand who were not cowards, but who only lacked this disposition to work in close co-​operation with others. (Philosophy of Right, Section 327, p. 157; see on this, TeshaleTibebu, Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011), p. 211) 36 On this see, Ranajit Guha’s commentary on Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History in History at the Limit of World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), Chapter 3, “The Prose of History or the Invention of World History”, pp. 24–​47. 37 Mahadev Desai, The Gospel of Selfless Action, or, the Gita according to Gandhi (Ahmedabad: VivekJitendrabhai Desai, NavajivanMudranalaya, 1946), pp. 11–​ 12, p. 128 –​www.mkgan​dhi.org/​ebks/​gita-​accord​ing-​to-​gan​dhi.pdf (accessed on 28 June 2017); also “Actions do not affect me, nor am I concerned with the fruits thereof. He who recognizes Me as such is not bound by actions” –​The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi (Blacksburg, VA: Wilder Publications, 2011), p. 28. 38 Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, Lectures at the College de France, 1982–​83, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 354.

7 Annihilation of Caste and Universalism of the Oppressed

I Imperial imaginary of the universal relegates any transformative discourse originating in the postcolonial world to a particular or local status. The local does not produce the universal. The particular is genuine, but local. Some have taken this concern seriously. Taking the cue ironically from Hegel the high priest of the universal, they have spoken of the “concrete universal.”1 Hegel’s tripartite division of the Logic into a logic of “being,” that of “essence,” and finally of “the concept” indicates specific spheres or modes of conceptual as well as ontological determinacy. If the particulars fall outside the universal determinacy they hold in common, then the form of universality is other than its content, which are the particulars. Thus, on the one hand, the very particularity that is supposed to be accounted for by the universal falls outside the latter, and on the other hand insofar as the universal stands over and against the particulars subsumed under it, it too can only be something particular. Hegel’s has been seen rightly as a philosophy of abstract universality signalling totalising subsumption of particulars under an all-​ encompassing universal spirit. Therefore, we need to think anew through the problem of “the concrete universal” –​the mark of explicit determinacy and discard Hegel’s preoccupation with the implicit logic of the universal. This chapter continues the discussion of the universal introduced in the previous chapter and is written in the background of this concern of concrete universal. It suggests that the problem is not around “universals,” but the disinclination to accept the possibility that concrete thoughts originating in the colonial and postcolonial world too can negotiate histories and gain universal value. In other words, the question is not that the universal has to be concrete, but that the process of concrete determination attains universal relevance, significance. The universal is thus not a passive exemplification of a neutral universality, but a concrete determination attaining its broader significance through a series of other concrete determinations. Indeed in this way, the emancipative thoughts of the colonised originating in particular conditions and aiming at resolving particular questions have left for us a heritage of global validity. DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-11

Annihilation of Caste and Universalism of the Oppressed  133 In this context, this chapter picks up a distinct text, B.R. Ambedkar’s (1891–​ 1956) address, Annihilation of Caste (1936). The chapter draws attention to some of the sections of this remarkable tract to show that its messages aimed at wider audiences by way of untying particular questions and the resolutions of those particular questions. This is what has ensured global relevance to what Ambedkar wrote nearly ninety years ago. The chapter suggests that the emancipative ideas growing within the colonial and postcolonial milieu have much to offer in terms of a transformative thinking of the future, because these ideas attain universality not through an espousal of universal principles, but through determining particular questions of society and politics. The determination of the concrete has been the way to attaining universal significance. This determination is not however a one-​dimensional process. Several determinations mark this concrete process of determination. It is through this concrete process that a universal emerges. In the case of this remarkable manifesto, the universal ideal of non-​discrimination, equality, justice, abolition of race, caste, and colonialism emerges through concrete determinations of the associated questions. Ambedkar combats caste as the main form of religious, racial, and colonial oppression. The task is difficult, since struggle against caste oppression and discrimination is at the same time a struggle against religious injunctions and principles. Ambedkar demonstrates the paradox of the enunciation of the universal. He is sceptical towards the possibility of enunciating the universal that works as a tool of domination, yet through his critique he produces an ideal of the universal that has become a fact of common sense in postcolonial contemporary life –​in India and many other countries. He did not set out to erect a parallel and competing universal. Yet in his work, the determination of a concrete universal (related to caste, religion, and colonialism) remains an inescapable demand –​in politics and notably in practice. The universal of the dominant is untenable. Not to enunciate the concrete universal through encounters with concrete problems is impossible.2 It is not just a case of conflict of universalities. It is a case of the relation between the idea of domination and the enunciation of a universal. The paradox constitutes the life of universality and the productive path that thinkers like Ambedkar took to lay out their visions of an alternative future.

II Let us reflect on some of the implications of B.R. Ambedkar’s arguments in The Annihilation of Caste on the question of universalism. This chapter will consider three important ones. First, dwelling on the question of the supposed polarity between political reform and social reform, Ambedkar wrote, [1:] The path of social reform, like the path to heaven (at any rate, in India), is strewn with many difficulties. Social reform in India has few friends and

134  Two Universalisms many critics. The critics fall into two distinct classes. One class consists of political reformers, and the other of the Socialists. [2:] It was at one time recognized that without social efficiency, no permanent progress in the other fields of activity was possible; that owing to mischief wrought by evil customs, Hindu Society was not in a state of efficiency; and that ceaseless efforts must be made to eradicate these evils. It was due to the recognition of this fact that the birth of the National Congress was accompanied by the foundation of the Social Conference. While the Congress was concerned with defining the weak points in the political organisation of the country, the Social Conference was engaged in removing the weak points in the social organisation of the Hindu Society. For some time the Congress and the Conference worked as two wings of one common activity, and they held their annual sessions in the same pandal. [3:] But soon the two wings developed into two parties, a ‘political reform party’ and a ‘social reform party’, between whom there raged a fierce controversy. The ‘political reform party’ supported the National Congress, and the ‘social reform party’ supported the Social Conference. The two bodies thus became two hostile camps… [4:] It was, however, evident that the fortunes of the Social Conference were ebbing fast. The gentlemen who presided over the sessions of the Social Conference lamented that the majority of the educated Hindus were for political advancement and indifferent to social reform… [5:] This indifference, this thinning of its ranks, was soon followed by active hostility from the politicians... the spirit of enmity went to such a pitch that when the Social Conference desired to erect its own pandal, a threat to burn the pandal was held out by its opponents. Thus in the course of time the party in favour of political reform won... [7:]… There were many who were happy that the victory went to the Congress. But those who believe in the importance of social reform may ask, Is (such) an argument… final? Does it prove that the victory went to those who were in the right? Does it prove conclusively that social reform has no bearing on political reform?3 In this way, to make a fundamental point, namely, that freedom is empty without social emancipation from bondage and caste oppression, Ambedkar brings in the duality of politics/​society or political reform/​social reform or upper caste nationalist politicians/​social reformers who wanted to do away with discriminations in society. More importantly, the point: politics that ignores social discrimination and caste oppression cannot do any good to the colonised. For even once, there is no universal theory of equality and dignity here; on the other hand, Ambedkar is confronting the universality of liberal constitutional politics with the sword of social reform. In the later part of the address, however, he even contests what goes on in the nature of reform –​reform of the caste system, reform of religious practices, or reform of the religion. He says, none of these items on the reformist agenda will

Annihilation of Caste and Universalism of the Oppressed  135 work. These concrete determinations have implications for a universal cry for justice. Ambedkar continues with the same style of determining the concrete relation –​this time between religion and discrimination and oppression. Let us hear him as he argues that the party of social reform lost out because it operated within the confines of a religion and did not break out of the stranglehold of religion: [15:] The Social Conference was a body which mainly concerned itself with the reform of the high-​caste Hindu family. It consisted mostly of enlightened high-​caste Hindus who did not feel the necessity for agitating for the abolition of Caste, or had not the courage to agitate for it. They felt quite naturally a greater urge to remove such evils as enforced widowhood, child marriages, etc.—​evils which prevailed among them and which were personally felt by them. They did not stand up for the reform of the Hindu Society. The battle that was fought centred round the question of the reform of the family. It did not relate to social reform in the sense of the break-​up of the Caste System. It… was never put in issue by the reformers. That is the reason why the Social Reform Party lost. [16:] I am aware that this argument cannot alter the fact that political reform did in fact gain precedence over social reform. But the argument has this much value (if not more): it explains why social reformers lost the battle. It also helps us to understand how limited was the victory which the ‘political reform party’ obtained over the ‘social reform party’, and to understand that the view that social reform need not precede political reform is a view which may stand only when by social reform is meant the reform of the family. That political reform cannot with impunity take precedence over social reform in the sense of the reconstruction of society, is a thesis which I am sure cannot be controverted.4 Ambedkar goes further and makes a significant observation without any grand declaration and only by way of putting a section heading (section 4), “Caste is not just a division of labour; it is a division of labourers.” He writes under that section: [5:] There are many occupations in India which, on account of the fact that they are regarded as degraded by the Hindus, provoke those who are engaged in them to aversion. There is a constant desire to evade and escape from such occupations, which arises solely because of the blighting effect which they produce upon those who follow them, owing to the slight and stigma cast upon them by the Hindu religion…5 Caste-​based division of labour may have contributed to a particular mode of economy and its own logic of efficiency. However, what is significant is the way Ambedkar approaches the issue of “durable inequality” as growing from within a religious system. Hindu religion is interrogated here not on the

136  Two Universalisms basis of any eschatological judgement or theology or religious philosophy, but simply on social-​historical basis and efficiency. We must note also the way a particular determination, which evolves into something of general significance, is made. Religion is determined through a discussion on caste and vice versa. Thus we hear Ambedkar saying further, There is an utter lack among the Hindus of what the sociologists call ‘consciousness of kind’. There is no Hindu consciousness of kind. In every Hindu the consciousness that exists is the consciousness of his caste. That is the reason why the Hindus cannot be said to form a society or a nation. There are however many Indians… (who) have insisted that underlying the apparent diversity there is a fundamental unity which marks the life of the Hindus in as much as there is a similarity of habits and customs, beliefs and thoughts which obtain all over the continent of India… But... similarity in habits and customs, beliefs and thoughts, is not enough to constitute men into society… This is because similarity in certain things is not enough to constitute a society. Men constitute a society because they have things which they possess in common. To have similar things is totally different from possessing things in common. And the only way by which men can come to possess things in common with one another is by being in communication with one another. This is merely another way of saying that Society continues to exist by communication—​indeed, in communication. To make it concrete, it is not enough if men act in a way which agrees with the acts of others. Parallel activity, even if similar, is not sufficient to bind men into a society.6 (Italics mine) Second, Ambedkar has to engage with the issue of religion in order to interrogate the colonised society. It is still a long way to go to arrive at the principle of universal equality. In the above excerpt we can note, Ambedkar has displaced Hinduism. In place of Hinduism he is engaged with Hindus, just like if one were to discuss Christianity by discussing Christians.7 For, Christianity permitted slavery just as Hindus produced castes. This displacement is of revolutionary significance. For, besides other elements, the stress on communication (“Society continues to exist by communication—​ indeed, in communication”) tells us of the social reality of unequal communication and hence a society and a religious system based on inequality and injustice. Readers of Ambedkar know that The Annihilation of Caste was a lecture that remained undelivered as the ferocity of the address scared the organisers (leaders of the caste-​Hindu reform organisation Jat-​Pat Todak Mandal8) of the forum who withdrew the invitation. The address was to be delivered at Lahore on the occasion of the annual conference of the forum in 1936. Having read the text of the speech circulated in advance, the organisers informed Ambedkar that as a Hindu social reform body, it was not possible for it to host a speech that declared that the speaker was addressing the audience for

Annihilation of Caste and Universalism of the Oppressed  137 the very last time “as a Hindu.” After his address was cancelled, Ambedkar printed at his own expense the unmodified and unabridged text to make it available to the public. Excommunicated, Ambedkar pitchforked communication as the basis of his campaign. Language in The Annihilation of Caste was deployed to interrogate key elements of the world of the Hindus –​their ideas and practices. The aim was to disrupt this world, annihilate the world from which the ideas and practices that resulted in indignity of the humans had emerged. No universal rationality was invoked by Ambedkar. Indeed, the motto of annihilation is not directly invoked in the address even. The word “annihilation” occurs only once after it is used in the title of the address. Yet the conceptual world of Dalit emerging from the address is one of insurgence that must finish off the social-​mental world of the Hindus. Nothing from the extant religious world is appropriated; it has to be simply expropriated. There is nothing in “common”; therefore “communication” has stopped. Ambedkar has spoken for the last time as a Hindu. Excommunication of the untouchables from the Hindu society does not free them, excommunication replicates caste in the very space of the exile from caste.9 Therefore, the call for “annihilation” as a struggle against excommunication, and hence we can only repeat Ambedkar’s words referred to little while ago, “Hindu society as such does not exist… In every Hindu the consciousness that exists is the consciousness of his caste…” Religion cannot make a nation, because a religious society cannot mend the fault lines within the society. To be modern, to develop, to be free and independent, to grow into a society in which all will have common stakes, the ethics of a divisive religion must be done away with. The effect of caste on the ethics of the Hindus is simply deplorable. Caste has killed public spirit… A Hindu’s public is his caste. His responsibility is only to his caste. His loyalty is restricted only to his caste. Virtue has become caste-​ridden, and morality has become castebound.10 Ambedkar notes the biological dimension of the debate: Some have dug a biological trench in defence of the caste system. It is said that the object of caste was to preserve purity of race and purity of blood. Now, ethnologists are of the opinion that men of pure race exist nowhere, and that there has been a mixture of all races in all parts of the world. Especially is this the case with the people of India… The caste system cannot be said to have grown as a means of preventing the admixture of races, or as a means of maintaining purity of blood.11 Therefore, Ambedkar confesses in an exasperating tone, “My ideal: a society based on Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”12 While scholars may scoff at this invocation of an old modernist ideal that has garbed in history many a conquest and domination, we must sense here the incipient cry in a colony for justice, dignity, and recognition.

138  Two Universalisms This is the universal. The universal cannot condone the classification of people towards perpetuating inequality, because such classification (for instance, dividing people into four definite classes) would mean a forced “lumping of individuals into a few sharply marked off classes” (Ambedkar’s words), completely obliterating the recognition that the individual is a being of infinite tendencies and possibilities.13 But this universal emerges not through the enunciation of a universal principle, but through a particular critique of nationalism. The dominant nationalist view regarded caste as an internal problem of Indian society that could be addressed and resolved once independence was attained. In this way, justification had been made for considering caste as of secondary priority. Ambedkar was arguing back: How could a society that had not allowed freedom of its own members and did not have the conditions of freedom would attain genuine independence?14 The universal can emerge only through the negation of what passes on as the “universal” –​only through the process of concrete determinations, as in this case determinations of the concrete issues of the nation, colonial society, caste inequalities, classificatory mode, religious domination, and stranglehold of ideologies. The old universe of the Hindus must be annihilated for a universal to emerge, because that universe is a closed one. … the membership of a caste is not open to all and sundry. The law of caste confines its membership to persons born in the caste. Castes are autonomous, and there is no authority anywhere to compel a caste to admit a newcomer to its social life. Hindu society being a collection of castes and each caste being a closed corporation, there is no place for a convert. Thus it is caste which has prevented the Hindus from expanding and from absorbing other religious communities… shuddhi (mission to purify the religion) will be both a folly and a futility.15 The new universe will be one of justice. Once again, it is important to note that the principles of justice were being enunciated by Ambedkar not through a general critique of religion. Hindu religion stands on the plank of the idea and the desirability of a caste-​ classified society; hence it is to be critiqued. As he explained in the context of his long-​held attraction to Buddhism, (a) religion was necessary for a free Society; (b) but not every religion was worth having; (c) religion must relate to facts of life and not the theories and speculations about God, or Soul or Heaven or Earth; (d) it was also wrong to make God the centre of religion, likewise wrong to make salvation of the soul as the centre of religion; (e) real religion lived in the heart of man and not in the Shastras; (f) it was not enough for morality to be the ideal of life; since there was no God it must become the law of life, and the function of religion was to reconstruct the world and to make it happy and not to explain its origin or its end; (g) private ownership

Annihilation of Caste and Universalism of the Oppressed  139 of property brought power to one class and sorrow to another; (h) all human beings were equal, and what was important is high ideals and not noble birth.16 As his other writings on Buddhism show, his principal concern was democracy. Hindu society was undemocratic. Buddhism was of democratic nature and had the potentiality to make society democratic. In that sense, Buddhism was a democratic religion. Fraternity never resulted from political arrangements; the religion must be democratic so as to promote equality. By the mid-​1950s Ambedkar had decided to convert to Buddhism. Thus, if the teaching of the Buddha was democratic, then democracy was not an invention of the West, but a product of the Indian history as well. In his historic speech of 25 November 1949 where he had presented the final draft of the Indian Constitution to the Constituent Assembly which passed the final draft on 26 January 1950, he had recalled the tradition of the republics and assemblies in ancient India of the Buddha’s time.17 The increasing engagement with Buddhism happened in the last years of Ambedkar’s life as his interest in Marxism also grew. All his major writings during this period “Buddha and the Future of his Religion,” “The Buddha and his Dhamma,” and “Buddha and Karl Marx” refer to Karl Marx as a central figure in the quest for democracy, equality, and justice. Third, and as these overlapping arguments bring out, the nation also as a given universal is to be rejected. Ambedkar asks, why have the mass of people tolerated the social evils to which they have been subjected? While there have been social revolutions in other countries of the world, why have there not been social revolutions in India? It is because the lower classes of Hindus had been completely disabled for direct action. They could not bear arms, and without arms they could not rebel. They were all ploughmen –​or rather, condemned to be ploughmen –​and they never were allowed to convert their ploughshares into swords. They were condemned to be lowly; and not knowing the way of escape, and not having the means of escape, they became reconciled to eternal servitude, which they accepted as their inescapable fate.18 Such a society lacks organic unity and cannot develop into a nation. Such a society has no sense of dignity. The “question is not whether a community lives or dies”; but “on what plane does it live. There are different modes of survival. But not all are equally honourable.”19 In this undelivered address, the nation as it being shaped by the colonised society lurks in the background. Nowhere Ambedkar explicitly discusses or rejects the nation as a universal political organisation or nation as a society organised in a particular way. But he seems to interrogate all through and asks his audience, if this is your society, are you fit to be a nation? Or, even if you develop as a nation, what kind of a nation will it be? What is this national that inheres and admits gross indignities and inequalities? What will then enable

140  Two Universalisms the Indians (most of who are Hindus) to be a nation? Fit to declare on the face of the alien rulers that India is a proud nation? He knows that the Hindus cannot become a nation, and he has decided to sever his links with Hinduism. He has to conclude and he manages to place the question of the nation (swaraj, self-​rule) with these remarks unsayable, indeed unthinkable in 1936, I am sorry I will not be with you... But even when I am gone out of your fold, I will watch your movement with active sympathy, and you will have my assistance for what it may be worth. Yours is a national cause. Caste is no doubt primarily the breath of the Hindus. But the Hindus have fouled the air all over, and everybody is infected –​Sikh, Muslim and Christian. You therefore deserve the support of all those who are suffering from this infection –​Sikh, Muslim and Christian. Yours is more difficult than the other national cause, namely, swaraj. In the fight for swaraj you fight with the whole nation on your side. In this, you have to fight against the whole nation—​and that too, your own. But it is more important than swaraj. There is no use having swaraj, if you cannot defend it. More important than the question of defending swaraj is the question of defending the Hindus under the swaraj... Without such internal strength, swaraj for Hindus may turn out to be only a step towards slavery. Goodbye and good wishes for your success.20 The fight will be conducted with the nation on its side, but the fight will be also against the nation. Remember as Ambedkar later pointed out, “A caste has all the exclusiveness and pride which a nation has. It is therefore not improper to speak of collection of castes as a collection of major and minor nations.” However, The caste is a nation but the rule of one caste over another may not be admitted to be the same as the rule of one nation over another. But supposing the case is not carried so far but is limited to majority and minority, even then the question remains: What right has the majority to rule the minority?21 Will minority rights suffice? Ambedkar admits that there may be a patent disharmony within a nation and therefore a proper field for the application of the principle of self-​determination. If the advanced classes are clamouring for its application to India and if the powers that be have sanctioned it, however partially, to ward off the future stunting and dwarfing of the Indian people, may not the untouchables with justice claim its benefit in their own interest? Admitting the necessity of self-​ determination for the untouchables, communal representation cannot be

Annihilation of Caste and Universalism of the Oppressed  141 withheld from them, for communal representation and self-​determination are but two different phrases which express the same notion.22 How does then India become a nation? The implications of the answer that Ambedkar provided for politics-​society relation are profound. In the midst of the Second World War, when the Indian nation had been irremediably communally divided, Ambedkar turned to the political life of M.G. Ranade (1842–​1901), the great liberal of nineteenth-​century colonial India. He said that one cannot be a political radical and a “social Tory” at the same time. Instead, one must have the social goal of emancipation as constant. He said In political negotiations the rule must be what is possible. That does not mean that we should be content with what is offered. It means that you must not refuse what is offered when you know that your sanctions are inadequate to compel your opponent to concede more… There can be no compromise on principle, and there should not be. But once the principle is agreed upon, there can be no objection to realize it by instalments. Graduation in politics is inevitable, and when the principle is accepted it is not harmful and indeed it may in certain circumstances be quite advantageous… I am not a liberal, but I am sure the view Ranade held was the right one. The absence of sanctions in Ranade’s political philosophy need not detract much from its worth. We all know what sanctions are available to us. We have tried all, old as well as new, with what effect I need not stop to describe.23 Thus politics cannot ignore social constraints and social realities for long. To envision a new society, politics must know how to wait and how to make advances. A new nation cannot be created overnight. For the nation to be a commons, the primacy of social reconstruction cannot be ignored for long. As the last decade of colonial rule began, Ambedkar found, the ardour for social reform in India had considerably lessened. The craze for politics (now) held the Indian public in its grip. Politics had become an appetizer –​the more one tastes it the more one craves it.24 Ambedkar was pointing out the hollowness of the universal hold of nation as the final frontier of politics.

III Gandhi was not late in responding to Ambedkar’s critique and the call to reject Hindu religion as the way to annihilate caste. He said expectedly, some Hindu rituals and religious practices may be bad, but the religion was not. Ambedkar had overstated his case.

142  Two Universalisms Caste has nothing to do with religion… Varna and Ashrama are institutions which have nothing to do with castes. The law of Varna teaches us that we have each one of us to earn our bread by following the ancestral calling. It defines not our rights but our duties. It necessarily has reference to callings that are conducive to the welfare of humanity and to no other. It also follows that there is no calling too low and none too high. All are good, lawful and absolutely equal in status... Can a religion that was professed by Chaitanya, Jnyandeo, Tukaram, Tiruvalluvar, Ramakrishna Paramahansa, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Maharshi Devendranath Tagore, Vivekanand, and a host of others who might be easily mentioned, be so utterly devoid of merit as is made out in Dr. Ambedkar’s address? A religion has to be judged not by its worst specimens, but by the best it might have produced. For that and that alone can be used as the standard to aspire to, if not to improve upon.25 Yet Gandhi’s rejoinder could not address the fact that caste had been perched on religion that had emerged as an essential element of the nation, and to make the nation as belonging to all, the religious question must be faced. The idea of annihilation of caste was being determined by several other determinations and in turn was leading to other determinations –​of religion, caste, liberalism, etc. With the call for annihilating caste, a powerful idea was born. It was an idea that could be pitted against all universalising claims that in effect denied justice. One may say, the radical power of the idea of annihilation of caste stemmed from a yearning for justice. But this was not any universal principle of justice such as enunciated by say Plato, but one that had emerged from concrete determinations. So, this was the great moment of a text in the life of the colonised. As if Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was saying, since history cannot be ignored because it tells us of the deep fault lines of the society, we must recall the history of the depraved society and devote ourselves to addressing those fault lines in order to redeem the country. Only in this way we can make ourselves masters of our nation, while as of now we can see how few have been their own masters and masters of the society! What is the great moment here? It is the moment of raising the life question of the oppressed above the domination of few and empty promises of fortune. What is great is a steadfast approach, determination in adversity, an idea that can pit itself against every event of discrimination, excommunication, and expulsion, indeed the idea of dignity on one’s lips, a cause ready to work for. With the call for annihilation of caste, the internal struggle has been inseparably linked with the external struggle, which involves standing up to adversities and resisting the temptations of the pleasures of an elect idea of the nation. Such a text could not but be a manifesto. A manifesto is not a time-​bound programme. It is a form of expressing an idea –​a congealed form of philosophy, history, politics, resistance, struggle, and glimpses of a desirable, alternative life. The form of manifesto is thus argumentative, polemical, pithy

Annihilation of Caste and Universalism of the Oppressed  143 but rhetorical by the highest standard –​in short, a particular way to universalise one’s vision of social transformation. Annihilation of Caste is a manifesto of justice. Its reading is never complete at one go. That is so, because its meanings are in the overlap of arguments, implications, and gestures –​defying strict literal explanations, transcending immediate occasions, interlocutors, and upholding a militant idea of justice. The call for annihilation of caste is a jump towards a universal cry. Though the form of the address as I have mentioned is a manifesto, the call for annihilation however does not come as rhetoric. It is an outcome of several determinations. Thus, Ambedkar first explains in the introductory communication to the organisers of the cancelled event, I did not expect that your Mandal would be so upset because I have spoken of the destruction of Hindu Religion. I thought it was only fools who were afraid of words. But lest there should be any misapprehension in the minds of the people, I have taken great pains to explain what I mean by religion and destruction of religion. I am sure that nobody, on reading my address, could possibly misunderstand me. That your Mandal should have taken a fright at mere words as ‘destruction of religion etc.,’ notwithstanding the explanation that accompanies them, does not raise the Mandal in my estimation. One cannot have any respect or regard for men who take the position of the Reformer and then refuse even to see the logical consequences of that position, let alone following them out in action.26 Is it a call for annihilation of religion? In the later part of the text, Ambedkar clarifies, While I condemn a Religion of Rules, I must not be understood to hold the opinion that there is no necessity for a religion. On the contrary, I agree with Burke when he says that ‘True religion is the foundation of society, the basis on which all true Civil Government rests, and both their sanction.’ Consequently, when I urge that these ancient rules of life be annulled, I am anxious that their place shall be taken by a Religion of Principles, which alone can lay claim to being a true Religion.27 These clarifications however do not lessen the scorching light on the issues to be determined. Each of these issues suggests connections with others in the process of determination. Consider therefore the issues he raises one by one, explains, and moves on with successive thrusts of the rapier: Why social reform is necessary for political reform; why social reform is necessary for economic reform; caste is not just a division of labour, it is a division of labourers; caste cannot preserve a non-​existent “racial purity”; caste prevents Hindus from forming a real society or nation; caste prevents Hinduism from being a missionary religion; the worst feature of the caste system is an anti-​social spirit;

144  Two Universalisms caste deprives Hindus of mutual help, trust, and fellow-​feeling; it destroys public spirit, public opinion, and public charity; it is a powerful weapon for preventing all reforms; internal reform of the caste system is virtually impossible; no reformers, and no appeals to reason, have so far succeeded; caste prevents the uplift and incorporation of the indigenous population groups; the real key to destroying caste is rejection of the Shastras; destroying caste does not destroy the true principles of religion; and the struggle is yours; and finally, I have now decided to leave the Hindu fold; my ideal: a society based on liberty, equality, and fraternity.28 Readers can notice each of the issues he raises is in turn shaped by a few others, if you like, abstract notions, such as reform, its possibility and limits; public sphere, its authenticity, and delusion; religion and reason; the mutual conditioning of society and nation; and finally the great question of truth, thus –​Ambedkar emphasises what is truly public, a true nation, true equality, true reform, true reason, and true religion. Even though the invocation of truth cannot but attract our attention, yet we can notice, there is no enunciation of what is truth. The truth is held up as an elusive mirror against which the injustices are critiqued and judged. Principles are set forth not to enunciate any positive definition of a religion or social equality and justice, but to arm the campaigners with the great sceptre of negativity by which all discourses will be henceforth judged. This indeed is an instructive instance of how the universalism of the oppressed functions in human thought. The process of the emergence of the universal is through a series of concrete determinations which relate to each other and condition each other. This process is also concrete. There were quite a few such instances of the colonised producing concrete universal ideas –​perhaps, as many instances as were the awakenings of the colonised. Twenty-​seven years after this undelivered address was composed by Ambedkar, Franz Fanon wrote the great manifesto of the colonised, The Wretched of the Earth, and he ended with these words, All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought. But the action of European men has not carried out the mission which fell to them, and which consisted of bringing their whole weight violently to bear upon these elements, of modifying their arrangement and their nature, of changing them and finally of bringing the problem of mankind to an infinitely higher plane. Today we are present at the stasis of Europe. Comrades, let us flee from this motionless movement where gradually dialectic is changing into the logic of equilibrium. Let us reconsider the question of mankind… The Third World today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers… It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man…

Annihilation of Caste and Universalism of the Oppressed  145 (I)n the framework of the collectivity there were the differentiations, the stratification, and the bloodthirsty tensions fed by classes; and finally, on the immense scale of humanity, there were racial hatreds, slavery, exploitation… So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies which draw their inspiration from her... But if we want humanity to advance a step further… then we must invent and we must make discoveries… Moreover, if we wish to reply to the expectations of the people of Europe, it is no good sending them back a reflection, even an ideal reflection, of their society and their thought with which from time to time they feel immeasurably sickened. For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.29 In this way, the universals of the oppressed have emerged from concrete circumstances and concrete determinations. They are the concrete universals which become pathways to alternatives. In this way they become the truth. Truth, and we are here speaking primarily of political truth, does not come from any special knowledge or greater knowledge of the world, but from a political engagement with own history. In this case, the historical questions these anti-​colonial thinkers confronted: What is the state in which the colonial society finds itself racially and caste wise abused, discriminated against, and dominated internally by a few and externally by a colonial master power? What is this history that pushes the society into the prehistory of slavery and discrimination, and the mysterious frontiers of inequality? How does this condition give birth to the State and a type of politics that perpetuates discrimination, domination, and inequality? Around these questions articulated in interrogative and polemical style, the principle of non-​discrimination, equality, and justice was born. We have much to learn from the ways in which alternatives are thought out in human history –​in particular, in the history of our time. Recall manifestos like the Diggers’ and Ranters’ in the seventeenth century that were authored and declared in a particular time and context and became a treasure for a universal idea of justice. On the problematic of concrete universality, Marx had said with an obvious allusion to Hegel, “The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.”30 Equally relevant is his caustic remark made in later years of his life on any “universal” theory of society.31 Is it not what militant anti-​colonial thought proved time and again?

Notes 1 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. Arnold Vincent Miller (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1969); in Hegel’s Science of Logic, universality as an explicit conceptual determinacy is first shown to be necessary as a result of deficiencies found in the categories of substance and causality. Substance

146  Two Universalisms appears at the apex of what Hegel calls “reflection” or the “logic of essence.” The determination of the universal is not self-​determining in the sense that it cannot determine itself further; it has a reflective return to self. The universality of a concrete universal is realised only by way of particularity, and this dialectical relation between universality and individuality makes concrete universals distinct from what Hegel called “property universals.” Hegel wrote, Quality is especially a property only where, in an external relation, it manifests itself as an immanent determination. By properties of herbs, for instance, we understand determinations which not only are proper to something, but are the means whereby this something in its relations with other some things maintains itself in its own peculiar way, counteracting the alien influences posited in it and making its own determinations effective in the other —​ although it does not keep this at a distance. The more stable determinates, on the other hand, such as figure, shape, are not called properties, nor even qualities perhaps, because they are conceived as alterable, as not identical with the being [of the object]. (“Determinate Being”, paragraph 206) 2 On this, Etienne Balibar’s discussions on the “universal” are helpful. See, Etienne Balibar, “Constructions and Deconstructions of the Universal”, Critical Horizons, Volume 7 (1), 2006, pp. 21–​43; also Balibar, “On Universalism: In Debate with Alain Badiou”, English version revised by Mary O’Neill, Transversal Texts, February 2007 –​https://​tran​sver​sal.at/​tran​sver​sal/​0607/​bali​bar/​en (accessed on 2 March 2022). 3 Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936), Section 2, “Why Social Reform is Necessary for Political Reform” (Unless otherwise mentioned, I have used here the edition circulated by the Columbia University Center for New Media Teaching and Learning) –​https://​ccn​mtl.colum​bia.edu/​proje​cts/​mmt/​ambed​kar/​ web/​readi​ngs/​aoc​_​pri​nt_​2​004.pdf (accessed on 1 May 2022). 4 Ibid., Section 2. 5 Ibid., Section 4, paragraph 5. 6 Ibid., Section 6, paragraphs 3–​6. 7 Ambedkar wrote, What the Orthodox Hindu will say about this book I can well imagine for I have been battling with him all these years. The only thing I did not know was how the meek and non-​violent looking Hindu can be violent when anybody attacks his Sacred Books. (Who Were the Shudras? (1946) in Valerian Rodrigues (ed.), The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar (hereafter Essential Writings; New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 391) 8 Literally this would mean, “The Forum for Break-​Up of Caste.” 9 On this see the discussion by Soumyabrata Choudhury, Ambedkar and Other Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme (Delhi: Navayana, 2018), pp. 72–​ 73; also Soumyabrata Choudhury, “Ambedkar’s Words: Elements of a Sentence-​ to-​Come”, Social Scientist, January–​February 2017, Volume 45 (1–​2), pp. 3–​18. 10 Ibid., Section 13, “Caste destroys public spirit, public opinion, and public charity”, paragraph 1.

Annihilation of Caste and Universalism of the Oppressed  147 11 Ibid., Section 5, paragraph 1. 12 Ibid., Title of Section 14. 13 Ishita Roy, “Caste Environment and the ‘Unthinkability’ of ‘Annihilation of Caste’ ”, Contemporary Voice of the Dalit, 2020 (pp. 1–​9), p. 4 –​DOI: 10.1177/​ 2455328X211072995 14 K. Srinivasulu, “Dr. Ambedkar and Annihilation of Caste”, in Simhadri Somanaboina and Akhileshwari Ramagoud (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Other Backward Classes in India: Thought, Movements, and Development (London: Routledge, 2022, pp. 87–​99), p. 93. 15 Annihilation of Caste, Section 10, paragraph 3. 16 Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, “Buddha or Karl Marx” (1956) in Essential Writings (pp. 173–​189), pp. 174–​175. 17 For a collection of writings by Ambedkar on democracy, see Christophe Jaffrelot and Narender Kumar (eds.), Dr Ambedkar and Democracy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018). 18 Annihilation of Caste, Section 17, paragraph 5. 19 Ibid., Section 19, paragraph 9. 20 Ibid., Section 26, “The struggle is yours; I have now decided to leave the Hindu fold”, paragraphs 3–​4. 21 Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar , Thoughts on Linguistic States (1955) in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, Volume 1, compiled by Vasant Moon (hereafter Writings and Speeches; New Delhi: Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India and 2014, pp. 137–​204), pp. 167–​169. Available at: http://​dra​mbed​karw​riti​ngs.gov.in/​upl​oad/​uplo​adfi​les/​ files/​Volume​_​01.pdf 22 Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar , “Evidence before the Southborough Committee on Franchise” (1919) in Writings and Speeches, Volume 1 (pp. 243–​278), p. 270; Arundhati Roy wrote, Ambedkar realised that the problem of caste would only be further entrenched unless Untouchables were able to organise, mobilise and become a political constituency with their own representatives… He began to develop the idea of a separate electorate for Untouchables. In 1919, he submitted a written testimony to the Southborough Committee on electoral reforms. The committee’s brief was to propose a scheme of territorial constituencies based on existing land revenue districts, and separate communal representation for Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, for a new constitution that was to be drafted to prepare for Home Rule. The Congress boycotted the committee. To his critics, who called him a collaborator and a traitor, Ambedkar said that Home Rule was as much the right of the Untouchable as it was of the Brahmin… In his testimony, Ambedkar argued that Untouchables were as separate a social group from Touchable Hindus as Muslims, Christians and Sikhs. –​“The Doctor and the Saint, an Introduction” by Arundhati Roy to Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, ed. S. Anand (Delhi: Navayana Publishing, 2014) 23 Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar , Ranade, Gandhi, and Jinnah (1943) in Essential Writings (pp. 121–​131), p. 131. 24 Ibid., p. 127.

148  Two Universalisms 25 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Harijan, 18 July 1936, appended at the end of Annihilation of Caste. 26 Ambedkar’s letter to Mr. Har Bhagwan, one of members of the Mandal, 27 April 1936 –​ https://​ccn​mtl.colum​bia.edu/​proje​cts/​mmt/​ambed​kar/​web/​readi​ngs/​aoc​_​ pri​nt_​2​004.pdf (accessed on 2 May 2022). 27 The Annihilation of Caste, Section 24, paragraph 1. 28 I have taken here the sub-​ titles of some of the sections of the Address, though the sub-​titles are of uncertain provenance (they are not found in other editions) –​ https://​ccn​mtl.colum​bia.edu/​proje​cts/​mmt/​ambed​kar/​web/​readi​ngs/​ aoc​_​pri​nt_​2​004.pdf (accessed on 2 May 2022). 29 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), pp. 314–​315. 30 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Rough Draft (1857–​58), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 101; Marx’s words, The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being... The real subject retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before; namely as long as the head’s conduct is merely speculative, merely theoretical. Hence, in the theoretical method, too, the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition. 31 See for instance Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otecestvenniye Zapisky, 1877, trans. Donna Torr, Marx and Engels Correspondence (New York: International Publishers, 1968) –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1877/​11/​rus​sia.htm (accessed on 8 June 2022).

Section Four

Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking

8 Charles Tilly’s Theorising of Contention

I After Marx, we are no social scientists or historians if our analyses are not situated in studies of contradictions –​economic, social. Yet we all know that studying a contradiction and appreciating social process and social transformation is not enough to study politics. Contradictions in economy make their presence felt in politics often not directly but in round about ways. There are mediations in the process. To carry forward transformative politics, a straightforward study of existing contradictions is not enough and, at times, may be damaging unless there is a fair idea of the dynamics of the translation of elementary contradictions in the political process. Probably unknowingly, Charles Tilly through his lifelong endeavour to conceptualise “contention” helped us with the knowledge of how to break that impasse. We no longer have to strike our heads on finding “the last instance” in which the social and economic contradiction will make its presence felt.1 Tilly cut through the philosophical cobwebs of determination of the fundamental economic contradiction in politics and straightaway went towards the task of historicising contentious politics. Typically his questions were: Where do political actors come from? What causes violent conflicts? What is the relation between social struggles and democratisation? How do state formation and development of capitalism influence all of these? By his own admission, this was his inquiry in his later age.2 He thought that his own arguments and descriptions in his early works were modelled on structural determinism, and he had to move away from structure to process. In three consecutive books (Stories, Identities, and Political Change, The Politics of Collective Violence, and Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–​2000) written in three feverish years of astounding production (2002–​04), he took this giant step. In essay after essay, he relentlessly showed how narratives, that is stories, were important in documenting uncertain outcomes, how political processes were like narratives of collective violence, and how different paths to democracy lay through various forms of political contention, confrontation, and retaliation, which in turn were marked by inequalities and challenges to inequalities, trust networks, and participation. DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-13

152  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking It is debatable though if his earlier works were products of structural determinism as he thought, but his works had been always products of concrete inquiries aimed at capturing the dynamics of social contention. His interest in contentious politics led to inquiries into the origin of rights.3 This was typical of his agenda of inquiry. In order to understand the significance of the idea of contention, it will be instructive to see the distinct style of Tilly’s investigation into the origin of rights. Rights to him were claims, also entitlements (enforceable claims on the delivery of goods, services, or protection by specific others).4 Tilly planned to understand wherefrom rights such as citizenship rights had originated. He said that Barrington Moore’s classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) had inspired him to pose that question. Barrington Moore had considered rights as historical products and therefore outcomes of struggle. Democracy meant the making of rights, and crucial rights come to fruition by means of revolution and class struggle. However, Tilly moved away from Moore’s arguments: He doubted the “centrality of feudalism” in the account of genesis of rights. He was not also ready to give huge importance to the issue of ideas in this history and considered that the “crucial events had occurred after the general dissolution of feudalism.”5 Moore however was inspirational for him with insistence on factors such as “resistance and struggle,” and on grounding rights in specific histories of different regions. Tilly argued: There were several fundamental questions concerning how rights spread to larger population and how they eventually became citizenship rights. Were the rights wrested from local authorities and spread to the larger population from there? Did benevolent despots grant these rights to a few, which were eventually passed down to the rest of the population? Or did the rights spread due to a struggle at a national scale? For him, the last perspective was important. He argued that struggles at national scale had to do with the rise and spread of rights. Rights and duties were enlarged and enforced obligations –​the result of bargaining between the two parties –​states and peoples. We see here two planks in formulating a theory of contentious politics. First, Tilly seemed to suggest that democracy as a process of transformation was perched on a national template. It was the national sphere in which collectives could emerge and make claims. Second, these claims often in the form of claim making actions finally settled in a series of bargaining. Bargaining as we know is a collective action; thus, there was again a twofold meaning in Tilly’s usage here: (a) struggles over demands made by the state on their subjects, or by subjects on the state, or by subjects on each other; and (b) struggles by specific groups of subjects to enter the polity, to help others to enter the polity, to defend certain polity membership, or to exclude others from the polity. In this process, bargains and struggles of both kinds resulted in citizenship rights.6 In Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-​1834, Tilly demonstrated how forms of contention change.7 Between 1750 and 1840, ordinary British people abandoned such

Charles Tilly’s Theorising of Contention  153 time-​honoured forms of protest such as collective seizures of grain, sack of buildings, public humiliation, and physical violence and, in their place, adopted measures such as marches, petition drives, public meetings, and other known routes of social movement politics. The change created perhaps for the first time mass participation in national politics. Yet, this did not mean a weakening of states. For instance, early modern Europe with no previous experience of large-​scale bargaining between the state and its subjects witnessed two developments at the same time: bargaining between state and the subjects, and second, which actually caused the former, the passage from indirect rule to direct rule, as due to internal and external power struggle and competitions states in Europe now required standing armies in place of the earlier practices of mercenary troops, mostly hired foreigners. States found it necessary to create standing armies consisting of members of the domestic subject population. Indirect rule meant that states till then had to rely on a series of local power holders to rule. Bargains over the supply of resources therefore were of different type. Direct rule on the other hand was centralisation of power by means of which states took charge of resources, including human resources. With this, the nature of bargaining changed. Direct rule created rights. Interestingly, at the time when Michel Foucault through a series of lectures was showing us the possible past of democracy involving securitisation of life, politics, territory, and the emergence of rights in a liberal framework,8 Charles Tilly was presenting a related but a different explanation.9 To a good measure, this contrast owed to a contrast in the explanatory tools. For Foucault, it was mainly a survey of thinking; for Tilly, it was a survey of incidents, events, institutional measures, contentious legislations, and actions. For Foucault, it was the overall emergence of bio power and bio-​political mechanisms within which rights and controls emerged. For Tilly, a relational framework was crucial. Rights congealed the relation between the rulers and the subjects. He went on to explain how the creation by the state of a national army consisting of its own subjects created also the obligation to concede the claims of the latter. Maintaining standing army was costly. It required increased levels of taxation, and in Tilly’s language, “more opportunity cost for population.” Bargaining was required from both sides, and rights and obligations of citizenship rose from this process. It also meant grant of national rights only to a minimum set of people. Tilly’ main argument was that the creation of mass national armies created the rudiments of national citizenship in Europe. Rights eventually expanded. As he pointed out, struggle for one kind of rights prepared claimants to struggle for the next kind. In this context, we can refer to the way he compared nation states with protection rackets –​levying money from the subjects in exchange of offering protection. “Consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction,” he wrote in a well-​known essay, “War making and State

154  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking Making as Organised Crime.”10 This was of course a theoretical sketch, but we can see its main elements of this model: a The claim making agent or the claimant and the target of claim can reward or punish each other in a significant way; b The two are thus bargaining over those rewards and punishments; c The two parties or one of them are also bargaining with third parties having interest in these claims; and d In this relational process, the parties to the claims constitute durable identities and stakes on each other. Tilly’s explanation of the origin of modern power was thus distinct from Foucault’s explanation. In all these researches, like Foucault, he never bothered with the explanatory mechanism or the heuristic device. But like Foucault’s, Tilly’s works show an extraordinary alertness to the issue of method. So, what then is “contention” as a template of analysis? It is not so much a theme as a mode of analysis, or we may say that it is a theme that is a problematic as well. In other words, away from a positivist way to understand, it is an alternative way of looking at social history. It renegotiates the relations among problem, mode, and theme. It is a different way of looking at the question of method. Tilly devoted a considerable part of his work to methods used by social science. Insights such as the ones mentioned above were possible because he could synthesise large series data effortlessly.11 This he could do because he posed the right question, often simple and straight in first appearance. He parted with (a) groups of historians by advocating the use of numbers to come up with testable hypotheses, and (b) with groups of sociologists by insisting (reminding his colleagues of Karl Marx and Max Weber) that the historical context of cause and effect greatly matter.12 We have already shown how while not being a bargain theorist he used creatively the relevant insights of a bargain situation. Similarly, as he said, his goal was to do “social science,” which would mean doing sociology, history, political analysis, and social theory together. In this task of harmonising, what was the key? In course of emphasising the relation, he said once, observers of human violence divided into three camps: idea people, behaviour people, and relation people. Members of the three camps differed in their understanding of fundamental causes in human affairs. Idea people stressed consciousness as the basis of human action. They generally claimed that humans acquire beliefs, concepts, rules, goals, and values from their environments, reshape their own (and each other’s) impulses in conformity with such ideas, and act out their socially acquired ideas. Idea people divided over the significance of the distinction between individual and collective. Relation people did not undervalue these distinctions per se but held that only in the context of relational dynamics these made sense, and in fact, these owed greatly to the relations between agents. Relational dynamics shape contentions, outcomes, and the stage for

Charles Tilly’s Theorising of Contention  155 renewed goals and activities.13 We shall come back to the issue of method while closing this chapter. In short, Tilly showed that the state was not necessarily the sole origin of control practices like taxation, borders, or citizenship. The state was not a homogeneous entity imposing control. The state itself was a product of contentions around finance, taxation, mobility, rebellions, settlements, and various controlling practices, including security practices. His investigations of these contentions underlying the history of modern nation states have opened up ways –​and here we can recall the way Walter Benjamin wrote of opening up history14 –​to think of politics as a process of contentions that will henceforth have the narratives of the illegal assemblies, the actions of the outcast, the undocumented, the uprooted peasant, and the like. Charles Tilly’s works compel us to think of the political process in a new way.

II The cause of Tilly’s death was lymphoma. He died on 28 April 2008. He was 78, yet this death was untimely, as he seemed to be taking a new turn in his inquiries. Even though the community of sociologists knew him as a great sociologist who mostly preferred to work in the mode of historical sociology, also in a comparative mode for his analyses of social movements, social change, emergence of political phenomena like the nation, and most significantly the persistence of social phenomenon like inequality and contentious politics, yet he had confounded the crowd. As he started inquiring into stories, repertoires, particular events and actions, and other hitherto unattended phenomena of trust and our varied sense of causality, he was about to make a new move in relational investigations. His analysis of networks was an instance. In Why?, he tried to make systematic understanding of people’s need to give reasons.15 In Credit and Blame published before his death, he drew on literary sources like Dostoyevsky, office water cooler conversations, truth commissions, and many other events to examine how people faulted and applauded each other and themselves. He illustrated how assigning credit and blame stemmed from, and redefined, relations between the creditor and the credited, the blamer and the blamed. People accepted credit, and society assessed blame, with commonalities between the two. Society was saturated in credit/​blame shows. Blame was not simply credit upside down. Blame resembled credit as if in a social game of mirrors.16 Thus, to give an instance, Tilly cited the Sacre-​Coeur Basilica in Paris as a testament to the human tendency to assign credit and blame for historical events and discussed the universal tendency of the public to assign credit and blame and the profound implications of this in democracy. This was a form of storytelling; it defined our collective boundaries and effectively bound us together.17 More than any other activity war stimulates the collective attributions of credit and blame; and not surprisingly perhaps more than any other memorial, war memorials abound human territory today as

156  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking recently constructed institutions. It is important, Tilly observed that, we do not seek too much of official sanction or seal over our judgements such as these because official sanction tend to make the division of us and them more acute and lasting. Our own efforts towards reconciliation or retaliation should remain at the level of stories more than at the level of official acts. It is true of course that those stories make what we are as collectives that have grown out of contests and contentions. To strengthen democratic spirit, past contentions have to remain stories.18 This was an exercise in interrogating the relational dynamics from an unusual angle, namely the narrative form of identity formation, its relation to psychological traits, and the politics of war making and war remembering. If we situate this exercise with the massive undertaking by Pierre Nora, we can appreciate the direction Tilly was taking.19 Tilly said famously in that article (and the book) cited just now, “We are our own stories.” And then he went on to say, Reparations politics involves two great dangers: It provides great incentives for people, lawyers for one, to hoard rewards for them rather than redistribute these to genuine victims; and it reinforces us-​them boundaries instead of dissolving them. When Native Americans receive compensation for past wrongs in the form of property rights, exemption from taxes and direct governmental subsidies, both scenarios come about. Lobbyists and lawyers make money as differences between Native Americans and other Americans sharpen. The public assignment of credit and blame has profound implications for democracy. Democracy can live with us-​them differences, in part because the public assignment of credit and blame provides a means of temporarily bridging social differences of class, gender, religion or race without abolishing them. But writing us-​them divisions into law and politics undermines democracy. That is why we count the abolition of property requirements, of racial exclusion and of male-​only electorates as historical triumphs for democracy. Narratives of credit and blame pose difficult problems for democracy, however. All of us spend much of our lives assigning credit and blame, for justice matters to everyday personal relations as it matters to public life. Those of us who seek the proper assignment of credit and blame often turn to the courts, legislatures and other governmental institutions to back up our judgments of right and wrong. Indeed, Americans and their lawyers regularly call for courts to award not only material compensation but punitive damages. Within limits, successful pursuit of legal redress reinforces democracy. It establishes that even relatively powerless people can get justice and that government officials care about their welfare. Beyond those limits, however, use of public power to fix credit and blame writes us-​them divisions into political life. It also reinforces the operation of the same divisions in private life.20

Charles Tilly’s Theorising of Contention  157 We must however note here a problem. While Tilly’s insights had value for politics of reconciliation without which a post-​transition social order would not be stable and democracy would not produce consensus, yet these books of late Tilly perhaps suggested that he was unable to think through the problematic relation between reconciliation and contention. As he entered the last phase of his life, the post-​globalisation world had begun to be marked by massive violence, new modes of power and new patterns of contention, mass deaths, and democratic politics becoming increasingly contentious. In this milieu, the relation of reconciliation and contention was changing. His colleague Sydney Tarrow tried to chart out a research framework in the new context.21 However, Tilly’s lack of adequate knowledge of colonialism and his lifelong researches confined to Europe, plus his uncritical acceptance of the official political terms in the United States, such as terror, low capacity regime, undemocratic, were evident in his later discussion on the theme of collective violence on a macro-​historical scale.22 Even though he sensed that that America’s “new war” reflected an epochal change in the nature of collective violence, his treatment was at times banal. They resembled words and phrases of US security studies specialists. He said that since Second World War humanity had witnessed increased deployment of violence, not by officially constituted national armed forces but by paramilitary forces, guerrilla units, death squads, secret police, and other irregulars, and increased direction of state-​sponsored and state-​seeking violence against civilians, especially whole categories of the population stigmatized for their religious, ethnic, and/​ or political identities. These trends greatly exceeded population growth and the multiplication of independent states. The period since Second World War stood out for the prevalence of civil war and genocide. He cited the reasons, such as more targets, weaker states, external support, more weapons, financial support, emigrant support, low capacity undemocratic regimes, terror as a political strategy, hostage taking. Though significantly he concluded with these words, Collective violence occupies a perilous but coherent place in contentious politics. It emerges from the ebb and flow of collective grievances and struggles for power. It interweaves incessantly with non-​violent politics, varies systematically with political regimes, and changes as a consequence of essentially the same causes that operate in the non-​violent zones of collective political life. Understanding those causes will help us minimize the damage human beings inflict on each other. In our own violent time, advocates of non-​violent political struggle need all the help they can get. But he had underestimated the changing nature of collective violence, new claim making forms, and new contentions. One of the problems in his macro-​historical approach to sociology was his relative inability to account for continuities and discontinuities. As a result, at times, his invocation of

158  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking democracy or the dynamics of collective claim was seamless. He was unable to account for the hugely different scenarios of the two worlds of colonial powers and colonised countries, and similar other differences in time, epoch, and geography.23 Yet amidst these gaps and lacuna –​to go back to the question if he was leaving macro-​histories behind –​Tilly was now actually trying to combine the two: the insights characteristic of his earlier majestic macro-​historical works in sociology with specific social questions. Let us see some of the questions: Why was the twentieth century in terms of human violence to other human beings ten times bloodier than any other in recorded history? Why, four decades after the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the USA and innumerable comparable worthy initiatives, do American women of equal professional status continue to earn less than their male counterparts? Or, say, why 9/​11? Why did Hurricane Katrina leave behind it such a chaotic, as he said, an “un-​American” aftermath? There could be at least five different ways to explain why things happen: a conventional explanation, a technical explication, a code-​based explanation, a ritualistic explanation, and finally stories. Tilly now favoured the last, that is, narratives, which weaved together these explanations in ways intelligent lay people, outside specific disciplines, could make sense of, and specialists could accept as intellectually acceptable. The use of narrative enabled him to handle the two problems faced by social science, namely, how specialists could engage with what ordinary people and politicians talked about, and if a social scientist thought that something as explanation was important, then how would s/​he get it across to the public domain? But of course it never meant posing simple questions simply. It meant posing profound questions “simply,” which means directly. Thus, for instance, why did inequality persist, why was some inequality durable?24 Inequalities endured, Tilly held, because, for instance, civil rights legislation addressed only the situation in which a hiring boss, or committee, employed or promoted one person but not another in a formal system of straight competition. But say there is a large grocery store with different departments –​one of them meat, the other vegetables. It turns out that women move into the vegetables and the men into the meat. At entry level, they are paid the same. No discrimination. Walking about the store, the men go to places where they can talk to other men and swap stories about football. Women go to places where other women are present, and they can exchange stories of their common interest. But the promotion structures work differentially so that managers mainly come from the meat department. There’s no point at which you have two candidates, one of them male, one of them female. No discrimination at point of entry; or even promotion. But what you get over time is an invisible structure which is, in effect, discriminatory. Therefore to remedy durable inequality what is needed is again to learn about linkages between enclaves and ghettos, about networks, trust stocks, and about migrations. So it is the process. Categorical forms of inequality assist in solving common organisational problems and are therefore durable. They

Charles Tilly’s Theorising of Contention  159 are entrenched and not functionless vestiges. Thus, the extraction of surplus return from subordinate workers within a firm is rendered legitimate as these workers are drawn from sub-​populations those who in the wider social system are correspondingly subordinate, such as the female population, people of coloured origin, or immigrants. Such staffing practices reinforce with wider institutional backing existing relational structures for the purpose of organisational efficiency. It thus avoids the potentially high cost of developing new structures from scratch. On the other hand, as we know immigrants, women, and other categorically defined groups will tend to dominate particular occupational niches in the labour market. It is social closure, in Tilly’s words, “opportunity hoarding.” It emerges because information about job openings spreads through networks that are categorically segregated. Also managers and labour recruiters choose to rely on such informal networks because it is cheaper to harness pre-​existing organisation than to devise it afresh. To understand this to know and remedy inequality, Tilly would say, no need to go to the economics professor or to Walmart or the Imperial Chemicals. We all shall have to listen to narratives closely to find out why?25 In this way, Durable Inequality explored persistent social inequality between paired categories, such as male/​ female, white/​ black, citizen/​ non-​ citizen, and investigated the mechanisms that created the socially defined categories. As we have noted, he started with close observation, in this case with his scrutiny of processes of persistent inequality that defied laws and required close monitoring and analysis of how inequality was reproduced. The observation would be followed up by deep and direct questions on contentions and structures of inequality. In many cases, the answer he suggested lay in processes of self-​reproduction. This brings us back to the issue of method.

III Thinking of the idea of contention and being able to ask the right question, we have to remember that sociology withdrew from public political consciousness in the seventies of the last century, when history became the exciting discipline because it seemed to be the most productive avenue in terms of answering politically acute questions. Sociology following Talcott Parsons and Clifford Geertz (though vastly different from each other) either took a turn towards abstract theory in the 1970s and away from observation, description, and detailed historical analysis, or escaped history via the route of some select tactics of creating categories. Professional careers of sociologists advanced without having to do primary observation, primary data collection, and primary analysis, particularly in terms of long-​range series of data, and historical analysis. Sociology miserably failed to enter public consciousness. It explained little to lay literate public as to why violence was there in the air in last century’s sixties and seventies. There was little light on real people, history, and their stories, and on lessons for how social transformation could be

160  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking achieved more successfully. But as socialism was increasingly discredited in the seventies and eighties, sociology got away with that excuse. Tilly was an exception. There was one more name, Pierre Bourdieu (again vastly different in many respects), on whom this chapter is not the place for discussion. Like a true sociologist, Tilly increasingly came to emphasise relations among people as the most valuable tool for social analysis. He was concerned with how people were changed by their relationships and interface. He was critical of the contemporary social thought that talked of “society” and “community” as if they were real things, but these were words rather than things. To speak of system, it was not enough to invoke the word “society” or “community”, but to look for some attributes, that would be typical of not some institution but a conglomerate like society. He was equally critical of the focus on individual motivation based on some assumptions. He would say characteristically in his direct style, ask anyone as his/​her experiences as individual; and you will see the relationships between people, and why they matter. Similarly he dealt with issues of economic change and innovation as something that could not be understood without sociology. More like an engineer, he felt his task was to find and ask the right questions about the characteristics of a structure and find ways of answering the questions on them. He went on directly to investigations of contentions marking the structure to the point of breaking or inducing changes in the structure. This partly explains the immense speed with which he practised social science also gives us a clue to the methods he deployed. To ask simple questions in a straightforward manner regarding a complex social phenomenon is not an easy thing. Conventional explanations die hard and such explanations have deep roots. We need, Tilly showed, close and careful observation, a material task routinely ignored in our social sciences. As an example, one more of the questions he raised: Is the struggle to secure scarce resources like land or water enough to explain worsening conflicts? Or do we require taking into account the crucial factor, the leaders, those Tilly called the political entrepreneurs, to find out how the process of conflict exacerbates and produces ineradicable symbols of a larger conflict? The study of conflicts in this sense is still in infancy and the current conflict studies are as yet unable to help us with insights and mark its presence in public discourse. The elementary reason according to Tilly was that the conflict studies explanations lacked common sense. Yet in placing common sense at the heart of study, he had not abandoned the investigation of big processes noted first in his earlier studies on revolutionary France, rise of the nation state, and popular contentions in early modern and modern period. How did he arrive at such investigations? Sydney Tarrow, his collaborator, observed, Underlying Tilly’s contributions to the social sciences was his ability to bring different methodological approaches, insights from different

Charles Tilly’s Theorising of Contention  161 disciplines, varying styles of work, and an immense store of historical knowledge to his work. That catholicity grew as his work shifted from the largely archival approach of his first book, The Vende´e (1964), to the mixed methods employed in his work on contentious politics in the 1980s and 1990s, to the mechanism-​laden approach in Dynamics of Contention, to the linguistic analysis in Contentious Performances toward the end of his life.26 Tilly had a central concern with the rise of war-​prone nation states within which human actions evolved defying standard predictions. The subject of contention inspired him to chronicle centuries of revolution while immersing in ancient grain-​trade records. That is how he undertook his first work, his 1958 doctoral thesis on the Vendée in France. Describing the 1793 counter-​ revolutionary uprising in the west of France, he reversed the usual formula: less importance to background and overwhelming importance to military history. In doing so, he emphasised for instance the consequences of France’s 1787 administrative changes: in particular, the changing relations between provincial social strata amid urbanisation. Again, a decade later, while staying in post-​1968 France to work on The Contentious French (1986), Tilly surveyed several centuries’ disputes from closely observed places of France. The book chronicled the rise of the nation state and its effect upon its component capital and labour forces. Tilly noted, it would surprise the twentieth century social scientist as to how much of the old-​regime public administration consisted of watching, regulating, or promoting the distribution of grain.27 The methodologically most ambitious work was of course on the phenomenon of asymmetrical political and economic relationships, Durable Inequality. We have already referred to that work. We can only briefly note its salience: First, Tilly tried to understand the concept of exploitation, we may say by turning the wisdom upside down. Not that he discarded the Marxist idea of exploitation leading to inequality, but he tended to say that durably unequal situations produced exploitation. Second, he showed that “opportunity hoarding”, one of his innovative formulations, operated when members of a categorically bounded network acquired access to a resource that it considered valuable, renewable, supportive of the network, and enhanced by the network’s modus operandi, and thus subject to monopolistic control. “Opportunity hoarding” thus made inequality durable. The concept allowed insights into inter-​group dynamics, race, ethnicity, identity, which include national units also in this inter-​group dynamics. Economics rarely combines identity and interest; it takes into account only the latter. History emphasises mostly the former. Tilly wanted to give us an approach based on a combination. Third, the implications of this approach were deeper. Tilly attempted at an organisational analysis of inequality. He said,

162  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking Mistaken beliefs reinforce exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation and adaptation but exercise little independent influence on their initiation.... It follows that the reduction or intensification of racist, sexist, or xenophobic attitudes will have relatively little impact on durable inequality, whereas the introduction of new organizational forms will have great impact.28 Tilly thus objected to any sweeping trans-​historical explanation about causes of durable inequality. He explored instead the organisation of inequality that made it in turn enduring. If we want to follow Tilly, it would imply that we would have to specifically investigate organisations predicating upon human relationships, and producing what he called categorical inequality, and like Tilly, we would have to posit and test a set of specific empirical hypotheses. Tilly said, “Large, significant inequalities in advantages among human beings correspond mainly to categorical differences such as black/​white, male/​ female, citizen/​foreigner, or Muslim/​Jew rather than to individual differences in attributes, propensities, or performances.”29 The theoretical task, then, as Eric Olin Wright suggested, is to explain why this should be the case. But it also means understanding what Wright calls the “central meta-​theoretical foundations” of Tilly’s approach to this problem.30 In fact, we shall see that Tilly managed to merge a series of functional explanations with a novel way of structural analysis, based on mapping out what may be termed a number of elementary forms, and building them in complex and ever more complex combinations. In this case, he had two elementary forms: types of social relations and inequality-​generating mechanisms. Tilly combined these two elements and proceeded to an organisational analysis of inequality, “organizational view of inequality-​generating mechanisms.”31 The theory of opportunity hoarding as a cause of exploitation followed from such an analysis.32 Via this fusion of Marx and Weber (as he said “a bridge from Max Weber on social closure to Karl Marx on exploitation and back.”33), Tilly inched closer to the materialist tradition of social analysis. His functional-​organisational approach enriched our understanding why material inequality persisted. On one occasion, in the background of the discussions on democracy, he reflected on his approach, Such an approach involves high-​risk wagers in theory and method. It rests on the assumption that democracy emerges contingently from political struggle in the medium run rather than being a product either of age-​ old character traits or of short-​term constitutional innovations. Partisans of political culture, on one side, and of democratization as legal reform on the other, have often bet against that assumption. My inquiry guesses, furthermore, that the social world’s order does not reside in general laws, repeated large-​scale sequences, or regular relationships among variables. We should not search for a single set of circumstances or a repeated set

Charles Tilly’s Theorising of Contention  163 of events that everywhere produces democracy. Nor should we look for actors having democratic intentions seeking to discover how and when they get chances to realize those intentions. We should look instead for robust, recurrent causal mechanisms that combine differently, and with different aggregate outcomes in different setting.34 Charles Tilly belonged to the rich American sociological tradition of Eric Wolf, Barrington Moore Jr., Rokkan Stein, and others. While this tradition had similarity in some significant respects with the corpus of ideas and methods Marx left for us, this was a distinct tradition which had less reliance on political economy and the class conflicts in society, but more on organisational analysis of the contentious times and places. All these call for separate investigation, and the scope of current chapter is not appropriate for such consideration, though it will remain an important task.35 To conclude: Tilly’s work on social change and collective action on a large scale spanning across centuries has helped develop a rich body of research on contentious politics. His methods in posing questions were important. Why a specific technique –​ranging from a consideration of logic to quantitative methods in historical analysis to consideration of epistemology –​ was to be chosen was equally significant. The idea of contentious history developed through his focus on the ontology of macro social change. Tilly took care to define the phenomenon he wanted to describe and explain, and considered to what extent his definition itself implied historical limits. He examined multiple instances of that phenomenon to make a minimum set for making some sort of comparison and then saw whether conclusions held up for a new theory. He would at time gather a small sample of the relevant historical material, try out a miniature version of his analysis, and then flesh it up. This was instructive. Through all these, the historical sociology of contentions flourished.36 The idea of contentious history and politics will be immensely significant in removing positivist traces in our understanding of social change. We now move on to one of the most contentious phenomena of our time, namely genocide.

Notes 1 This of course refers to Frederick Engels’ famous passage in one of his letters and Louis Althusser’s commentary on it. Frederick Engels wrote, According to the materialistic conception of history, the production and reproduction of real life constitutes in the last instance the determining factor of history. ...Now when someone comes along and distorts this to mean that the economic factor is the sole determining factor, he is converting the former proposition into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis but the various factors of the superstructure –​the political

164  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking forms of the class struggles and its results –​constitutions, etc., established by victorious classes after hard-​won battles –​legal forms, and even the reflexes of all these real struggles in the brain of the participants, political, juridical, philosophical theories, religious conceptions and their further development into systematic dogmas –​all these exercise an influence upon the course of historical struggles, and in many cases determine for the most part their form. There is a reciprocity between all these factors in which, finally, through the endless array of contingencies... Were this not the case, the application of the history to any given historical period would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree. (“Letter to J. Bloch”, 21 September 1890 –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​ marx/​works/​1890/​lett​ers/​90_​09_​21a.htm (accessed on 15 April 2022) Louis Althusser commented, Here, then are the two ends of the chain: the economy is determinant, but in the last instance, Engels is prepared to say, in the long run, the run of History. But History ‘asserts itself’ through the multiform world of superstructures, from local tradition to international circumstance. Leaving aside the theoretical solution Engels proposes for the problem of the relation between determination in the last instance –​the economic –​and those determinations imposed by the superstructures... it is sufficient to retain from him what should be called the accumulation of effective determinations... It seems to me that this clarifies the expression overdetermined contradiction ... this specifically because the existence of overdetermination is no longer a fact pure and simple, for in its essentials we have related it to its bases... the real existence of the forms of the superstructure and of the national and international conjuncture (is) an existence largely specific and autonomous, and therefore irreducible to a pure phenomenon. (Italics and bold in the original; “Contradiction and Overdetermination” (1962) in Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster –​www.marxi​ sts.org/​refere​nce/​arch​ive/​althus​ser/​1962/​overde​term​inat​ion.htm (accessed on 15 April 2022)) 2 Richard Hogan, “Charles Tilly Takes Three Giant Steps from Structure toward Process: Mechanisms for Deconstructing Political Process”, Contemporary Sociology, Volume 33 (3), May 2004, pp. 273–​277; Hogan refers to a letter from Tilly wherein Tilly mentions these four inquiries. 3 Charles Tilly, “Where Do Rights Come From?” in Tilly, Stories, Identities, and Social Change (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). 4 Entitlements have been famously defined by Amartya Sen as “the set of alternative commodity bundles that a person can command in a society using the totality of rights and opportunities that he or she faces” ’ –​Amartya Sen, Resources, Values and Development (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 497. 5 “Where Do Rights Come From?” in Charles Tilly, Stories, Identities, and Social Change, p. 56. 6 Ibid., pp. 65–​71. 7 Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–​ 1834 (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 8 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the College de France¸1977–​78, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Charles Tilly’s Theorising of Contention  165 9 On this, we shall have to read closely his arguments in Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–​1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). 10 Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organised Crime” in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Chapter 5 (pp. 169–​191), p. 171. 11 Illustrative of this method, Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768–​2004 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), Chapter 3, “Nineteenth-​Century Adventures”, pp. 38–​64; He was also careful on the issue of method and refused to dance to anything whose claim to methodological excellence was because it was professedly new. He said that none of the big questions had actually yielded to the bludgeoning of the big-​data people. See, Charles Tilly, “The Old-​New Social History and the New Old Social History”, Review, Volume 7 (3), Winter 1984, pp. 363–​406. 12 Charles Tilly, From Mobilisation to Revolution (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 48. 13 Charles Tilly, “Editor’s Introduction: Violence Viewed and Reviewed”, Social Text, Volume 67 (3), Fall 2000, pp. III–​VII. 14 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 245–​255. 15 Charles Tilly, Why? What Happens when People Give Reasons and Why (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 16 Charles Tilly, Credit and Blame (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 17 Credit and Blame, introduction, archived in “Memorials to Credit and Blame”, Social Science Research Council, 2008 –​http://​ess​ays.ssrc.org/​tilly/​intro​duct​ion (accessed on 12 June 2012); Tilly’s interest in story as a form of social repertoire grew from his interest in repertoires of contention. It will be useful to study in this context his slightly uneven book, Regimes and Repertoires (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), particularly Chapters 3–​4. 18 “Memorials to Credit and Blame”, written for The American Interest, May–​ June 2008; it was published in full by the Social Science Research Council in June 2008 –​http://​ess​ays.ssrc.org/​tilly/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2008/​06/​tilly-​memori​ alst​ocre​dita​ndbl​ame.pdf (accessed on 12 June 2012); the essay summarises the arguments in his last published book, Credit and Blame, op. cit. 19 Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory, 3 Volumes (Volume 1 Conflicts and Divisions, Volume 2 Traditions, and Volume 3 Symbols), (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–​1998). 20 “Memorials to Credit and Blame” –​http://​ess​ays.ssrc.org/​tilly/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ ads/​2008/​06/​tilly-​memori​alst​ocre​dita​ndbl​ame.pdf (accessed on 12 June 2012). 21 Sydney Tarrow, “Trans-​ national Political Contention and Institutions in International Politics”, American Review of Political Science, Volume 4, 2001, pp. 1–​20. 22 Marcel van der Linden commented,“... parts of Tilly’s model merit revision in the future, so that it may be embedded in a broader analysis that accounts not only for the North Atlantic region but for the world as a whole and consequently reflects greater consideration for capital formation, culture, and the non-​coercive aspects of state intervention” in a detailed review of Tilly’s works, “Charles Tilly’s Historical Sociology”, trans. Lee Mitzman, International Review of Social History, Volume 54, 2009 (pp. 237–​274), p. 271. 23 I am here referring mainly to Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

166  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking 24 This was the main question of the well-​known book by Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). 25 While interviewing Tilly on the eve of the publication of the book, Why? John Sutherland of The Guardian (3 October 2005) thought it was the biggest question of all Tilly was now trying to answer. 26 Sydney Tarrow, “The Contributions of Charles Tilly to the Social Sciences”, Contemporary Sociology, Volume 47 (5), (pp. 513–​524), 2018, p. 516 –​www.asa​net. org/​sites/​defa​ult/​files/​att​ach/​journ​als/​sept​18cs​feat​ure.pdf 27 Christopher Hawtree, “Charles Tilly –​Social Scientist Who Used History to Shine a Light on the Present”, The Guardian, 22 May 2008. 28 Durable Inequality, p. 15. 29 Ibid., p. 7. 30 Eric Olin Wright, “Meta-​ theoretical Foundations of Charles Tilly’s Durable Inequality”, September 1999 (Revised version of Paper presented at panel on Charles Tilly’s Durable Inequality at the Social Science History Conference, Chicago Illinois, November 20–​23, 1998) –​www.ssc.wisc.edu/​~wri​ght/​Tilly.PDF (accessed on 12 April 2022). 31 Durable Inequality, p. 9. 32 Only some of the institutional economists inquiring into the origin and persistence of inequality were somewhat near to the position that Tilly was taking. Besides Amartya Sen’s works, one can also read in this context, Partha Dasgupta, An Inquiry into Well-​Being and Destitution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); see in particular his discussion on uncertainty, insurance, social norms, and household –​ Chapters 8 and 11. 33 Durable Inequality, p. 7. 34 Charles Tilly, Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–​ 2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 9. 35 On Tilly’s methods and methodological affinities and differences with other historical sociologists and historians, one of the most informative, Marcel van der Linden, “Charles Tilly’s Historical Sociology”, op. cit. 36 Charles Tilly, “How I Work”; it is an excerpt from “Lullaby, Chorale, or Hurdy-​ Gurdy Tune?” an afterword to Roger Gould, ed., The Rational-​Choice Controversy in Historical Sociology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002) –​http://​ etss.net/​evolut​ion/​how​_​i_​w​ork/​tilly.htm (accessed on 12 April 2022).

9 Genocide A Most Contentious Word and Concept of Modern Time

I We continue with contention and antagonism as a template of alternative thinking. It should not surprise us that extreme contention and antagonism, for instance war, has produced new thinking. The modern global era –​to which we gave the name twentieth century, and which still continues –​is replete with such new thoughts appearing in the wake of extreme antagonism, such as a war or genocide. Such a new thought or concept cannot free itself of the contentions of the time. Thus, this new concept of genocide, which grew out of the mass murders committed by Nazi Germany, situates itself on the edge of an act, called mass murder. Here, the “mass” means group. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) says, In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.1 The concept carries the traces of specific conflicts, contradictions, and ambivalences of the time. The potentiality and limits of the concept are bound by that specificity. The concept genocide directs us to a displaced site of contemporary globalism, namely, globalised mass murders. The word carries within it two parallel stories: first, the unfolding of the theme of mass murder as a crucial one in global politics and global governance in the twentieth century; and second, the particular way race has been integrated with the concept of genocide in the liberal discourse. The question of mass murder as a problem for global governance became acute when mass murder created a crisis in politics or happened in the wake of a political crisis. We need detailed DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-14

168  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking historical research on the context in which genocide emerged as a crucial legal concept to account for large-​scale killings of populations in our time. Yet, such history tells us, the concept remains highly problematic owing to the deeply hierarchised notion of mass murders. In The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, historian Dirk Moses offers a critical understanding of genocide hitherto accepted as an unproblematic legal, political, and moral concept.2 After jurist Raphael Lemkin introduced the concept and the Nuremberg trial accepted the concept in its deliberations, communities of human rights thinkers, jurists, and practitioners thought that civilised humanity had found the ultimate word for the crime of mass murder.3 Dirk Moses quizzes this assumption that moralists, liberal politicians, jurists, and writers almost uncritically accepted. We may ask: What is the frontier of killing? What is the limit to murders en masse? Is there any hierarchy in the violation of human rights? What are the problems in viewing mass murders through the prism of the concept, genocide? In view of the quarrels over making right slots for right kind of murders, we may slightly rephrase Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Brothers Karamazov and say of ourselves, the more we love humanity in general, the less we are concerned about the lives of actual men and women. In our dreams, we often make plans for the service of humanity, and yet we can perfectly say that this mass murder is not as ultimate as that one. The more we hate men and women individually, the more we love humanity. Hence we are all against genocide even though mass killings may continue in front of our eyes and at times with our involvement in one way or another. Looked from this angle, the difficulties inherent to the concept of genocide also point to the problems in the concept of modern humanitarianism. Humanitarianism as distinct from philanthropy, charity, piety, and sympathy is a distinct ideology that draws at least in our time much from human rights. Yet it does not stop at that. It grows from sentiment, assumes an ethical sense of responsibility, to finally being an idea unto itself, an ideology that will require mega institutions and laws. This is a curious journey of an idea. Some have described the situation as the “humanitarian trap.”4 The crucible of this journey is of course the real history of mass murders and battle of perceptions and involvements in these murders. An account of humanitarianism thus is not simply the history of an idea but one laced with real-​life political events of killings, debates over those killings, the legitimating and de-​legitimating strategies around them, and the emergence of a global discourse on these killings that had been hitherto considered nation-​centric events. In The Problems of Genocide, the humanitarian and the global are intertwined in a historical narrative as historian Dirk Moses connects the dots. There are also other historical accounts which tell us how “mass murder” as a phenomenon became a problem for the international order in the wake of the two World Wars and tumult in Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.5 Through a study of that period, we get a fair sense of the links between the question of genocide, killings of Jews, the issue of survival,

Genocide  169 and recognition of small nations in the global emergence of nationalism and nation states. At the same time these links tell us of the relation between on one hand the rise in number of modern mass murders, politics around lives, and claims to legitimacy around destroying or protecting lives, and on the other emergence of modern humanitarianism. A massive war produced the Geneva Conventions; massive refugee crises gave us humanitarian institutions like the UNHCR; and colonialism produced clergies and missionaries who preached the need and hymns to save souls while saving diseased bodies. Doctors became companions to clergies. In this sense, politics, medicine, and humanitarianism were bound by the same historical destiny.6 The global moments of the rise of humanitarianism, mass murder as a political phenomenon, and the birth of the nation states as a widespread phenomenon occupied the same space of time. Michel Foucault noted, “citizen massacres” were essential for the birth of nation states and famously wrote of the moment, Wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and ... never before did the regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations …. Entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed....7 Foucault continued, For the first time in history ... biological existence was reflected in political existence …. But what might be called a society’s “threshold of modernity” has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.8 In this context humanitarianism became essential for modern forms of global governance. The liberal way to rule and the liberal way to war are linked in more than one way in this interlinked history of the nation states and global governance. Histories of partitions –​we can think of the simultaneously happening Indian partition and the partition of Palestine –​throw light on the citizen-​massacres as almost a secular law of history. Yet one can note that these massacres escaped the opprobrium of genocide. The ground for the humanitarian was prepared in unnoticed ways through the history of hierarchised mass violence. Thus, genocide as a legal concept did not include events such as famines (for instance, the Irish Famine in 1840s or the Bengal Famine of 1943) or epidemics. These were not seen as events of mass violence.

170  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking Yet the situation is changing at least in the postcolonial context. Consider the remark by an Indian High Court in the wake of a ravaging return of the Covid pandemic in the country in April 2021, “The death of Covid-​19 patients just for non-​supply of oxygen to the hospitals is a criminal act and not less than a genocide … how can we let people die in this way?”9 A commentator drew attention to the High Court’s said observation and added, This was a huge pronouncement, one that equates intentional massacres of civilian populations with ‘letting people die’ of starvation, or from a lack of air. It redefines the production of death itself, beyond wars and natural disasters. By pointing to those in authority who had reneged on their responsibilities, the honourable court was also implicitly probing larger questions of leadership, political parties and the state, holding each of these accountable. The pronouncement recalls two historical trials that illuminate the larger questions our own honourable court has raised: that of “crimes against humanity” itself.10 In course of his discussion the commentator recalled the observation in the Nuremberg trial, No state organisation is on trial here today. The indictments do not accuse an entire people of being collectively guilty of the crimes …. It may be tempting to generalise when dealing with the conduct of leaders at the highest level. But that is an error that must be avoided …. Collective guilt forms no part of the prosecution case.11 Around the same time, noted writer Arundhati Roy invoked the phenomenon of “crime against humanity” to indict the government of failure to save thousands of lives and avert avoidable deaths.12 Real-​life events confirm the critique by Dirk Moses, who raises the issue of the inadequacy of the term genocide and the emergence of complementary terms such as “crime against humanity,” “crime of all crimes,” and “crime of atrocity.” Yet as he shows these supplementary terms are also inconclusive in nature. Following Lawrence Douglas, Dirk calls the discursive situation one of “the atrocity paradigm.”13 But then in the actual hell where nations descend, it matters little whether we call it genocide or a crime against humanity. In this hell-​like situation we confront the question, when did it become a political question as to how death is produced? Where do we place the politics of death that philosophers describe as necropolitics? It is not a fancy question but an important one. Since forms of production of mass deaths are not standardised, we delude ourselves with the idea that some of these mass deaths are not results of extermination of lives on a large scale. With our received idea of “crime,” we ignore the fact that not always people are exterminated in wars and what is called “ethnic cleansing.” Deaths of large populations can happen differently as

Genocide  171 now. We all know of the term, “herd immunity.” The pseudo-​Darwinian theories of “herd immunity” have basically meant calculating and arbitrating the number of deaths that can be allowed in order to ensure the lives of the rest.14 For Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, the epidemiological crisis was a fantasy, and the former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, spoke of “herd immunity” –​the population should be exposed to and infected with the virus in order to “get it over with.”15 Indeed, biological security like other security games plays on the principle of determination of ratio. We should not be surprised that modern governmentality is essentially a matter of calculation of various options and possibilities and determination of ratio between options, alternatives, and possibilities. Invocation of the two concepts of “genocide” and “crime against humanity” actually crosses the academic boundary between studies of genocide and studies of famines and mass health disasters. In the postcolonial memory of deaths the boundaries between say the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of around 400 unarmed civilians by the colonial military forces (1919), the Bengal Famine (1943) in which about 2.5 million people perished, and the Great Calcutta Killings (1946) which by a conservative estimate devoured 4,000 people are blurred. From the angle of boundaries of concepts this is transgression. From the angle of memory this is the chiaroscuro of mass deaths taking place at frequent intervals. In some cases, we can identify the perpetrator of violence, in some cases we cannot (as in the Bengal Famine and now the thousands of Covid deaths). There is no one perpetrator of death and destruction. Yet, seeing the way thousands in country after country died owing to lack of primary healthcare needs, commentators have been moved to invoke “crime against humanity.”16 Indeed one commentator has written, Originally a Polish Jew himself, Lauterpacht coined the term ‘crimes against humanity’ in the backdrop of the severe death and destruction he saw his people and, indeed, his own family, go through. It is this overwhelming sentiment of seeing one’s people grief-​stricken and scarred for generations to come that underpinned Lauterpacht’s decision to coin the term. And while he did it for legal purposes, the term he coined carried much more weight, representing the almost unthinkable impact that mass deaths, widespread grief and untold sorrow have on generations of a people. In this sense, the term ‘crimes against humanity’ may well have outgrown its strict legal meaning right from its inception. The same is true for its cousin, the term ‘genocide’, as evidenced by how the term has been used extra-​legally in the time since it was coined.17 From Malthus onwards bourgeois historical knowledge of biopolitics has been built upon an obfuscation of the principle of determination of the ratio between expendable lives and lives to save because the latter category of lives will be of productive lives. If the ratio was being determined hitherto by nations at nation state level, today global strategies are focused on this same principle

172  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking of determination. The ratio is being globally determined –​whether in case of the Mediterranean boat crossings or the Rohingyas at sea or the massive camps working as holding places for unwanted lives irrelevant for production, or for running global supply chains, or health safety of the human species (as witnessed in the gross inequity in global vaccine availability). In each of these cases, the ratio of lives to be expended and secured is being determined –​globally, historically, and contingently. Extermination of Jews happened at the same time when conquered population groups were being put to labour in the German production machines exactly as the case was nearly a century ago, when in the United States extermination of native Americans was accompanied and followed by massive import of contracted labour from China, a generation of whom perished in the construction of railway lines. Seen in this light the small nations of say Eastern Europe, other subordinated population groups, suppressed races, subjects of Atlantic slavery, and the Jews and Roma people formed a large continuum of population groups who could be considered expendable when found unsuitable to be used as raw labour. There is always a line of a continuum of victims of the modern time. In short, at one level terms like genocide or crime against humanity are legal terms carrying the imprint of a history. These terms prod law to continuously approximate the reality of recurrent mass deaths. At another level, these two terms acquire as we can see their specific, distinct, parallel but interrelated lives. They are active in shaping events, memory, and our understanding.

II The two stories of race and nation are imbricated as parallel stories in the genealogy of the concept of genocide. As a form of crime genocide is committed against targeted groups as well as against small nations. And thus, if race is one axis of genocide, the other axis is small nations. Racial superiority, racial discrimination, racial hatred, racial destruction, racial consciousness, racial typologies, racial histories, racial hierarchies, and racial domination –​forming the core of aggressions in nineteenth and twentieth centuries -​have taken the form of colonial and neo-​colonial domination. Yet racial domination was not possible if the theme of race was not interlinked with the other theme of small nations. Small nations became small races and vice versa. The mutual transformation made modern mass murders possible at frequent intervals through the last one and half century. In fact a lesser narrated story of the reality of state formation in vast parts of the world including Eastern Europe is the way race acted as a fulcrum on which small nations built themselves. The same small nation that cried out for recognition discriminated against and suppressed various “races” within –​Jews, non-​ Slavs, Romas, Muslims, non-​Orthodox Christians, and non-​Turk subjects. Clearly race has functioned as a sceptre driving a wedge through the landscape of universalism and nationalism. Racism did not begin with the modern age. However, as various fault lines appeared in the permanent drive

Genocide  173 for colonial conquest by stronger countries and powers, race acquired greater potency as a compulsive reason for mass murder. The Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin’s efforts to make the world recognise mass murder as an international crime was part of producing a new type of historical knowledge about the function of race in modern international politics. Historical studies like that by Dirk Moses tell us how the new historical knowledge was formed in the wake of specific events such as the massacres of Armenians during the First World War and the absence of any international law to prosecute the Ottoman leaders responsible for these massacres.18 This new historical knowledge played a crucial role in creating a hierarchy of mass murders. It formed the hinge between the global governing power in the post-​Second World War age and the silent recognition of the fact that the creation of this power owed among others to the horrific realisation that the victory in this war had come only on the basis of defeating a race war. Thus Lemkin could build the word genocide from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing).19 Yet this new knowledge was not to be confined to a reality of killing of races only, it had to be broad. Hence Lemkin’s definition, “Genocide is directed against a national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.”20 With genocide a new type of historical knowledge was thus established; it hid the reality of race wars, colonial wars, mass extermination in famines, and the continuing histories of enmities and friendships. Mass killings became the subject of law. We now had, besides the knowledge of individual and the society and an accompanying theory of rights, knowledge of threats to societies as a whole. Liberal societies acquired full form with the acquisition of two parallel streams of knowledge –​that of the rights of an individual (legally codified in the concept of crimes against humanity) and that of the security of endangered collectives (legally codified in the concept of crime of genocide). Liberal societies claimed to value both. Suppression of individual rights and obliterating weaker nations, identities, and groups were the combined feature of an illiberal society. These were diseases of power. The new knowledge in the form of the Genocide Convention and the Declarations of Human Rights (UDHR and ICCPR) embodied the process that began on a strong note with the Nuremberg Principles.21 It culminated with the Rome Statute of 1998 that set up an International Criminal Court to cover the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. The Rome Statute recalled for many the Geneva Conventions of 1864 and 1906 that had aimed to “submit war to the laws of humanity and dictates of public conscience.” Yet it was precisely this new knowledge that hid quite a many realities while setting up new themes for rational global governance. Race was thereafter banished from the arena of governance. The world was now told that it would have to fight racism.22 The mutual determination of racism and nationalism must not miss our eyes. The reconstitution of nation states in the post-​ Second World War era was based on reconstitution of their foundations, one of the starkest

174  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking instances being the citizen/​stateless duality. The immigrant soon became the other race. This transformation of the liberal nation state system happened in the wake of a crisis of rule that extended for nearly fifty years. Redrawing the state system of Europe in the wake of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, emergence of the nations on a global scale, extermination of Jews, large-​scale killings of populations in the occupied areas during the Second World War, the formation of Israel, partition of the Indian sub-​continent –​all of these were marked by crises of the extant political order of a colonial world. The weakening of the liberal foundation of the nation state system continues –​not to forget thus the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Balkan Wars in the last decade of the previous century. In all these scenarios crises indicated ruptures and despair of states to find final solutions to the intractable issues they confronted. States wanted stability, but stability could be achieved only with the compensatory mechanisms of murder and expulsion. As if large-​scale expulsions and murders formed a guarantee of freedom. At times, expulsions got the formal name of exchange of populations. These moments, which we know today as the genocidal moments of modern era, spoke of the crisis of the general apparatus of rule. The study of these killings and discourses around them has to be conducted in the light of a parallel history of the general apparatus of government being periodically subjected to violent shocks and tremors. Over and above the juridical consensus on outlawing genocide, the presence of mass killings as an act on the edge of a continuous history of state formation sustains.23 The anxiety about how to confront the phenomenon of mass murders in the age of civility is an anxiety about the ethicality of the modern state. Etienne Balibar saw the crisis of civility as a political question.24 Raphael Lemkin had put great stake in the concept of genocide as he wanted to ensure a safe future of smaller nations of Eastern Europe, other subordinated population groups, and suppressed races and population groups such as the Jews and Roma with an international legislation that would proscribe the singular act called “genocide.” Lemkin’s work demonstrated an ethico-​legal mind at work. It also showed his double anxiety, namely anxiety about how to ensure “never again” to the killing of Jews and “never again” to the denial of political existence of small nations at least in Central and Eastern Europe. Yet the fact that genocide was not found to be enough of an accommodative concept and needed to be continuously supplemented with another one, namely “crime against humanity” showed that the stakes for Lemkin were perhaps too high.

III Security is thus a never-​ending anxiety. It runs in circles. As Dirk Moses shows, the presence of the theme of security always overwhelms and in turn is subsumed by the question of genocide and now crimes against humanity. The logic of permanent security is pervasive in the liberal political state system, yet the logic by its nature faces permanent challenges. This logic, it has been

Genocide  175 noted, “boomerangs from home to abroad to home, via the racialization and militarization of institutions like the police and the prison industrial complex.”25 Security is a concentric circle continuously drawing inward and expanding out to remain a valid concept. The entire history of security with its debates on proportionality, just ways and just motives to war, collateral damage, use of tactical nuclear weapons to achieve limited and measured damage to the enemy, permanent security of borders, combining frontier making with border making exercises, securing a nation with a right size and right mix of population, and the discourses of human security involving food, climate, environment, migration, climate, water, in fact every conceivable asset of the earth ... is a history of discovering and mending fault lines in the architecture of security and rediscovering yet more fault lines. Policies of macro-​ security have almost everywhere produced micro-​insecurities all around. Liberal state claimed that it had broken the back of pre-​modern networks of power based on clan, tribe, race, royal lineages, religion, etc., and created a secular structure of rule based on a republican identity of voter, citizenship, and the institution of universal suffrage. Neoliberal regimes realised the limits of a liberal solution to ongoing wars and extremely contentious politics. They decided to co-​opt the non-​republican networks of power in the market-​based networks. While this may have solved at least temporarily some of the problems of liberal security paradigm, we find ourselves in a time when the reality of the intermeshed networks of power that act as the foundation of global governance produces the virtual possibility of seditions and riots all around. The daily life of the state belongs also to the virtual life of the state –​a life framed by sedition and riot. Following the footsteps of Lemkin states will have to take responsibility for this possibility of riots and sedition. States cannot forget what Machiavelli had told long back, namely, how the prince would rule depended on how the prince had acquired power (thus, by hereditary means or conquest or transfer of power, or through a cabal-​led conspiracy ...).26 Neoliberals would like to have a perfect solution to the conundrum. On one hand they would like the conditions to be such that genocide becomes increasingly an obsolete concept, or at least one that society can no longer be accused of committing; on the other, necessary killing and expenditure of lives continue so that “societies are defended.” Force will be ready to be deployed whenever required. We have here a combination of the imperial theme of power and the modern theme of government that addresses the problems of life and population as the object of a policy of security. The combination transforms the language of security. The language is now ever ready to change. It will be increasingly flexible. Security is achieved only through a transgression of its given language. The language of transgression becomes the language of security of the neoliberal time. This is how security can become permanent. The flexibilisation of security as we see in the management of borders, immigration controls, climate security, building up sovereign funds, trading in futures, and a host of other issues tells us of the way

176  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking governments work. They are always weighing options; hence you have carbon credits and carbon exchange, or killing people straightaway or expelling them. Saskia Sassen tells us why we cannot think in the usual terms of poverty and injustice in the current precarious conditions leading to destruction.27 These are forms of expulsion –​from livelihood, living space, indeed the biosphere that makes life possible. In such condition, recognition of rights is not a one-​time affair. Recognition has to be in a continuous mode, as if the rights question is a matter of daily plebiscite. At one level, the rights revolution as a major feature of global politics has ended. At another level, beginning with the UDHR it continues subsuming in it as many aspects of life as possible. Hence is the exasperation of jurists and lawyers, when will the battle of rights end and law will be allowed some sleep? We may recall the role of the Spanish jurist Bartolome Clavero known for his tireless efforts to bring a special international law on the rights of the indigenous peoples in the light of the limits of the Genocide Convention (1948). Clavero brought up the history of “genocide” of American Indians as the basis of the formation of the United States and showed how the expropriation of the property of the American Indians by the constitutions of the states joining hands to form the United States was crucial in establishing the rule of property as laid down by the US constitution.28 Eight letters only, but they have a long history that Clavero wanted to unravel. In fact the UN Special Rapporteur’s submission to the Tenth Session of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (2011) explicitly mentions the inadequacy of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to ensure and protect the rights of the indigenous people or the people of the colonial world. The Report said, Indigenous peoples were clearly included in the official draft of the Genocide Convention, submitted by the Office of the Secretary-​General of the United Nations, since the draft referred to potential attacks on the culture of groups which corresponded objectively to habitual State policy towards these peoples. Brazil objected, arguing that this would allow “minorities” to oppose policies necessary to State-​building and to the equality of a State’s citizens. New Zealand, South Africa and Canada agreed with Brazil. The American States and the European States that were current or former colonial powers, such as Great Britain, France and Belgium, also supported Brazil’s position. They demanded the inclusion in the Convention of a “colonial clause” that allowed the metropolis to decide whether or not to extend its provisions to its colonies, or to decide to do so with modifications. This led to the virtual disappearance of the provision in question from the final text of the Convention, and therefore to the subsequent establishment of a separate form of genocide: cultural genocide ... In any event, the definition of genocide includes not only “killing members of the group” in order to “bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, but also non-​violent acts committed

Genocide  177 with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a group which, under the definition contained in article 2 of the Convention, could well constitute an indigenous people .... This extremely limited definition of genocide in the case of indigenous peoples was applied in theory, but rarely in practice. At the time of the Convention’s entry into force in 1951, the difficulty of applying it was recognized. For example, a civil rights group immediately submitted to the United Nations the case of the intentional partial destruction of the African American group in the United States but received no response whatsoever.... This significant exclusion of colonies from the Genocide Convention was not applicable to indigenous peoples living within the borders of a State, but there was a potential for contamination; this made the Convention even less effective in respect of all indigenous peoples .... Since the 1970s, the concept of “ethnocide” has gained currency, replacing “cultural genocide” and with the same meaning, with “genocide” referring only to physical genocide. This has created a new problem without resolving any of the old ones. Ethnocide as a category does not provide a basis for the international judicial defence of indigenous peoples. In international law, genocide, which does have that potential, has a meaning under the Convention which is far broader than physical destruction and which is lost with the new concept of ethnocide.29 Neoliberal rule subsists on this network of mass killings, woven through modern history, which makes impossible coining a single omnibus term covering all forms of mass killings and expulsion. Incitation and struggles, face-​ to-​ face confrontations, permanent provocations, and the continuous tussle between insecurity and insecurity –​these mark the political formation of the states almost everywhere. Power’s proximity and reach is ubiquitous. This is the way the word genocide has achieved wide currency. Thus, the point is not if genocide is a limited term,30 but that its almost omnibus use directs us to a reality, where legal solution to extreme injustice –​as envisioned by Lemkin and Lauterpacht –​by itself is an impossible category. There is no permanent security in as much as there is no solution to the secular feature of transgression of liberal security norms. Within the principle of security, at least in our time, the possibility of transgression remains. Transgression follows closely the language of security. The challenge is how do we link the concept of security with dialogue, contingency, and the notion of a daily practice of friendship –​all of which mean accepting uncertainties of life, a readiness to live “uncertainly” that is to say, “living dangerously”?31 The purpose of this chapter is therefore not to castigate the concept of genocide and replace it with another concept of “universal crime” or “crime of all crimes,” but to show that a new concept is produced on the fault lines of a history, in the contentious atmosphere from which it will draw inspiration. Raphael Lemkin’s idea was born in the history of the time, and the journey from that specific context to its universalisation was a long and an

178  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking equally contentious one. Lemkin conceptualised in the context of occupation. He wrote of the context, In the situation as it exists at present there is no means for providing for alleviation of the treatment of populations under occupation until the actual moment of liberation. It is then too late for remedies, for after liberation such populations can at best obtain only reparation for damages but never restoration of values, which have been destroyed and which cannot be restored, such as human life, treasures of art, and historical archives.32 The context of occupation is important because occupation and racism are inseparable from each other. Concepts are thus always political, more so when they classify and rank killings. In this case, the old idea about the notion of “concepts” is more important, as we are bound to ask, “How do meanings relate to words?” Is this relation equivocal or univocal?33 And thus, while Lemkin could not anticipate, we can raise the questions: What should be the term regarding the destruction of groups if not genocide when such destruction is carried without full-​scale physical occupation as is happening in the neoliberal time? How shall we situate such destruction vis-​à-​vis the extreme violation of rights of the person? How shall we hold to account groups, which, say, practise infanticide if not in terms of genocide? Will colonial killings and killings of indigenous population groups be not considered genocides?34 The genealogy of the notion of genocide tells us of an amalgam of empirical cases, historical perspectives, reality of victor’s justice as justice, and theoretical-​legal considerations.35 Yet the task, to repeat, is not to keep on emphasising the vulnerability of the concept but to discover precisely through examining the operation of this concept other perspectives, realities, and alternatives that the future requires. To sum up: The methodological lesson these discussions lead us to is that rather than orienting our research on the inadequacy of the juridical edifice of redress to mass killings, we should orient our analysis of the concept towards its contexts, material operations, and the connections among the uses of the concept. These will tell us of varying forms of subjugation and their historical knowledges, also a different way towards conceptualising the theme of redress. For that, perhaps we need to imagine a different form of justice, which for lack of better term we may provisionally call, minimal justice which is dialogic justice. Dialogic justice does not deny the contentious nature of the politics of our time but builds on the fault lines towards a dialogic future. Given the proliferation of borders and exercises of boundary making within national and international life, dialogic politics may be the only way to avoid the possibility of a genocidal future confronting us. At least six principles of dialogic justice may be culled out from the history of the last hundred odd years:

Genocide  179 1 2 3 4 5 6

Acknowledgement of past injustices; Jointly determined compensation for past injustices; Guarantee that such injustices will not happen again; Joint mechanisms to ensure that guarantee; Joint determination of the path to a future that is affected by the unjust past; and Acknowledgement that not all were affected adversely, equally, and at the same time, and hence the guarantee that the principle of autonomy is universal, and that the operation of achieving justice must continue deeper within the victim societies.36

Notes 1 Article 2 –​www.un.org/​en/​gen​ocid​epre​vent​ion/​docume​nts/​atroc​ity-​cri​mes/​Doc.1_​ Con​ vent ​ i on%20on%20the%20Pre​ vent​ i on%20and%20Pun​ i shm​ e nt%20of%20 the%20Cr​ime%20of%20G​enoc​ide.pdf (accessed on 20 October 2021). 2 A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 3 Alexa Stiller, “The Mass Murder of the European Jews and the Concept of ‘Genocide’ in the Nuremberg Trials: Reassessing Raphael Lemkin’s Impact”, Genocide Studies and Prevention, Volume 13 (1), 2019, pp. 144–​172; we have to note that the concept of war crimes already existed in international law as criminal violations of the laws of war. But the existing idea of the war crime did not cover some of the most severe crimes committed by Nazi Germany on population groups including Germany’s own citizens on racial grounds. The Allies had called the mass murder of the Armenians “crimes against humanity” in 1915; see also Guido Acquaviva, “At the Origins of Crimes against Humanity: Clues to a Proper Understanding of the Nullum Crimen Principle in the Nuremberg Judgment”, Journal of International Criminal Justice Volume 9 (4), 2011, pp. 881–​903. 4 Amanda Alexander, “The Ethics of Violence: Recent Literature on the Creation of the Contemporary Regime of Law and War”, Journal of Genocide Research, 2021, p. 13 –​DOI: 10.1080/​14623528.2021.1985809 (accessed on 10 March 2022). 5 Raphael Lemkin’s life and work enlighten us about the specific context. See Dan Eshet (primary writer), Totally Unofficial: Raphael Lemkin and the Genocide Convention, The Making History Series, Facing History and Ourselves (www.facing​ hist​ory.org), 2007 –​www.facing​hist​ory.org/​sites/​defa​ult/​files/​publi​cati​ons/​rapha​el_​l​ emki​n_​0.pdf (accessed on 20 October 2021). 6 Guillaume Lachenal and Bertrand Taithe, “A Missionary and Colonial Genealogy of Humanitarianism: The Aujoulat Case in Cameroon, 1935–​1973”, Le Mouvement Social, Volume 27 (2), 2009, pp. 45–​63, trans. Cadenza Academic Translations –​www. cairn-​int.info/​jour​nal-​le-​mouvem​ent-​soci​al1-​2009-​2-​page-​45.htm (accessed on 9 March 2022). 7 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), Part V, “Right of Death over Life”, pp. 136–​137. 8 Ibid., pp. 142–​143.

180  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking 9 The Wire, “Covid-​19 Patients Dying due to Oxygen Shortage Is Not Less Than a Genocide: Allahabad HC” –​https://​thew​ire.in/​law/​covid-​19-​oxy​gen-​short​age-​ genoc​ide-​allaha​bad-​high-​court (accessed on 4 June 2021). 10 Siddharth S. Aatreya, “Why India’s Covid-​19 Catastrophe Is Indeed a ‘Crime against Humanity’ ”, The Wire, 13 May 2021 –​https://​thew​ire.in/​hea​lth/​why-​ind​ ias-​covid-​19-​cata​stro​phe-​is-​ind​eed-​a-​crime-​agai​nst-​human​ity (accessed on 4 June 2021). 11 Ibid. 12 “We Are Witnessing a Crime against Humanity: Arundhati Roy against India’s COVID Catastrophe”, The Guardian, 28 April 2021 –​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​ news/​2021/​apr/​28/​crime-​agai​nst-​human​ity-​arundh​ati-​roy-​india-​covid-​cata​stro​phe (accessed on 1 June 2021); Roy wrote, Healthcare is a fundamental right. The private sector will not cater to starving, sick, dying people who don’t have money. This massive privatisation of India’s healthcare is a crime. The system hasn’t collapsed. The government has failed. Perhaps ‘failed’ is an inaccurate word, because what we are witnessing is not criminal negligence, but an outright crime against humanity. Virologists predict that the number of cases in India will grow exponentially to more than 500,000 a day. They predict the death of many hundreds of thousands in the coming months, perhaps more. 13 The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, pp. 20–​23. 14 One analyst has remarked, “Clothed in scientific expertise and upward and downward curves of infection” the discourse of herd immunity seemed like “a pantomime being played out for a population that seems more dispensable than ever before.” Social Darwinism, after all, is a fond faith of “rulers and ideologues, who have devoted their lives to privatising education and destroying education itself as a public good …” –​Rashmi Varma, “Lockdown in London: The Demise of What the Neoliberal City Has Made us Accustomed to”, The Wire, 28 March 2020 –​ https://​thew​ire.in/​world/​lon​don-​lockd​own-​covid-​19 (accessed on 30 March 2021). 15 These responses exemplify a laissez-​faire approach to health, but perhaps it also signifies a more fundamental global reality of our time –​the state’s incapacity to guarantee life. 16 On the concept of “crimes against humanity” and the pioneering role of Lauterpacht, Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2016). 17 Siddharth S. Aatreya, “Why India’s Covid-​19 Catastrophe Is Indeed a ‘Crime against Humanity’ ”, The Wire, 13 May 2021 –​https://​thew​ire.in/​hea​lth/​why-​ind​ ias-​covid-​19-​cata​stro​phe-​is-​ind​eed-​a-​crime-​agai​nst-​human​ity (accessed on 4 June 2021). 18 A close reader of the recent literature on genocide has observed, “As Graf’s term “universal crime” (Sinja Graf, The Humanity of Universal Crime: Inclusion, Inequality, and Intervention in International Political Thought, Oxford University Press, 2021) makes explicit, the concept of genocide as the archetypal crime in the current paradigm is a particular, historically situated understanding of criminal violence. Graf and Moses show this through their accounts of alternative understandings of universal crime or, in Moses’ words “languages of transgression.” Moses demonstrates that in the past, the language of transgression captured

Genocide  181 a much wider range of activities, including economic and political oppression. Moreover, both Graf and Moses are able to show just how closely these standards are tied to their time and how poorly ideas of crime and ethical behaviour translate across historical periods. Graf does this by pointing out that Locke employed an idea of universal crime to justify English ownership of property in America, while Moses shows how population exchanges were linked to prevailing ideas of rights.” –​Amanda Alexander, “The Ethics of Violence: Recent Literature on the Creation of the Contemporary Regime of Law and War”, Journal of Genocide Research, 2021, p. 5 –​DOI: 10.1080/​14623528.2021.1985809 (accessed on 10 March 2022). 19 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), p. 79. 20 Ibid., p. 79. 21 The Nuremberg principles are a set of seven guidelines for determining what constitutes a war crime. The document was created by the International Law Commission of the United Nations to codify the legal principles underlying the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi leaders following the Second World War. 22 Etienne Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-​Racism?’ ” and “Racism and Nationalism” in Immanuel Wallerstein (ed.), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), Chapters 1 and 3; for a critical discussion on Balibar’s idea of racism without race, Ranabir Samaddar, “Pangs of Ambiguity: Race, Nation, Class deciphered for India” in Manuela Bojadzijev and Katrin Klingan (eds.), Balibar/​Wallerstein’s Race, Nation, Class: Rereading a Dialogue for our Times (Hamburg: Argument Verlag and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2018), pp. 171–​198. 23 See the summary of literature by Amanda Alexander, “The Ethics of Violence: Recent Literature on the Creation of the Contemporary Regime of Law and War”, Journal of Genocide Research –​ https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​14623​ 528.2021.1985​809 24 Etienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Jones, James Swanson, and Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002). 25 Marie E. Berry, “Genocide and Grievability” (a response to the forum on Dirk Moses’ book, The Problems of Genocide), International Politics Reviews, February 2022 –​ https://​doi.org/​10.1057/​s41​312-​022-​00134-​4 (accessed on 12 March 2022). 26 Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1513), trans. William Kenaz Marriott (Project Gutenber E-​book, 1998), Chapters 7 and 8 –​www.gutenb​erg.org/​files/​1232/​1232-​ h/​1232-​h.htm#pre​f05 (accessed on 27 May 2021). 27 Saskia Sassen, Expulsions –​Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). 28 Bartolome Clavero, Freedom’s Law and Indigenous Rights: From Europe’s Oeconomy to the Constitutionalism of the Americas (Berkeley, CA: The Robbins Religious and Civil Law Collection, School of Law, University of California, 2005); also Bartolome Clavero, Genocide or Ethnocide, 1933-​2007: How to Make, Unmake, and Remake Law with Words (Milan: Giuffre, 2008). 29 “Study on International Criminal Law and the Judicial Defence of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights”, submitted by the Special Rapporteur, Bartolome Clavero Salvador, to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Tenth session New York, 16–​27 May 2011, Item 7 of the Provisional Agenda, UN Economic and Social Council, paragraphs 5–​10 –​www.refwo​rld.org/​pdfid/​4dbfc6​862.pdf (accessed on 25 May 2021).

182  Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking 30 Besides Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, see also Benjamin Meiches, The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). 31 See the work following Michel Foucault by Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilience: The Art of Living Dangerously (London: Polity, 2014). 32 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, pp. 94–​95. 33 Giovanni Sartori, “Guidelines in Concept Analysis” (Chapter 1, pp. 15–​ 72) in Sartori (ed.), Social Science Concepts: A Systemic Analysis (London: Sage, 1984), p. 22. 34 Kiera Ladner, “Political Genocide: Killing Nations through Legislation and Slow-​ Moving Poison” in Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton (eds.), Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), Chapter 10, pp. 226–​ 245; A.D. Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust”, Patterns of Prejudice, Volume 36 (4), 2002, pp. 7–​36; also on this, Bartolome Clavero Salvador’s extensive writings, two of which are mentioned above (n. 28). 35 On victor’s justice in Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (1946–​48), see the discussion by Partha Chatterjee, I am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2020), Chapter 1, “Even Justice”, pp. 1–​30. 36 I have written elsewhere on the principles of dialogic justice. See Ranabir Samaddar, The Politics of Dialogue: Living Under the Geopolitical Histories of War and Peace (London: Routledge, 2004), Chapters 5 and 11.

Section Five

Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds

10 The Impossibility of Politics Brecht, Manto and Two Acts of Literature

I Two writings of Bertolt Brecht and Sadaat Hasan Manto are joined by a realisation that in certain situations political openings become impossible. Strangely these are not stable or more correctly speaking static situations but are situations of mobility. Yet the conditions of mobility bring to us only spectre of closure and deaths. Political openings towards transformation at least in a conventional sense are ruled out. The severity of itinerant situations at times makes it impossible for the migrant subjectivity to become political. German dramatist Bertolt Brecht’s play, Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), and the short story on the Indian partition by the Urdu writer Sadaat Hasan Manto, Toba Tek Singh (1955), tell us of situations that are marked by an impossibility of politics. These two literary pieces critique existing political responses to the closures of the time –​a war and a partition. They produce an aesthetic of empathy paradoxically perched on an interrogative posture, and this irrespective of whatever the authors may have wanted to convey through these two writings. They replace politics as they become “acts of literature.”1 Precisely by refusing to suggest a political solution, they present an uncertain and delicate message, namely that politics does not solve everything. There are many situations on earth that prove a closure of politics, where perhaps aesthetics provides the opening. Aesthetic sensibility acquires fundamental importance in envisioning alternative ideas. It makes the reach of understanding global while its roots may be local. In case of Toba Tek Singh we can certainly say, power of the aesthetic escapes the postcolonial bind. Readers may recall Chapter 2 of this book that introduced the discussion on the power of the aesthetic.

II We always have this nagging question in our minds, and politics seems incapable of addressing or at times stops short of addressing it. The question is deceptively simple, namely: During war, famine, riots, massive population flows, political upheavals and ruthless coercive steps by the army, police, DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-16

186  Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds administration, etc., what happens to the itinerant? What happens to people on the fringes of societies –​the criminal, the lunatic, wandering vagabond, and the forgotten? We are speaking here of impossible situations. We can say that if wars, riots, and famines will be with us, the situation of the itinerant will be an impossible one: not only impossible for political doctrines, welfare measures, humanitarian policies, and impossible for the itinerant, but impossible for narration also. Recall young Marx, who in On the Jewish Question (1844) had said that abolition of the Jewish Question is impossible until the identity of the Jew along with the identity of the political state has disappeared. Marx pointed out the closure of political language in situations that call for social transformation. Readers of Toba Tek Singh perhaps will not remember the name of the main protagonist of the story, Bishan Singh, but they will remember the name Toba Tek Singh. By the end of the story Toba Tek Singh, a settlement, has been anthropomorphised. Bishan by the time of his death has become Toba Tek Singh, who, Manto says, lay dead on the middle ground between two countries. We must carefully read Manto in his incomparable economy of words here as he describes the situation in the wake of the partition of lunatics between India and Pakistan and thus the division of Indian lunatics and Pakistani lunatics: Two or three years after Partition, the governments of Pakistan and India decided to exchange lunatics in the same way that they had exchanged civilian prisoners … . Most of the lunatics were opposed to the exchange. They did not understand why they should be uprooted and sent to some unknown place. Some, only half-​mad, started shouting … . When Bishan Singh’s turn came to be entered in the register, he spoke to the official in charge. “Where is Toba Tek Singh?” he asked. “Is it in Pakistan or India?” The official laughed. “It’s in Pakistan,” he replied. Hearing this, Bishan Singh leapt back and ran to where his remaining companions stood waiting. The Pakistani guards caught him and tried to bring him back to the crossing point, but he refused to go. “Toba Tek Singh is here!” he cried … The officials tried to convince him that Toba Tek Singh was now in India. If by some chance it wasn’t they would send it there directly, they said. But he wouldn’t listen. Because he was harmless, the guards let him stand right where he was while they got on with their work. He was quiet all night, but just before sunrise he screamed. Officials came running from all sides. After fifteen years on his feet, he was lying face down on the ground. India was on one side, behind a barbed wire fence. Pakistan was on the other side, behind another fence. Toba Tek Singh lay in the middle, on a piece of land that had no name.2

The Impossibility of Politics  187 But we can also say that while Bishan Singh asserted that the place where he was standing was Toba Tek Singh –​his only memory of the past, Manto was suggesting surreptitiously that the place which he stood on and knew, was indeed the place of his memory or dream, and therefore, “Toba Tek Singh lay in the middle, on a piece of land that had no name.”3 This is, in as much we could say that the individual had been transformed into a place, an imaginary of a place which was there perhaps in Pakistan or perhaps in India, but no, as Manto said, was in the middle. In the story Manto gives the reader no clue as to where this asylum was. It was somewhere, and Manto tells us that Partition had just taken place, “two or three years” before. Political rationality in the form of division, territorial policies, and administrative fairness had failed. Manto is particular about suggesting administrative fairness in implementing partition –​even lunatics were to be exchanged on a fair basis. Yet for politics it was a closed situation; perhaps and more importantly, for language. Standing through the night on the border fence, Bishan Singh gave out a scream and died.4 However, if we think that at least a scream can express the impossibility of any decision that the itinerant must make, please hold on for a while. Yes, you can refuse a choice that politics places before you, you can become a lunatic to scream and die. But as Bertolt Brecht wrote in Mother Courage and Her Children, “The screamers don’t scream long, only half an hour, after which they have to be sung to sleep, they’re all in.” Even screaming does not solve the problem. All it does is to signal that language has ended. In case of Brecht, we may say that he at least thinks that only political consciousness can prise open such situation. Manto however declines to make that suggestion. Perhaps the closure is permanent and therefore the situation has the potential to make readers think of its absurdity. Not without reason Toba Tek Singh will rank as one of the remarkable short stories of our time. Manto describes the situation as the situation closes in on language and the exchange of lunatics is about to take place: Preparations for the exchange had been completed. Lists of the lunatics coming from here to there, and from there to here had arrived, and the day of the exchange had also been fixed. It was extremely cold when the lorries full of Hindu and Sikh lunatics from the Lahore insane asylum set out, with a police guard. The escorting wardens were with them as well. At the Wagah border the two parties’ superintendents met each other; and after the initial procedures had been completed, the exchange began, and went on all night. To extricate the lunatics from the lorries and confide them to the care of the other wardens, was a very difficult task. Some refused to emerge at all. Those who were willing to come out became difficult to manage, because they suddenly ran here and there. If clothes were put on the naked ones, they tore them off their bodies and flung them away. Someone was

188  Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds babbling abuse, someone was singing. They were fighting among themselves, weeping, muttering. People couldn’t make themselves heard at all-​ -​and the female lunatics’ noise and clamour was something else. And the cold was so fierce that everybody’s teeth were chattering.5 The question of the failure of language tells us of the failure of spirituality and ethics also. Recall Marx once more namely that Jewish spirituality will live and die with Christianity; political democracy of the Christian state will not emancipate the Jew. In Marx’s words, Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism –​huckstering and its preconditions –​the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man’s individual-​sensuous existence and his species-​ existence has been abolished. The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.6 (Italics in the original) Here, as if the storyteller is saying: in a situation like this we fail in our own opinion once we have dispensed with critical judgements. We have submitted the declaration of human worth to an impossible situation. Our subjectivity is meaningless. Our heroism is a deceit. The verification of truth does not come by political means, because verification faces a blocked situation. On the other hand, it is the dramatic development exhibited in a flash by the literary mode that brings out the subject-​less state of an exile, the situation of an itinerant –​ a situation where language becomes meaningless. Word, philosophy’s wait to be listened to, must be postponed. That is the biggest part of the reality. The reality of politics must reconcile itself as only the exterior of a situation, whose materiality defies political language. The critique of politics is achieved through an aesthetic mode. In other words, politics must be subjected to criticism from outside, as if our storyteller and the playwright are saying, we are taking you, readers, immersed in your petty political judgements to a situation where you will find political language has ended, the conceit of politics has been brought home to you, and the void will tell you that to prise open the situation, force has to appear from outside. The closure will invite this force. “Political spirituality,” we can borrow a phrase of a philosopher, emerges in the wake of the death of political language: the language of reason, administration, and solution.7 If spirituality as a world reordering phenomenon has died as indeed Marx pointed out in his discussion On the Jewish Question, it can reappear now only in a combination with politics, that is when politics is able to emerge as a spiritual response. Political spirituality makes counter-​ conduct possible. As if through death Bishan was saying, men will not be governed by politics; its hold over people’s lives has to stop, from now on will begin the story of “counter-​conduct.” We must therefore dare to think

The Impossibility of Politics  189 of Bishan’s life as wildly as possible. The counter-​conduct was possible as the situation closed down on language. As one commentator has noticed, it was a case of “the loss of word” but at the same time “the meaning of the world” retrieved by Manto.8 Manto’s language revolves around the great technique of expression, yet it retains the power of symbols and abstraction, and injects the critique of politics through the combination of a sense of confusion and the eventual breakdown of the narrative. It is a message of the death of the contemporary language of politics. We must ask: Why could literature and not politics produce a critique of Partition? Is it because such a critique would be a critique of politics itself and therefore could be produced only from the outside, which is to say from outside of politics? Must we then engage in an analysis of what one reader of Manto terms as “radical evil” that plagues politics today, at least conventional politics? Must we term the unexpected consequences of human actions –​deliberated and taken with proper political considerations –​ as satanic urges propelling our political situations to unexpected outcomes with complete disruption of our fragile sensibilities?9 In the same story Manto writes, A mad person got embroiled in the syndrome of Pakistan and India to such an extent that he got further deranged mentally. While sweeping the floor, one day, he suddenly climbed the nearby tree. He delivered a long speech from the tree for about two hours on the delicate issue of India and Pakistan. When soldiers asked him to climb down, he climbed further up the tree. When he was threatened some more, he said, ‘I want to stay on this very tree’ … Manto continues, Molbi Saab, “what is this Pakistan?” After deep contemplation, he replied, “It is a place in India where blades are manufactured”.10 As Bishan the lunatic dies at the end, we cannot ask any more if the event of Partition was historically a damned thing –​true or false by the great standard of the history of a nation form. On other hand, as the story builds up with Bishan and other inmates of the holding place for the lunatics arguing and trying to reason out their places of belonging in the event they end up being divided, we are faced with the impossible challenge of deciding what is this specific history of the nation form that must produce a true/​false division and eternally shape our historical understanding of our own past? What kind of historical knowledge is this that will depend on such specific divisions? Toba Tek Singh is not the tale of a futility or if you will fatality; it is a critique of the mode of historical knowledge by itself. An itinerant situation has produced the critique. Conventional commentaries have pointed out the salience of madness as a critical factor in Manto’s narrative. Yet, we must go further and ask, why could not madness be imagined in the “normal” setting of a violence-​ridden space, say a locality,

190  Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds a family, a community, but somewhere at some unknown place at an unknown time (“two or three years after Partition,” in a holding place for the lunatics) –​ suspended in our imagination? Both the nature of the situation and the form of commentary produce a critique which conventional political language would have failed to discern. Manto composed his own epitaph. Though it does not appear on his grave, it shows the bite of his form even in death. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the Secrets and mysteries of the art of short-​story writing... Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who among the Two is the greater short-​story writer: God or he. Saadat Hasan Manto, 18 August 1954

III We have referred already to the phenomenon of “counter-​conduct.” In a sense Mother Courage is a story of counter-​conduct. Anna Fierling is not a noble character. She is a wanderer, displaced from her job as a canteen woman as the war begins, she roams along the war fields with her three children, but more importantly her wagon –​her home, depository of food, goods, and clothes, and her place of hiding –​which Anna Fierling, the Mother, pulls to survive the thirty years’ war of Europe. Her cart or the wagon symbolises survival in a time of war, hence also the perpetuation of war. With it she knows she will have shelter and a way to support herself and the children. As a petty businesswoman, she must find the means of wading through the war with the help of the cart. Considered the greatest play of the twentieth century, Mother Courage and Her Children does not tell us of any ethical practice, humanitarian motto, any moral lesson, specifically a moral lesson of how to survive a war. Yet you cannot say that it is a dog-​eat-​dog world, a Hobbesian world; it is a world where you must move on to survive. As the Chaplain said in the play, Well, I’d say there’s peace even in war, war has its islands of peace. For war satisfies all needs, even those of peace, yes, they’re provided for, or the war · couldn’t keep going. In war –​as in the very thick of peace –​you can take a crap, and between one battle and the next there’s always a beer, and even on the march you can snatch a nap on your elbow maybe, something can always be managed. Of course you can’t play cards during an attack, but neither can you while ploughing the fields in peace time: it’s when the victory is won that there are possibilities. You have your leg shot off, and at first you raise quite an outcry as if it was something, but soon you calm down or take a swig of brandy, and you end up hopping about, and the war is none the worse for your little misadventure. And can’t you be fruitful and multiply in the thick of slaughter –​behind a bam or

The Impossibility of Politics  191 somewhere? Nothing can keep you from it very long in any event. And so, the war has your offspring and can carry on. War is like love; it always finds a way. Why should it end? ... Be sensible, the war will go on a bit longer, and we’ll make a bit more money, then peace will be all the nicer.11 The mother survives by trading in war. She trades in a situation. She must look after Kattrin the dumb daughter. With the help of her judgements she must manage or rather use the war to survive. She is a huckster, recall Marx’s word in On the Jewish Question, and war has enabled her to survive. The daughter dies at the end, yet the mother must survive, though by now after twelve years of pulling the wagon and barely managing life, she does not know if she will have the strength to pull the wagon and continue. But she must move on to wherever she will survive, meanwhile the villagers offer to give her daughter a burial. Brecht said when the play was opened in war time Zurich in 1941, The world premiere of Mother Courage and Her Children in Zurich during the Hitler War, with the outstanding Therese Giehse in the title role, made it possible, despite the anti-​fascist and pacifist stand of the Zurich Schauspielhaus (mainly staffed with German emigrants), for the bourgeois press to speak of a Niobe tragedy and of the overwhelming vital strength of the mother animal. Duly warned, the playwright made some changes for the Berlin production. Once again, the readers must consider the biting irony with which Brecht speaks of bourgeois humanitarianism over the tale of a Greek tragedy around the life of one who had to face the consequences of “arrogance,” “excessive pride,” in one word, “hubris.” Brecht makes clear that the story will not submit to piety, sympathy, ethics, as Mother says (harnessing herself to the wagon): “I hope I can pull the wagon by myself. Yes, I’ll manage, there’s not much in it now. I must get back into business. Another regiment passes at the rear with pipe and drum.” The playwright says, “Mother Courage starts pulling the wagon” ... and as the soldiers march and sing, she calls out, “Hey! Take me with you!”12 Shortly before Kattrin’s death, the cook companion of Mother Courage suggests that he can take the Mother away to another town that has no war and the two can live. Mother refuses to leave without the dumb daughter and the wagon. She tells, Cook, how could she pull the wagon by herself ? The war frightens her. She can’t bear it. She has terrible dreams. I hear her groan at night, especially after battles. What she sees in her dreams I don’t know. She suffers from sheer pity. The other day I found her with a hedgehog that we’d run over.13

192  Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds The cook says, Yes, we’re told to be unselfish and share what we have, but what if we have nothing? And those who do share it don’t have an easy time either, for what’s left when you’re through sharing? Unselfishness is a very rare virtue-​-​it doesn’t pay. And then the cook sings, Unselfish Martin could not bear His fellow creatures’ woes He met a poor man in the snows And he gave this poor fellow half his cloak to wear: So both of them fell down and froze. His brothers’ woes he could not bear, So long before the day was out The consequence was clear, Alas: Unselfishness had brought him to this pass. A man is better off without. To this, Mother Courage says, “Lamb, I couldn’t swallow a thing. I don’t say what you said is unreasonable, but was it your last word? We’ve always understood each other.”14 But have we understood Mother Courage? Perhaps not. The Mother will have to live and get Kattrin a husband, and only then we may say that the Mother will be free to make a choice. She refuses the offer of the cook, and we do not know if Mother Courage survived the war. It is a situation. Brecht would call it “fabel” –​a story, a fable, plot, narrative, the spectators, actors, stage workers, all communicating with each other to produce the on-​stage performance itself. These interrelations allow variability which will then carry different intentions and messages.15 The “mediation” is important.16 It allows for a particular gesture to appear and become effective. Yet if we say the gesture is effective because it presents itself to us as a spectacle, as Bishan’s death after the scream was, then this spectacular imagery also does not give any way out. Instead, it tells of a closure. The construction of a situation is like moments of life deliberately put together in a design to show that politics –​here the politics of war and in the earlier case the politics of rational governance of a territory –​has completely colonised life to the point of closing it. What remains is the social relation left to be mediated by images. The reader is alienated from the image. The image is distant, indeed estranged from the reader. It is impossible for the reader to identify with the image, the image cannot produce its other, and knowledge of the subject is barred. No bourgeois mode of knowledge will help us know the subject’s mode of being –​Mother’s or Bishan Singh’s. The impossibility of politics is profound. Closure of the situation makes politics in the routine sense of the

The Impossibility of Politics  193 word impossible. Yet this impossibility –​dramatically presented –​suggests possible worlds, other worlds. Literature of this order we are seized with here is built around an impasse internal to it. But this means that this impasse is a condition of its possibility. If Toba Tek Singh and Mother Courage have solved the representational problem, it is because they have abandoned the task of representing a reality –​ and here we are speaking of political reality. We confront the problematic of closure precisely because literature has opened up dramatically the closure of a situation. The paradox is internal to the phenomenon, and as immanent feature cries out for its resolution. The resolution however is nothing short of its supersession, yet this paradox is also a precondition for the opening. The end is where it all began. Literature’s conditions of possibility and impossibility are one and the same. Politics has much to learn from this. The truth of the migrant condition can be attained only with an acknowledgement of the death of subjectivity of the migrant. Bishan Singh dies by literally becoming a place; Mother Courage tries to console her dumb daughter Kattrin minutes before Kattrin dies. Mother assures Kattrin that she would not go away with the cook leaving Kattrin behind, and the wagon is too valuable to discard. She says, Kattrin! Stay where you are, Kattrin! Where do you think you’re going with that bundle? (She examines the bundle.) She’s packed her things. Were you listening? I told him there was nothing doing, he can have Utrecht and his lousy inn; what would we want with a lousy inn? (She sees the skirt and trousers.) Oh, you’re a stupid girl, Kattrin, what if I’d seen that and you gone? (She takes hold of Kattrin who is trying to leave.) And don’t think I’ve sent him packing on your account. It was the wagon. You can’t part us, I’m too used to it, you didn’t come into it; it was the wagon. Now we’re leaving, and we’ll put the cook’s things here where he’ll find ‘em, the stupid man. (She clambers up and throws a couple of things down to go with the trousers.) There! He’s fired. The last man I’ll take into this business! Now let’s be going, you and me. This winter’ll pass, like all the others. Get into harness, it looks like snow.17 Kattrin is desperate about her situation. She beats the drum while the soldiers order her to stop drumming as the sound would give away their position to the enemy. The soldier gives a warning. The order does not reach Kattrin’s ears. The soldier fires at Kattrin. The playwright finishes off the cry of Mother Courage and collapse of the girl with the line, “Kattrin the dumb daughter is killed.” The migrant became a subject only after she died. Remember, in 2015, the four-​year-​old migrant child Alan Kurdi became a subject only after his dead body brought ashore by the wave had been photographed and the photograph been widely circulated.18

194  Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds

IV Let us reflect for one more time on the lives of Bishan Singh and Mother Courage. Bishan Singh and Mother Courage have vitality. They have the strength to live in their worlds. You may call them stupid, as indeed one is a lunatic. They attain agency through we may justifiably say an illusion. We may deride at their powerlessness at that very moment they seem to have achieved agency. The paradox gives birth to a disfigured situation, which will force us out of our passivity, resignation, and compromise into active thinking. The cry of Bishan and the despair of Mother at the loss of her daughter as she resumes pulling her wagon to follow the soldiers are not self-​conscious acts made from choice. Yet their gestures have a truth. They are truer than the choices that could have been made based on rational considerations. Gesture is thus not a matter of style, but of the entire composition which mediates the relation between the creator of the composition (a play, a short story, etc.) and the reader, the spectator, or the listener. Gesture mediates the relation between literature and politics, and if you extend the line of thinking, between the migrant and the society. It foregrounds the social significance of an action with every component of the act (literary or the dramatic) contributing to the social theme. Gesture originates from the entire composition, accumulating surprises –​as if accumulating elements by stealth, resulting in a calculated suddenness –​in a jerk. The idea is one of a “pregnant moment.”19 The situation we are considering here is therefore one of immanence, which lends gesture a dramatic effect. Immanence lends gesture its power. Recall Marx who in the second thesis on Feuerbach calls for a practice of thought, which can demonstrate “its reality and power, this-​sidedness of thinking in practice,” its position as an absolute being-​within history.20 Immanence is on the concrete terrain of history, it is not a speculative notion. As concept it offers a concrete possibility to appreciate outcomes, more importantly the concept can work for outcomes, which are laws in a historical sense, which is to say “tendencies.” Yet it will be reasonable to ask, why do we usually think of immanence in a metaphysical way? Both Brecht and Manto show, you do not have to be metaphysical to think of situations that produce out of themselves the unpredictable, unimaginable. We can only thank the literary form for bringing the unimaginable into our realm. Brecht and Manto both were formalists. In the dark time of war and the immediate aftermath of mass killings over the partition of the Indian sub-​continent, they found forms that said the unsayable, tackling the difficulty of formulating a response to war and killings over national allegiances.21 Consider what Brecht wrote as a War Primer positing the following lines below a photograph of steelworkers labouring over winching chains and sheets of metal –​the photograph originally appearing in Life magazine in 1940: “What’s that you’re making brothers?” “Iron waggons.” “And what’ about those great steel plates you’re lifting?”

The Impossibility of Politics  195 ”They’re for the guns that blast the iron to pieces.” “And what’s it all for, brothers?” “It’s our living.”22 Form makes historical immanence possible, because form can detect a trend, a tendency. For an understanding of the possibility of a historical situation, we must attend to the relevant question of the form –​the form of the historical reality, the form of the response, the form of the new language. The two acts of literature described in this chapter convey the deep relation between immanence and form as two historical truths. They deal with unstable situations. Their central characters are itinerant fi ­ gures –​ figures that carry the truths of potency as well as the possibility of doing the unpredictable. However, after readers have gone through all these, here is a cautionary note: The argument is not that arts and literature can become an alternative to the politics of a capitalist world marked by wars, partitions, colonial conquests, and territorial aggrandisements. The argument is that representational politics reaches a dead end when the situation closes on the subjects of the time. The subjects cannot be represented anymore. The power of the aesthetic brought out for instance by these literary acts can prise open such situation and show new possibilities for the subject to emerge. Alternative is the other name of possibility. In these two great literary tracts, Bishan Singh and Mother Courage instruct. The instruction originates from a disorienting action –​Bishan Singh dies with a scream after standing silently through the night; Mother Courage wails for the dumb daughter killed by the war and then follows the war to survive. In both cases, clarity is achieved through disorientation. Their actions escape our judgement.23 But as has been pointed out, their actions remain “infinitely available to our struggles to understand.”24 Note in passing that Brecht and Manto do not present their characters as victims, but if you like, subjects with desires. Their will defines the time and space; their predicaments offer the readers no freedom of sentimentality. The fluidity of the situation the narrators create enables the latter to keep distance with the characters. As readers we are not allowed to submerge in pathos. The situation will vex us as to what an itinerant situation can be. We must suspend our belief of the reality (the other way of saying “willing suspension of disbelief ” of what has been portrayed) and thus disengage ourselves from the realistic arguments about what could have happened, for in these two tales of fantasy the semblance of truth is the real gesture towards a critical understanding of our subjectivity and the shape we as subjects are going to give to our life. Bishan died and the Mother lost everything while trying to do business in the war to protect her family. The paradox of truth and disbelief, and fantasy and belief, is solved only through a specific form in which these present themselves to us, in this case the form to be known as gesture. As in Mother Courage we are told, “War is a business proposition… .” Courage itself is an ambivalent quality.

196  Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds The poor need courage. They are lost, that’s why. That they even get up in the morning is something –​in their plight. Or that they plough a field –​ in war time. Even their bringing children into the world shows they have courage, for they have no prospects. And, therefore, with the Mother, her hunger, her practicality, her willingness and determination to pull off the impossible that is surviving the war with her children, we must ask, was it useless for her to chart out the path that she took? Or, for the lunatic Bishan to cry and die for a place that we do not know where it was but was somewhere at some time and was his own? As wandering figures, they are like poor monuments. We shall not remember them. Yet can we not think of a history where great subjects will not be there to mark it for us? The lives of Bishan and Mother will forever ask us to struggle for such a history.

Notes 1 Name taken from the title of the book by Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992). 2 Sadaat Hasan Manto, Toba Tek Singh, trans. Richard McGill Murphy, edition: Words without Borders, Magazine, September 2003 –​www.word​swit​hout​bord​ers.org/​arti​ cle/​toba-​tek-​singh (accessed on 20 January 2021) (Note: In this chapter the spelling Sadaat is used, though other spellings are in currency; similar is with Hasan. In citing articles, published spellings of Sadaat and Hasan have been retained.) 3 Commentators of Manto while portraying him as a realist have noted the economy of words. However, his verbal economy has depended not on realism but on the relations between the “internal elements” of a situation the presence or absence of which will determine the outcome. Salim Akhtar, “Is Manto Necessary Today?”, trans. Leslie A. Fleming, Journal of South Asian Literature, special issue on The Writings of Sadaat Hasan Manto, Volume 20 (2), Fall 1985, pp. 1–​3 (p. 1). 4 Commentators have pointed out that “in the period following Partition, madness became the guiding metaphor” in much of his writings. Besides the fact that like Manto’s fiction, illness as a theme was deployed by a number of writers working on partition. Mental illness cast a “long shadow” on Manto, and madness became the only conceivable response to the genocidal violence of Partition. Partition violence meant huge psychological trauma manifest in belated after-​effects. This was, and continues, to be a long and difficult process, and it was one of the most important implications of Manto’s work … . –​Tahir Jokinen and Shershah Assadullah, “Saadat Hasan Manto, Partition, and Mental Illness through the Lens of Toba Tek Singh”, Journal of Medical Humanities, 2019 –​https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​s10​912-​019-​ 09590-​w (accessed on 3 May 2021). 5 Toba Tek Singh, op.cit. 6 Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question (1844) –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​ 1844/​jew​ish-​quest​ion/​ (accessed on 21 September 2021). 7 Michel Foucault, “Questions of Method,” in James D. Faubion (ed.), The Essential Works of Foucault, Volume 3 (New York: The New Press, 2000); Foucault’s words How can one analyse the connection between ways of distinguishing true and false and ways of governing oneself and others? The search for a new

The Impossibility of Politics  197 foundation for each of these practices, in itself and relative to the other, the will to discover a different way of governing oneself through a different way of dividing up true and false—​this is what I would call ‘political spirituality’. (p. 233) 8 Mohua Ahiri, “The Loss of Word and the Meaning in the World of Saadat Hassan Manto”, Scholarly Research Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Volume 3 (17), March–​April 2015, pp. 3120–​3126. 9 Afreen Faiyaz, “The Satanic Urges: An Analysis of Radical Evil besetting the Short Stories of Sadaat Hasan Manto”, Muse India, 2017 (no further publication details available) –​www.acade​mia.edu/​39007​913/​The_​Satanic_​Urges_​An_​ Analysis_​of_​Radical_​Evil_​besetting_​the_​Short_​St​orie​s_​of​_​Saa​dat_​Hasa​n_​Ma​ nto (accessed on 5 September 2021). 10 Toba Tek Singh, op.cit. 11 All excerpts are from Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), trans. Eric Bentley, edition: Doubleday, Garden City, 1955; pp. 74–​75 –​http://​ ciml.250x.com/​arch​ive/​com​muni​sts/​bre​cht/​engl​ish/​mot​her_​cour​age.pdf (accessed on 21 January 2021). 12 All quotations in this paragraph are from the online edition (n. 11). 13 Ibid., pp. 99–​100. 14 Ibid., pp. 101–​102. 15 Brecht’s words and explanations taken from Manfred Wekwerth, Daring to Play: A Brecht Companion, ed. Anthony Hozier and trans. Rebecca Braun (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 153–​155. 16 Ibid., p. 154 (Wekwerth’s word). 17 Mother Courage and Her Children, p. 103. 18 I am indebted to Brett Nielson on the ways the photograph of Aylan Kurdi’s circulated in the global media. Alan Kurdi, initially reported as Aylan Kurdi, was a four-​year-​old Syrian child with Kurdish background. He drowned on 2 September 2015 in the Mediterranean Sea along with his mother and brother. Alan and his family were Syrian refugees attempting to reach Europe in 2015, known as the year of European refugee crisis. A Turkish reporter Nilufer Demir photographed the child’s dead body. The photograph of his body quickly went viral, triggering international responses. The child’s death became the symbol of the wider refugee crisis. Photographer Demir’s photograph accompanied by hashtag roughly translated in English as “humanity washed ashore” became the top trending topic on Twitter. In March 2016 it became the subject of a Dutch documentary about iconic photos, despair. 19 Roland Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein” in Image-​Music-​Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 69–​78. 20 Marx’s actual words, The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth —​i.e. the reality and power, the this-​sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-​reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question. (Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845), published as appendix to Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of the Classical German Philosophy (1888) –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1845/​the​ses/​ the​ses.htm (accessed on 24 September 2021))

198  Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds 21 Indeed, while theorising his idea of the “estrangement effect” Brecht realised the importance of a form that would remove the illusion of reality. As one Chinese commentator pointed out in the context of the introduction of Brecht’s plays in post-​liberation China, Huang (Huang Zuolin, the director of Shanghai People’s Art Theatre –​RS) gave us a rather detailed lecture on Brecht’s dramatic theories and their characteristics in 1959 when he began to direct Mother Courage. He pointed out that, as Western drama wanted to come out of the swamp of naturalism, Brecht found some help from the East. The difference between the Eastern and Western stages was that the latter emphasized the ‘fourth wall’ to create the illusion of living, while the former, especially Chinese opera, never used the ‘fourth wall’ and, instead, wanted to dispense with the illusion of living … . This was seen in the whole process of our search for the meaning of the alienation effect during the rehearsals. (Gong Boan, “First Performance of Brecht’s Dramatic Work in China: The Production of Mother Courage and its Stage Design”, trans. Ping-​ leung Chan in Antony Tatlow and Tak-​Wai Wong, Brecht and East Asian Theatre, The Proceedings of a Conference on Brecht in East Asian Theatre, 1982, mimeo (pp. 65–​71), p. 66. I could not acquire any further publication details of the PDF of the conference proceedings) 22 Bertold Brecht, War Primer (1955), trans. and ed. John Willett (London: Verso, 2017; second photograph with the verse below with no page number); the question of the form was again evident when Brecht composed these lines: If you meet your parents in Hamburg or elsewhere Pass them like strangers, turn the corner, don’t recognize them Pull the hat they gave you over your face, and Do not, o do not, show your face. (Around 1926/​7 Brecht wrote some poems under the title Lesebuch für Städtebewohner, Handbook for City Dwellers, or, A Reader for Those Who Live in Cities –​cited from Esther Leslie, “Ice is Set on Fire”, 7 July 2017, Verso Blog –​www.ver​sobo​oks.com/​blogs/​3311-​ice-​is-​set-​on-​fire (accessed on 21 September 2021)) 23 It will be pertinent to note here that Brecht’s Mother Courage has an unusual pedigree. Here is what the relevant information in German language tells us –​ Brecht took the name ‘Courage’ from the novel Trutz Simplex: Oder Ausführliche und wunderseltzame Lebensbeschreibung Der Ertzbetrügerin und Landstörtzerin Courasche (1670) by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, who uses the example of a gypsy woman to describe how the turmoil of the Thirty Years’ War leads to moral and human neglect. Grimmelshausen’s novels relentlessly depict the horrors of war … . Brecht, who appreciated Grimmelshausen for his un-​heroic depiction of the war, did not adopt the plot of the Courasche novel or the character of the title character. In Grimmelshausen’s case, the Courasche is a soldier with a strong erotic charisma, she is infertile (but has seven different husbands; cf. the three different fathers of Eilif, Schweizerkas and Kattrin) and is of high birth. The term ‘courasche’ does not refer to courage, but to the vagina: ‘But when the sermon was at its best, and he asked me why I had done my opposite so

The Impossibility of Politics  199 abhorrently, I answered: Therefore, that he has reached for my courage, where else no man’s hands come.’ Nevertheless, there are indirect parallels between the two literary figures. Like Brecht’s Courage, Grimmelshausen’s ‘Courasche’ also deliberately goes to war. In men’s clothing, she seeks opportunities to live out her lust and greed for money. Neither of them thinks anything of religion. On the other hand, the Courasche tries to earn her money as a soldier, mainly through a chain of short-​lived marriages, an aspect of her personality that is reflected in Brecht’s character of Yvette Pottier. I am grateful to Ludger Hagedorn for the information he sent me in personal correspondence, also for the translation in English from the German in original. Sandro Mezzadra has clarified that the original German word “Soldatenhure” suggests, “the Courasche is a whore for soldiers, with a strong erotic charisma; the Courasche tries to earn her money as a whore for soldiers.” 24 Tony Kushner, “Mother Courage Is Not Just an Anti-​war Play”, The Guardian, 8 September 2009 –​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​stage/​2009/​sep/​08/​tony-​kush​ner-​mot​ her-​cour​age (accessed on 7 July 2021; I am indebted to Partha Chatterjee for drawing my attention to this note).

11 Memories of the Forgotten

I The previous chapter raised the theme of an itinerant situation. The theme is significant, because as the previous chapter suggested, the nature of an itinerant situation poses problems for subject-​centric politics and a subject-​ centric political understanding. Let us discuss further the problematic –​this time from another angle. We shall discuss migrants’ memories, which create the migrants as subjects –​but again subjects born of post-​event construction. Migrants as migrants are forgotten soon. They are remembered as persons, individuals. But perhaps one generation will remember them as migrants, relate to them as migrants; perhaps their neighbours, friends, and colleagues will share their stories, recall them through their migrant narratives, and when they will die, or even before they die, they will have become “normal”. Their migrant personhood will slowly move into neglect and oblivion. Only among their relatives back home (if there still will be a home from where they had emigrated), and if they are lucky, they will be recalled as emigrants. On exceptional occasions when reunions take place, the migrants will return in person or appear from the clouds of memory. This is strange because migrants retain the memories of their journeys a lot. They remember the details. They also revisit the objects of memory –​not only as real-​life objects, such as persons or some artefacts as souvenirs, but memories of places and mobility too. Perhaps a bus journey, or taking shelter in an unknown house, being robbed or being taken care of, the last money being stolen or appearing as penniless before an unanticipated good Samaritan, stitching a small packet of money on the hem of a dress or the shawl, promised and betrayed, jailed, questioned and interrogated by the guards at airport, border outpost, station, and back home at the police station when trying to return –​these all are images of mobility retained by memory. Migrants revisit their memories by narrating them, recording them, re-​tracing their paths, reorganising them, reordering them, and preserving and displaying them in a particular manner, and it is through this labour of memory that their migrant personhood and the accompanying stories of their journey, logistical paths, and the fault lines, all will become public documents of society. Is it not ironic DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-17

Memories of the Forgotten  201 that we familiarise ourselves with migrants through their memories more than through our direct attempts to know them? Directly they are persons, through their acts of memory they become migrants. It is always a battle between the normalcy of a settled society and the mediating, unsettling memories of the footloose. The three texts are presented in this chapter as part of a further discussion on the problems for a subject-​centric study of politics. These three texts are tied by traces of memory, and in distinct individual ways as well as collectively they shed further light on the problems of subjectivity. Yordanos Almaz Seifu’s travel journal, Wayfarers, tells us of the desperate escape of an Ethiopian to South Africa to join the huge labour market in Johannesburg. He is sold, he is taken to a rampaging boat wherefrom human bodies forming extra-​load are thrown away to the sea; he is taken to numerous police stations where he is beaten, interrogated, and finally let off to reach his destination Johannesburg in whose refugee markets he manages to vanish. Written five years ago, it speaks of our time of subaltern globalisation.1 Shahram Khosravi’s ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-​Ethnography of Borders created a sensation when it came out over a decade back. It is of the same genre telling us the ways of escape, the networks of body shopping and smuggling in the postcolonial world, the flesh markets of Karachi, Delhi, and other cities which devour migrants like Khosravi, the teeming thousands of Afghan construction workers in Iran, passport forgers of various countries, money lenders, immigration officials, and the family members back home who will wait to hear the news of the emigrant reaching “successfully” the place of destination, “establishing” him/​ herself, so that the emigrant can now communicate safely and with peace of mind.2 These two accounts will take you to the sub-​Saharan world of Ethiopia, the tender and semi-​poetic world of Ispahan, and tell you besides others what religion has meant to the life of the footloose. Finally, Winfried Georg Sebald’s The Emigrants takes you to the pre-​Second World War time of flight from Germany –​in this case to England, and the lifelong effort of an emigrant to get back the lost world, search out the relatives dead and still alive, and recover the lives and thoughts of men and women who irrevocably belonged to Germany of the 1930–​50s and never proceeded beyond that time even when some of them had physically left Germany.3 Memory for Sebald, a German, is like a network of small holes and tunnels underground. You may begin at one point, but you will move through endless connections to times, places, persons, and memories from which you cannot come back. Time will slowly recede. You will forget even your identity as an emigrant. You will meet past characters in that dream world. Gradually, you will be dissolved within the time and realm of memory. A final displacement of life if that is what migration would finally mean. In Sebald’s The Emigrants memory succeeds in appearing as pure, when politics dies, all circumstances die, and only persons with acts of memory, those recalling and being recalled, live. In this way, memories in place of persons become living characters. They become pure. In Yordanos Almaz

202  Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds Seifu’s Wayfarers and Shahram Khosravi’s ‘Illegal’ Traveller, this transmogrification happens, though to a less extent. There too memory after a point becomes pure. There is no violence in that act of recalling. Murders, escape, mercy, shelter, meeting the unknowns for moments never to meet them again, betrayal, and love –​all are recounted as episodes of a world that is beyond the storyteller now, a world that will be always there with him/​her, but gone now. There is no rancour, no bitterness, but a realisation that the itinerant world is like a series of passing shots. Seifu and Khosravi have no grudge against even the so-​called human smugglers, who appear only as the characters of destiny facilitating mobility. It is as if a displaced world, which you knew, you know, but which has passed you. It is a surreal world, out there –​on the outside of our life, but inside our memory, a kind of image that is precariously perched on the inside/​outside of our existence. Is this metaphysics? To that question, readers may recall the two texts discussed in the previous chapter. There, as we saw, in both the narratives of displacement due to war and violence of partition, politics is confined to providing a template. But politics as the mediator vanishes as soon as its function of mediating is over.4 Art achieves its purity. So, to the question famously put by Theodor Adorno, if there can be poetry after Auschwitz, we must point to these acts of literature.5 Likewise, these three narratives –​at times feebly, at times mightily –​achieve purity when they attain aesthetic selves. Sebald’s The Emigrants from this angle is unique; in an unparalleled way, it tells us of that world of memory which is at once inside and outside of the world we live in. The other two narratives also convey us the sense that the migrant is one who lives in our time, but for whom the past is always a passage to go beyond the present. A passage that will never arrive and hence will be always recalled. Thus, the three narratives never, for even once, tell us of arrival, of reaching the golden West or democracy or a state of peace. Wayfarers tells us of the migrant’s arriving at the flesh market in Johannesburg –​the labour market really is a flesh market there –​where the migrant labourer must wake up each morning at the wee hours to toil through the day, be robbed by other migrants, and must still earn a living the next day. Khosravi’s Illegal Traveller likewise does not celebrate the arrival of the immigrant in Stockholm from Ispahan through Karachi, Delhi, and other cities and towns, but it tells of the migrant finally arriving in Stockholm when he would be shot there by a racist xenophobe. The narratives of escape and survival do not end. And, of course, Sebald never left Germany even though he was lifelong in Manchester –​a Manchester that will still remind you of the city in Frederick Engels’ time in 1844 –​old industrial Manchester, through which Sebald must recover the pre-​war Germany. For centuries of modernity, man remained what s/​he was for the bourgeoisie: a living institution of stability, investment, labour, income, and life with the additional capacity of settling down and stabilising all around. Modern man became an animal whose occupation placed his/​her existence in the form of a living being as a flag of stability. All that happened in the

Memories of the Forgotten  203 tumultuous sea outside was not allowed to affect this global narrative of stability. The migrant was the abnormal. The bourgeois myth is now called into question by these three narratives. We must not be surprised that these narratives –​particularly of Seifu and Khosravi –​are narratives of illegality. Law is always authorised in the language of fixity, rules, and stability. Mobility is thus the opposite of law. You cannot be lawfully mobile for long. You must then die like Bishan Singh of Toba Tek Singh on the border of legality and illegality. The illegal is never illegal. As Seifu chronicles, the illegal is always semi-​legal, stepping on the borders of legality, entering and exiting the legal world at will or as life takes you along its tailcoat. The migrant may die, as Seifu discovers in Johannesburg, and there will be perhaps no one at hand to reach the news of your death to the relatives back home. But as Seifu further tells, you can die with a solace that there will be other migrant workers around of similar illegal existence, to mourn your death. Recall Brecht’s play: After the death of Mother Courage’s daughter, the villagers ask Mother to move on from the dangerous war field leaving the daughter’s dead body. They assure her, “We’ll mind her, see that she gets proper burial. Don’t you worry about that.” Similar migrants, similar lives, similar world of reality and hallucination –​this is the chiaroscuro of migrant universe. It is there, almost within our reach, but always beyond, below the surface of law and visibility. These three accounts teach us of the laws of visibility and invisibility, connected to our knowledge of the still, stable, and the passing. Yet the laws of visibility and invisibility do not operate in the same way. Sebald’s characters are from a dignified world and a time when civility still made sense. Sebald never says that they were Jews in Nazi Germany. They had self-​respect; with dignity they had made their ways in this world. Physical hurdles, sorrows, punishments, sufferings, the trauma of escape, and escape routes do not feature in Sebald’s recollection. The reader only gets page after page of exquisite prose of daily life of protestant characters whose sense of work, life, and family virtues push traces of politics behind and erase the marks of a contentious time. Sebald does it by orchestrating a multiplicity of voices to produce a coherent discourse of the emigrant. Putting on the mask of the narrator he throws away the identity of an author. Indeed he recoils even from suggesting that there is any question of subjectivity involved. The narrative is the other of the character –​character of a fundamental profile called the emigrant. The narrative is, if you must use the word, the subject. Through perhaps a sort of Kafkaesque narration, Sebald achieves the impossible. He can tell us of the emigrants without portraying any fundamental kind of subjectivity which we want to associate with emigrants. Does it mean that there is no difference between an emigrant and a native/​ settler? No, it only means that here the history is in the practice of migrating and the consequences of it on life, and not in any fundamental identity of a particular type of individual. Thus, the migrant figures appear The Emigrants regularly: such as the former Maasai chieftain who cooks in the probably unlicensed Wadi Halfa café in Manchester, Elaine, the maid in the Selwyns’

204  Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds house, who reminds you of an inmate of an asylum, and who occupies the hidden world of the servants’ passageways, the school where Max Ferber is sent, Paul Bereyter, a school master, who teaches a quarter of his lessons outside the syllabus and outside the school when possible, and again Max Ferber who spends his days closeted in a studio in the Manchester docks and continues to work as he always has, despite his work fetching high prices and articles on him appearing in Sunday supplements. Paul Bereyter, the schoolteacher of course, dies. He commits suicide. A short distance from S, where the railway track curves out of a willow copse into the open fields, he had lain himself down in front of a train.... Almost by way of an aside, an obituary, with no further explanation, that during the Third Reich Paul Bereyter had been prevented from practising his chose profession.6 And then, “The gleaming bands of steel, the crossbars of the sleepers, the spruce trees on the hillside above the village of Alstadten, the arc of the mountains he knew so well, were a blur before his short-​sighted eyes ....”7 In that moment of death, “ending up on the railways” the emigrant dies.8 (Italics in the original) In the escapes of the Iranian and the Ethiopian, invisibility however is not achieved in that way. Here, far removed from literary tropes, the migrant becomes one of the innumerable cogs in the wheels of global commodity chains and supply networks, where the migrant must relinquish any identity. The Ethiopian migrant must be scared of the Johannesburg based marauding Ethiopian gangs of looters, smugglers, and extortionists; friends must be constantly suspected; any identity must be accepted as fleeting. The only visibility is one of presence as an informal labourer in the vast army of informal workers in South Africa. These migrant accounts do not allow our judgement of migrant people to be overwhelmed by the sentimental stories of identity and affinity. The footloose appears like a neurotic, denizen of a world where psychic reality takes the place of actual reality. Surely, the psychic reality initially coincided with the factual, and the migrant did at least initially what s/​he had intended to do. But then the deed of moving on became the thought, in as much as the reality of thought substituted the deed. In this way, the book of memory of the footloose never closes definitively. Memory is the most enduring ethnography of the border. Never ending, always moving on, at times sleepwalking –​migrant memory is always crossing borders. Migrant memory never ends.

II Perhaps for the migrant then road is the subject. Roads shape memory. Roads recall the characters that trod them. The characters make the road. Roads create rivals. When the migrant crosses the sea, the sea is the perilous road.

Memories of the Forgotten  205 You do not have the license to use this road. You are the stowaway. Imagine the ship is still in port and the stowaway has not been found. Desperate search by local authorities, masters, members of the crew, and guards engaged by local agents have produced no result. You manage to sail as the ship departs. The ship then goes from place to place. At times you know your destination, at times you do not. As Seifu writes, at times you have your guys at the destination as standby. At times you get the right information about them, at times you find no one. You will never know who they were to be, those who did not turn up. But at times, you do not know if at all there was someone to really come to take you and accompany you to your next destination, or was it only a promise of the road? What remains then of the vagaries of the journey in your memory? Nothing human, but the road, the journey, and you will agree that the migrant is not the subject, but the road is the subject of memory. It is this materiality, at once phantom-​like as much as real, that defies the law of subjectification. This probably explains the enigma alluded to at the outset of this chapter. Perhaps at the end, we shall say memory is the home the migrant finally reaches. Yet since objectification and commodification is the law of bourgeois life, museum will be the home of the refugees and the migrants. In a migrants’ museum say in Cologne or in Adelaide, you will be immediately struck by the ordinariness of the exhibits –​a box, a pair of shoes, a suitcase, a pen, a guitar, a plate and a bowl, and the like, a dress such as a trouser, and you own realisation of how an identity had been already given to these objects, artefacts of everyday life. You will start imagining those objects as used or worn by a Turkish cobbler on the Rhineland or a woman left by a British miner escaping to the wilderness of South Australia in search of gold. In many ways then the objectification of memory on which so much of art, film, and literature of the present migration crisis is based is complicit in the making of bourgeois life. The objectification of migrant memory aims to make the migrant an outsider to society. In fact, this has been a process continuing through centuries, only accelerated in the bourgeois age. Stories of war and forced displacement have shaped Western civilisation since Virgil’s Aeneid. The origin story of Rome is a tale of Mediterranean migration –​departing from the coast of Anatolia, the starting point of many of today’s Syrian refugees –​ and foreshadows other societies founded by emigrants, evacuees, and aliens. Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were all refugees. The Thanksgiving holiday is a celebration of refugees, who fled from England to the Netherlands, then to Plymouth Rock. Yet objectification and commodification is normalisation, for who remembers that Marilyn Monroe and Clint Eastwood, perfect Americans, were the inheritors of the Pilgrims? Migrant memory is thus very much like a fragmented geography of the world and the mind, scattered geography of routes –​through mountains, hills, snowfields, deserts, narrow lanes, railway tracks, homes, prisons, camps, schools, UN or immigration offices, checkpoints, family, workplace, and time. Memory is thus like an assemblage. Indeed, migratory paths are redrawn

206  Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds through the assemblages of tactics involving migrant escapes, but equally importantly migrant hunts that turn migrant bodies into targets of capture. These cartographies, uneven and fragmented in nature, reorganise the network of events, sequences, associations, agencies and enable the figure called the migrant to live in dual time –​the real-​time of living, also the transmogrified time through which the sequence of events and persons will feature as passing shots. With the expansion of migration infrastructure, forms of mediation multiply. Migration at the end of the day is a passage. It is a passage mediated by roads, hills, seas, camps, work places, and not the least human associations. Mediation becomes the message of migration. It comes to occupy the deepest layer of memory. In this way, memory too travels along these roads and seas. In Khosravi’s account, the attempt to kill him comes at the very end. He barely hints at the fact that even after that he continued to help other illegal travellers. But the strain is unmistakable: The journey from Ispahan to Stockholm was accidental, and Khosravi does not know if the journey has ended. Melancholia confronts the readers with the meaning of the road, the passage, which as Khosravi tells us through the narrative, was accidental, and therefore the uncertainty of the journey gives no guarantee to the migrant that the journey has ended. Melancholia in this way leaves the reader with an open wound. The road will bring back to you –​who have trodden it –​memories you may not like. Precisely because melancholia stays with you alternatively with the courage to get on with life and go further, melancholia triggers memory. Memory is the hero. But it is not memory of a particular individual, but of the road, the journey, the passage. It is the same with Sebald’s characters. Individual characters that an émigré meets are only a pretext. The text is the search, the journey, and their multiplication. We are thus problematising the very notion of the subject. It is true that one boundary will remain up to the last moment –​the much-​spoken boundary of self that makes it apart from others. Others are objects, while the self wants to defy objectification. Yet, is it not surprising, or perhaps not, that this boundary is effaced through the operation of memory, a combination of the real and the virtual? In The Emigrants, Winfried Sebald rarely speaks of his self. His account is like a camera moving on and focusing on others –​the longest surviving member of a large, extended family, the instructions that a survivor leaves, the ways to reach the places, objects, and persons narrated by a survivor or recorded in her testament, the places and the times associated with these journeys. Sebald succeeds in almost excluding himself in these recollections. His self is invisible. The others of his book could belong to say anyone else’s account, whereas in Yordanos Almaz Seifu’s Travel Journal, there is no way the reader can take Seifu out of the account and yet think of the others inhabiting the pages of his memory. It is a rough world of a survivor. Shahram Khosravi’s ‘Illegal’ Traveller is by admission an auto-​ethnography,

Memories of the Forgotten  207 but less rough, perhaps tendered by the roots of Ispahan, perhaps made possible by his academic status. Still, while admitting that there is a border in the landscape of memory –​between the self and other –​do these three books collectively cross the border? We can leave this judgement to the reader, save saying that the wellspring of memory is always in a series of border crossings, and at times the self has to die –​a kind of sacrificial death to bring to life the identity of others. After all, when the books will be closed and put down, you will not remember so much the Ethiopian Seifu or the Iranian Khosravi, but the shadowy world of mobility and deaths of countless characters trying to survive and dying in the ebb and tide of memory. Roads shape the world of mobility.

III Before concluding we must push the point further. As said earlier, the special thing about these three books is that they erase the migrant as the subject. The stake in their accounts should have been in subject’s being, for these are after all autobiographies; but the subject is able to access the truth of migration only by turning to others. This turning away of the gaze from oneself to others must be carried out as the possibility of a necessary knowledge of migration, flight, and the road the migrant will take. In these accounts, therefore there is no curiosity, the desire to know bad things about others, while there is no overwhelming concern about what is happening inside oneself. The migrant is probably the classic stoic. This turning the gaze away from oneself becomes the necessary condition of truth. This is the reason why Sebald’s account becomes an ethical account, as if we as migrants have been able to grasp the secret of existence; we can grasp how precarious we are as migrants. If the migrant is saying, “This is what I am,” he has achieved the position of a double subjectivity. The migrant is a subject of his/​her actions as well as is one who enunciates. The migrant is a product of a system of power relations. At the same time the migrant has agency. The relation is political and ethical both. Let us dwell on this a bit: In the second story of The Emigrants there is a photograph.9 It shows railroad tracks disappearing into the woods, where Paul Bereyter ends his life, but at the same the photograph leads us at the end to a possible scenario that will exclude us. The railroad tracks will not only eternally remind us of Paul Bereyter’s fate, but it will also tell us of a heterotopic space of self and others, victims and actors, the dying and the to-​be-​soon-​dead and the living –​the life histories that collectively make a migrant. The migrant, Shahram Khosravi shows, participates simultaneously in the life histories and discourses (of migration, exile, and belonging) and emerges in this way as a literary figure inquiring into problematic of memory in human life. The clue to this ability of represent life and discourse is in the enigma called memory (often and necessarily traumatic) to which the migrant as a figure stands as testimony. You can only say that the migrant will have

208  Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds to die to escape this cross of double responsibility, or double representation. Thus, Paul Bereyter dies, Seifu nearly dies several times, Khosravi is shot and almost dies and miraculously survives. Only with death will end the responsibility of double representation. We know literary subjectivity is a construct. But this knowledge tells us nothing deep. We may say it is a cliché. For, the migrant as a protagonist and a narrator must act out and at the same time must continuously confront the truth of the migrant life. If this is how the migrant will have to die, it will be also the mode of subject-​formation. The hidden correspondence between apparently isolated random events in the migrant life is in the chain of mobile phenomena, which ironically only a specific life history can embody. Hence only the multiple indeterminacies and heterogeneity of a migrant life make the migrant life unique as an act of representation –​of life and discourse. This is what we mean by life as precarious existence. However, the access to the truth of precarious existence is ensured by a technique of knowledge that has effaced the subject of precarious life. What do we mean by a technique of knowledge here? It is the act of writing, and a specific technique of writing. In the ancient time, grammarians and certain philosophers knew how to compose without allowing the self to dominate the writings. Rules therefore became important. With the assault of literature, grammar as a collection of rules of writing eclipsed for a while. But we can now see the re-​emergence of a technique of writing that will shift the gaze away from the self yet throwing the light of truth on the self. The migrant is the essential author of such technique. To the problem then famously put by Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?”, we may forward the proposition that the migrant is an author, who will write but will always write of others and the roads s/​he took, and thereby will have negotiated the aporia of author’s subjectivity.10 Written texts have an enigmatic relation with the birth of a discourse. Written texts may give birth to a specific discourse which opens these written texts to several possibilities. This is true of for instance Marx’s writings. In this case, the migrant writings discussed here do not seem to fall into a given pattern, they are open ended. Is it not then an irony that an act of writing becomes evidence of memory, and through a specific technique memory has erased the self ? This is perhaps what Foucault had called “counter-​memory.”11 The orthodox narratives on memory direct us to the absolute and almost privileged status of the exercise of memory over the exercises directed towards the “future” –​the future to which the migrant supposedly is constantly moving. But –​in these texts –​the reflecting world of the migrants –​there is no premeditation of future perils. The migrant may say, there are enough problems in the present, and one need not additionally worry about evils that very well may not happen in the time ahead.

Memories of the Forgotten  209

Notes 1 Yordanos Almaz Seifu, Wayfarers: Travel Journal, translated from the Amheric by Hiwot Tadesse, published with help of Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (Addis Ababa, 2018). 2 Shahram Khosravi, ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-​Ethnography of Borders (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). 3 Winfried Georg Sebald, The Emigrants, translated from the German by Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1996). 4 For the use of the term, see Fredric Jameson, “The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber”, New German Critique, Volume 1, winter, 1973, pp. 52–​89. The vanishing mediator exists to mediate between two opposing ideas, as a transition occurs between them. This mediating concept lives only to facilitate such an interaction, and at the point where one idea has been replaced by the other, the concept becomes redundant. It vanishes. In terms of dialectical thinking, it would mean that the conflict between the theoretical formulation and its empirical negation will be resolved by a new formulation that would replace the previous contradiction. The old formulation in its function of a mediator vanishes. Etienne Balibar commented on the concept, This is the figure (admittedly presented in speculative terms) of a transitory institution, force, community, or spiritual formation that creates the conditions for a new society and a new civilizational pattern –​albeit in the horizon and vocabulary of the past –​by rearranging the elements inherited from the very institution that has to be overcome. This is notoriously the case of the “Protestant Ethic,” centred around the paradoxical notion of “worldly asceticism,” or an immanent spiritual calling, where a twist in the meaning of religious beliefs prepares the subjective conditions for the secularized behaviour of individuals and the whole society –​the emergence of “rational” economic subjects. It therefore creates the conditions for its own suppression and withering away. But without this “vanishing” mediation, no transition from the old to the new society would have been possible. (Etienne Balibar, “Europe: Vanishing Mediator”, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, Volume 10 (3), 2003, pp. 312–​338 (p. 334)) 5 In much cited passage in “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1949), Theodor Adorno famously said: The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself today faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-​satisfied contemplation. (Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson and Samuel Weber (reprint, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983), p. 34; later Adorno explained the situation in terms of a dialectic which demands the existence of art while declaring its inadmissibility in a context of unimaginable violence and horror)

210  Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds 6 The Emigrants, p. 27. 7 Ibid., p. 29. 8 Ibid., p. 63. 9 Ibid., p. 27. 10 Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” (1969), trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Foucault (ed.), Language, Counter-​ memory, Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), pp. 113–​138; Foucault ended the essay with these lines, We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity. No longer the tiresome repetitions: “Who is the real author?” “Have we proof of his authenticity and originality?” “What has he revealed of his most profound self in his language?” New questions will be heard: “What are the modes of existence of this discourse?” “Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?” “What placements are determined for possible subjects?” “Who can fulfil these diverse functions of the subject?’ ” Behind all these questions we would hear little more than the murmur of indifference: “What matters who’s speaking?” (p. 138) 11 Language, Counter-​memory, Practice; elsewhere Foucault wrote, But the moment, maybe, is coming for us to ask, do we need, really, this hermeneutics of the self ? Maybe the problem of the self is not to discover what it is in its positivity, maybe the problem is not to discover a positive self or the positive foundation of the self. Maybe our problem is now to discover that the self is nothing else than the historical correlation of the technology built in our history. Maybe the problem is to change those technologies. And in this case, one of the main political problems would be nowadays, in the strict sense of the word, the politics of ourselves. (Michel Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth”, introduced by Mark Blasius, Political Theory, Volume 21 (2), May 1993, pp. 198–​227 (pp. 222–​223))

Section Six

Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities

12 Settling Account with the Point of Origin Marx, Engels, and the Revolution of 1848

I Event is the birth site of alternatives. Or, we may say, event is the practice of alternative. The point of course is not that there is some original event from which all wisdom, consciousness, and spirit flow. The event’s gaze is not connatural with things that are to be seen. It is not also the case that in the light of the event we find everything visible. The light of the event does not shine on all our practices of alternatives to the present world. It does not tell us what will happen, what will bind us to our alternative practices of politics, and what will make the history of the necessary utopias visible to us. The force of the event works in less divine and more complex ways. Indeed, revolutionaries, engaged in practising alternatives and creating an alternative society, have to settle accounts with the point of origin –​not once, but repeatedly. This is because practising alternatives is the acutest form of critique, including critique of the present to which these alternative practices belong, of which they are a part. Settling accounts with the point of origin is thus a part of critiquing the present; we may say it is the revolutionary way of self-​ critique. From the point of legacy then we must turn the transcendence of an event on its head and ask, is not the “original” event of an alternative at the same time a crisis of the form of the existing, also a crisis of the transcendent nature of such alternative, the creation of that alternative? In the context of this question this chapter proposes to recall how Karl Marx and Frederick Engels framed the legacy of 1848 in their writings and political lives, how they settled account with the point of origin. For that, let us briefly see how the legacy of 1848 was framed by them. Their comments exemplify the practices of direction, at times in the dense form of analyses and institution building and at times in simple commentaries, towards relating an “original” event with continuous revolutionary practices of social transformation.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-19

214  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities

II The revolutions of 1848, collectively known as the Year of the Revolution or the Revolution of 1848, formed the most widespread revolutionary wave in nineteenth-​century Europe. The revolutions essentially sought to establish democracy, remove old feudal structures, and create independent nation states. The revolution began in France in February that year, and then spread fast to most of Europe. Demands for popular participation in government, press freedom, and other social issues of life and work conditions were raised by the working class and were coupled with an upsurge of nationalism and widespread dissatisfaction with existing political leadership and rule. The uprisings were led by shaky alliances of reformers, intellectuals, liberal politicians, the middle classes, and workers (in some cases the peasantry also), and as a rule these alliances did not hold together for long. Thousands of people were killed, and many were forced into exile. Serfdom was abolished in Austria and Hungary, absolute monarchy ended in Denmark, and electoral democracy was introduced in the Netherlands. France, many states of the German Empire, Italy, Poland, and the Austro-​Hapsburg Empire were the principal locations of the revolution. Liberal reformers, radical politicians, and revolutionaries had joined hands in the beginning, fell apart as the struggle progressed, and almost without exception the revolutionaries were defeated while the liberals won. Democracy in Europe came in this way. But while political democracy developed in gradual manner after these revolutions, the social demands of the working masses were sacrificed. Serious crop failures, particularly those of 1846, had created hardship among peasants and the working urban poor, who two years later rose in revolt. But almost everywhere the bourgeois politicians whose demands were limited mostly to ending royal absolutism jettisoned the latter’s cause. Marx and Engels working at that time in Brussels had written the Manifesto of the Communist Party (popularly known as the Communist Manifesto), which had been just published in London in February 1848; and now following the March insurrection in Berlin, they planned agitation in Germany and issued from Paris in March “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany.” These demands included besides social demands of the poor unification of Germany, universal suffrage, and abolition of feudal duties. The middle classes and the working class thus shared a desire for reform and agreed on many of the specific aims. Their participations in the revolutions, however, differed. Leadership remained with the middle classes, while the lower classes formed the foot soldiers of the battle. Ideas in this milieu competed. Democracy, liberalism, nationalism, and socialism became competing flags of struggle. In Britain, the Reform Act of 1832 ensuring general enfranchisement had partly pacified the middle classes. Agitations, violence, and petitions of the Chartist Movement came to a climax with their peaceful petition to Parliament in 1848, which ended with some sort of whimper. However, the

Settling Account with the Point of Origin  215 repeal in 1846 of the protectionist agricultural tariffs, called the Corn Laws, had partly satisfied the proletarian fervour. In Canada the year saw establishment of electoral government in some parts of the country. The legacies of the Revolution were thus multiple. Democrats looked back to 1848 as a democratic revolution, while communists and socialists saw it as a betrayal of working-​class ideals by a bourgeoisie hostile to the demands of the toiling people. For nationalists, 1848 was the year of hope. Newly emerging nationalities began disowning the old multinational empires.1 The Communist Manifesto was the child of 1848. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were also the sons of the Revolution. At the time of the European Revolutions of 1848 Marx was thirty years in age, Engels twenty-​eight. Even though their intellectual lives had commenced five years earlier, in a true sense their baptism as revolutionaries happened in 1848, with their experiences subsequently enriched through the history of the International Workingmen’s Association (1864–​1874).2 For the rest of their lives both Marx and Engels repeatedly went back to the revolution of 1848: what the revolution was, what the European revolutions in that year were, what was the nature of the class struggle at that time, its limits, the growing strength of capitalism, the parallel growth of the working class in the following decades, and the legacy of the revolution. Marx and Engels overgrew the revolutions of that year. But there was no question of forgetting, renouncing or rejecting it. They remained heirs of the Revolution while pointing out the weaknesses, immaturity, and intrinsic deficiencies of 1848. The year marked the most famous clarification of ideas by them. They were commissioned by a secret group named the Communist League to draw up on its behalf a manifesto of principles and beliefs and thus came to be written, The Manifesto of the Communist Party. In it they took care to distinguish between different existing socialist ideas and communist principles. They wrote, Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?... It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself. And, they ended the Manifesto with these ringing lines, The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.3

216  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities 1848 was that spectre. Without the increasing activities of the secret revolutionary sects and the revolutions of 1848, the spectre would not have appeared. There were rival conceptions of communism at that time. Also, many respectable persons and day dreamers were socialists. Likewise there were many contending ideas of democracy. From Chartists to parliamentary liberals –​ all had their ideas of what democracy should be. The Manifesto took notice of that. During the period of the revolution in Germany Marx had backed the democrats in the revolutionary surge, till he saw that the democrats had used the workers almost everywhere to press ahead with their liberal constitutional demands and had jettisoned the cause of the latter.4 “Communism” after 1848 thus became the watchword for the ideas of equality, justice, an end to oppression in the name of religion, private property and exploitation based on private property, and its place cooperation, association, internationalism, comradeship, atheism, full human development as social development and vice versa, and vitality of people’s life. By 1840 “communism” had become the object of public attention. Before the 1840s “communism” indicated a set of beliefs, but after that “communism” became political, representing the revival of revolutionary republican tradition, destruction of privileges, and a general assault on private property. This distinguished it from the cluster of doctrines inspired by Saint Simon, Fourier, and others who were relatively indifferent to revolution and focused only on principles of association, harmony, and cooperation. Engels’ Principles of Communism, and then Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto laid bare the differences, clarified what was at stake, and what “communism” meant as a political idea. The philosophy, which they had inhered in Germany and declared as having “ended,”5 the political economy of capitalism in Great Britain, which they started studying intensely in that decade, and the political struggles in France with which they were associated –​ these three elements were discussed, critiqued, and combined towards producing the new thought, now to be known famously as communism. 1848 enabled them to perform the historic task. The year of 1848 was the glue to their clarifying exercises in the preceding years towards arriving at what we know today as the Manifesto –​its popular, ideological, and scientific roots.6 However, the process self-​clarification by Marx and Engels as a part of the interrogation of reality did not end there. Clarification of ideas, principles, and assessments for the working-​class movement went on along with self-​ clarification. While they always upheld the principle of association, they did not forget that the proletarian associations in the 1840s were characterised by abject misery, pauperism, violence, collective struggle, and efforts at unionising, and hence alongside their association with workers’ movements, they continued their inquiry of capitalism, which was forever changing the old world of artisans. Marx and Engels linked communism to the proletarians in this milieu. Later Engels wrote, In 1847, socialism was a middle-​class movement, communism a working-​ class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, ‘respectable’;

Settling Account with the Point of Origin  217 communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that ‘the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself’, there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take.7 The political aspect of communism was enunciated emphatically in this way in as much as its scientific-​analytic part. The spark being provided by the revolutions of 1848, the two authors had to go back again and again to the question of origins of the Manifesto, lest any misunderstanding among the readers on this should remain. Writing twenty-​four years after authoring the Manifesto, they wrote in the Preface to the German edition of 1872, …much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-​five years … Here and there, some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that, ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-​made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.’ (See, The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association, 1871, where this point is further developed) Further, it is self-​evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated.8 In the Preface to the Russian edition of 1882, they noted the limited field that the proletarian movement occupied at that time (December 1847), an indication of which was that the Manifesto had missed mentioning the two most important countries in the context of global capitalism and class struggle –​Russia and the United States. Both were considered only “pillars of the existing European system,” but “How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North America for a gigantic agricultural production, whose competition is shaking the very foundations of European

218  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities landed property –​large and small. At the same time, it enabled the United States to exploit its tremendous industrial resources with energy and on a scale that must shortly break the industrial monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England, existing up to now. Both circumstances react in a revolutionary manner upon America itself. Step by step, the small and middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis of the whole political constitution, is succumbing to the competition of giant farms; at the same time, a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous concentration of capital funds are developing for the first time in the industrial regions. And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848–​49, not only the European princes, but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat just beginning to awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today, he is a prisoner of war of the revolution in Gatchina, and Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe. The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-​to-​face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: Can the Russian obschina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.”9 Marx and Engels drew heavily from the defeat of the Paris insurrection in 1848. Marx wrote in 1850 his famous commentary (serialised in Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue), Class Struggles in France, 1848–​50, which was published as a book after his death by Engels in 1895.10 Class Struggles in France is all about a particular moment of correlation of class forces, the vacillation of the liberals, the weakness of the vanguard social force, the workers of Paris –​in short why the event of 1848 could not transform the society according to the desires of the lower orders of the society. In the Preface to the Manifesto’s English Edition of 1888, Engels was even more direct and specific on the revolution of 1848 –​its dialectic of contemporaneity and inadequacy. He wrote, after “the defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June 1848 –​the first great battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie … the struggle for supremacy was, again, as it had been before the Revolution of February, solely between different sections of the propertied class; the working class was reduced to a fight for political elbow-​room ….” He noted that while the Manifesto as the symbol of the revolutionary consciousness of the time “seemed henceforth doomed to oblivion,” still it “came to the front again...,” and the history of the Manifesto reflected the history of the modern “working-​class movement.” We

Settling Account with the Point of Origin  219 may add, the history of 1848 as it was repeatedly remembered in the form of rewriting the prefaces of later editions of The Manifesto reflected the history of the working-​class movement. Nevertheless, Engels insisted, The Manifesto represented the most militant and the most advanced consciousness of the time. “Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France, both of whom, at that date, had already dwindled to mere sects gradually dying out.” Socialism in 1847 signified a bourgeois movement, communism a working-​class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, quite respectable, whereas communism was the very opposite. And since we were very decidedly of the opinion as early as then that ‘the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the working class itself …’ In 1893 two years before Engels died, the task of writing the Preface to the Italian Edition of the Manifesto in 1893 provided him the one more opportunity to revisit 1848. He brought in the question of the nation in making a democratic revolution. He wrote, Everywhere that revolution was the work of the working class; it was the latter that built the barricades and paid with its lifeblood … But conscious though they were of the fatal antagonism existing between their own class and the bourgeoisie, still, neither the economic progress of the country nor the intellectual development of the mass of French workers had yet reached the stage which would have made a social reconstruction possible. In the final analysis, therefore, the fruits of the revolution were reaped by the capitalist class … But in any country the rule of the bourgeoisie is impossible without national independence. Therefore, the Revolution of 1848 had to bring in its train the unity and autonomy of the nations that had lacked them up to then … Thus, if the Revolution of 1848 was not a socialist revolution, it paved the way, prepared the ground for the latter. Through the impetus given to large-​scaled industry in all countries, the bourgeois regime during the last forty-​five years has everywhere created a numerous, concentrated, and a powerful proletariat. It has thus raised, to use the language of the Manifesto, its own gravediggers. Without restoring autonomy and unity to each nation, it will be impossible to achieve the international union of the proletariat, or the peaceful and intelligent co-​operation of these nations toward common aims...11 Engels was thus looking back to 1848 not as a sovereign event with a capacity to restructure the society, but in the prism of the dialectic of contemporaneity/​inadequacy, also the event as the birth site of unanticipated developments. Those who were struggling for social emancipation in the second half of the nineteenth century would have to self-educate and self-​ train through their momentous pasts of rebellion –​the ways they must, to use a Leninist phrase, “bend history” to their cause.12

220  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities Equally revealing was Marx’s Class Struggles in France, to which we have already referred. Class Struggles in France chronicled the progress of the French revolution of 1848, its fluctuating fortunes, and its eventual defeat. Marx showed that the bourgeoisie, which had participated and led the revolution of 1848, was haunted by the French revolution of 1789, when the bourgeoisie had hoped that through the revolutionisation of masses they would capture public power and set up a bourgeois state. However, the radicalisation of masses went ahead, and finally the bourgeoisie had to take extreme measures including setting up a dictatorship to control and stop the radicalisation. Civil war that followed 1789 resulted in deaths of thousands. In 1848 the bourgeoisie was careful and aimed to keep the workers in tight leash. The spectre of 1789 haunted the bourgeoisie of France for a long time to come. The development of capitalism in the continent (including England) was the final determining factor that prevented any return of the proletarian masses to power. Such was the fate of 1848. Class Struggles in France was written in that backdrop. In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx noted that the 1848 revolutions were neither the bourgeois revolutions of the past nor the proletarian revolution of the future.13 He saw them as ineffectual replays of the past. The slogan of universal suffrage (still meaning male suffrage) and the new political participation of the masses were only the political side of the equality of exchanges in the market. No new era was dawning in Germany and the Italian Risorgimento was spurious. And the establishment of the Reich in Bismarck’s Germany proved the inadequacy of 1848 and the historical confirmation of the rule of capital and the victory of bourgeois property relations. As we know, only with Paris Commune Marx felt that the historical inadequacy of 1848 had been dispelled. The Paris Commune as Lenin also believed had been able to provide the principles of proletarian rule, even though the Commune had been short-​lived and brutally suppressed by counterrevolution. Before his death in 1895, recalling the time of 1848 one more time, indeed for the last time, Frederick Engels noted the change in the situation. That year on the occasion of the republication of Class Struggles in France he wrote that he and Marx were guilty of ignoring contemporary economic changes. In his words: In judging the events and series of events of day-​to-​day history, it will never be possible for anyone to go right back to the final economic causes .... A clear survey of the economic history of a given period is never contemporaneous; it can only be gained subsequently, after collecting and sifting of the material has taken place .... Statistics ... always lag. For this reason ... the materialist method has often to limit itself to tracing political conflicts back to the struggles between the interests of the social classes and fractions of classes encountered as the result of economic development, and to show the particular political parties as the more

Settling Account with the Point of Origin  221 or less adequate political expression of these same classes and fractions of classes. It is self-​evident that this unavoidable neglect of contemporaneous changes in the economic situation, of the very basis of all the proceedings subject to examination, must be a source of error. But all the conditions of a comprehensive presentation of the history of the day unavoidably imply sources of error—​which, however, keeps nobody from writing contemporary history.14 Equally significantly, he noted the growing ineffectiveness of barricade tactics in the city, the relative stability of the army, the capacity of the state to quickly mobilise it, and the vacillating role of the petty bourgeoisie. While also noting the upswing in the capitalist economy he finally noted, that the revolutionary possibilities of 1848 were defeated by the coup by Napoleon III. In sum, the hopes of a revolutionary revival in the immediate future after 1848 were not realised. Engels ended with these famous lines: When the February Revolution broke out, we all of us, as far as our conception of the conditions and the course of revolutionary movements was concerned, were under the spell of previous historical experience, namely, that of France. It was, indeed, the latter which had dominated the whole of European history since 1789, and from which now once again the signal had gone forth for general revolutionary change. It was therefore natural and unavoidable that our conceptions of the nature and the path of the “social” revolution proclaimed in Paris in February 1848, of the revolution of the proletariat, were strongly coloured by memories of the models of 1789-​1830. Moreover, when the Paris upheaval found its echo in the victorious insurrections in Vienna, Milan and Berlin; when the whole of Europe right up to the Russian frontier was swept into the movement; when in Paris the first great battle for power between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was joined; when the very victory of their class so shook the bourgeoisie of all countries that they fled back into the arms of the monarchist-​feudal reaction which had just been overthrown—​for us under the circumstances of the time, there could be no doubt that the great decisive struggle had broken out, that it would have to be fought out in a single, long and changeful period of revolution, but that it could only end with the final victory of the proletariat. After the defeats of 1849 we in no way shared the illusions of the vulgar democracy... But we, too, have been shown to have been wrong by history, which has revealed our point of view of that time to have been an illusion. It has done even more: it has not merely destroyed our error of that time; it had also completely transformed the conditions under which the proletariat has to fight. The mode of struggle of 1848 is today obsolete from every point of view, and this is a point which deserves closer examination on the present occasion.

222  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities And then, History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the removal of capitalist production … But owing to this, the struggle of these two great classes, which, apart from England, existed in 1848 only in Paris and, at the most, a few big industrial centres, has been spread over the whole of Europe and has reached an intensity such as was unthinkable in 1848... If even this mighty army of the proletariat has still not reached its goal, if, a long way from winning victory with one mighty stroke, it has slowly to press forward from position to position in a hard, tenacious struggle, this only proves, once and for all, how impossible it was in 1848 to win social reconstruction by a simple surprise attack.15 In the same way Marx had to clarify his position on the Russian situation and the intriguing question as to how far the Russian situation corresponded to his analysis of economic development outlined in Capital and therefore the tasks of the revolutionaries in Russia in the situation of that country. The year of 1848 had generated hope for a generalised transition in Europe through workers’ revolutionary struggle, but as revolutionaries they had to look back critically at the time that had passed, critiquing their own illusions. Social transformation called for long drawn and arduous work informed by an awareness of the changing conditions. In short, these writings –​The Manifesto, the prefaces to its subsequent editions, Class Struggles in France, and its subsequent republication, Marx’s letters to Russian revolutionaries –​besides other purposes –​served the purpose of self-​clarification. Critique meant not only criticising other positions (similar in appearance but different), but criticising own misconceptions, and thus becoming materialist in ideas and modes of inquiry. Self-​clarification was thus a part of the permanent exercise of clarification of ideas in the interest of struggle. In this mode, Marx and Engels together had worked at length on their unpublished (till 1932) and never to be completed manuscript, The German Ideology (1845–​46).16 The German Ideology was the time of their self-​ clarification in philosophical terms.17 The time for political self-​clarification arrived soon with the defeat of the revolution of 1848. The point of origin was also a point of discontinuity.

III The event is also a mediation in the long and sustained process of transformative praxis. The event of 1848 was a kind of mediation through which the revolutionaries had to understand the nature and the dynamics of class struggle. The leap from theory to practice could not be otherwise. The revolution of 1848 had given birth to its own illusion –​a passage that Marx and

Settling Account with the Point of Origin  223 Engels would have to go through if they as persistent revolutionaries were to negate it. The origin is necessary but cannot be allowed to exercise a vice-​like hold over the actors of the subsequent time. The writings of 1846–​50 by Marx and Engels were products of a tumultuous time from 1789 to 1848 –​the years of French Revolution, European wars launched by Napoleon, Napoleon’s abolition of the Holy Roman Empire, transformation of Central Europe, introduction of liberal reforms in several countries, the rise of workers as a separate political force, and the inauguration of a new state system in Europe at the Congress of Vienna (1815). This was also the time when political struggles had advanced in an unprecedented manner in France, philosophical enquiries into the formation of individual, reason, state, civil society, history, etc., had remarkably sprouted in Germany, and political economy as a science of wealth of a new age had blossomed in Britain. The year of 1848 represented both the climax and the crisis of the union of these three trends. German philosophy drew from the French Revolution but aimed at primarily solving the spiritual crisis of the age. French politics wanted to be social, and the French Revolution was social, but repeatedly ended up with establishing a republic only as the final achievement of a society. There was no further horizon. British political economy claimed labour was the source of wealth but argued for expansion of capitalism globally as the logic of wealth. Also, the simultaneity of these three trends was broken up. “Classical German philosophy” as Engels claimed ended. With the setting up of the dictatorship of Napoleon III French politics ended. And as Marx thought, British political economy lost much of its scientific nature following the emergence of John Stuart Mill and other theorists who focused more on global expansion of British economy than on scientific inquiries into the origin of wealth. Marx and Engels noted all these changes, which left their imprint on their commentaries in 1848. To Marx and Engels, the period of the revolutions of 1848 provided the goal to remove an existing whole range of mediations and return to immediacy, at the core of which stood the programme of abolition of private property and the state. This is what the revolution had to achieve. The revolution would usher in a society where the distinction between state and civil society would be abolished. The constitution would be brought back to its actual basis, the actual human being, the actual people; and the distinction between political and non-​ political human being would become irrelevant. Marx had been thinking along this line before he (along with Engels) wrote The Manifesto, when he had said four years before, In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-​sided antithesis to

224  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities the consequences but in all-​round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-​winning of man …18 (Italics Marx’s) Settling accounts with the point of origin is thus important –​origin of an idea, of an ideology, of misconception, of fallacy, or even revolution. When 1848 failed, Marx did not renounce his enquiry into the origin. He resumed it fiercely. Previously he had criticised other young Hegelian fellow travellers for not settling accounts with their origin –​the Hegelian dialectic and German philosophy. For the subsequent lifelong enquiry, 1848 was a constant companion in the ongoing struggle for social transformation. But, 1848 was not idealised. In the materiality of error, struggle, advance, reflection, critique, and theorisation, 1848 was subsumed. In his statement on the Cologne Trial, Marx had sneeringly written of the false revolutionaries who were not serious, “It would be no less incorrect to agree with the prosecution in describing the Willich-​Schapper party as the ‘party of action’, unless by action one understands indolence concealed behind beer house bluster, simulated conspiracies, and meaningless pseudo-​ alliances.”19 Already, in their pre-​1848 writings the vanguard role of the philosophers had disappeared. The revolt of the working class was shown as the consequence of the development of bourgeois property relations. Not doctrinal quarrels, philosophising, and bookish exercises, but the material process of social contradictions and the self-​organisation of the workers would lead to revolution ending with the abolition of private property. If 1848 created history, it was also in equal measure subject to history –​of mistakes, struggles, and achievements. The failure of 1848 pointed to the need to deploy a dynamic and historically sensitive approach to economy and popular struggles. Thus, no coherent theory was to be built around 1848. Economy, relation of class forces, and their political implications had to be studied anew, as the hopes for any such theory had threatened to implode sooner rather than later. In the aftermath of 1848 Marx not only wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) but also had to confront and experience the defeat and massacre of the Communards in Paris in 1871. Obviously, the purpose of this chapter is not an exhaustive analysis of the role of an event in creating alternative politics or a world outlook. The purpose is only to offer a brief view of what is at stake in our historical attitude towards an event as the birth site of alternative. Coherence comes through struggles. An alternative is never given from the top. It is not a discovery, discovery of a truth, knowledge of the truth. The event does not speak to the revolutionary in an oracular fashion, revealing its inner message in phases in an evidential manner. There is no manifestation of truth. Revolution is a matter of practice, and there is no event-​truth relation in the work of a

Settling Account with the Point of Origin  225 revolutionary. To the revolutionary, the revolution is not an object of knowledge; Society is the object of transformation. Events that spark off alternative practices –​and a revolutionary event is such a practice –​are situated in the site of social transformation and not in any final truth-​act. This is at the heart of the contemporaneity/​inadequacy dialectic. Though Marx and Engels never wrote details about the implications of the dialectic of contemporaneity and inadequacy or contemporaneity and obsolescence, it is clear how they approached 1848 in their revolutionary lives. In their polemics of 1840s, there was no anxiety about the historical stage of the proletariat, no apprehension about the revolution failing, and no pathos about the society to be destroyed by revolution. But with 1848 failing and the long summer of capitalism setting in, they became extremely careful in not harbouring hopes about grand outcomes. Marx did not complete Capital but immersed himself in studies of pre-​capitalist societies in the prairies of North America to the village communes in the steppes of Russia. In 1848 things were simple. But after 1948, Marx had to move on to studying rigorously the laws of capitalism to understand why capitalist economy was proving durable, what capitalist crises were, and how capitalism sought to overcome the crises. And then, almost fifty years later one of co-​founders of modern socialism admitted that things had become complicated, which required renewed struggles by the workers with new tactics and new strategies. In some sense, not only the rulers were haunted by a spectre, that of communism, workers also had to struggle against the spectre of defeat. The shadow of defeat loomed large over the proletarian movement. In the process it gave birth to several right-​wing modifications to formulations and policies of working-​class movement. One thing more remains to be clarified on the question of the dialectic of contemporaneity and inadequacy. It relates to the question of transition. Programmes of social transformation always pose the problem of transition. Engels in Revolution and Counter Revolution in Germany (1851–​52) had chronicled step by step the tide and ebb of the revolution in Germany, which showed the uncertainties of alliances that workers had forged with other classes, the tension in the common list of demands for democracy and socialism –​all of which made the functioning of the Frankfurt Assembly difficult. Engels wrote, The high aristocracy and the stock-​ jobbing bourgeoisie, which had formed the principal nonofficial supports of the Metternichian Government, were enabled, even after the events of March, to maintain a predominating influence with the Government, not only by the Court, the army, and the bureaucracy, but still more by the horror of “anarchy,” which rapidly spread among the middle classes. They very soon ventured a few feelers in the shape of a Press Law, a nondescript Aristocratic Constitution, and an Electoral Law based upon the old division of “estates.” The so-​called Constitutional ministry, consisting

226  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities of half Liberal, timid, incapable bureaucrats, on the 14th of May, even ventured a direct attack upon the revolutionary organizations of the masses by dissolving the Central Committee of Delegates of the National Guard and Academic Legion, a body formed for the express purpose of controlling the Government, and calling out against it, in case of need, the popular forces. But this act only provoked the insurrection of the 15th of May, by which the Government was forced to acknowledge the Committee, to repeal the Constitution and the Electoral Law and to grant the power of framing a new Fundamental Law to a Constitutional Diet, elected by universal suffrage. All this was confirmed on the following day by an Imperial proclamation. But the reactionary party, which also had its representatives in the ministry, soon got their “Liberal” colleagues to undertake a new attack upon the popular conquests. The Academic Legion, the stronghold of the movement party, the centre of continuous agitation, had, on this very account, become obnoxious to the more moderate burghers of Vienna; on the 26th a ministerial decree dissolved it. Perhaps this blow might have succeeded, if it had been carried out by a part of the National Guard only, but the Government, not trusting them either, brought the military forward, and at once the National Guard turned round, united with the Academic Legion, and thus frustrated the ministerial project.20 This then was the problem of transition. In their writings of that time Marx and Engels had posed the theme of transition as strategic and structural –​ as one of bourgeois order replacing the feudal order, and the socialist order replacing the bourgeois order. Yet, in those writings they had to also grapple with the political fact that in the moment of struggle, insurrection, and revolution, separate registers meet. In the wake of capitalism as the dominating order there is no pure democratic demand that does not have socialist kernel in as much as there is no pure socialist demand that ignores democratic components. While not shying away from the requirement of the alliance that 1848 had posed before the revolutionaries, Marx and Engels were however clear that a “democratic” unrest may not necessarily carry with it socialist demands and issues. The working class will have to be on guard to safeguard its interests, more importantly its own survival. The reason is, in every pre-​ socialist revolution working people had been utilised as foot soldiers only to be sacrificed as soon as the liberal democratic demands had been met. The worker will have to die and the bourgeoisie will win power. 1848 thus represented not only revolutionary time, but also this conundrum of revolutionary/​democratic politics, where if the dialectic of social revolution and democracy is not handled properly, the revolution will die. Engels showed how the dual power represented by the Frankfurt Assembly (thrown up by popular protests and upsurge) dissolved quickly.21 1848 thus remained relevant as a priceless revolutionary experience, contemporary in terms of being instructive, and as strategy inadequate.

Settling Account with the Point of Origin  227 Only seventy years later in a condition of a generalised war and breakdown of the state system in the continent that the impasse (or the blocked dialectic) of contemporaneity and inadequacy was resolved –​in a land, Russia, relatively less affected by the defeats of 1848 and 1871. In that resolution also, 1848 was discussed as to why it had failed, and what lessons the revolutionaries of Russia could draw from the lessons Marx and Engels themselves had drawn a generation back from 1848.22

III We cannot draw extreme parallels to our time of revolutionary or rebellious attempts. Comparisons have their limits. But at least we can draw a few conclusions. a

First, like 1848, the neoliberal time of the last thirty-​five years has been the time of extreme unrest. Yet, revolutionary or rebellious attempts at transforming society have been defeated. It is important therefore to go back to the point of origin in each of these cases –​not to idealise the point of origin but to settle with it. In this act of settling account, we have two parallel but connected exercises: clarification of the ongoing work and self-​clarification. b Second, accounting for class relations and the evolving strengths of the respective classes is a paramount task. In the months of 1848–​49 the strengths of the respective classes and their interrelations fluctuated, resulting in eventual defeat of the revolution of 1848. Likewise, in contemporary events the coalesced strength of the peasantry, semi-​peasants, and workers varied vis-​à-​vis the state and the exploiters, resulting in defeats in decisive battles with consequent collapse. Everywhere with the defeat of the upsurge authoritarian rule was imposed through the imposition of National Emergency or some other semi-​legal mode. By the time all these ended, country after country saw the return of the neoliberal bourgeoisie to power. Thus, careful analysis of the respective strengths of the classes in a dynamic context is a constant task. c Third, lessons of strategy and tactics can be drawn only from these clarifying exercises. If all truths had flown from a revolution, then there was no need for the clarifying exercises. Lessons of strategy and tactics mean determinations of certain principles, modes, time, and specific contexts. As Marx reminded us, all determinations are negations, and all negations are determinations. The dialectics cannot be avoided. There is no unilinear advance from the point of origin. d Fourth, upsurges always create the possibility of the emergence of dual power. How to protect and sustain the revolutionary counter-​power will determine how much the movement has progressed from the point of origin. This has been true of all successful and failed attempts at social transformation as was true of 1848.

228  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities

Notes 1 There is a sizeable literature on 1848. Readers may consult Peter N. Stearns, 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe (reprint, New York: W.W. Norton, 1974); Mike Rapport, 1848: The Year of Revolution (reprint, New York: Basic Books, 2010); Eric J. Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–​1848 (reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1996). 2 For the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels as part of the International Workingmen’s Association –​ www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1864/​iwma/​ index.htm (accessed on 25 February 2022); essential for an understanding of the International Workingmen’s Association, Marcello Musto (ed.), Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 3 All lines from the text taken from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1848/​ commun​ist-​manife​sto/​ch01.htm (accessed on 25 March 2017). 4 On their writings during this period, Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW), Volume 7 (New York: International Publishers, 1977); see also August H. Nimtz, Jr., Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), particularly Chapter 2, “From Theory to Practice: Toward a Communist Party,” pp. 29–​51; also pp. 110–​113; essential for an understanding of their attitude to the revolution of 1848, Frederick Engels, Revolution and Counter-​Revolution in Germany (1851–​1852) –​www.marxi​sts. org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1852/​germ​any/​index.htm (accessed on 27 February 2022). 5 Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886) –​ www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1886/​lud​wig-​feuerb​ach/​ (accessed on 29 March 2017); Engels noted, after 1848 philosophy was over, it was taken over by class struggles and the politics of class struggles, and the advancement of science, to which the working class was the true heir. 6 To understand the nature of the clarifying exercise as it appeared to Marx and Engels, it is important to read the historical review that Frederick Engels undertook in Socialism Utopian and Scientific (1880), Marx/​Engels Selected Works, Volume 3, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), pp. 95–​151. 7 Preface to the 1888 English Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party –​Communist Manifesto (Preface) (www.marxi​sts.org) (accessed on 21 September 2017). 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France, 1848–​1850 –​ www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​ marx/​works/​1850/​class-​strugg​les-​fra​nce/​index.htm (accessed on 28 March 2017). 11 All cited lines from various prefaces to The Communist Manifesto taken from –​ www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1848/​commun​ist-​manife​sto/​pref​ ace.htm (accessed on 25 March 2017). 12 This refers to the numerous allusions by Lenin in 1915–​17 to the task of the proletariat to make use of war and anarchy in Russia for proletarian revolution. 13 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) –​www.marxi​sts. org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1852/​18th-​bruma​ire/​ (accessed on 28 March 2017). 14 Frederick Engels, “Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France” (1895) –​www. marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1850/​class-​strugg​les-​fra​nce/​intro.htm (accessed

Settling Account with the Point of Origin  229 on 28 March 2017); for the main text of Class Struggles in France, www.marxi​sts. org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1850/​class-​strugg​les-​fra​nce/​ (accessed on 25 March 2017). 15 Ibid. 16 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology: Critique of Modern German Philosophy According to Its Representatives Feuerbach, B. Bauer and Stirner, and of German Socialism According to Its Various Prophets (1845–​1846) –​ www.marxi​sts. org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1845/​ger​man-​ideol​ogy/​ (accessed on 23 March 2020). 17 Frederick Engels wrote in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886),“In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in Berlin, 1859, Karl Marx relates how the two of us in Brussels in the year 1845 set about: “to work out in common the opposition of our view” –​ the materialist conception of history which was elaborated mainly by Marx –​to the ideological view of German philosophy, in fact, to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience. The resolve was carried out in the form of a criticism of post-​Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript, two large octavo volumes, had long reached its place of publication in Westphalia when we received the news that altered circumstances did not allow of its being printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose –​self-​clarification!” (Italics mine) –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​ marx/​works/​1886/​lud​wig-​feuerb​ach/​index.htm (accessed on 31 March 2017). 18 Karl Marx, “Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1844) –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1843/​criti​que-​hpr/​intro. htm (accessed on 27 March 2017). 19 “Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne by Karl Marx, 1853”, Preliminaries, last line –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1853/​reve​lati​ons/​ ch01.htm (accessed on 30 March 2017). 20 Frederick Engels, Revolution and Counter Revolution in Germany (1851–​1852) –​ Revolution and Counter Revolution in Germany, Letter 11, “Vienna Insurrection”, 19 March 1852 –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1852/​germ​any/​index.htm (accessed on 31 March 2017). 21 Engels wrote, The (National) Assembly …, at last, commenced to see clearly, at least so far, that it had allowed all power to slip out of its hands, … and that if it intended making a Federal Constitution for Germany at all, it must set about the thing at once and in good earnest. And many of the vacillating members also saw clearly that they had been egregiously duped by the Governments. But what were they, in their impotent position, able to do now? The only thing that could have saved them would have been promptly and decidedly to pass over into the popular camp; but the success, even of that step, was more than doubtful; and then, where in this helpless crowd of undecided, short sighted, self-​conceited beings … where, we say, among these poor creatures, whom a single year of Parliamentary life had turned into complete idiots, where were the men for a prompt and decisive resolution, much less for energetic and consistent action? (Revolution and Counter Revolution in Germany (1851–​1852), Letter 14, “The Restoration of Order: Diet and Chamber”, 24 April 1852 –​www. marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1852/​germ​any/​index.htm (accessed on 27 February 2022))

230  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities 22 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905), “Epilogue”, section III, “The Vulgar Bourgeois Representation of Dictatorship and Marx’s View of It”; Lenin wrote there, On the question of the tasks of this dictatorship Marx wrote, already in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung [of June 6 1848]: ‘The National Assembly should have acted dictatorially against the reactionary attempts of the obsolete governments; the force of public opinion in its favour would then have been so strong as to shatter all bayonets.... But this Assembly bores the German people instead of carrying the people with it or being carried away by it [them].’ In Marx’s opinion, the National Assembly should have ‘eliminated from the regime actually existing in Germany everything that contradicted the principle of the sovereignty of the people,’ then it should have ‘consolidated the revolutionary ground on which it stands in order to make the sovereignty of the people, won by the revolution, secure against all attacks.’ Thus, the tasks which Marx set before a revolutionary government or dictatorship in 1848 amounted in substance primarily to a democratic revolution: defence against counterrevolution and the actual elimination of everything that contradicted the sovereignty of the people … Marx speaks of the “people.” But we know that he always ruthlessly combated the petty-​bourgeois illusions about the unity of the “people” and about the absence of a class struggle within the people. In using the word “people,” Marx did not thereby gloss over class distinctions, but combined definite elements that were capable of carrying the revolution to completion. (www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​lenin/​works/​1905/​tact​ics/​ ep-​s3.htm (accessed on 31 March 2017))

13 The Actuality of October Revolution as an Alternative in the Colonial and Postcolonial Time

I The October Revolution of 1917 was a Russian event and primarily a European event. The Bolshevik revolutionaries were European revolutionaries. Lenin thought that the October Revolution would be followed by a mighty European revolution beginning with a German revolution. We know, the European revolution did not materialise and the German revolution failed. However the October Revolution survived. This was of course primarily on its own strength. But the fact that imperialist intervention had to stop was for a good reason due the international prestige of the Revolution, the specific conditions, and the support it got throughout the world. Equally important, it gradually won support of the peasant masses of the Asian parts of the erstwhile Russian Empire. The radicalisation of the anti-​colonial struggles was perhaps an even more important element in that global scenario. And this was in no small extent due to the specific nature of the impact of October Revolution. Why was it so? We may reformulate the question in the following way: Why was an event in Russia accepted as one of world importance, by which we mean that this event transcended the European boundaries and was seen in the vast parts of the colonial world as one of global consequence? What then is the actuality of an event, such as the October Revolution, or perhaps other such events? What were the implications that appeared in the congealed form of an alternative?

II In the context of this question, we have to note the dualities of October Revolution. As a great, exceptional event in global history, it exceeded theories, expected boundaries –​territorial, political, and conceptual -​and created several dualities, mostly unanticipated. These dualities crystallised around the questions of nation, and what has been called in revolutionary circles the question of the path of revolution that reflected on the question of power, in the language of revolution, “dual power.” These and several other dualities DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-20

232  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities framed the actual appearance of October Revolution in vast parts of the world, which was then mostly colonial and in a strict sense still not capitalist, and gave shape to the emergence of October Revolution as an alternative. As we all know, October Revolution was around issues of the autocracy of the Tsarist rule, a corrupt and servile bourgeoisie, war and economic crisis, democracy for the masses, awakening of the workers and the toiling people, and a general feeling in the country that this rule was at its end, it could not take Russia out of the crisis, and there was a complete collapse of confidence in the pillars of the State. In this milieu, the Revolution began in February and climaxed in October. In a sense then the national question was not directly on the agenda of the Revolution. It was not a revolution for national independence. Yet Russia as a nation grew out of the Revolution, but more importantly, all weak and subjugated nations thought this was the path. October Revolution betokened global awakening of the subjugated masses and nations. This is what Mao thought when he spoke of the significance of October Revolution for China that the Revolution stood for oppressed masses and nations. During the Second World War in 1942 when German power was at its height, Mao said on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Revolution, It is with the greatest optimism that we celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution this year. I firmly believe that this anniversary marks the turning point not only of the Soviet-​German war, but also of the victory of the world anti-​fascist front over the fascist front. Hitler was previously able to keep up the offensive without being defeated because the Red Army was alone in resisting fascist Germany and its accomplices in Europe. Now the Soviet Union has grown more powerful in the course of the war and Hitler’s second summer offensive has failed. Henceforward the task of the world anti-​fascist front is to take the offensive against the fascist front and inflict final defeat on fascism. The warriors of the Red Army at Stalingrad have performed prodigies of heroism which will affect the destiny of mankind. They are the sons and daughters of the October Revolution. The banner of the October Revolution is invincible, and all the forces of fascism are doomed to extinction. In celebrating the victory of the Red Army, we the Chinese people are also celebrating our own victory.1 The Revolution as a beacon of national revolutions did not happen spontaneously as if without a theory of it, or more correctly speaking, without a strategy. If we recall the debate between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, while Rosa Luxemburg denied the possibility of national wars against imperialism, Lenin not only admitted such possibility, he also spoke of its necessity. He wanted the Bolsheviks to view the question of national self-​determination dialectically. He was aware of the question of contradiction in the national question.2 In many of his writings before the Revolution, Lenin had judged

October Revolution  233 carefully as to why some nations may stand up against imperialism today and succumb to it later, or why anti-​colonial struggles were an inalienable part of global anti-​imperialist struggles by communists and national revolutionaries, which later became a reality when new nations were born through decolonisation. Treating the question of national self-​determination dialectically was important. It was not be praised sky high; it was not to be damned. It had to be made to serve broad democratic and proletarian interests. When it did, the proletarian revolutionaries would support it; when not they would condemn it. This was the core of Leninist teaching on the right of national self-​determination. October Revolution carried this message. Thus, even as an event of revolution that signified class struggle, October Revolution signified anti-​colonial struggles and anti-​colonial revolutions. After the Revolution, Finland got independence, Russia renounced extra-​territorial claims, and the significance of the Revolution in terms of freeing Russia as the prison house of nationalities was soon clear. The World War was imperialist, subjugated nations had no stake in it. Clearly the appeal of the Revolution was dual: to the subjugated classes, and subjugated nations. The Revolution’s appeal was transformative, and thus poly-​vocal. In this aspect it exceeded the dual significance of the French Revolution in an uncompromising and wider manner. Post-​French Revolution Europe and post-​October Revolution Europe were similar in many ways, but different too. French Revolution had turned back its face on the Black Jacobins in the revolution in Haiti.3 In 1920s, there was no Concert of Europe, as the spread of socialist ideas in Europe and explicit anti-​colonial influence of October Revolution prevented any such Concert forming against the Revolution. One can say in the style of Hegel, who seeing Napoleon on horseback entering Jena, had exclaimed that this was world history.4 October Revolution however in a much bigger and grander manner epitomised world history: as a struggle of exploited classes, a struggle against world war and a struggle for peace, a struggle of the subjugated nations, and the struggle for an existence that exceeded the boundaries of Europe and inspired the world. Equally importantly or perhaps more, while the Napoleonic surge conquered and annexed many territories, the Russian Revolution gave a call for national self-​determination. The Revolution recalled earlier histories of revolution as a phenomenon, as a transformative event, so much so that new histories were imagined under the inspiration of the October Revolution.5 The long twentieth century began with 1789 and ended with the 1975 or little later with decolonisation, the end of the Vietnam War, and independence of several African nations. The mark of the long twentieth century was the link between war and revolution. October Revolution symbolised this umbilical cord. Thus, we have to look back and see why decolonisation, battle against racist practices, and appreciation of October Revolution went together. It began with the Revolution but soon proceeded apace. The Communist University of the Toilers of the East was established in 1921. It was similar to International Lenin School, which mainly accepted students from Europe

234  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities and the Americas. Headed by Karl Radek, the curriculum of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East included both theoretical and practical matters, including Marxist theory, party organisation and propaganda, law and administration, theory and tactics of revolution, problems of socialist construction, and trade union and peasant organisations.6 The University published Revolutionary East. In 1928, about 1,000 foreign students studied at this University, and the 400 strong Chinese students comprised the largest group, followed by 350 ethnic minorities within the Soviet Union, and between 30 and 40 Japanese. The tradition continued and many African national revolutionary leaders were schooled there. To give an idea: Among its alumni were famous revolutionary leaders like Liu Shao Qi, the President of the People’s Republic of China (1921 class), Ho Chi Minh, President of Vietnam (1923 class), other Vietnamese revolutionary leaders such as Tran Phu, Le Hong Phong, and Ha Huy Tap, Muhammad Najati Siddiqui, writer and activist in the Palestinian independence movement (from 1925 to 1928), Nazim Hikmet, Turkish poet, Khalid Bakdash, secretary of the Syrian Communist Party, Fahd, secretary of the Iraqi Communist Party from 1941 to 1949, Harry Haywood, leading African American member of the US Communist Party, Manabendra Nath Roy, an Indian revolutionary who helped the foundation of the Communist Party in Mexico, Sultan Galiev, a prominent Muslim National Communist, and an exceptional leader, Nikos Zachariadis, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece and chairman of Greek Communist Provisional Democratic Government from 1947 to 1949. The list is short, incomplete, and selective. But there was also a larger history of organisation. We are referring here to the long history of organisational efforts such as the Afro-​Asian summit in Bandung (1955), Pan-​ African Summit in Accra, Ghana (1958), the Tricontinental Conference of African, Asian, and Latin American Peoples in Havana (1966), and the writings and activities of not only political leaders like Nasser or Zhou en Lai, but also thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Malcolm X, and Che Guevara. It involved strategies of internationalism, solidarity movements, and anti-​capitalist struggles. It was said in those days, as Ben Barka, the Moroccan Leftist leader, had reportedly declared prior to the Havana conference, the “two currents of the world revolution would be represented there: the current born with the October Revolution and the national liberation revolutions’ currents.” Pan-​African ideas were a direct result of the anti-​colonial movements, drew inspiration from the October Revolution, and became a part of the existence of the anti-​colonial world. Fidel Castro spoke in similar vein that October Revolution was a struggle against colonialism, which could not have ended without the Revolution. He said, Without the October Revolution and without the immortal feat of the Soviet people, who first resisted intervention and the imperialist blockade and later defeated the aggression of fascism and crushed it at a cost of

October Revolution  235 20 million dead, which has developed its technique and its economy at an incredible cost of sweat and sacrifice without exploiting workers in any country on Earth, it would not have been at all possible to end of colonialism and liberate dozens of peoples on all continents.7 And then again, the October Revolution of 1917, the first state of workers and peasants arose in the world, and the revolutionary movement, both in its struggle against colonialism and for national independence as well as for social liberation, acquires an extraordinary inspiration and an immense wealth of experiences.8 All these however must not lead us to an illusion, namely that the October Revolution represented a superior form of consciousness, or more aptly speaking, pure “revolutionary consciousness.” Philosopher Gilles Deleuze in discussing Spinoza had drawn a distinction between consciousness and thought and spoken of the “devaluation of consciousness” in favour of the attribute of thought.9 Consciousness may be partial and fickle; thought can be critical. But thought is not simply thinking, but its organisation –​the organisation of thinking. Thought is organised voice. Thus, and equally significantly, the Revolution symbolised the critical voice of Lenin, because voice epitomised the thought of Revolution as a critique of society and the order. In that sense, the Revolution had another duality: It represented the universality of the voice of the masses, and the organisation of thought that will enable the voice to be heard. The Revolution had brought to fulfilment the idea of Lenin in What is to be Done?, namely, organisation, masses, and voice.10 The Revolution was not representing anyone; it was the voice of the masses. Voice needs organisation; it is a matter of articulation, articulating in a way so that the voice is heard. It is not amplification. Think of radio, the voice is articulated in a way so that others hear. The slogan land, bread, peace spread wide. It was an act of articulation, and thus became the voice of many worlds, including the anti-​colonial world. The event therefore was plural in significance, yet singular in the articulation of a strategy. Etienne Balibar in a recent reflection on October Revolution has reminded us of the significance of the Leninist practice of strategising in the context of this relation –​the strategy that is able to actualise a transformative event. He refers to the dualities of the great event: a revolution to end war that became another war, a party of politics that became a party with military discipline to win a civil war; a theory of vanguard having to co-​exist with a reality of collective political actions in the form of “soviets” or councils, and so on. Such a unity of opposites could not be spontaneous and stable.11 In this crucial historical juncture the Revolution represented the paradoxical combination of organisation and an unruly condition.

236  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities Similarly, the transformation signified that the Revolution was socialist, yet it had inspired internationalism in the colonial world that is to say global anti-​colonialism. We should not be surprised at this, because in the Stuttgart Congress (1907) itself Lenin had fought for the rights of the colonial people. He noted, Let us now examine individual questions that were discussed at the Congress. The differences of opinion on the colonial question could not be ironed out in the Commission. The dispute between the opportunists and the revolutionaries was settled by the Congress itself, settled in favour of the revolutionaries… On the colonial question an opportunist majority was formed in the Commission, and the following monstrous phrase appeared in the draft resolution: ‘The Congress does not in principle and for all time reject all colonial policy, which, under a socialist regime may have a civilising effect.’ In reality this proposition was tantamount to a direct retreat towards bourgeois policy and a bourgeois world outlook that justifies colonial wars and atrocities… The attempts to justify this retreat by the tasks of a ‘socialist colonial policy’ and of constructive reform work in the colonies were unfortunate in the extreme… this can have nothing in common with… our stand in principle against conquests, subjugation of other nations, violence, and plunder, which constitute ‘colonial policy’. The minimum programme of all the socialist parties applies both to the home countries and the colonies. The very concept ‘socialist colonial policy’ is a hopeless muddle…12 The Revolution had thus placed itself in the existing anti-​colonial political space, and this made it global. This global political space was enriched through the defeat of fascism in the Second World War. This was the milieu in which decolonisation started. Having emerged from a void, the Revolution as an exceptional event was thus a transitory mode of being, resisting any fixed meaning. We rarely have in history a combination of critical thought and an event as critique of society and order. The main point is here: The Revolution symbolised an “un-​representable” void while thought proceeded alongside with these two at times conflicting with each other, but more frequently mutually interacting. If we do not understand this duality, we shall be at a loss to understand why the October Revolution could make revolution a global agenda, a universal experience as distinct from a universal logic, an experience repeatedly interrupted –​in 1848, 1851, 1871, 1905…. And, now the October Revolution through its organisation (including conduct of civil war, organisation of the party, formation of the Third International, and probably most importantly by making Soviet the representative of power) had enabled the globalisation of the experience of revolutions, precisely because it had inhered anti-​colonial ingredient. Russia became Soviet Union, but it also became a nation –​proud and anti-​imperialist. It became a model, so much so that

October Revolution  237 tools of Soviet reconstruction of society and economy (good and bad both), such as planning, nationality policy, women’s education, mass literacy, heavy industry, etc., became globalised, with many newly independent nations implementing them to their respective capacity. The Revolution which drew strength from the principle of organisation –​therefore, What is to be Done?, and thus the Party –​also drew strength from the call, “All Power to the Soviets!”. Soviets belonged to the working masses. The theory of organisation was thus dialectical. On the issue of duality, one final point. The Revolution showed how Lenin had read Marx on the question of revolution. Revolution was inseparable from crisis. Marx had analysed crises as organic to capitalism and, along with Engels, had thought that 1848 would solve the crisis of European capitalism through the overthrow of the order by revolutionary democrats and communists. In 1871, they thought that national wars, Prussian militarism, French aristocratic stagnation, and the corrupt regime of Napoleon III would be ended by the Commune. Indeed, as the previous chapter discussed, they wrote later in prefaces and afterword to later editions of the Manifesto and Class Struggles in France that they had illusion about the breakdown of bourgeois order in 1848. Lenin and the Bolsheviks read Marx in a refreshing way. Crisis was the moment of the birth of revolution. If there was logical necessity of crisis, there was a logical necessity of revolution too. Crisis beckoned transition; transition signified that the crisis was being met. Crisis signified further the necessity of revolution. If as Marx indicated crisis was repetitive, so were revolutionary attempts. Therefore, 1905 as the precursor of 1917 left its mark in the passage where Lenin left State and Revolution unfinished. Lenin wrote as he left the manuscript, This pamphlet was written in August and September 1917. I had already drawn up the plan for the next, the seventh chapter, ‘The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917’. Apart from the title, however, I had no time to write a single line of the chapter; I was ‘interrupted’ by a political crisis –​the eve of the October revolution of 1917. Such an ‘interruption’ can only be welcomed, but the writing of the second part of this pamphlet (‘The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917’) will probably have to be put off for a long time. It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of revolution’ than to write about it.”13 In this repetition of crisis and revolution, there was the logic of spiral –​ transition from the logic of circle to the logic of an ever-​increasing necessity. Crisis and revolution in this way implanted itself in global anti-​imperialist sphere. The possibility of a globalised revolution loomed large before the October Revolution became actual. We may recall in this connection Lenin’s famous book on imperialism,14 and here perhaps more relevant to our point, the tract published after the February Revolution, The Impending Catastrophe

238  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities and How to Combat It –​both written as the war raged and the crisis appeared unending. He wrote as he began the last chapter of that tract, To be really revolutionary, the democrats of Russia today must march in very close alliance with the proletariat, supporting it in its struggle as the only thoroughly revolutionary class. Such is the conclusion prompted by an analysis of the means of combating an impending catastrophe of unparalleled dimensions. The war has created such an immense crisis, has so strained the material and moral forces of the people, has dealt such blows at the entire modern social organisation that humanity must now choose between perishing or entrusting its fate to the most revolutionary class for the swiftest and most radical transition to a superior mode of production. Owing to a number of historical causes –​the greater backwardness of Russia, the unusual hardships brought upon her by the war, the utter rottenness of Tsarism and the extreme tenacity of the traditions of 1905 –​the revolution broke out in Russia earlier than in other countries. The revolution has resulted in Russia catching up with the advanced countries in a few months, as far as her political system is concerned.15 Apart from the fact that imperialism and colonialism were and are global phenomena, which is why nationalism has always searched for international support and that is how the Third World was created, October Revolution made crisis, awareness of crisis, revolution, and the experience of revolution global. October Revolution heralded globalisation of revolution.

III There was always an eagerness, or at least a curious interest in colonial India about rebellions outside the country right from the nineteenth century. Nationalist revolutionaries had visited Great Britain and France to learn bomb making, cryptography, building networks, and arranging for money and arms to be transhipped to India, apart from reading European revolutionary literature. The Ghadar party and the rebellious ship in voyage in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, the Komagata Maru, are only the most well-​ known instances of the international dimension of the anti-​colonial universe.16 As soon as the Left leaning nationalists in India received the news of the October Revolution, there was commotion among them. They made desperate effort to contact the Bolshevik leaders in Moscow. Some like Mahendra Pratap reached Moscow. Some like Birendranath Chattopadhyay, M.N. Roy, and Pandurang Khankhoje wandered through other lands before reaching Moscow. Poet Tagore visited the Soviet Union in 1930 and wrote the famous bunch of letters Russiar Chithi.17 These letters of the poet on Russia, written during his travels, vivid, full of descriptive details of the life in the country, were commentaries on the society and the people. To him this was one of the greatest experiments in human civilisation. Warm, sympathetic,

October Revolution  239 and critical at the same time, the poet’s letters were also his reflections on the urgent issues of national reconstruction in India and in the East. The Letters also signalled a perspective for the future. India’s future first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru also embarked on his first ever visit to Moscow to take part in the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, and the visit exerted enormous influence on the evolution of his world view. He also met the famous German revolutionary Clara Zetkin, Sun Yat-​Sen’s widow Soong Ching Ling, and the eminent Mexican writer Diego Rivera and had scores of meetings with Soviet activists. He published his impressions in a booklet called “Soviet Russia” providing vivid accounts of Soviet socio-​ economic transformations. In the Discovery of India, he wrote, Soviet revolution had moved human society forward by a great leap and sparked the fire that would never be extinguished. He confessed that study of Marx and Lenin had produced powerful effect on him and helped him to see history and the contemporary situation in a new light. The long chain of history and of social development appeared to have some meaning, some sequence, and some light on the future. The practical achievements of the Soviet Union were tremendously impressive. And though he disliked the curbs on personal freedom and consequent regimentation, he had no doubt that the Soviet Revolution had advanced human society by a great leap and had lit a bright flame which could not be smothered, and that it had laid the foundations for that new civilization towards which the world could advance.18 Nehru’s response was characteristic of scores of nationalist leaders. As part of decolonisation, they all thought of adopting Soviet mode of social transformation, regardless of the difference in circumstances. The anti-​ colonial Third World was born in this way. Of course Soviet assistance was there, and in time this became part of the Cold War. The story of the Third World is inextricably bound with the fortunes of this global story. Large tracts of the world witnessed fierce peasant revolts, drew on the experiences of the Chinese Revolution, and there were now many paths –​from that of Cuba to Vietnam. Yet the building blocks of the Third World were put in place by the internationalisation of the October Revolution, namely anti-​colonialism, anti-​ racism, strong state, planned economy, industry building, language rights, nationality principles, etc. These as we know could not stop the eventual decay of the Third World –​primarily because of the neglect of the peasant question and a failure to reconstruct the state on democratic lines and appropriate to the postcolonial situation. But convictions die hard. When the economist Gunnar Myrdal in Asian Drama (1968) wrote of the cataclysmic changes amidst social stagnation in the developing countries and the limits of development,19 the reply came in form of Asian Dilemma: A Soviet View and Myrdal’s Concept.20 Or, we may remember in this context People’s Daily’s two successive editorials on Nehru’s politics, On Nehru’s Philosophy (1959) and

240  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities More on Nehru’s Philosophy (1962).21 The clay feet of the nationalist leaders had been exposed. Revolution needed a firmer footing. This brings us to the question of path, the so-​called Russian path or the Chinese path, a debated that once animated the revolutionaries of the Third World, and once again it was around a duality of the October Revolution. This is bit complicated; we have to patiently go through the analysis. October Revolution had two underpinnings, related but different: the message of class struggle and the message of national struggle. For a time in the colonial revolutionary struggles, the two different strands were combined. But after national independence, the newly decolonised states stressed the path of national reconstruction, which effectively meant limiting, muting, and controlling class struggle, basically peasant uprisings, and depending on the local capitalists, compradors, and bureaucracy for national development. But October Revolution above all meant for the lower classes, workers and peasants in particular, carrying forward the task of social transformation of the country through revolution, and not allowing the comprador bourgeoisie to usurp the nation. The mighty Chinese revolution was a signal that peasant struggle and the struggle for genuine national independence had to continue. Throughout the world, from Malay to Mexico, from Greece to Algeria, the struggle continued. The Soviet Party thought that the revolutionary classes should help consolidate the newly won national independence through lending support to the national bourgeoisie, and that transition from national underdevelopment to a non-​capitalist path of development with socialist aid was possible. This was conceptualised as national democracy (first used probably in case of East European socialist countries in the post-​war era). On the other hand, revolutionary class struggle necessitated that such support to the bourgeoisie of the country must not be given, and radical decolonisation lay through the path of peasant struggle. This was the path of October Revolution, reinforced by Chinese Revolution. This was conceptualised following Mao’s famous speech as people’s democracy, as “people’s democratic dictatorship” –​later rechristened as the Chinese path of revolution. This meant emphasis on peasant struggle, emphasising villages in place of cities (by implication, workers) as the base of revolution, the dual policy of united front and protracted war, giving importance to the national question, and thus uncompromising anti-​imperialist struggle, and marginalising the bourgeoisie as far as possible in the era of what Mao had termed “new democracy.” The peripheries were to surround the centre, and this was to be a global strategy. For a while in the sixties and seventies this seemed to be the case. To be clear, it was not a choice between the October Revolution and the Chinese Revolution. But postcolonial condition made the problem a matter of “path” –​strategy and tactics. October Revolution survived this crucial challenge, but its voice diminished. The Revolution had sprung before the world the fundamental issue of popular autonomy, autonomy of people’s organs like the soviets, and autonomy of the nation. The Soviet inheritors forgot the essential path of the Revolution and

October Revolution  241 turned the Revolution into an event of a bygone era to be celebrated annually, but not to be taken as strategy or a path. In this way its legacy suffered. The Third World too inherited and then left the legacy by the wayside. We have to see how in the time of neoliberalism and new global conditions the national and the class will be combined, or one will eclipse in the wake of the re-​emergence of the other. Whichever way it happens October Revolution will be recalled as the cherished and instructive moment of the duality. India was one of the principal theatres of this momentous play. The Communist Party in India split more than once as it split elsewhere in the world. The vivisection of global communist movement was part of the same postcolonial scenario that had universalised the voice of the Revolution. The trajectory of class struggle in the current neoliberal time is uncertain and its relation to national struggle waits to be redefined in a definite manner. All we can say is that the voice of the October Revolution will increase or diminish according to the degree of class struggle and the degree to which neoliberalism will propel national resistance. This is a complicated discussion, and we can only mention it here. But at least we can bear in mind Marx’s and Engels’ ideas about the relation between the working class and the nation: The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.22

IV Yet through all the ambiguities of the situation, the October Revolution survived –​not because the inheritors continued with the legacy, but because of one supreme feature the Revolution symbolised. The feature was that of dual power. In some sense, thus, we are back to the question of duality: the simultaneity and the paradox of the co-​existing but contrasting realities, and the inexorable demand for dialectics in studying the postcolonial problematic of social transformation. Dialectical understanding of politics and society is at the heart of the postcolonial formulation of the theory of dual power. To be sure, this is not a matter of an esoteric theoretical exercise, but one that requires study of vital practices of power, the actual situation of which is far more complex than what can be theorised at the present moment of history. It will involve studying among others the dynamics of the construction of dual power inherent in the already existing bourgeois state making projects, institutions, and structures, in a society characterised by different class bases. It is a condition that throws up issues of alliances, united front, and other tactical issues, and thus new practices of power. Power is a relational concept as it connects institutions and structures. Structural analysis points to the direction of how the protracted co-​existence

242  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities of two structures creates what we call dual power –​a situation that may exist up to the time of revolution. Dual power is thus not a story of purity. In fact, it contradicts any notion of the purity of a process of social and political transformation. Lenin had pointed out in his famous note on “Dual Power” that in a situation of dual power there was an element of compromise also.23 The main function was thus not to change consciousness, but build new structures, from which emerged related institutions, new relations of power, and consequent consciousness. This is perhaps what Gramsci had theorised as “war of position.”24 War of position is of course connected with issues of building popular hegemony and moving towards a situation of dual power. One can also visualise the situation as one of acquiring “combat ability.” Mao was clear on this question, which not only meant emphasis on the decisive role of the subjective factor in making revolution, but also a structural analysis of how the state can be engaged in a war of position. The ruling class rarely crumbles down under gradual overwhelming pressure from various autonomous groups. Revolutionary strategy has various components; and dual power is both a structural feature of a state with which revolutionary forces are engaged in a war, at the same time it is a product of a hegemonic strategy. The point is: If the postcolonial problematic is built around the issue of limits to the hegemony of capital and the variety of ways in which the popular resistance to capitalism, imperialism, and neoliberalism develop, then we must admit that dual power has remained one of the most significant global features in the politics of anti-​colonial revolution and postcolonial democracy. Ways of resistance by oppressed races, castes, nationalities, and popular solidarities of workers, semi-​workers, and peasants ultimately tell us of the dynamics of dual power. In fact, all revolutionary experiences suggest the possibility and reality of dual power. We can think of what Marx and Engels wrote of the features of 1848 revolutions in Europe. Almost everywhere, as opposed to the old State, the rightist-​moderate centre, and the party of order, the revolution developed parallel power. In Revolution and Counter Revolution in Germany, Engels described how the Frankfurt Assembly functioned as the parallel power and collapsed due to its own vacillation.25 Lenin drew specifically from Engels. October Revolution brought out the reality of dual power as it developed from February 1917 onwards, bringing back to memory the emergence of the soviets as the dual power in 1905. In the postcolonial context, two paramount questions have been: If the nation symbolises a situation of dual power in the global imperialist arena, does not class also symbolise a similar situation within the national context? How to bring to bear on politics the fact that the worker is the symbol of dual power in a bourgeois society and the existence of the nation is the symbol of dual power in an imperialist order? Or, say autonomy as the counter-​power to sovereignty? Let us see how Lenin viewed the phenomenon of dual power. We may summarise the main aspects of his analysis: First, Lenin viewed the situation

October Revolution  243 of dual power as one of contingency, the product of a developing, a precariously balanced situation, “alongside the Provisional Government, the government of bourgeoisie, another government (italics Lenin’s) has arisen, so far weak and incipient, but undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing –​the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.” This power is “weak and incipient”, but since the “basic question of every revolution is that of state power, unless this question is understood, there can be no intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the revolution.”26 Second, important is the question of class composition of this other government, its proletarian and semi-​proletarian nature. One of the fundamental characteristics of this type is that the source of power is not any law discussed and enacted by parliament, but the direct initiative of the people from below, in their local areas. Third, for the parallel power “to become a power, the class-​conscious workers must win the majority to their side.” Lenin reminds, “We are not Blanquists; we do not stand for the seizure of power by a minority. We are Marxists; we stand for proletarian class struggle against petty-​ bourgeois intoxication, against chauvinism-​defencism, phrase-​mongering and dependence on the bourgeoisie.”27 Hence, the potency of power will depend on the judgement of the question: Will the form of dual power exacerbate class antagonism and clarify proletarian tasks? In Lenin’s words, it was an entirely different kind of power, from the one that generally existed in the parliamentary bourgeois-​democratic republics of the usual type still prevailing in the advanced countries of Europe and America. In this way Lenin anticipated the future postcolonial response to the quandary posed by the European history of republican revolutions. The history of the immediate months before the October Revolution, though well known, is important to recall in order to understand how this idea of dual power developed in Leninist revolutionary practice of October Revolution. Lenin wrote in April Theses, As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticizing and explaining errors and at the same time advocate the necessity of transferring the entire power of state to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the masses may by experience overcome their mistakes… . Our immediate task is not to ‘introduce’ socialism, but only to bring social production and distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.28 The April Theses was significant, not merely because it outlined the profile of dual power, but also laid down (a) why the scenario of dual power had to be judged with revolutionary determination; (b) and equally importantly, why dual power not only suggested co-​existence of two forms of power, but

244  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities also a dynamic situation, which suggested the possibility of transition from the previous, old type to a new type of power. Mao followed this idea deeply when he raised the question after the defeat of the agrarian revolutionary war in China in 1927 and then answered, “Why is it that Red Political Power Exist in China?”29 In short, as long as in the crisis-​borne postcolonial world situations of dual power will exist –​and this does not depend on any subjective will –​the influence of October Revolution will be felt. Yet, in the background of the enormous experiences of situations of dual power in the vast postcolonial lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the inability of revolutionary forces to sustain it even at the coast of thousands of lives must strike us. In Malay, Indonesia, India, Burma, Iran, and many more countries, the communist movements created red political power but could not sustain it, and red political power was submerged in nationwide counter-​ revolutionary bloodbaths. The emergence of red political power and the inability to sustain it both have been features of the postcolonial history of revolutions. The history of sustained resistance and failures offers us insights to the dynamics of power specific to postcolonial situations. At the same time, it also tells us of an abiding legacy of the October Revolution, namely, that every revolutionary situation will raise the prospect of dual power, and revolutionaries will strive to create and enhance such a situation. In such perspective, the politics of dual power owes very little to a philosophical theory of power. Rather, it is a specific kind of political practice; dual power is a fact that moulds revolutionary political practice. Throwing away every vestige of sociologism, power in the history of dual power acquires a revolutionary-​ practical nature. Postcolonial history also shows that dual power is manifest not only in terms of institutions, areas, or territory, but in terms of classes and ideas also. One such idea is that of autonomy in which the notion of dual power is reflected in the postcolonial world. October Revolution universalised the practice of dual power by raising the question of autonomy of the soviets. In short, dual power did not make its appearance in the world in the way Minerva appeared to the society of gods and men. Dual power exists as a critical history in the annals of revolution only in so far as it occupies a problematic position. It secures its place in the thick of an already occupied world, only because conflict makes it something distinct. The politics, which constitutes the theory of dual power and is able to make sense of this feature and builds around it, is essentially a matter of organising this power, strengthening it, defending it, and developing it as a feature of a particular situation. This may be called a “new practice of power.” October Revolution made it a global practice for the colonial and ex-​colonial people. Or, with some exaggeration, we can say, the revolutionary practice of power by the colonial and ex-​colonial people made the October Revolution global. If the situation of dual power successfully led to a revolution in Russia through transfer of power from the bourgeoisie to the soviets, it was because –​ as Lenin insisted –​Russia was the weakest link in imperialist chain. Echoing

October Revolution  245 Hegel Marx had said against Proudhon, history always proceeded on the bad side, for the bad side was the one which brought movement to life, and made history by bringing the struggle to a climax.30 The postcolonial situation is the weak link in global order; with its anarchy it represents the bad side today. The bad side with its equivocal attitude often represents a radical novelty upsetting the balance of forces. The Revolution of 1917 gave a new meaning to the practice of power, as power in the Revolution of 1917 drew not from any ideology but from the practice of revolution as an alternative. This was the actuality of a revolution, which emerged, or was indeed practised as an alternative to capitalism, the ills of society, and the destitution of the masses. Social transformation means change in the conditions of life, bringing in the process a new form of spirituality around collective life: How does one lead life or what does it mean to take life as commons? In the history of nation building in decolonised countries as in post revolution Soviet Union or China, variegated experiments were conducted as to how to make life and the nation as a common possession, which would mean nation of the people and nation as the collective, care and protection, responsibility, common services, various forms of common property, and common performance –​these and many other essentials of a common life were promoted through several decades in order to achieve a new transformative subjectivity. Revolution had brought in destruction, at the same time a promise of new life. The Revolution stood at the threshold of transformative politics and death. No doubt this history is full of tragic dimensions as all histories of spirituality are. But this spirituality was a condition to the revolutionary subject’s access to politics, which for long had been the preserve of the affluent classes of society. We may call it “revolutionary experience” that appeared in history but not to stay for eternity. This is a different history. The afterlife of a great event, such as the October Revolution, that emerged in history as an alternative to the present belongs to a history of that different kind. It is the history of revolution as a singularity of message and a plurality of processes of social transformation. October Revolution presented that duality, and that is how it came to symbolise revolution as a practice of creating alternatives. As a different way of practising power, it was exceptional. Although our social life is the only source of revolution, yet the revolution showed that people were not satisfied with life alone and demanded the freedom to step out of banality of existence and participate in politics on “a higher plane, more intense, more concentrated, more typical, nearer the ideal, and therefore more universal than actual everyday life.”31

Notes 1 “In Celebration of the Twenty fifth Anniversary of the October Revolution”, 6 November 1942, Selected Works of Mao Tse-​Tung, Volume III (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965) –​www.marxi​sts.org/​refere​nce/​arch​ive/​mao/​selec​ted-​works/​ vol​ume-​3/​mswv3​_​11.htm (accessed on 28 November 2017).

246  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities 2 On this see, Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis of German Social Democracy (1915) –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​luxemb​urg/​1915/​jun​ius/​ (accessed on 28 November 2017); Lenin appreciated Rosa’s internationalism but criticised her views that ruled out the principle of national self-​determination against imperialist rule. See Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (hereafter V.I. Lenin), “The Junius Pamphlet” (1916) in Lenin Collected Works, Volume 22 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), pp. 305–​319 –​ www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​lenin/​works/​1916/​jul/​jun​ius-​pamph​let.htm (accessed on 28 November 2017); also among his other writings, V.I. Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-​determination (1914) in Lenin Collected Works, Volume 20 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 393–​454. 3 Cyril Lionel Robert James (hereafter C.L.R. James), Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1963; revised edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). 4 Hegel wrote, I saw the Emperor –​this world-​soul –​riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it. (G.W.F. Hegel’s letter to Niethammer, 13 October 1806 in Hegel, The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christine Seiler (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), Letter 74, p. 114; also read Isaac Deutscher, “The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution: Some Suggestive Analogies”, World Politics, Volume 4, 1952, pp. 493–​514) 5 From this angle, C.L.R. James’ Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution remains an unsurpassable history. C.L.R. James wrote while concluding the book, Such men as Loveway (in his words an “obscure Rhodesian black”) are symbols of the future. Others will arise, and others. From the people heaving in action will come the leaders; not the isolated blacks at Guys’ Hospital or the Sorbonne, the dabblers in surrealisme or the lawyers, but the quiet recruits in a black police force, the sergeant in the French native army or British police, familiarising himself with military tactics and strategy, reading a stray pamphlet of Lenin or Trotsky as Toussaint read the Abbe Raynal. (p. 377) Earlier in the book, he wrote of the failure of the Haitian revolution, Criticism is not enough. What should Toussaint have done? A hundred and fifty years of history and the scientific study of revolution begun by Marx and Engels and amplified by Lenin and Trotsky justify us in pointing to an alternative course. (p. 282) and (But) Toussaint, like Robespierre, destroyed his own Left-​wing, and with It sealed his own doom. The tragedy was that there was no need for it.

October Revolution  247 Robespierre struck at the masses because he was bourgeois and they were communist. That clash was inevitable, and regrets over it are vain. But between Toussaint and his people there was no fundamental difference of outlook or of aim. Knowing the race question for the political and social question that it was, he tried to deal with it in a purely political and social way. It was a grave error. Lenin in his thesis to the Second Congress of the Communist International warned the white revolutionaries -​a warning they badly need-​that such has been the effect of the policy of imperialism on the relationship between advanced and backward peoples that European Communists will have to make wide concessions to natives of colonial countries in order to overcome the justified prejudice which these feel toward all classes in the oppressing countries. Toussaint, as his power grew, forgot that. He ignored the black labourers, bewildered them at the very moment that he needed them most, and to bewilder the masses is to strike the deadliest of all blows at the revolution. (pp. 286–​287) 6 Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, “The Political Tasks of the University of the Peoples of the East”, Speech delivered at a Meeting of Students of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, 22 May 1925 –​www.marxi​sts.org/​refere​ nce/​arch​ive/​sta​lin/​works/​1925/​05/​18.htm (accessed on 21 January 2021); Rossen Djagalov, “The Communist University for Toilers of the East (KUTV)”, Global South Studies: A Collective Publication with The Global South, 28 August 2020 (see also the rich references to the paper) –​https://​glo​bals​outh​stud​ies.as.virgi​ nia.edu/​key-​mome​nts/​commun​ist-​uni​vers​ity-​toil​ers-​east-​kutv (accessed on 21 January 2021); Kopzhasar Zhetybayev, Yerzhan Pazilov, Lazzat Dinasheva, Khoja Akhmet Yassawi, and Bakytzhan Nurkhanov, “Communist University of Eastern Toilers to Transform the Consciousness of Kazakh Women”, Universidad del Zulia, Utopia y Praxis Latinoamericana, 30 July 2020 –​www.reda​lyc.org/​jour​ nal/​279/​2796​3984​004/​html/​ (accessed on 21 January 2021). 7 Quoted in Emmanuel Neba-Fuh, Triumph of Racism: The History of White Supremacy in Africa and How Shithole Entered the U.S Presidential Lexicon (Kansas City, MO: Miraclaire Publishing, 2021), p. 355. 8 Ibid; see also, https://​soviet​hist​ory.msu.edu/​1968-​2/​third-​world-​frie​ndsh​ips/​ third-​world-​frie​ndsh​ips-​texts/​cas​tro-​on-​the-​octo​ber-​rev​olut​ion/​ (accessed on 20 January 2023). 9 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley, (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1988), pp. 17–​22; see also in this connection, Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone, 1990). 10 V.I. Lenin, What is to be Done?(1902) in Lenin Collected Works, Volume 5 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), pp. 347–​530. 11 Etienne Balibar, “October 1917 after One Century”, Crisis & Critique, Volume 4 (2), 2017 –​www.cri​sisc​riti​que.org/​ (accessed on 3 January 2018). 12 “The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart”, 1908, Lenin Collected Works, Volume 13 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 82–​93. 13 “Postscript to the First Edition”, The State and Revolution the Marxist Theory of the State & the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution, 1918, Collected Works of V.I. Lenin, Volume 25 (Moscow edition), (pp. 381–​492) –​www.marxi​sts.org/​ebo​ oks/​lenin/​state-​and-​rev​olut​ion.pdf (accessed on 23 December 2018).

248  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities 14 V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” (1917) in Selected Works of V.I. Lenin (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), pp. 667–​766. 15 V.I. Lenin, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It (1917) in Collected Works of V.I. Lenin, Volume 25 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), (pp. 323–​369), p. 369 –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​lenin/​works/​1917/​ich​tci/​index. htm (accessed on 23 December 2018). 16 There is a growing literature on the voyage of the Komagata Maru; of these, see Sohan Singh Josh, The Tragedy of Komagata Maru (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1975); Renisa Mawani, Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); and Rita Dhamoon, Davina Bhandar, Renisa Mawani, and Satwinder Kaur Bains (eds.), Unmooring the Komagata Maru: Charting Colonial Trajectories (Toronto: UBC Press, 2019). 17 Rabindranath Tagore, Russiar Chithi, 1338 B.S. trans. Letters from Russia, (Kolkata: Visva Bharati Publications, 1960). 18 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, 1946 (Centenary edition), (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 29. 19 Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Enquiry into the Poverty of the Nations, 3 Volumes. (London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 1968). 20 Rostislav Aleksandrovich Ulianovsky and Vladimir Ivanovich Pavlov, Asian Dilemma: A Soviet View and Myrdal’s Concept, trans. Leo Lempert (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974). 21 “The Revolution in Tibet and Nehru’s Philosophy”, the Editorial Department of Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily), 6 May 1959, trans., and published in Concerning the Question of Tibet (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1959), pp. 39–​276; also available at www.archi​eve.cla​udea​rpi.net/​main​tena​nce/​upload​ed_​p​ics/​5905​06_​N​ehru​_​ Phi​loso​phy.pdf (accessed on 26 December 2018); “More on Nehru’s Philosophy in the Light of the Sino-​Indian Boundary Question”, the Editorial Department of Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily), 27 October 1962, trans., and published in The Sino-​Indian Boundary Question, enlarged edition, (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1962), pp. 93–​134; also available at https://​dig​ital​arch​ive.wilso​ncen​ter.org/​ docum​ent/​175​947.pdf ?v=​11a52​0736​40aa​0da0​2607​03d5​3790​f3a (accessed on 21 January 2022). 22 Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Chapter 2 –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​ marx/​works/​1848/​commun​ist-​manife​sto/​ch02.htm (accessed on 1 January 2018). 23 V.I. Lenin, “The Dual Power” (1917) in Collected Works of V.I. Lenin, Volume 24 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), pp. 38–​41 –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​lenin/​ works/​1917/​apr/​09.htm (accessed on 27 November 2016). 24 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, eds. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1996), p. 238. 25 Frederick Engels, Revolution and Counter-​ revolution in Germany (1851–​52) –​ www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1852/​germ​any/​index.htm (accessed on 12 January 2022). 26 V.I. Lenin, “The Dual Power”. 27 Ibid. 28 V.I. Lenin, “April Theses: The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution, April 17, 1917”, Pravda, 20 April 1917 –​http://​soviet​hist​ory.msu.edu/​1917-​2/​april-​ cri​sis/​april-​cri​sis-​texts/​april-​The​ses/​ (accessed on 27 November 2017).

October Revolution  249 29 Mao Tse Tung, “Why is It that Red Political Power Can Exist in China?”, 1928, Selected Works of Mao Tse Tung, Volume 1, www.marxi​sts.org/​refere​nce/​arch​ive/​ mao/​selec​ted-​works/​vol​ume-​1/​mswv​1_​3.htm (accessed on 28 November 2016). 30 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon (1847) in Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 6 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), p. 168. 31 Mao Tse Tung, “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature” (May 1942) in Selected Works of Mao Tse Tung, Volume 3 (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1981) –​ www.marxi​sts.org/​refere​nce/​arch​ive/​mao/​selec​ted-​works/​vol​ume-​3/​mswv3​ _​08.htm (accessed on 2 February 2022).

14 Occupy College Street, 1967–​69

I One of the instructive histories of how alternatives to the bourgeois mode of existence have taken shape is that of the specific spatial mode of rebellious existence in our time. Urban historians have noted how the city grew up as a mode of contentious existence. Historians of guerrilla struggles have written of the ways in which the partisans and agrarian revolutionaries have used the vast countryside, forests, hills, etc. A crucial theme informing these discussions has been around the issue of subjectivity of these partisans, fighters, and urban militants shaped by the way their activities interacted with the space in which they operated. In this context, the specific inquiry undertaken by this chapter is into the occupy movement which made a particular way of conducting life possible. Perhaps we can call such way an incipient alternative to the bourgeois-​individualist mode of living. This chapter therefore proposes to take the readers back to the decade of the sixties of the last century in Kolkata when the insurgent movement in West Bengal took to occupation and developed the tactic, which helped the movement to crystallise and caused ironically the undoing of the mobilisation in the end. Occupy as a tactic thus has a history. Occupy in Kolkata began with the tactic of gherao (a form of sit-​in, the tactic of surrounding and cordoning of the bosses by masses of workers and preventing the former from exiting till demands are met) deployed by the agitating workers in various mills and factories around the same time. Gherao made the city of Kolkata infamous.1 The tactic became irretrievably associated with labour movement in West Bengal of that time and made the radical a figure of terror. The most noticeable use of this tactic was by the rebellious students and youth of that time. From gherao developed the tactic of occupation. The most famous instance of occupation was that of the College Street, a small part of the city, associated with the presence of a university, several colleges, book stores, and narrow lanes and by-​lanes. In that tumultuous time of the sixties of the last century, the boundaries of occupation were constantly contested and often led to unknown outcomes. Encounters within that space were transformative. Occupation of college campus led to the production of DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-21

Occupy College Street, 1967–69  251 “College Street” –​the name of a street, also figure of a territory that appeared to the State and represented by the State as anarchic, violent, and extremist. “College Street” was the dry gun powder ready to explode any moment and anywhere. Rebels were known by their identity as denizens of College Street. Yet the state could not appropriate College Street, because the way the space was being reproduced was beyond appropriation. Henri Lefebvre would have said, space attained its full meaning only when contrasted with “the opposite and inseparable concept of appropriation.”2 Power on the College Street in this way flowed from a kind of dialectical spatiality that made “possible tomorrow what was impossible today.”3 Equality, friendship, and comradeship under conditions of occupying generated a dialectical situation, which meant a refusal to accept given ways of politics, even given notions of non-​ conformist politics and party building, and a resolve to master the conditions of existence. New politics came out of the new territoriality that grew out of the need to occupy spaces outside the form of the State. These were, if we are allowed to adopt the title of a book of cartography of social movements in Latin America, “territories in resistance.”4 But occupation also invited full-​ scale violence by the state. As we shall show later, the trend of the activists to huddle back in the sanctuary of occupation proved in the long run a wrong tactic. When white terror came down, the camp, the colleges, and all those who had assembled there in solidarity were trampled under boots of the paramilitary forces meticulously prepared for counter-​insurgency task. As an event “occupy” is now re-​enacted again and again. Given that the city is becoming one of the most contentious sites the world over to stage alternative ideas to capitalism, we have to examine real-​life events of contention closely, minutely. Through a narrative of occupation fifty five years ago, this chapter enquires into the dialectic of territoriality in the annals of modern urban resistance. Equally significantly, it aims to bring to light the alternative spirit of comradeship and conviviality that resistance based on a particular kind of spatiality produced. In the process, it will throw light on a slice of the history of a tactic now famous worldwide through various enactments of it from 2011 onwards.

II As mentioned, the tradition of gherao began in a strong way in West Bengal in the 1960s. The Hindi or Bengali word gherao means encirclement and was (and still in some cases) a tactic of labour militants in India. It is like picketing. Usually, workers would keep a management boss, or a factory owner, or a government building under gherao until their demands would be met, or answers given. This tactic was advocated as a means of workers’ protest by Subodh Banerjee, the PWD (Public Works Department) and Labour Minister respectively in the 1967 and 1969 United Front Governments of West Bengal. Gheraos became occasions when rebellious workers showed that they disagreed with the managers and bosses by standing or sitting around persons

252  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities in authority and not letting them leave until they agreed to do what the protesting workers wanted. Gherao became the site of assembly of mass of workers picketing, sitting, slogan shouting, throwing questions at bosses, and waiting with courage or in trepidation, apprehension, or resignation for the police and the goons to appear at any time, pounce upon them, and free the bosses. The tactic of gherao was deployed in jails also at that time, when jailed activists (for instance in Medinipur Central Jail in 1970) demanding improvement of living conditions and better treatment of prisoners by jail officers and warders stood their ground outside their wards and cells and refused lock up. The prisoners were mercilessly beaten, kicked, dragged inside, torched, maimed for life, and some eventually killed.5 While gherao made the city of Kolkata infamous and the word became irretrievably associated with labour movement in West Bengal in the decades of the sixties and seventies in the last century and made the radical a figure of terror, the most noticeable use of this tactic was by the rebellious students and youth of that time. Gheraos of principals of colleges became familiar incidents. The famous case was the event of gherao of the Principal during the anti-​expulsion movement in Presidency College, supported by the broad student community, in 1966–​67. It was preceded by the picket at Eden Hindu Hostel in 1966, when boarders of the Hostel went on hunger strike with their demands for improvement of the living conditions of the hostel; they picketed at the gate of the hostel for three days and nights, confining the superintendent of the hostel to his apartment in the hostel building, eventually forcing him to resign. The gherao of the historic hostel established in 1886 shocked the educated middle classes of the city. Subsequently the Principal of the Presidency College was gheraoed by the students with a charter of demands. The movement against the expulsion of radical students in September 1966 led the students to encamp in the college. The college was closed sine die and eventually opened after six months when the expelled students were accommodated in other colleges. The long closure of the college helped the students to stay put at the gates and spend days in the locality. Gradually, this became a fine technique, which would mean rebellious students camping in the college at night, and the college running as usual during the day. The college lawn became the meeting ground for political discussions, strategy meetings, consultations. It was a rendezvous site, also a control room, where news of any attack on radical students or youth in any part of city would reach fast, support for comrades under attack would be mobilised, and help would be sent with Godspeed. In time, both in the college and the hostel, crude bombs (called peto) and other handy tools for self-​defence began to be stored. After dusk fell, the college lawn, portico, and the corridors reverberated with animated discussions, exchanges of views, only to become silent as night progressed, and weary, tired activists fell asleep. By morning, the cadres would leave the precinct, the college would be returned to its due owners –​students, teachers, administrative staff, and police spies. As evening approached, the students and youth activists had to be alert about informers and spies, the

Occupy College Street, 1967–69  253 ever present possibility of police contingents suddenly landing in the college to pick up the wanted and other activists, and at night whispering voices of volunteers were on duty to awaken the occupiers to the marching sound of the boots of a police party ready to swoop down on unarmed youth and student activists. Who camped in the college? During the day, the union room, the canteen, the corridors were frequented by the rebellious students of the college with some outside delegates joining them. However, as the day ended the number of outsiders would increase, comrades of other student and youth units would join. The college would become what is called today the “commons” of radical forces. Representatives of other units and unions, and curious participants joined the virtual camp. The college in this way would be occupied. The following modes were crucial to make the college an occupied territory. First, in order to secure the college the vicinity had to be secured. Thus, students had to go out to the neighbourhoods, visit slums, shops, dens, and pits to befriend the populace and neutralise the potential attackers. The vanity of birth and education had to be left behind. If students had to be welcomed in the neighbourhoods, the rough and plebeian denizens of the lower depths had to be also welcomed in the college. Friendship led to comradeship, comradeship broke boundaries of college and outside. The college became the commons. Second, for the college to become a camp of the students and other radical activists, links had to be forged with radical fraternities of other colleges, and equally importantly with other localities. Students had to be companions of youth. In this way, an “All Units” (units of students and youth organisations, and trade union solidarity platforms) was formed. The college precinct became the headquarters. Third, no potential enemy was to be allowed in the area or immediate beyond. Intense education, conscientisation, deliberation, visits, and unionisation –​all these became the mode of neutralising threats of terror. And failing all these, occasionally strong arm tactic was needed. In brief, in order to occupy the college, the neighbourhood had to be secured. Fourth, the occupy site had to become the general site of revolution. Thus, besides students and youth activists and leaders, union militants and organisers, political educators from the party who conducted political classes in the evening considered the college space as their own. In those days with only few landline phones available, and no computers, mobile telephones, and social media platforms, delegates from units afar, for instance from the North Bengal University, could come to College Street without prior intimation to seek advice or extend invitation to a meeting or conference, because they were sure to find someone in responsible position present in the college. That someone was not always a student leader of the Presidency College though. Fifth, the flexibility of the assembly was an important factor behind the metamorphosis of the college precinct into an occupy zone. Flexibility helped crossing boundaries of education, institution, birth, locality, surveillance,

254  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities and pre-​determined schedule. Nobody declared that the Presidency College lawn was to be the headquarters; no one inaugurated it; no celebrity came to visit the rebellious students and youth activists. It was an open university, a never to end workshop of ideas. Yet this was different from today’s occupy stories, because there were lines of command. Activists were not present there through twenty four hours of day and night. They went out on organisational tasks, came back, convened consultations, and took decisions. This required discipline, but it was not excessive. The All Units had regular meetings, though there was no chairman, vice chairmen, or general secretaries. The meetings were conducted strictly democratically. The units had equal status, and consensus on modes, methods, and programmes developed without much deliberate efforts. It was more of a coordination of units, though ironically the name by which it became initially known was Presidency Consolidation. The occupation was reinforced continuously through new ideas and new personnel generated by activities outside College Street, the college, and the city –​in the factories of Howrah or the villages of the Medinipur district of West Bengal. Through the nearly six-​month long Presidency College movement, College Street, where the College and the University of Calcutta (main campus) were located, became the centre of rebellious students and youth of Bengal. The leaders of the movement became well known in radical circles and organisations. The sudden fame of College Street, however, was built on its historical reputation. The University was the centre of radical movements in the fifties and sixties, such as student mobilisations in anti-​tram fare rise movements in 1953 and 1965, food movements in 1959 and 1966, student movements against educational policies of the government, and rise in educational expenses, including tuition fees. The links with non-​student actors were not new either: From the late fifties student activists had been going to villages to stay with the peasants and mix with peasant activists. College Street occupation carried the legacy and bore the spirit of militant style of communist work.6 The balance, however, was too delicate to last. As white terror was mounted by the State from 1969 and an atmosphere of fear enveloped the city, the efficacy of occupation as a tactic of struggle declined. Arrests, killings, torture, and forced disappearance decimated the insurgent ranks. The lane next to Presidency College, Bhabani Dutta Lane, now stands as mute witness to the killings by the police of seven youth activists who belonged to the neighbourhood and had regular presence in the college in the evening. The police shot them dead at night, and now only the memorial plaque at the mouth of the Lane on College Street speaks of the time. The camp evaporated as years passed and activists fled to escape police violence. When the violence subsided and “normalcy” returned, and more than a decade later the activists sought to recreate the tactic, the milieu of mass upsurge was over by then. The College and the College Street once again had shrunk within its structural boundary.

Occupy College Street, 1967–69  255

III The tactic followed in those days came back from the depths of popular memory in the early years of this century when on different occasions protesting people occupied various sites, such as agitating workers occupying the automobile factories in Gurgaon near Delhi and farmers and political activists occupying for days the road leading to Singur in West Bengal.7 Before that, in the eighties farmers had occupied district headquarters in Satara in Maharashtra and Merat in UP in India.8 We cannot also forget workers’ occupation of the Kanoria Jute Mill in the beginning of 1990s. Kanoria Jute Mill was the laboratory of autonomous workers’ movement that ran the mill later under the collective leadership of trade union leaders like Prafulla Chakrabarty, Purnendu Bose, Kushal Debnath, Dola Sen, and others who shot to prominence because of the Kanoria Jute Mill Occupy movement.9 We must not forget that various parts of the world had reverberated in the sixties of the last century with echoes of the occupation of campuses in the United States in 1965–​66 in protest against the Vietnam War, and then occupation of factories and universities in Paris in May 1968. And more than forty years later, the reverberation was felt again in many parts of the world. Occuption Wall Street happened –​preceded and followed by occupations in Tunis, Cairo, and Istanbul. In some cases occupation was a tactic. In others, as in New York, occupation became a goal by itself, a strategy of social transformation. College Street and the Presidency College precinct had no park to defend such as the Gezi Park in Istanbul. College Street is a kilometre (in some accounts 1.5 km) stretch of thin road crowded by a university campus and a number of colleges and book stores, though there is the College Square, always a natural part of the College Street, but never a point of contention or occupation. College Square is mainly a large tank which acted and still acts as a swimming pool for children. Presidency College precinct and the College Street symbolised the widespread spirit of insurgent youth, political rebellion, and an ideology of revolt, and a network of insurgent organisations. In a sense, this also implied defending College Street, though not in the sense of amassing hundreds and thousands of people to occupy the space as a focus of the movement. Possibly, this was the reason, the flexibility, which helped the mutineers to retain possession of College Street for nearly two years. Presidency College functioned in the day, the University functioned likewise; College Square brimmed with children playing in the swimming pools; radical literary functions took place, progressive publications rolled out from College Street; Minerva Theatre on the nearby Beadon Street and defended by youth volunteers from attacks of the toughs of the party of order still staged revolutionary plays like the Kallol,10 and couriers and emissaries from fraternal organisations kept on coming in and going out talking of revolution. It was an act of occupy of a different type. Perhaps purists will not call it an occupation. Perhaps College Street functioned as a base. In a sense, this was natural,

256  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities given the history of association of the place with rebellious memories of the past –​particularly memories of suburban and mufossil students, youths, and teachers coming to College Street and being sucked into the mutinies on College Street. In other words, space had not been idealised as yet. It was still a part of a general struggle. There is no doubt that the epic demonstration in the city in November 1968 against the visit of Robert McNamara, the then World Bank President and earlier the US Secretary of Defence, known as the “butcher of Vietnam,” was possible because of the flexible marshalling mode of the organisers of the All Units quartered in College Street. McNamara’s cavalcade could not pass through the rebellious city to the Governor’s House, his place of stay and meetings, and he had to be flown in a helicopter from the airport to the Governor’s House.11 Drawing from all these instances, we can say with some qualifications, wherever occupy was a tactic aided by and being part of a larger political movement, it met with bigger or smaller success. In some cases as in the Indian Railway Strike of 1974, workers walked out of the workshops, plants, marshalling yards, stations, and offices and declared indefinite strike.12 They did not occupy any square, any place of work, or any building. Elsewhere, in various places of Europe, migrants occupied with varying degrees of success churches, empty buildings, squares, and town halls to turn the latter into shelters. In 1947–​51 in India too refugees had occupied vacant plots and abandoned buildings and grounds with varying success. When refugees occupied in 1978 some of the vacant forest islands in the Sundarbans in West Bengal, they were driven out, arrested, and some killed in a police operation –​ an event known as Marichjhanpi massacre.13 Besides the fact that in Kolkata the occupation of College Street originated from the radical students with traditional communist background while in the West occupy movement such as Occupy Wall Street owed to a variety of political persuasions (new left, anarchist, liberal left, environmentalists, feminists, do gooders, etc.) with at times pronounced criticisms of communist politics, there is one more difference between the form of occupation of the Presidency College precinct and the College Street as a whole in the sixties and the occupations that happened decades later in the West. In the latter case, the occupiers focused on physical occupation of a place, enlarging the assembly there, improving the dynamics of occupation in that defined space, and posing that space as the counter-​space of the power of Wall Street or the Westminster in London, and other seats of rule. Fifty years back the Presidency College precinct occupation leading to the College Street occupation was different. It was not a busy multi-​road traffic junction like the Tahrir Square in Cairo, indeed the street is not wide at all, and not all kinds of public naturally converge there. As indicated earlier, institutions such as the University of Calcutta, the Presidency College, the two prominent schools, the Hindu and the Hare, the Calcutta Medical College, the Institute of Welfare and Business Management, Surajmal Women’s College, the City College of Commerce, Scottish Church College, Maulana

Occupy College Street, 1967–69  257 Azad College, and the Goenka College with the entire place surrounded by an arc of plebeian educational institutions, such as the Bangabasi College, Surendranath College, Vidyasagar College, City College (main campus), Jaipuria College, and finally with hundreds book shops, tea stalls and small restaurants, two big bazaars, and office goers landing in the city at the Sealdah Station and walking to the Dalhousie Square (later renamed as BBD Bagh), made College Street –​an initially unnatural but understandable place of mobilisation and occupation. College Street up to Boubazar Street or a little up to the Wellington Square crossing was for at least two decades before the sixties a place of mobilisation of students and youth. The rebellious student and youth activists seized this legacy and built their strategy of occupation on this history. In that animated space called College Street there was also a considerable intermingling of students belonging to different persuasions. Three researchers in a meticulous study of student unrest that took place in the University of Calcutta in March 1969 analysed the responses to four student formations and found considerable overlap of opinions among student leaders of these formations. This co-​authored account describes clearly the flexibility of the student activists in pressing their demands (mainly, withdrawal of certain unfair administrative measures).14 The intermingling of students of various persuasions was evident in the student demonstrations against the visit of Robert McNamara in 1968 as well. Our description brings out one more crucial difference with today’s Occupy Movement. In Occupy Wall Street, the strategy was to converge and assemble, while in case of Presidency College there was no such strategy. Rather it was to use the place as the rebellion’s headquarter, and hence of contact and dialogue, a place to decide issues of deployment of cadres to go various places to spread the message of unrest.15 It was thus the live centre of a growing network of points of upsurge. The inside and the outside of the occupation of College Street were not clearly marked apart as two territories, temporalities, or figurations. In securing the College and the College Street, mobilisations from outside were needed, while for these mobilisations from outside to actualise the inside had to be at least partially ready to accommodate the “outsiders.” Slums played an important role. The Kalabagan slums and the lower middle class inhabited lanes of the area had traditionally produced toughs and for decades were utilised as foot soldiers of reactionary forces in communal riots and beating down radical demonstrations. Not only were they neutralised now, but a large section of the youth also came forward to help the insurgents and several of them courted deaths in the ensuing battles with the armed police. Rooms for manufacturing bombs had to be found; walls and exit routes had to be identified in the event of escape, local units had to be built, shelters had to be pre-​arranged. All these required rings of support –​so first the core area of College Street and the two precincts of Presidency College and the Eden Hindu Hostel had to be secured, and then the nearby lanes, then the colleges

258  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities and the surrounding localities, and in this way the outer peripheries were made one after another. This was a concentric circle where the inside and outside were mixed in a flexible mode. As was found out, this spatial design suited urban mobile struggles that were to characterise the city from 1969 to 71. The boundary redrawing capacity of occupy College Street was thus crucial in the grammar of mobilisation. Space was an active process rather than a fixed container or marker. The boundaries of the occupy zone were in constant flux; the social processes of boundary making took place in the particular spatial context. Occupy College Street became a strategy of flexible territoriality, where almost nothing was pre-​given about what was to come. The boundaries of the College Street were thus constantly contested and often led to unknown outcomes. Encounters within that space were thus transformative. The narrow lanes and streets, educational institutions, centres of cultural repertoires, publishing houses, slums, bookshops, lower class including lower middle class houses –​were all laden with memories of street rebellions of years and decades. But this also meant that the counter-​insurgency forces now had to devise a strategy whereby they could secure one locality after another in opposition to localities dominated by the insurgents, to restrict the mobility of the rebels, and eventually to isolate them, cut out their exits, and kill them. This is how the Baranagar-​Cossipore massacre happened. Other round ups at the dead of nights and shooting the activists down in say Beliaghata, College Street, Howrah, or Bagha Jatin-​Jadavpur happened in this way. The State was already learning to anticipate urban mobile warfare and tackle it. The occupation with all its flexibility ended in the fire of battle. The rebels could not maintain and did not know how to maintain the flexible tactics of occupation in the overall war like atmosphere of the city. Resistance had created the territory. However as mentioned earlier the outset, occupation also invited full-​scale violence by the state. The trend of the activists to stay back in the sanctuary of occupation proved fatal. The fault lines grew wider. While occupation undid many old boundaries, it drew new ones. The flexible tactics of occupation had not been designed as part of deliberate strategy, and hence these were not pursued later properly, and this led to its doom. The popular nature of the protest of the mid-​sixties and its wide base made such flexibility around College Street possible. The State lost little time to learn the spatial features of the situation and plan counter-​ insurgency strategy. The paramilitary forces were deployed for cordon and search operations. The “outsiders” and the “enemies within” locality after locality were identified with the help of informers in these sudden, unannounced combing operations, and were picked up and killed or maimed for life, or jailed. Several of the denizens of the occupation site were killed by the police, others spent years behind bars, and in the following decades gentrification changed the face of College Street significantly. New campuses of the Calcutta University were set up elsewhere in the city with consequent dispersal of student masses.

Occupy College Street, 1967–69  259 The history of occupation is varied, so is the outcome. It is important to see occupy in the specific context in which it happens, the nature of popular mobilisation, and its overall relation with the broad revolutionary movement. Occupy College Street has lesson to offer as to how specific spatial-​historical situation helps alternative ways of practising politics to emerge.

IV We have to dispense with a possible misunderstanding. The purpose is not to set up two contrasting ideal categories of political occupy and social occupy as two parallel models of political mobilisation and social mobilisation –​one that happened in the sixties and one that happened in the beginning years of the last decade. In real life the political and the social have meshed with each other on various occasions and in varying degrees. The experience of College Street, experiences of different kinds of friendships along with practices of an alternative kind of public ethics suggest a history not to be found in a standard political text book. It is a history of techniques of mobilisation, action, deliberation, and birth of a collective that did not perish with the death of the insurgency but lived on in the lives of organisations, forums, and platforms, which have been all rooted in the contentious politics of the time. They have impacted on postcolonial polity, reinforced the notion of popular politics and the significance of street politics, brought forth the idea of radical democracy, and made the right to rebel to be acknowledged as the only real historical right in democracy. Seen in this light, occupation suggests an alternative history of public ethics that will encourage us to retrieve the various moments of occupation –​chronicled only as events but not given importance as the birth place of an alternative ethics of public life. India witnessed the same experiences of an insurgent public life based on collective struggle, collective spirit, and collective sacrifice as thousands of farmers laid siege of the capital, New Delhi, for one year (2020–​21) –​occupying the roads leading to the city from three sides (Singhu, Ghazipur, and Tikri). The mobilisation was against the three farm laws passed by the central government.16 It became significant in the context of the country’s agrarian crisis.17 Newspapers, diaries, and political reports noted the determination of farmers to stick to the agenda of encampment on the outskirts of the city, yet their steadfast policy of non-​violence, morchas, and processions, creating and managing parallel supply lines from distant villages and towns hundreds of kilometres away to provide for the thousands of protesting farmers water, food, blankets, medicines and medical assistance, tents, provisions to sleep at night, press conference, meeting rooms, caring places of the children and the ill, and money to keep the occupation of the roads going for months. The movement spread to the districts of at least four neighbouring states, organised two nationwide general strikes, tractor rallies in various places, and gheraos of district administrative headquarters. Here again determination and flexibility, planning of sites of protest, assiduously building up the

260  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities overall space of protest, plurality of composing elements and forces, fluid communication, and finally breadth of mobilisation combined with firm leadership were key to making the farmers’ year –​long dharna (sit-​in, occupation) a success. Solidarity activists lived with the farmers out in the open for months, shared their meals, donated money, drew posters, conducted social media campaigns, and refused to leave the protest sites. Equally important was the way the mobilisation happened –​along community lines, and the grand congregation (mahapanchayat) of the village councils, which are often caste dominated. In this case however, Muslims and farmers belonging to non-​Jat community members participated enthusiastically in the day long and at times two day long congregations. One report said, Contrary to the popular belief that the mahapanchayats are only being attended by the dominant Jat peasants after Rakesh Tikait’s showdown with the Uttar Pradesh police, the Bhainswal mahapanchayat had representatives and participants from all the 36 communities of the region, including a significant section of Muslims, who had been in oblivion since the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. Evidently, the agitational expression of a united peasant community in western UP has all the potential to diffuse the Hindu-​Muslim polarisation that the saffron party has precipitated in this agrarian belt. 18 Another report noted “unity in an unequal rural landscape.”19 Yet another spoke of five virtues –​banal, one will say or too good to be real –​that marked the farmers’ occupation: fearlessness, assertion, resolve, morality, empathy, and righteousness (making up the acronym FARMER).20 Fabulous as it may seem, these five virtues originated from the event of occupying the roads leading to the capital of India and led the mobilisation along the path of a new kind of militant public life –​renascent, ethical, self-​renouncing, and cultivating hospitality. About 700 farmers died of cold, sickness, hunger, infirmity, illness, and being run over by speeding vehicles. The government admitted not a single death; it said that it had no information of a farmer’s death from police and other administrative sources. The farmers bore the deaths with equanimity. Sacrifice did not make them vainglorious. Tragedy and tenacity marked the collective life in the tents, gatherings, and on the barricades. Occupation gave birth to the commons. College Street, the parks of occupation, the roads leading to a city –​they all were commons. The city was a commons. These assemblies were not however without internal fault lines. Caste, class, political views and inclinations, and external linkages –​all periodically raised their heads. Occupation movements elsewhere also were marked with such fault lines.21 In the farmers movement however the leadership succeeded in managing these internal conflicts and saved the movement twice from near disaster with grit and flexibility. Leadership and the structure of occupation were important, and in all these, factors like the space to be occupied, space as

Occupy College Street, 1967–69  261 hinterland, and space of mobilisation were important. The year-​long occupation of roads by the farmers was a product of a series of exceptional interfaces of space, territory, and mobilisation. Also, we must not forget the salient factor of time, the moment, when the heavenly meeting of these three stars –​ space, territory, and mobilisation –​took place. Thus, much like the movement in the sixties of the last century, the farmers’ movement again showed how a new people can emerge out of a political practice of alternative living. As the farmers’ movement becomes a thing of the past, the sceptics may ask, will these values of new life last in popular life? Did the values of occupy College Street last? The sceptics have a point. Much of the answer depends on what we mean by lasting. On other hand, people at a certain historically specific time and in certain historically specific conditions achieved what philosophers for millennia have made futile attempts to achieve –​namely making humans noble beings. Perhaps effort at making permanent what is fleeting is the essence of the social practice of utopia. Perhaps this is the permanent task of social transformation. In any case as popular politics spreads across various countries of the world, the work of broadening the narrative of democracy and breaking down the intellectual orthodoxy of the story of democracy has never been so urgent. In all these events mentioned above and to be discussed in the next two chapters, solidarity characterised the life of the people. It did not come from classroom teaching of ethics; it came from events that were based on a particular structure of interface between space, territory, and mobilisation.22 It will be worthwhile for all those interested in the possibility of politics as practice to see: How does an event produce movements and campaigns that break existing institutional frameworks? Under what conditions an event or a movement ignites broader forms of contentious politics? Again, under what conditions does an event create new bases, “a single spark” that will create “a prairie fire?”23 And thus what explains the multiplicity of forms within a movement, its openness to new actors, and finally how all these contribute to new repertoires of politics? At least some answers to all these will not only help us to understand what happened in Bengal in 1967 or Paris in 1968 or Pakistan in 1968–​70, the possibilities they created, but will also unlock many of the stalled situations today with new alternatives. This chapter in a historical gesture has enquired into the microphysics of power when power works in the mode of solidarity. Given the significance of solidarity as an alternative principle to that of bourgeois individualism and self-​glorification, we shall continue with theme of solidarity by way of ending this book. This is a theme that will put to better understanding the way this book has sketched some of the experiences of alternatives to capitalism. The appeal of these experiences is due neither to its explanatory power nor to its ability to generate new problems and questions. These experiences such as the one of occupy College Street with its distinct repertoires demand very few explanations. Their power draws from, to borrow the title of a Pierre Bourdieu book, the “logic of practice” rather than the logic of theory.24 It is a logic that

262  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities resonates with the lived experiences of mobilisations and movements offering us in the process a form of radicalism that continuously sheds light on our self-​transformation.

Notes 1 On the origin of gherao movement in India, Sugata Dasgupta, Ronen K. Bhattacharjee, and Surendra Vikram Singh, The Great Gherao of 1969 (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1974), p. 3, n 1; Dasgupta and others also bring to light the contribution of Ram Manohar Lohia in inventing the form, “ghera dalo” (lay seize) in the wake of the anti-​famine agitation in Palamau, Bihar, in 1958, p. 4, n 2. 2 Henry Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 165. 3 Henry Lefebvre The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production (London: Alison and Busby, London, 1976), p. 36. 4 Raul Zibechi, Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012). 5 For details of these prison revolts and killings of prisoners, see Ebong Jalarka, special issue on Jail Bidroha (in English, mutiny in jails), Volume 14 (3–​4), October 2011–​March 2012. 6 On this history, see for instance, Shyamal Chakrabarty, Shat Shottorer Chatra Andolan (Kolkata: National Book Agency, 2011). Chakrabarty’s account though one-​sided and extremely critical of the radical students and youth movement yet throws light on various aspects of student movement in the fifties till the mid-​ sixties and the presence and spread of the movement in the districts. See in particular his analysis of the Presidency College movement, pp. 285–​308. 7 On workers’ occupation of factory premises and the roads outside in Gurgaon, Mithilesh Kumar and Ranabir Samaddar, “Workers’ Struggles and Autonomy: Strategic and Tactical Considerations” in Dario Azzelini and Michael Kraft (eds.), The Class Strikes Back (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2018), pp. 19–​36. 8 On farmers’ occupation see Dattatreya Narayan Dhanagare, Populism and Power: Farmers’ Movement in Western India, 1984–​2014 (London: Routledge, 2016). 9 Prafulla Chakraborty, Kanoria Jute Mill-​ e Noer Dashake Shramik AndolonerUdbhab O Kromobikash, Fourth Jayanta Dasgupta Memorial Lecture (in Bengali, Kolkata: Calcutta Research Group, 2015). 10 On the revolutionary play Kallol and the time, Naren Mondal, “Waves of Protest against Neo-​Imperialism: Kallol by Utpal Dutt”, Literary Herald, Volume 6 (1), June 2020, pp. 15–​25 –​http://​tlh​jour​nal.com/​uplo​ads/​produ​cts/​4.naren-​mon​dal-​ arti​cle.pdf (accessed on 22 September 2021). 11 “McNamara Rescued from Calcutta Mob By Helicopter Lift”, New York Times, 21 November 1968 –​www.nyti​mes.com/​1968/​11/​21/​archi​ves/​mcnam​ara-​resc​ued-​ from-​calcu​tta-​mob-​by-​hel​icop​ter-​lift.html (accessed on 3 September 2020). 12 Ranabir Samaddar, The Crisis of 1974: Railway Strike and the Rank and File (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2016); Stephen Sherlock, The Indian Railway Strike of 1974: A Study of Power and Organised Labour (New Delhi: Rupa, 2001). 13 On Marichjhanpi massacre there is now a considerable amount of literature. See for instance, Ross Mallick, “Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichjhanpi Massacre”, The Journal of Asian

Occupy College Street, 1967–69  263 Studies, Volume 58 (1), February 1999, pp. 104–​125; Anu Jalais, “Dwelling on Marichjhanpi”, Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 40 (17), 23 April 2005, pp. 1757–​1762; also “Massacre in Marichjhanpi”, Letters to the Editor (response to Asok Mitra), Economic and Political Weekly, 18 June 2005; Sukharanjan Sengupta, Marichjhapi Beyond and Within (Kolkata: Frontpage, 2010); in Bengali –​ Madhumay Pal, Marichjhanpi: Chinna Desh, Chinna Itihash (Kolkata: Gangchil, 2009); Jagadish Chandra Mandal, Naishobder Antorale: Marichjhanpi (Kolkata: Sujan Publications, 2002). 14 The Great Gherao of 1969, op. cit., particularly Chapter 4, pp. 85–​126. 15 Some of accounts on that time tell us of the spirit of dialogues among the radical activists. Besides the three volumes of Sattar Dashak (n. 2), see for instance, Aloke Mukherjee, “Shat Sattar Dashaker Sandhikkhane B.E. Colleger Chatra Andolan: Kichu Katha”, Ebong Jalarka, Volume 17 (1–​2), April 2014–​September 2014, pp. 194–​214; Kaushik Banerjee, “Katachenrai Barbar: Naxalbari, Charu Mazumder”, Parts I and II, Ebong Jalarka, Volume 16 (3–​4), October 2013–​March 2014, pp. 219–​244 and Ebong Jalarka, Volume 17 (1–​2), April 2014–​September 2014, pp. 250–​284. 16 The demands were: (a) MSP based on the comprehensive cost of production should be made a legal entitlement of all farmers for all agricultural produce so that every farmer of the country can be guaranteed the MSP announced by the government for their entire crop; (b) Withdrawal of the draft “Electricity Amendments Bill,” 2020/​2021; (c) Removal of penal provisions against farmers in the “Commission for Air Quality Management in the National Capital Region and Adjoining Areas Act,” 2021; (d) Sacking and arrest of Union Minister of State for Home Ajay Mishra, whose son is an accused in the Lakhimpur Kheri violence; (e) Withdrawal of all cases filed against thousands of farmers in Delhi, Haryana, Chandigarh, Uttar Pradesh, and other states during the protests; and (f) Providing compensation and rehabilitation support for the families of the over 700 farmers who died during the agitation. Land should be allotted at the Singhu Border to build a memorial for the deceased farmers. 17 Of the several articles and monographs on the agrarian crisis in India, we may mention two: commentaries as the farmers’ movement broke out –​Dipu Rai, “The Agrarian Crisis in Punjab”, India Today, 19 December 2020 –​www.ind​iato​day.in/​ diu/​story/​the-​agrar​ian-​cri​sis-​pun​jab-​1751​057-​2020-​12-​19 (accessed on 15 August 2021), and P. Sainath, “Agrarian Crisis is a Social Crisis”, Frontier, Volume 53 (29), 17–​23 January 2021 –​www.fro​ntie​rwee​kly.com/​artic​les/​vol-​53/​53-​29/​53-​29-​Agrar​ ian%20Cri​sis%20Is%20a%20Soc​ial%20Cri​sis.html (accessed on 15 August 2021). 18 Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta, “With Growing Trust Deficit for Modi Govt, Will Opposition Gain from the Kisan Mahapanchayat Model?”, The Wire, 11 February 2021 –​https://​thew​ire.in/​polit​ics/​kisan-​mahapa​ncha​yat-​opp​osit​ion-​part​ ies-​modi-​farm​ers-​movem​ent-​bjp-​congr​ess (accessed on 15 August 2021). 19 Ranjini Basu, “Long March to Peasant Unity in India”, The Bullet, 11 January 2021 –​ https://​socia​list​proj​ect.ca/​2021/​01/​long-​march-​to-​peas​ant-​unity-​india/​ #more (accessed on 15 August 2021). 20 Rohit Kumar, “Why You Should Visit the F.A.R.M.E.R. at Tikri Border at Least Once”, The Wire, 29 March 2021 –​https://​thew​ire.in/​rig​hts/​tikri-​bor​der-​ far​mer-​prot​est-​six-​reas​ons (accessed on 15 August 2021); also, by Rohit Kumar, “A Winter’s Night with the Farmers at Delhi’s Tikri Border”, The Wire, 20 November 2021 –​https://​thew​ire.in/​rig​hts/​farm​ers-​delhi-​tikri-​bor​der (accessed

264  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities on 25 November 2021); and “Protesting Farmers Will Always Remember the People Who Stood By Them”, The Wire, 24 November 2021 –​https://​thew​ire.in/​ rig​hts/​pro​test​ing-​farm​ers-​will-​alw​ays-​remem​ber-​the-​peo​ple-​who-​stood-​by-​them (accessed on 25 November 2021). 21 Accounts of the Wall Street Occupation also tell us of such internal fault lines. The account by Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promises of Occupy Wall Street (New York: HarperCollins, IT Books, 2012) reported of violence against women (p. 43) and noted the absence of a direction of the movement save only the programme of occupying the Zuccotti Park –​thus no single demand, no specific charter of demands endorsed by the “Occupy Wall Street General Assembly”, “un-​tethered by political discipline” (p. 109). 22 On this an instructive report by Rick Noack and Sandra Mehl, “This a Food Bank Now: Workers Seized a MacDonald’s in France”, The Washington Post, 24 June 2021 –​www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/​world/​inte​ract​ive/​2021/​mcdona​lds-​marsei​ lle-​food-​bank/​?utm_​c​ampa​ign=​wp_​po​st_​m​ost&utm​_​med​ium=​email&utm​_​sou​ rce=​new​slet​ter&wpi​src=​nl_​m​ost&carta-​url=​https%3A%2F%2Fs2.was​hing​tonp​ ost.com%2Fcar-​ln-​tr%2F3403​8a8%2F6​0d5f​ca49​d2fd​a806​0e76​f27%2F6​0b1e​38fa​ de4e​2105​851f​0fe%2F31%2F72%2F6​0d5f​ca49​d2fd​a806​0e76​f27 (accessed on 29 November 2021). 23 Mao Tse-​Tung, “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire”, 5 January 1930, Selected Works of Mao Tse-​Tung, Volume 1 (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, n.d.) –​ www.marxi​sts.org/​refere​nce/​arch​ive/​mao/​selec​ted-​works/​vol​ume-​1/​mswv​1_​ 6.htm (accessed on 23 February 2022). 24 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).

15 Crisis, Biopolitics from Below, and a New Model of Public Power

I Crisis produces alternative thoughts and practices. We are referring here now the bio-​political crisis in the wake of the Covid-​19 pandemic all over the world. In Michel Foucault’s writings, the theme of biopolitics is connected with the development of governing mode, in his words, “governmentality.” He argued, sovereignty before the modern capitalist age rested with the king whose power lay in the capacity to inflict death. It was on that power that the institution of state depended. But this changed with the advent of the bourgeois age when political power began to depend on guaranteeing life. The business of a government was in the main to deal with lives of the population. In this connection, Foucault analysed how new advances in biology informed political control in modern age and defined biopower as the deployment of “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations.” Biopolitics was a technique of biopower that operated through “the regulatory control and series of interventions deployed in order to supervise the mechanics of life: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy, and longevity.”1 It is necessary to quiz this complex formulation in the interest of developing the concept of biopolitics from below. For instance, what happens when a grave crisis overwhelms the society causing unimaginable distress, misery, sufferings, and deaths, in short causing the breakdown of economy, polity, the social order, indeed the order of life? Is it not true that in these hours of crisis governments attempt to adjudicate the number of deaths to save a number of lives? By the calculus of life and death, deaths become necessary to prolong life. As biopolitics under capitalism starts dealing with deaths in as much it was dealing with life, does this transformation reflect on the structure of public power? Reformulating the problematic in this manner is an imperative for developing the argument for an alternative vision of public power which will once again effect a transformation of this calculus, namely how society will try to reorganise itself when life will not be bound by a calculus of deaths. This chapter argues that moments of crisis, such as a war, or a famine, or DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-22

266  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities an epidemic, occasion bio-​politics from below. The question of life comes to occupy the centre stage of the politics of the lower classes. There is a great transformation in the politics of the lower orders. The emergence of biopolitics from below is thus contingent on moments of crisis. It is predicated on certain historical trajectories, when horizontal solidarity marks the political conduct of the subaltern classes. We should not be surprised at the fact that in “normal” time biopolitics from below fails to transform the nature of power. It leaves its imprints on society only when such horizontal mobilisation on issues of life combines with a new kind of vertical mobilisation of power. Crisis facilitates biopolitics from below and inaugurates the possibility of a union with a new kind of public power that will dramatically change the problematic of life and death to one of saving the society and bringing life back to the general task of saving and nourishing individual life. Species life becomes in such time the indistinguishable reflection of individual life. There is no “natural” life. Recall Marx: in order to be alive, life has to be traded, or in his words, life has to take the form of “living labour”; that is to say, life will take the form of the power of labour to be exchanged as commodity. But an epidemic, much like a famine, makes this trade-​off difficult, if not altogether impossible. Life –​biological life –​becomes a difficult phenomenon for a regime of power that is sustaining itself on the basis of calculating the ratio between lives and deaths because an epidemic much like a famine makes such a regime of calculation extremely uncertain. This is not only because, say, wage rates go down and the general condition of labour becomes precarious, but because life can be protected only by suspending economics, the condition of life under neoliberal conditions. The conundrum produces a different form of politics, which I call bio-​politics from below. The reformulation of the life question is the basis of the possibility of an alternative form of power to emerge. Biopolitics from below assumes significance in this context.

II The still continuing epidemiological crisis around Covid-​19 is in many ways exceptional, yet has to be seen in the long history of great wars, famines, and public health disasters. In the past, these times of crises had inaugurated changes in political orders, state systems, borders, cultural regimes, transformations in economy, and at times they “turned the world upside down.”2 While wars have attracted most attention in terms of impact, famines have attracted less, and we have only seldom noticed how much pestilence and massive outbreak of a disease changes the order. Yet as some say plague brought down the Roman Empire. The Black Death bacterium caused plague from the sixth to eighth century Anno Domini (AD) and killed more than 100 million people. The Spanish invasion of Mexico and other countries of Central and South America not only brought in the world new diseases, but it also changed forever the political history of the Americas. Repeated outbreaks of pestilence

Crisis, Biopolitics from Below, and a New Model of Public Power  267 in India and China in 1918–​19 in the form of the Spanish Flu caused devastation. Droughts also increased the presence of rats and mice in the New World. These animals probably transported the viruses capable of causing haemorrhagic fevers. In short, if wars have changed political orders and borders, or more correctly, if borders wars have changed the world by changing political orders, so is true of a pandemic. Given the way several countries, particularly countries representing the global liberal order, have coped with the epidemic resulting in deaths of millions worldwide (at the time of writing only four countries –​USA, Brazil, India, and the UK –​account for about a million and half deaths), there is reason to think that the old pattern of legitimacy of rule hegemony may lose a substantial part of legitimacy. The ruler cannot protect its citizens against economic catastrophe, brutal forces of globalisation, and now the force of a disease –​what legitimacy will remain? With welfare system, public health provisions, policing methods, public scientific research –​every bit of public life being subjected to privatisation, the winner will be the one who can demonstrate better capacity to reorganise the society in face a disaster like the present one, display technological depth, demonstrate new logistical thinking, gather resolve in marshalling the resources, and skill and plan to go back to a “normal” life (even though it will be a “new normal”) after the war against the virus will be over. This indeed is a moment of war that congeals in it the encounter of three crises: the much talked about ecological crisis, a crisis of global capitalist order, and the biological crisis as evident the current global pandemic of Covid-​19. The three crises have met and the combined effects will be devastating for the present order. In India, most demonstrably, the epidemiological crisis met with a financial crisis continuing since 2015, a political crisis, and what is known as the infamous “migrant crisis” in the wake of the nationwide lockdown in 2020, and together created the crisis of Covid-​19. The liberal democracies had been severely weakened due to their commitment to neoliberal agenda and the demotion of public welfare in favour of privatisation. The US and the British governments in particular were notoriously guilty of governing on the basis of provisional schemes of “affordable” death figures on the basis of highly suspect and ideologised modelling.3 It exemplified a laissez-​faire approach to heath. But perhaps it also signified a more fundamental reality –​the state’s incapacity to guarantee life. States seemed to be only concerned with, in Christopher J. Lee’s words, the “arbitration of death.”4 They had to find out the “hot spots,” isolate the spaces thus identified, and in this way continuously deploy boundary drawing strategy to arbitrate the number of deaths. The COVID situation thus looked suspiciously like a world war and post-​ war scenario. The metaphors of war frequently deployed by leaders around the world in this public health crisis remind us of one of the most physical aspects of rule, namely the physical survival of a population. As we know, long-​term residential care like public health care organisations had been reeling under the impact of neoliberal policies, reduction of public funds, and

268  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities an all-​round failure to keep up with demand for public services. Everywhere new managerial policies promoted part-​time jobs, contract work, privatisation of health care facility, and shrinking of municipal services. Gig workers became essential workers during the pandemic, enabling people to stay safely, kept the restaurant and food industry afloat, and supplied various essential provisions of life to the needy populations. Yet they were and are denied of basic work rights of other employees. The purpose from the beginning was to say that gig workers were app-​based workers and they were not employees and could claim no legal rights. There would be gig jobs, but no gig employees, and hence the captains of the industry wanted to make all jobs “gig jobs.” All these had impact on conditions of care. What happened then to 24 hour nursing services, which should be open to access based on need, not the ability to pay? How was the state to protect low middle class and poor homes that require nursing, food for the patients, and even medical care goods like injections? In long-​term care, the pressure is on relatives and volunteers, most of whom are women. The contracted women perform the precarious work of caring and nursing. They are often the racialised migrant. Whether in hospitals or in nursing homes or in individual families, the bulk of the work is carried out by providers of personalised care. There is no dedicated work-​force for an aging population. The political economy of health was never as paramount as in the battle against the virus. The ethics of care calls for a material structure. Till now, we knew how economics influenced population health, now the pandemic made us realise the ways in which population health impacted on economy. Banal statements became crucial: importance of cleanliness, adequate food, social support for the sick and elderly. Not surprisingly, these ordinary things called for greater public provision, governmental intervention, organisation of social support, and public arrangement of care. If the institutionalised world of care showed the operation of a strategy of exclusion, the affected communities and population groups of lower orders erected a parallel world of care and surveillance. While they participated in identifying and excluding the potential victims of the disease, they had to defend the community. The vigilantes of the shanty settlements, slums, and villages came out, erected gates, guarded them, prevented outsiders from entering, and thereby worked as the inner perimeter of a community –​a slum, a city ward, a village, a clan, a kin network, or the nation. Race originates from the obligation to defend a society in as much from the dynamics of conquest and subjugation. Disease brings out this reality. From communal strife to ethnic conflict, from national wars to civil wars, and from resource strife to a communicable disease leading to pestilence –​the operation of power is not simply vertical but horizontal also. In this play of power, the migrant stood on the borders of an entity. S/​he belonged to the world of labour. If s/​he was unable to sink her/​his identity as labour in the boundary-​making exercise, s/​ he was compelled to remain forever a migrant subject to the vigilantism of the community. We must not be astonished that in India in the wake of the exodus of migrant labour from Delhi in 2020 to reach distant towns in Uttar

Crisis, Biopolitics from Below, and a New Model of Public Power  269 Pradesh, migrants were apprehended and washed with insecticide to make them eligible to enter the district, or the village.5 Researches have shown body washing was a recurrent practice in quarantine centres, lazarettos, and inspection depots at ports to create sanitised borders in Europe. Epidemics “originating” from the unclean and untidy regions of the East populated particularly by the Ottomans were to be prevented from entering “safe” countries, empires, kingdoms, and zones in Europe in late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.6 Race produced as it produces now an irrevocable reality of physical segregation of a group. Disease much like conquest and war unleashes the process of segmentation and exclusion. Today too, or more than ever, race, class, caste, and gender operate as fault lines in the landscape of disease management. Interestingly, this appears as a postcolonial question, though its reference and significance are global. In urban slums, the big question this time was about the type of public health measures to be applicable there and to find out affordable alternatives in public healthcare. Lockdowns and work from home forced thousands of informal workers to lose daily wage. Families of daily-​wage earners receded to poverty. At the same time, governments worried more about the overall economy than paying the close attention to mitigating the medical aspects of the epidemic, changing public health priorities, and bringing about public health solutions. The situation globally called for immediate initiation of a new outlook on urban planning and public management of the city. The emerging crucial task was how to develop local strategies of self-​management of public health situation, neighbourhoods and enabling village self-​government bodies and other local bodies in order to allow local organisations to participate in the battle against the virus. The pandemic laid bare the extent to which individual health depends on the health of everyone in the community, while public healthcare had been eroded through decades of austerity policies, privatisation, and inadequate planning. This was most evident in inadequate supports for health care workers, lack of protective standards, decline in recruitment and retention, and the absence of resources and equipment they need. All these were results of the social fault lines operating in public healthcare, which proved weak in face of a crisis like this. The question then will be: If managing population to control the disease is the essence of the biopolitics of our time, can we think of a different form of biopolitics, which does not segregate populations along lines of caste, or race, or occupation for disease management, but thinks of the society in a different way, and addresses the task, “How can the entire society be defended?”? This of course calls for a new kind of public power, a new republican authority built on the sans culottes of the society –​the slum dwellers, neighbourhood committees, local clubs and associations, associations of health care workers, workers in waste processing and reprocessing –​sections in greatest danger and engaged in desperately defending themselves in precarious situations they are in. In this sense, it is legitimate to think of post-​ capitalism biopolitics at the core of which will be the role of the urban and

270  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities semi-​urban poor. They will support surveillance methods needed to fight the epidemic. They will sanction the toughness the society requires, because on them people have trust. They will have trust on the government because the latter will be able to provide necessary number of say ventilators, protective gear, arrange for work and food during lock down, and the government will be seen as giving priority to public health. Trust is crucial; patients trust the doctors, which is why patients follow medical prescriptions. Without trust, a society cannot rely on its rulers to save people’s lives. At the base of this trust is what we call, biopolitics from below. In short, can we imagine a society based on collective practices to help the health of populations, including large-​scale behaviour modifications, without a necessity to resort to large-​ scale expansion of forms of coercion and surveillance? What will collective “care of the self ”7 mean in such circumstances, an alternative politics of life? How will that principle of “care of the self ” admit self-​coercion? Can we pose this question at all if workers are forced to choose between life and livelihood? Will “care of the self ” signify anything if it does not mean caring for each other, a principle of solidarity?8 Admittedly, there always will be a tension between self-​organisation and public power –​particularly as more and more supply chain workers become crucial to the maintenance of life. Which is why, it will be a new kind of public power that all revolutions and great wars have produced on the combination of local autonomy and a new general authority. Think of the vaunted National Health Service (NHS) in the UK that was caught unprepared for the war against the new virus. A report of 2014 had warned that reforms of the NHS along the line of reducing staff, undermining public health provisions, and defining spare capacity as waste would make it vulnerable to pandemics. The report was ignored. Institutional and expert resources had been discarded, with no less than 10,000 key NHS staff made redundant. The Lansley Act’s conversion of NHS into a system of competing businesses (“trusts”) made the UK extra vulnerable to pandemics in two other keyways. One was that it downgraded public health and made it vulnerable to further cuts. In the last five years alone, the public health budget was cut by British Pound Sterling (GBP) 700 million in real terms. Spare capacity was redefined as “waste.” In this way, reforms led to inadequate personal protection equipment for clinicians and care workers, lack of ventilators (which was not thought fit to be included in the stockpiles list), and reduced capacity to quickly produce test kits and administer tests. As a result, in UK today there are just 6.6 intensive care beds per 100,000 people today, and a shortage of over 40,000 nurses. Now as the hour of crisis struck, NHS had to hire private hospital and nursing home beds.9 UK is an example of how liberal democracies obsessed with privatisation prepared themselves for a war. The call of war against the virus proved a hollow cry. The crisis thus reflected a greater fissure in the neoliberal era –​the fissure between economic management and social management. Jacques Donzelot commented thirty years ago,

Crisis, Biopolitics from Below, and a New Model of Public Power  271 The crisis, opened up by the alarming gap between the development of the economy and that of social expenditure, between work and ‘happiness’, thus comes to be blocked at both ends at once: by the creation with continued retraining of a new right which articulates the old, over-​rigid system of social rights on to the demands of the economy; and by the introduction through the new health policies of an economic imperative in the management of those same social rights. To the old Keynesian concept of state administration of the social to promote economic equilibrium, there thus succeeds the neo-​liberal idea of an economic administration of the social which links it up in a closed circular relationship with the economy.10 The epidemiological crisis of Covid-​19 is a looking glass through which one can see the main structure of neoliberal capitalism and the nature of politics today. We may be astonished, or perhaps should not be, that the vanguard of what we have termed as biopolitics from below was not always the trade union activists involved in day to day workers’ struggles or Left and Labour legislators busy in parliamentary debates, or the civil rights campaigners on the streets. The vanguard able to flag the new concerns that a public power would need to acquire and exercise legitimacy was figures such as nurses, other caregivers, doctors, bio-​medical workers, gig workers, police personnel on duty on the roads, municipal employees, sanitation and other waste disposal workers, and all those who kept the logistical lines running during the long COVID war. They symbolised issues of care, protection, and solidarity –​with which life would be saved. These issues of care, protection, and solidarity are already embodied in a vicarious way in the form of corporate care industry, bio-​medical establishments, and the decentralised platform economy, which has made new assemblages of personnel and functions possible. Yet as this phenomenon proved short-​lived, it became clear that the possibilities of reorganising the society based on care, protection, and solidarity could be realised only with a public power based on a combination of vertical and horizontal mobilisations. Such a form of public power will be the new Prince.

III The Prince of the coming time cannot be imagined without the gradient of biopolitics from below. Historical examples always provide glimpses of alternatives. Nearly four centuries back –​in the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century –​in a similar situation the virtue of solidarity and mutual care had emerged as the biopolitical response of the lower classes. It was a response to the critical moment when feudalism was fast becoming a thing of the past and trade and commerce were ushering in new modes of mobilising labour on an ever greater scale and a new regime of money that together made industrial capitalism

272  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities possible in one and half century. Private property in land led to enclosures, animal husbandry led to woollen garment making industry, commerce meant more circulation of goods and labouring bodies and hence transportation on a larger scale, and all these led to eviction of agrarian population that had to be drafted into large scale deployment of labour armies across the Atlantic and elsewhere in plantation industries. Capitalism was organising human labour through new modes: big commercial estates for the practice of mercantilist agriculture which included plantations and greater maritime trade; simultaneously a system of manufactures evolved out of the putting out system that required greater circulation of raw material and labour; new mode of organising capitalist firms mostly as chartered companies; and finally new ways of deploying labour based on large scale cooperation of human activity around complex and synchronised tasks, which required hierarchical and slavish discipline. Merchant and naval ships with inhuman modes of deploying sailors and summary punishment and executions became the model of disciplining labour. Rules of punishment were made unbearably strict and cruel in order to stop vagabondage, free beliefs, piracy, rebellious conduct of common soldiers, libertarian attitude of the market women and fishermen, wayward behaviour of coolies thronging into the cities, and mutiny of sailors, ship workers, and slaves. If disciplining of these rebellious men and women signalled the intensely physical character of the new model of power emerging at that time, most epitomised by the cruelty of Cromwell’s regime in England, the conduct of the rainbow assortment of the people, on the margin, the “motley crowd,” indicated biopolitics from below. It was a sort of counter-​conduct –​strategies of sheer survival and if possible mounting defeat on the ruling classes. Historians tell us of graphic accounts of the counter-​ conduct of the proletarians of that era.11 The time recalled here as an instance of biopolitics from below is significant in a different way. Marx called that early era of capitalism as one of primitive accumulation which certainly continued for next one and half century. The primitive mode of accumulation however is not a subject of a curious history of the past. It operates globally still today –​mostly in extractive areas of accumulation. The primitive mode of accumulation impacted the pre-​ industrial society in diverse ways. One was the emergence of what Michel Foucault called, “the punitive society.”12 As a consequence, diverse sections of dispossessed population made common cause on the issues of time, but issues that would remain of seminal significance for the transformation of society –​such as end to slavery, struggle against the reorganisation of society along the lines of “races,” the founding of the idea of the “commons,” new emancipative thinking even in religious practices, men and women joining each other struggles thereby marking a new frontier in the practices of solidarity, and the city as the common ground of the poor, and the laying down the timeless principles of mobilisation of the street people, etc. All these originated from a widespread desire among the subaltern classes to escape the “punitive society,” and wherever possible to found a new society. We may

Crisis, Biopolitics from Below, and a New Model of Public Power  273 call such periods the histories of the social practices of utopia. Inter-​racial unity, inter-​caste unity, and expansion of the frontiers of group solidarity in the desperate urge to save lives marked those ages –​an “absolute necessity for us to unite together and communicate each other...”13 Biological survival acquired new meaning. If many of the desires were utopian, these were necessary utopias. The emergence of the “motley crowd” in the wake of the spread of primitive accumulation (coupled with expansion of plantations, maritime trade, and mobilisation of forced labour on an increasingly bigger scale, and all these on the basis of expropriation of the peasantry) and the emergence of a punitive society were crucial factors in the growth of biopolitics from below. The history of biopolitics from below is however discontinuous –​partly because the lower classes did not engage in politics in a continuing manner, they were barred from politics; also partly because the history of biopolitics from below is a subjugated history. It is a minor history in the chronicle of politics. Thus, what happened in the early age of capitalism was forgotten. Changes in economy normalised labour deployment and mode of exploitation. Contract seemed to have replaced coercion, freedom had replaced bondage. These changes did not happen in a day. It took more than a century, and things are different now. Yet, notwithstanding the differences we can once more notice the essential biopolitical response of the lower classes –​and this time to the crisis of our time. Reports tell us say in India of the great exodus of the migrant workers in the wake of the nationwide lockdown in 2020.14 The year also witnessed in the country strikes by ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activists, who are the caregivers and service providers in villages) workers.15 Equally significantly, the lower classes organised and defended their lives in novel ways in the COVID time and expressed their political choices in elections in states such as Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Bihar. Again, as mentioned in the previous chapter, the farmers’ struggle in India in the same year exemplified a different kind of behaviour unfamiliar to parliamentary democracy. Farmers died in hundreds (more than 700 deaths), yet the mobilisation did not relent. An economic demand became a question of life though a specific persistent style of programme, wide support base in society, self-​organisation to sustaining the struggle such as arranging money, provisions of food and shelter for the farmers sitting in on the roads in heat and cold through a long year, fending off attacks by paid miscreants, accommodating youthful, energetic volunteers in numbers, and maintaining supply chains of provisions from distant villages to the occupy places around the metropolis of Delhi.16 A model of peaceful, non-​violent protest uniting its members behind the fulfilment of a common goal provided a different kind of conduct. For instance, convened by the mahapanchayat (Grand Assembly) of farmers close to a million farmers assembled in Muzaffarnagar, UP, in September 2021. This was an area which had witnessed eight years ago bloody communal violence within the farming community between Hindu Jats and Muslims leading to deep divisions and hatred. Right wing politics had gained

274  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities through these divisions. Yet now hundreds of thousands of farmers, Hindus and Muslims, assembled in the same area and together cheered with the traditional Hindu and Muslim religious slogans of “Har Har Mahadev” (glory to Mahadev, Lord Shiva) and “Allah hu Akbar” (God is great) given from the same platform. The regime tried to orient the behaviour of the masses along lines of religious loyalty. The farmers’ behaviour was an instance of counter conduct. Biopolitics from below not only revolves around the question of life, but by turning issues of existence as those of life, biopolitics from below becomes a great demonstration of what can be called “counter conduct.” In the same year as the pandemic appeared in India, at the ground level of fighting the disease, bustee dwellers (workers living in slums and shanty settlements) organised their collective life overnight in new ways. Gates were erected to regulate human mobility patterned on the duty hours of the maid workers, predominantly women, drivers, small shopkeepers, and others who became the “frontline” workers in the war against Covid-​19. Likewise, local panchayats (local self-​governing bodies) enabled the villagers to regroup their lives.17 ASHA workers enabled the children to survive. Nurses, ayahs, local municipal employees, frontline workers of political parties, trade unions and peasant associations, workers of gig economy, food vendors, paramedical workers including the lab technicians, doctors, traffic constables, workers on ports and docks, drivers in emergency services (railways, shipping, civil supply transportations, etc.) that kept the logistics of social and economic life running –​all reorganised their individual and collective lives –​often autonomously, with rules framed by collective bodies working at the grassroots. Even in the daily routine of cleaning and sanitisation of the common facilities in the bustees, workers reorganised the tasks with voluntary contributions and physical participation.18 Social relations were being renegotiated in these emerging power structures from below. While male dons of the slums appeared as protectors of these workers’ localities, women formed informal collectives to negotiate their time tables of work and other duties.19 Yet, this would have been an occurrence common to other times of stress –​ a strike, a picket, or a flooded bustee in the monsoon, or a fire that has broken out in a hamlet of a poor locality. Other levels of political life also experienced similar bursts of autonomous activism and institution making. Municipal governments, panchayat bodies, local clubs, teachers’ committees, groups of cine-​artistes, singers, performers, and students and youth came forward in waves of solidarity (whose significance we discussed in the last chapter) to defend the society in a dark time. Migrant workers’ visibility on the streets and highways was complemented by that of the solidarity associations that had overnight emerged in various parts of the country.20 It was indeed a world turned upside down. Readers will notice that crucial in this scenario was how the everyday was transformed into an element of new thinking. Recall the theorist of everyday life Henry Lefebvre who emphasised the power and potentiality of everyday life amidst its squalor, privation, humiliation, and said, “There is a power concealed in everyday life’s apparent banality, a depth

Crisis, Biopolitics from Below, and a New Model of Public Power  275 beneath its triviality, something extraordinary in its very ordinariness.”21 Everyday life is therefore starting point of the extraordinary; thus crisis creates changes within this everyday life –​the given space-​time of social reproduction where social relations are being constantly reproduced. People make these changes possible “as they can no longer lead their everyday lives.”22 The crisis of Covid-​19 showed the power of the everyday life that produced extraordinary political responses from the lower classes in various parts of the world.23 It produced what Fahmi Panimbang, the Indonesian labour researcher has called, a “new practice of collectivity.”24 It is admittedly an intriguing phenomenon. Nonetheless we can see with open eyes how these responses moved governments to undertake massive reforms, called out the deceits and failures of states to protect lives, encouraged other states to take bold steps to protect life –​and all these indicate the possibilities of the emergence of a new model of public power. Overnight, the old doctrinal feud between liberty and authority or the liberal representative system of democracy and more direct system of managing political life and indeed protecting life. The resort to everyday knowledge is crucial to what we may call the role of common sense in transformative acts. It not only means “people in common” but also “sense growing out of common knowledge.” Antonio Gramsci said, common sense works against metaphysics, it has “a certain measure of ‘experimentalism’ and direct observation of reality, though empirical and limited” (quotation marks by Gramsci).25 It is important to locate subaltern consciousness in common sense, which during the Covid-​19 crisis exhibited its biological character. The body was always there, always objectified, and in this way always reified. It was therefore at the centre of metaphysics, which posited mind or soul or self or consciousness as opposed to the body. Thus to the intellectual classes, Covid-​19 crisis typically meant lockdown, quarantine, loss of freedom, and after the lockdown a sense of freedom. Little wonder then that in almost all major European cities –​Paris to Berlin to Rome –​assemblies of the prosperous shouted in defence of freedom when faced with the prospect of another lockdown or a renewed vaccination drive. On the other hand, the lower classes were worried about job losses, how to send money back at home in remote villages, and exhibited “common sense” in defending the slums, peasant settlements, their families, or their jobs. Kwame Anthony Appiah while discussing the true cost of COVID in the global south speaks of “two pandemics.”26 The biological then is not always the same. The geography of the biological is a salient fact. We can put the problematic in a different way, possibly a simpler way: In the Covid-​19 crisis the form of economy was found irreconcilable with life.27 Life had to take an autonomous path –​dramatically, even though momentarily. Life for the lower classes included the element of common sense among others. In this context, the deployment of the term “biopolitics” in the phrase “biopolitics from below” is strategic. In times of crisis, it is poised against the biopower of capital which draws on new advances in life managing sciences and control technologies to impose “regulatory control and series of

276  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities interventions... in order to supervise the mechanics of life: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy, and longevity.” Biopower guarantees relations of domination and effects of hegemony.28 Biopolitics from below demonstrates a practice of collective action that transcends the given sociological rules of solidarity. In that sense, it has escaped sociology; it enters the domain of politics.

IV But a word of caution: Biopolitics from below is not an innocent phenomenon or notion. It is marked with trajectories of power –​existing and potential. Hence we cannot assume that biopolitics from below does not anticipate any power structure, and that it is a phenomenon existing in an amorphous manner, much along the line of what the philosophers meant by the word “rhizome,” a conceptual figure used in contrast to centred and rooted trees to connect us with the historical experiences of horizontal mobilisations along unlimited lines rather than nodal points. Yet as I have tried to indicate, the situation described above tells us something more than a Deleuzean scenario. The philosophers wrote, Principle of multiplicity: it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, “multiplicity,” that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world. Multiplicities are rhizomatic… There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in the object “return” in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows).29 On the other hand, the Covid-​19 scenario told us of a different vision of the public that expressed the desire for a power that would protect the society. It would not be something that would simply represent a power organised at the top but one that would combine the horizontal and vertical mobilisations of power. The multiplicity of responses below spoke of a singular desire to reorganise life. Multiplicity was the concrete singular that had two dimensions: the desire for a power that would protect the people and would care for them; and the determination to self-​organise and lend institutional form to that determination. “The prince” of our time will be the figure of both these dimensions. Philosophers of alternative paths to capitalism have long dreamt of a possible configuration of power that will be the source of care and protection of the people, at the same time will not look at the people as objects of care. Is that possible? The variegated histories of “dual power” give us the glimpses of such possibility. The Covid-​19 crisis again showed us visions of such possibility.

Crisis, Biopolitics from Below, and a New Model of Public Power  277 These massive efforts at reorganising life such as the ones recounted here often fail when they do not contribute towards reorganising the society. This is where the issue of a vertical mobilisation of power becomes crucial in a discussion on biopolitics from below, which is essentially a horizontal mobilisation of power. National governments became municipal governments –​that is they started attending to minute administrative tasks of care and protection at the ground level, ensuring that the poor do not go hungry during the COVID induced lockdown, and overnight expanded the public infrastructure of health, food distribution, and attempted to reach money to the poor. They ignored the wisdom of the fiscal conservatives. They also found in some cases innovative ways of reorganising the economy by encouraging fisheries, greater agricultural production, and re-​skilling people for other jobs. The world was bad, but not as bad as the big press was making out by crying out in shrill voice. People were fighting back. They were reorganising life as a mode of solidarity. Wherever national governments realised the momentous task of care and protection, the nature of an emerging public power appeared clearer through the haze and confusion of immediacy and the uncertain mosaic of responses to a cataclysmic event of global magnitude.30 We must not underestimate the historical role of the crisis, the rupture, and the consequent opening up of the possibility of a new form of power to emerge. The dire and desperate circumstances in the wake of the epidemiological crisis revealed the possibilities latent within this crisis. The sudden collapse of the daily economic life created breakdown of various regimes of access to food by different sections of populations, the overnight abrupt disappearance of employment for so many, and precipitated the disintegration of the public provision of universal healthcare –​a scenario where just the dearth of oxygen supply ended many lives. The crisis of the mode of production met the crisis of the form of life. The Covid-​19 crisis exacerbated class inequalities in a “living way” in the sense that the crisis compelled many lives to be put at risk simply so that they could continue as life. The moment of crisis proved to be the moment of the birth of biopolitics from below. It is important to notice briefly the features of such a new form of public power in the neoliberal time, when public power has been privatised. The public power appears as the protector of the society, the lower classes in particular. It would imply a dialogic approach between the focused form of public power and the biopolitical constituents below. It would also mean dialogic relation between these constituents, which marks the difference with the neoliberal organisation of social protection and reproduction along the chains of supply lines. Hence, in a scenario dominated by biopolitics from below, migrant labour, care workers, population groups belonging to the lower orders of the society, and workers in the platform economy and maintaining the supply chains will be as crucial as the scientific personnel of the society. Freedom will not be understood as the contra-​figure of authority. It will be an essential gradient of a form of power that will symbolise protection,

278  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities care, and enriched reproduction of life. Protection will not mean a special administrative regime to create borders around marked groups, but a dialogic strategy for the entire society that can address the stratified landscape, which in the first place had allowed the humanitarian borders to emerge. Not humanitarianism but responsibility to society will make such a protection strategy possible. The newness of such a form of power comes from a contradictory situation. The neoliberal regime of accumulation with its scattered and fragmented disposition of labour makes a logistical coordination of valorisation and accumulation of capital possible. Such coordination takes place not only through a framework of networking enterprises of transport and communication, but also through a reorganisation of production and the social relations based on particular space and time. Yet, the situation enables local subjectivities and a general power to coordinate social vitality. Only such a general power can realise the potentiality of biopolitics from below, which originates from local dispositions of labouring bodies and scattered locations of labour in neoliberal capitalism. This may appear like a utopia. But like other utopias this too has scattered historical precedents to it, making “another politics of life possible.”31 We may call it a social practice of utopia, a necessary utopia that can transform the world.

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976), trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 13, and pp. 139–​140; Foucault theorised the notion of power over life in the context of the rise of capitalism. 2 A phrase introduced in the Bible (Acts 17) and made famous in radical literature by Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). 3 An interesting aspect of such model building exercises is how they related to India. See, Gautam I. Menon, “Covid-​19 Pandemic: Should You Believe What the Models Say about India?”, The Wire, 4 April 2020 –​https://​scie​nce.thew​ire.in/​the-​scien​ces/​ covid-​19-​pande​mic-​inf​ecti​ous-​dise​ase-​trans​miss​ion-​sir-​seir-​icmr-​india​sim-​agent-​ based-​modell​ing/​ (accessed on 4 April 2020). 4 Christopher J. Lee, “The Necropolitics of Covid-​19”, The Citizen, 2 April 2020 –​ www.the​citi​zen.in/​index.php/​en/​New​sDet​ail/​index/​6/​18541/​The-​Necrop​olit​ics-​of-​ COVI​D19 (accessed on 3 April 2020). 5 “Coronavirus: Anger as Migrants Sprayed with Disinfectant in India”, BBC News, 31 March 2020 –​www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​asia-​india-​52093​220 (accessed on 12 September 2020). 6 Sevasti Trubeta, Christian Promitzer, and Paul Weindling (eds.), Medicalising Borders: Selection, Containment and Quarantine since 1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021). 7 The obvious reference is to Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self (1984; New York: Vintage, 1986).

Crisis, Biopolitics from Below, and a New Model of Public Power  279 8 It is important to note that Foucault’s emphasis on the “care of the self ” was in terms of the individual subject. Foucault’s formulation of “care of the self ” was a turn towards a consideration of the construction of the subject. Biopolitics from below bypasses the problematic of the subject and posits care and care of the self on a new ground. 9 On the details of the scandal of the NHS, Colin Leys and Stewart Player, The Plot against the NHS (London: Merlin Press, 2011); see also, Colin Leys, “How Market Reforms Made the NHS Vulnerable to Pandemics”, The Bullet, 25 March 2020 –​ https://​socia​list​proj​ect.ca/​2020/​03/​how-​mar​ket-​refo​rms-​made-​the-​nhs-​vul​ nera​ble-​to-​pandem​ics/​#more (accessed on 30 March 2020). 10 Jacques Donzelot, “Pleasure in Work” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Chapter 13 (pp. 251–​280), p. 278. 11 For instance, Henry N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961); Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972); Rosario Villari, The Revolt of Naples, trans. James Newell (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1993); Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–​1663 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-​ Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000). 12 Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society, Lectures at the College De France, 1972–​ 1973, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2013). 13 The Many-​Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, op.cit., p. 339. 14 On the Indian “migrant crisis” of 2020, see, Ranabir Samaddar, A Pandemic and the Politics of Life (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2021). 15 See for instance the report, “Anganwadi Workers Protest Demanding Wage Hike, Better Working Conditions”, Indian Express, 25 November 2021; the report said, “Over thousand workers stage protest from noon, police foil bid to gherao Haryana CM’s house” –​https://​indian​expr​ess.com/​arti​cle/​cit​ies/​panchk​ ula/​anganw​adi-​work​ers-​prot​est-​demand​ing-​wage-​hike-​bet​ter-​work​ing-​con​diti​ ons-​7640​166/​ (accessed on 30 November 2021); During the pandemic, the ASHA workers were in several ways effective in rural and semi-​rural areas. They reached food, carried the sick to the primary health care centres, provided information to the villagers on benefits announced by the government, etc. Cities, on the whole, failed in setting up a decentralised health monitoring infrastructure. Yet ASHA and other frontline workers giving care to the people remained ill paid and were ignored by the State. 16 Various newspaper reports testified to the phenomenon of self-​ organisation in the farmers’ movement. See for instance the report by Kamaldeep Singh Brar, “Villages, Gurdwaras (Sikh shrines) our Source of Funding: Tikait”, Indian Express, 27 September 2021 –​https://​indian​expr​ess.com/​arti​cle/​cit​ies/​ amrit​sar/​villa​ges-​gurdwa​ras-​sou​rce-​of-​fund​ing-​tik​ait-​7644​844/​ (accessed on 28 September 2021). 17 When viewed through the experiences of those on the front lines, the coronavirus response was a series of failures: failure to apply the precautionary principle,

280  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities which is fundamental to public health; failure to provide proper protections for workers; failure to implement recommendations to improve worker’s health and safety; and failure to place human health before the economy. Trained nurses were rarely given adequate opportunity to participate in the process of decision-​making regarding intensive care, especially in times of crisis. In both clinical and public health domains, their role and expertise were not considered important. Thus, there is no provision of a compulsory Public Provided Fund (PPF) for the survival of care workers in the informal sector (mainly untrained nurses and ayahs) in hard times. Although the National Food Security Ordinance (which later became an Act, NFSA), 2013, emphasised Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) through ration shops/​Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) and various welfare schemes, the union government vacillated with continuing food subsidies and providing direct cash transfers (DCT) to the poorer sections of society who found themselves without jobs in the time of the long lockdown. 18 See one of the many reports on COVID management in the Dharavi bustee, the largest slum in Asia: www.ind​iato​day.in/​magaz​ine/​up-​front/​story/​20210​524-​mum​ bai-​covid-​model-​the-​city-​sets-​an-​exam​ple-​on-​how-​to-​fight-​the-​virus-​effe​ctiv​ely-​ 1802​466-​2021-​05-​14 (accessed on 28 November 2021). 19 For details of some of the responses to Covid-​19 at the grassroots level, see A Pandemic and the Politics of Life, op.cit. 20 On a map of solidarity with migrant workers on march during the lockdown in India in 2020, Migrant Workers’ Resistance Map –​ www.mwsn.in/​resist​ance​map/​ (accessed on 28 November 2021). 21 Henry Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 1971), p. 35. 22 Ibid., p. 32. 23 Nicholas De Genova, “Life versus Capital: The Covid-​19 Pandemic and the Politics of Life”, Cultural Dynamics, Volume 33 (3), 2021, pp. 238–​245. 24 Fahmi Panimbang, “Algorithmic Labour Process and Resistance against it in the Platform Economy in Indonesia”, Journal IndoProgress, Special issue on Pandemic in Neoliberal Asia, Volume 1 (1), 2021, pp. 9–​33, (p. 25). 25 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1996), p. 348. 26 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “A Tale of Two Pandemics: The Two Cost of COVID in the Global South”, The Guardian, 23 November 2021 –​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​ world/​2021/​nov/​23/​a-​tale-​of-​two-​pandem​ics-​the-​true-​cost-​of-​covid-​in-​the-​glo​bal-​ south (accessed on 28 November 2021). 27 Nicholas De Genova, “Life versus Capital: The Covid-​19 Pandemic and the Politics of Life”, Cultural Dynamics, Volume 33 (3), 2021, pp. 238–​245. 28 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, p. 139. 29 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 6. 30 One analyst noted the capacity of a nation that wanted to reorganise its defences to protect its people. Ruminating on the possibility of the nation acting in the post-​corona age, Ayşe Buğra observed, Where policy intervention by nation-​state is not limited by the logic of the global market economy, it is possible to think of welfare provision in relation

Crisis, Biopolitics from Below, and a New Model of Public Power  281 to industrial and agricultural policy choices, and the terms of employment in industry and agriculture. Without the now overwhelming fear of capital flight and the objective of attracting foreign capital, employment policy would not be limited by concerns about the place of the national economy in ‘global commodity chains’, markets for agricultural production could cease to be subservient to organisation by agribusiness, peasant agriculture would not be perceived solely as an archaic form bound to disappear, and urban development could be approached in a way that problematises the current nightmarish patterns of urbanisation. At the same time, priorities in government spending could be set by acknowledging that the trends towards privatisation in health, education, or social care provision might not be compatible with the notion of social rights. In such a setting, social policy would form an integral part of an economy which, in Polanyean terms, is re-​embedded in society. (Ayse Buğra, Refet Gürkaynak, Caglar Keyder, Ravi Anand Palat and Sevket Pamuk, “New Perspectives on Turkey Roundtable on the Covid-​19 Pandemic: Prospects for the International Political Economic Order in the Post-​Pandemic World”, September 20, 2020, p. 14 –​www. cambri​dge.org/​core/​journ​als/​new-​persp​ecti​ves-​on-​tur​key/​arti​cle/​ %20new-​persp​ecti​ves-​on-​tur​key-​rou​ndta​ble-​on-​the-​covi​d19-​pandem​ icpr​ospe​cts-​for-​the-​intern​atio​nal-​politi​cal-​econo​mic-​order-​in-​thep​ostp​ ande​mic-​world/​3B800​3A8F​0A07​1F2E​A412​6A61​EC37​F6A (accessed on October 31, 2021)) 31 Didier Fassin, “Another Politics of Life is Possible”, Theory, Culture & Society, Volume 26 (5), 2009, pp. 44–​ 60; also, Panagiotis Sotiris, “Thinking Beyond the Lockdown: On the Possibility of a Democratic Biopolitics”, Historical Materialism, Volume 23 (3), 2020, pp. 3–​38.

16 Layers of Solidarity

I Following the emergence of a new variant of the Covid-​19 strain, and massive gatherings such as the Kumbh Mela in Uttarakhand and election campaigns and administrative-​security mobilisations in poll-​bound states of Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, and West Bengal (March–​April 2021), India once again found herself in a Covid-​19 crisis. This time the pandemic hit harder. There was a sharp rise in Covid-​19 cases all over the country from March 2021. India was engulfed in a severe crisis of shortage of hospital beds, plasma donations, and oxygen cylinders. Government institutions of health care and medical assistance were in a near collapse stage in a matter of two weeks. On 1 March, number of active cases in the country was 168,627; on 29 April, it rose to 3,084,814. The country’s public and private health infrastructure was pushed over the brink under the unrelenting spread of the virus. In the previous year, the shock situation had produced the “migrant crisis.” This time the situation was reflected in the “oxygen crisis” and the “bed crisis.” There were incidents of patients dying within hours of hospitals running out of oxygen supply, or dying while waiting for beds outside the hospitals, in ambulances and cars rushing from one hospital to another where relatives pleaded desperately for admission of their near and dear ones. And as during the migrant crisis in the previous year, this time too, the shock situation produced levels of solidarity not seen in usual time. The surge of solidarity in 2020 had been chronicled by journalists, diarists, commentators, news portals, and photographers. Solidarity activists had emerged from all walks of life. They had mobilised and provided food, money, shelter, medical treatment, and passage assistance to migrant workers returning home. They had also provided strength to the migrant workers who were defying the unnecessary restrictions imposed on them by administrations of the states; migrants were passing through to return home.1 In 2021 too, through the months of April–​June the shock surge of solidarity was evident. Young people, political activists, philanthropists, militant journalists, citizen reporters, humanitarian activists, officials at lower levels, doctors, nurses, care workers, noble hearted shopkeepers and drivers, municipal employees, artists, performers, and others DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-23

Layers of Solidarity  283 started rallying once again. Many activists took to social media platforms to send and relay urgent messages requests in attempts to crowd-​source emergency requirements (including critical medical supplies) for the needy ones –​ often beyond the boundaries of families and friends. As had happened last year, government helplines were found often unresponsive, and once again the government held out assurances to the courts and the media that it was in control of the situation and supplies of oxygen and medicines were in order. In this situation, many compiled lists of resources in the form of help lines, telephone numbers of local volunteers, to inform the needy of the availability of hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, and plasma donations in various areas. One report estimated the number of tweets in March and April 2021 as 81.63 million –​asking for help or responding with a relevant link, list, or contact over the same time frame. Out of the said 81 million tweets, 36.9 million were related to sourcing or refilling oxygen cylinders, 14.1 million were related to the broad-​ spectrum antiviral medication Remdesivir, followed by 13.9 million tweets relating to getting hospital beds. Social and political activists were most tagged, or they were sending messages to countless others to mobilise help. Messages to organise were passed on from various parts of the affected regions and sub-​regions, though we must remember that many towns and villages with substantial caseloads remained outside the digital network. As in the previous year, with the lockdown condition of Delhi, UP, parts of Gujarat, Maharashtra, and other states, users of social media were able to communicate with the victims; the social network of a population reeling under the pandemic rebuilt itself around the principle of solidarity. According to this report, of the 519,000 individual accounts actively engaged with SOS and emergency tweets from other Indian users to help provide relevant information or medical aid, over three-​quarters of these accounts (356,000) belonged to ordinary citizens lacking official Twitter verification or large followings on the platform. The engagement of ordinary Indian citizens far outweighed that of prominent social media influencers as well as other public figures in media and government.2 This virtual activity of solidarity was immediately interpreted by the State as a threat to the legitimacy of a centralised order. In one case, for instance, the UP police filed criminal case against a young person who tweeted to seek oxygen support for the grandfather. In other cases, local police and state government officials sought to intimidate users posting SOS tweets on the platform. The Twitter platform removed hundreds of tweets that demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Modi for mismanaging the Corona crisis and landing the country in a hell like situation. The situation was so absurd that the Supreme Court had to intervene and say, “We don’t want any clampdown of information. We will treat it as a contempt of court if such actions are taken.”3 On the other hand, these thousands of

284  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities messages relayed in almost all cases several times showed in bare outlines the power of support and solidarity when it turned into a material practice of ordinary individuals of communication and organisation in moments of collective adversity. Collective adversity is an important factor in the chronicle of solidarity. Instances of virtual mobilisation transforming into material actions to mobilise support to the needy were frequent in the media.4 In many other cases, grassroots workers of rival political parties belonging to two religious communities came forward to help each other –​even to the extent of conducting the last rites of a person belonging to a “rival” religious community deceased due to COVID.5 And, as one Indian newspaper reported, The politics over oxygen supply might have raged fiercely but at an operational level, states rallied for one another as the country faced its biggest crisis of medical oxygen. Maharashtra sent oxygen tankers to Goa, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu to meet emergency requirements; Karnataka, in turn, spared tankers for Maharashtra and Telangana while Kerala shared oxygen with Tamil Nadu even when it was not getting its full share.6 Solidarity with the victims of the pandemic was felt across boundaries of nationalism and hatred. A wave of empathy swept across Pakistan.7 Collective adversity is a shock situation. Once again let us go back to the time of lockdown last year: collective adversity that the migrant workers faced produced what has been called “shock mobility” not only in India, but the world over (for instance, in Italy, UK, Philippines). These migrant movements may have been for two three months, but the duration of their impact was long –​on themselves, the populations in general, on their homes, in short, the impact was of a general and pervasive nature. This is crucial in understanding the emergence of solidarity with the migrant workers, which was witnessed among several countries in India last year. Solidarity was the moment of link between the victims –​migrants and the society. The link-​moment symbolised the dramatic changes unfolding before the society. In moments of crisis, popular mechanism of solidarity activates. It is not that there is an inherent god given mechanism. However, such practices of solidarity borrow from popular memory to respond to pressure in ways they are already familiar with, for instance, the historical tradition of mutual aid, empathy, protection, and collective ways coping with adversities come to life. In some sense, these are routine coping strategies of a society. However, in each crisis, at least in a grave crisis, we see the emergence of these strategies of solidarity at expanded scale. Thus, as never before, India witnessed the emergence of “frontline workers” –​doctors, nurses, paramedical staff, ayahs, ASHA workers, waste disposal workers, community workers of various types, and now increasingly intrepid reporters –​who became the heroes and heroines in the landscape of solidarity. The saga of solidarity became on

Layers of Solidarity  285 one hand a distorted reflection of the everyday functioning of the order and limitations of its capacity; on the other hand, it proved to be a capacity which was in excess of the ruling order, always on the frontier, always telling us what may be possible, but was unrealisable in banal time. Experiences of such a surge of solidarity were a kind of renaissance of a social spirit seen in the colonial time when cooperatives, mutual aid associations, literacy and medical aid movements, flood relief campaigns marked the nationalist spirit. An overwhelming sense encouraged these efforts, namely, that life of the people under colonial rule was in grave danger. Solidarity is thus a life question, but one of life at its limit.8 Solidarity reflects the biopolitical nature of a collective at a time of crisis. Solidarity is life in crisis. Yet what is paradoxical is that it is through acts of solidarity that a collective comes into being. There is no pre-​given collective, and we leave out here the anthropological explanations of a collective, even though those explanations too tell us of practices of solidarity contributing to the making of a collective. At least politically speaking, there is no collective without solidarity, at the same time this collective must inhere differences without which an act of solidarity cannot take shape. One cannot have solidarity with oneself, which also means that a collective would have differences within, yet in the time of a crisis –​to remember again, crisis of a life as a collective –​that acts of solidarity emerge. One aspect of the acts of solidarity like the ones mentioned earlier is the nature of social leadership, which activates the ethical as well as institutional mechanisms of solidarity. Thus, a political activist of a locality, a village headman, or a restless woman appreciated and admired by the society, a school teacher, a slum leader, a club secretary –​they are all instances of social leadership. They produce solidarity from below. They also demonstrate the ethical dimensions of solidarity. Thus, they may aid someone in distress, insist on providing hospitality to a person fleeing persecution, take a sick individual to a hospital, raise resources to save the needy in crisis, recognise dignity of the vulnerable, or carry a dead body left somewhere in a desolate place by villagers in fear of the virus to do the last rites. There is something common to politics and an ethical act like this, namely the element of risk marking the acts of solidarity. We can think in the same breath of Florence Nightingale and the members of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, who perished in battles in Spain (15,000 out of about 50,000 members). Acceptance of risk is the first condition of hospitality and solidarity. Often, the advent of an act of hospitality is always in the dramatic context of solidarity. By providing hospitality we declare solidarity. It is with the victims of oppression, discrimination, misfortune, and crises and is a unique way to establish friendship. But we must remember that friendships do not do away with hierarchies. An ethical act of hospitality by itself does not create a chain of equal and equivalent relationship. Likewise, solidarity with the victim does not assume non-​discrimination. Reciprocity may be a symbol of solidarity. But reciprocity is conditional. Each reciprocal act reproduces life on the

286  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities existing template of life. Ethical act of solidarity does not end discrimination. The ethical virtue in this way is contradictory from within. The transformation of the social and ethical acts of solidarity into a political will to unite thus depends on an understanding of the paradoxical nature of solidarity. Contingency, difference, mutual aid and support, ethical imperative, and the sense of a common goal –​these attributes of solidarity do not sit coexist in a seamless manner. Solidarity is therefore, and not surprisingly, often marked with tension.

II The contingent nature of solidarity is evident in for instance what is known as “solidarity economy.” Solidarity economy is not conceptualised based on economics alone; there is always an attending and an equally crucial dimension, namely a social aspect. Hence, it is known as social and solidarity economy. Thus, purely financial profit is replaced by what is known as “social profitability,” which would mean beyond calculation participatory nature of governance in decision-​making processes. Some suggest that solidarity economy symbolises transformative economic qualities, practices, and foundations existing in the world in various forms. Thus, specialised cooperatives, reasonable exchange practices resembling gifts, or dynamic associations are considered as economic organisations, which seek to improve the life of a region or community based on solidarity often through local businesses and not for profit operations. The idea of solidarity economy began as with many other developments in life through a philanthropic-​altruistic activity that sprang from a desire among some sections of the propertied classes to do some good for the lower orders of the society. One such development was the idea of the savings bank, based on the “universal right to save.” It developed along with other efforts to develop a participatory pension scheme and a statutory health insurance scheme. The savings bank movement began in Europe in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. It developed in India in the nationalist time in India with efforts to attract small deposits and enabling access to the revenue by the small depositors. Savings banks were mutual banks also. Small scale rural landholders became the basis of solidarity economy in several countries. The Board of Directors of such savings bank felt a commitment to providing funds to the agricultural sector where credit was much in need. Yet the contradictions of economy took no time to manifest. An attractive investment opportunity for better off customers had to be created at the same time. In years, capital tended to be directed towards the bourgeoisie and the middle classes rather than the lower strata of society. Insolvencies always haunted the savings banks which could not escape the turbulence in the market.9 Ironically, small savings helped war efforts of governments perhaps more than they helped the poorer sections of the society. As imperatives to cope with health disasters, illness and old age, and other calamities grew, savings

Layers of Solidarity  287 proved to be of decreasing utility to the lower classes as they looked to the State for the essential welfare services. The revenue from their savings was low and inflation was almost always hitting harder. Savings banks are nowadays encouraged to go for “social innovations,” which means more participation in market activities and less importance to encouragement to save. The idea of saving has been taken over by the idea of “credit and debt” as the route to prosperity of the society. The original idea of the savings bank has transformed to “social banking” to facilitate the grant of micro-​credits to persons seeking to self-​employment, financing of social enterprises, and fostering partnerships with philanthropic donation organisations. Stock exchange fevers, new horizons in the capital markets, lure of credit and debt games, and the neo-​liberal social financing programmes –​all these have grievously affected the savings bank movement that originated from an idea of solidarity with the small farmers and lower sections of the middle classes. Indeed, the early language of the campaign of these banks was one of “solidarity.”10 In India, savings bank movement took the form of initiatives to set up cooperative banks in various parts of the country. These initiatives were linked to the rising nationalist consciousness and were held as part of the nation’s effort to be self-​reliant. Rural cooperative banks were to be of help to villagers in distress, though in many cases these banks soon went under the control of rural gentry, subsequently the rural political elite. The main problem lay with the nature of these initiatives, which were often philanthropic in nature. A combination of philanthropy and solidarity in place of a combination of self-​organisation, mutuality, and collective resilience guided such initiatives. Classic was the case of poet Tagore’s initiative to donate his Nobel Prize money to Patisar Krishi Bank in 1914. The aim was to help the peasants in distress, advance loans at low interest (7 per cent per annum –​ lower than the then commercial rate), though after 1921 the interest of the proceeds went to Visva Bharati, the educational institution he had set up.11 Tagore however spoke loudly on the need to develop cooperative movement towards self-​reliance and self-​confidence.12 Followers of Gandhi and leaders and activists of other strands of Indian freedom movement attempted to set up rural cooperative banks. Those that survived were finally helped by the government. The government was a much later entrant in the cooperative arena. In other countries, the history of solidarity economy took different forms. Ideas of solidarity economy became popular during military dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. These efforts broadened the idea of solidarity economy to indicate that production, distribution, and consumption activities must contribute to the democratisation of the economy via citizen engagement at the local and global level, and that enterprises are to be created to serve the members of the community instead of simply striving for financial profit. People and work must be prioritised over capital in the distribution of revenue and surplus. In this way, principles of equity, environmental sustainability and cooperation, territorial responsibility of the economic organisations, balance between multiple objectives, mutualism, social

288  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities wellbeing, and pluralism will develop economic processes that will be intimately linked to local realities, preservation of the environment, and cooperation. The final institutional stamp of practicality and ethicality on solidarity economy was given by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the United Nations that formed an Inter-​Agency Task Force on the Social and Solidarity Economy (UNTFSSE) in order to raise the importance of solidarity economy in policy circles towards sustainable development.13 However, the tradition of solidarity economy has other sources: the idea perhaps began with the campaign to develop solidarity among workers’ collectives in urban and rural areas. The logbook of the principles of solidarity economy records few cardinal ones, which we may summarise as follows: Solidarity economy is visualised as a global post-​capitalist order, which will put the people (both as producers and consumers) and environment at its centre in place of profit maximisation. It is a broad range of economic practices marked by values of participatory democracy, cooperation, reciprocity, mutual aid, equity, sustainability, and pluralism. While in some cases the economic practices marked by these values are already in existence, in some others, these practices are introduced as alternatives in every sector of the economy: production, distribution and exchange, consumption, finance and the state. These would imply increase of self-​provisioning and community production, moving money to new economic institutions, prioritising housing for use in place of speculation, and finally connecting with others in the emerging solidarity economy. Advocates of solidarity economy argue that these are not mere ethical projections. Community management of forests, fisheries, pasturelands, water, etc. has proven to be efficient, sustainable and equitable. For this, solidarity economy calls for institutional mechanisms to govern the commons, and rules and regulations to prevent anyone from taking unfair advantage.14 We may think of cooperatives, credit unions, community land trusts, participatory budgeting, community kitchens, fair trade practices, practices of care work, and a host of other activities and institutions existing around the idea of the commons.15 In short, solidarity economy suggests the institutional dimension of solidarity. Pure ethical urge is not enough. It calls for appropriate institutional management of solidarity practices. This also means that we cannot leave it to spontaneous surge of solidarity for it to leave a durable mark on society. Yet the received literature on solidarity economy has been unable to answer the question, namely is it able to transcend market economics in a significant way? Or is it in turn subsumed by market economy? Will not laws of market economy (particularly in neoliberal conditions), such as the credit and debt game, wage squeeze, falling rate of profit, and division of labour, affect solidarity economy? While we may leave the final answer to history, we may say at least this much that the idea of solidarity economy tells us of some of the features of a desirable future. On the other hand, there are both economic arguments and political arguments, the latter revolving around the question

Layers of Solidarity  289 of power, which suggest that solidarity cannot be an innocent idea. Such an idea must cope with the contentions and contradictions of society. Solidarity, to put it in one line, is a contentious concept and has a contentious history. It explains the ambivalent attitude of social scientists and Marxist scholars to the cooperatives, one of the key institutions of a solidarity economy. Marx himself praised the cooperative movement in the augural address to the Working Men’s Association. At the same time, he was cautious about the possibilities of cooperatives in a capitalist economy.16 In other words, the principle of solidarity as enunciated in the idea of solidarity economy cannot be practised in isolation. It must be socially and politically transformative. Solidarity economy from below has the potential to achieve such quality. Solidarity economy from below is usually a combination of two features –​common occupation and common place of stay. Anthropologist Xiang Biao’s fascinating study of a migrant village in Beijing tells the story of “a vibrant economic community with no significant religious element in social life” whose leaders derive their authority “from internal organic networks rather than a monopoly of strategic access to outside contacts.” The leaders of the community, in Biao’s words, are both “intrinsic to intensifying internal networks and a necessary dynamic for the outward expansion of the migrant community’s business networks.”17 Clearly, small scale economy flourishes at least in cases like this on the basis of solidarity principles. Ensuring a significant place for such solidarity economies in the overall grid of “national economy” is the challenge. Local governments play the most important part in innovating flexible institutional framework of such accommodation. Before we move on to further discuss the idea of solidarity, let us note that this article leaves out the huge anthropological literature on solidarity –​thus clan solidarity, tribal solidarity, solidarity of religious groups and followers, solidarity of localities, gang solidarity, caste solidarity, and the literature on the extensive gift cultures in various societies across the world. In each of these cases, the remarkable fact is that the solidarity is based on some fault line. Thus, gang wars, religious wars, caste wars, and other histories of enmity are the other of the histories of friendship. Countless libraries are filled up with this literature. Recounting them here even very briefly will serve no purpose, save to remind us that practices of enmity and friendship have various anthropological stories to tell. This is not to say that group solidarities have no political significance. Solidarities often interface, they cut across each other. They are often “impure.” Thus, solidarity with the Palestinians may spring from Arab identity, Muslim identity, also various anti-​imperialist identities –​singly or meshed. Likewise, solidarity of coloured people may spring from anti-​colonial history, the history of a continent, and many other histories.18 Such interface is truer in the case of anti-​racism movement. From the writings of Franz Fanon (“We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe”) to “I cannot breathe” moment of our time –​black consciousness is a remarkable

290  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities political account growing out of our anthropological pasts. In Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, the foundations of anti-​colonialism, anti-​imperialist solidarity, consciousness of racist oppression, national liberation, and internationalism form a complex that speaks of a particular politics of solidarity. Noticeably, Fanon notes how inter group clashes in a colony build on certain anthropological facts to become features of the life of the colonised people. They become expressions of masculinity and domination. Yet Fanon knows, “Violence unifies the people.”19

III We have discussed the ethical and the economic aspects of the practice of solidarity and have taken note of the anthropological narratives of solidarity. However, in the modern age of nationalism and massive wars the international as the field of solidarity has received the greatest attention. Variously conceptualised as cosmopolitanism, world citizenship, human unity and human solidarity –​these ideas have been expressions of the great liberal times of the past. Noticeably, these ideas did not build on any fault line, but on the fact that humanity was one. This presented a paradox: On one hand, the cosmopolitans could say that the world was one while all knew that world was not; on the other hand, they could say that they upheld the rights of the victims of gender or race oppression, or colonial and national oppression, and it was in this way that they championed the value of the humankind, the value of one world.20 If we are not to engage in quarrels built on rhetoric, we can acknowledge that cosmopolitans have played their roles in practising solidarity.21 They have also discussed appropriate institutional ways to realise the high ideas of cosmopolitanism. They cannot be dismissed as just dreamers. Yet, we must also accept the fact that cosmopolitanism has often served as the vehicle of elect nations in strengthening global dominance. Positioning itself against “small nation” mentality, cosmopolitanism works as a template of universalism of the dominant. “Responsibility to protect” is one of the doctrines that have enabled great powers to intervene. It was in ample evidence in the nineteenth century when the European colonial powers repeatedly declared solidarity with “oppressed Christian subjects” of Ottoman rule. Responsibility was the ruse of invoking solidarity with the “small nations” in Eastern and Central Europe. In the history of international law, the protection of “small nations” is linked with the responsibility to protect them. Likewise, the responsibility is to protect the “people” subjected to extreme state repression, particularly oppression of minorities within countries.22 Once again, we can see how the principle of responsibility is linked to the theme of world solidarity based on the template of global governance run by great powers. Liberal security has to be permanent, and this is possible only with a combination of a nation-​state constituted world order, a continuing “human rights revolution,” and “coalitions of the willing” of the global powers to put down the insubordinates disturbing global peace. The assumption that “enlightened”

Layers of Solidarity  291 nations share common values and hence should come to mutual aid and mount a common cause has led to the “coalitions of the willing” and joining hands to bomb Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria. Mostly, it has been a kind of common liberal will against obdurate locals.23 The Congress of Vienna (1815) and the Holy Alliance was one such solidarity of a continent determined to restore an old order. Much of these coalitions of the willing through the last two centuries had to do with whatever happened from time to time in the camp of capital. The establishment of global institutions at the end of the Second World War such as the Bretton Woods institutions, the advent of Cold War, the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe, the setting up of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), the restoration of free trade within a region (biggest example is the European Common Market and the European Union), and subsequent setting up of trade and trade-​military blocs (such as the North American Free Trade Agreement known as NAFTA or the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation known as APEC with periodic adjustments) are different milestones in the history of solidarity of capitalist countries. Meanwhile we must not forget that nations have produced spectacular acts of solidarity –​often bridging the world in unanticipated manners. Most anti-​ colonial revolutions were marked by acts of solidarity –​be they the revolution in China, or in India, or Cuba. In all these cases, it was possible as time became the same for various actors across great geographical distances, such as China for Dr. Norman Bethune and Dr. Dwarkanath Kotnis.24 Also nations lived in the same time –​the time of colonial oppression. Africa produced the idea of a continental revolution, Latin America produced its own idea of a continental revolution, and Asia dreamt of pan-​Asianism. The Tri-​Continental Conference of 1966 marked the climax of worldwide ant-​colonial, anti-​imperial solidarity.25 Characteristically, the solidarity the world witnessed was possible because of the plurality of the idiom of anti-​ colonialism and anti-​imperialism. In short, an understanding of the plural composition of solidarity practices of the nations in the anti-​colonial and anti-​imperialist time is important. In fact, the glorious history of anti-​colonial solidarity should open our eyes to a paradox in the idea of solidarity of nations. Nation we may argue is one of the purest forms of solidarity to the extent that it empties all other forms of solidarity and makes national solidarity the most natural and fundamental. Yet, as we have seen, nations have been internationalist in varying ways and degrees.

IV The statement that solidarity mostly operates on some deep fault line is perhaps only a truism. It tells us nothing more significant beyond the obvious. Yet we can ask has there been another vision of solidarity that draws on all these forms of solidarity –​partisanship, ethicality, plurality, commitment,

292  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities mutuality, and unity –​and appears in a pure political form? Or rephrasing the point, can we think of solidarity that appears as pure politics by subsuming in it the potential of these different attributes of solidarity evidenced in different historical experiences? Can we think of solidarity as politics by itself ? Every Indian knows of the infamous massacre by the British troops in Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar on 13 April 1919. At least 379 people died and over 1200 others were injured.26 Little after a month of the massacre, poet Tagore on 31 May 1919 renounced his knighthood in protest. In his letter to the British Viceroy he wrote, ... The enormity of the measures taken by the Government in the Punjab for quelling some local disturbances has, with a rude shock, revealed to our minds the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India. The disproportionate severity of the punishments inflicted upon the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced, are without parallel in the history of civilised governments barring some conspicuous exceptions, recent and remote. Considering that such treatment has been meted out to a population, disarmed and resourceless, by a power which has the most terribly efficient organisation for destruction of human lives, we must strongly assert that it can claim no political expediency, far less moral justification... the universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers-​possibly congratulating themselves for imparting what they imagine as salutary lessons... the very least that I can do for my country is to take all consequences upon myself in giving voice to the protest of the millions of my countrymen, surprised into a dumb anguish of terror. The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in the incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part, wish to stand, shorn, of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so called insignificance, are liable to suffer degradation not fit for human beings.27 This letter memorised by the nationalists and quoted on countless occasions continues to draw our attention because of its purity. It is not simply an act of protest. Solidarity here is a gesture of support to the “insignificant,” those “surprised into a dumb anguish of terror,” helpless as “British subjects in India,” when carrying an “honour (bestowed by the ruler) becomes a shame.” Solidarity here has no ulterior motive, no expectation, only a renunciation of a privilege that the victims will never have. Solidarity is the motive. It is a pure act. This purity has another aspect. It transcends the problem of mutuality and by implication the perils of a contract. Contract is mutual obligation. Contract has consent as its fundamental element on which membership of a political community rests. Contract is the virtuous basis of civic belonging. In

Layers of Solidarity  293 this way, solidarity accommodates its opposites in anthropological forms like caste or hereditary aristocracy, which sit perfectly with the protocols of citizenship. We can inculcate solidarity yet be sectarian. However, Tagore’s letter points out the “insignificance” of people who are persecuted by the colonial power. Coming in the long lineage of an anti-​colonialism that is built on the idea of the subordination of subjugated nations, “small nations” (think of the Eastern and central European nations in late nineteenth and the pre-​Second World War decades in the twentieth century),the phrase “so-​called insignificance” in Tagore’s letter transcends the immediate but the overwhelming reality of smallness. At the same time, the letter conveys the spirit of solidarity that has attained purity as a “virtue.” Tagore’s letter opens the idea of solidarity to new impulses, calling without fully scripting a future of the idea of solidarity. Solidarity as politics recalls this purity: hence solidarity is politics. Solidarity as politics solidarity transcends the sociological boundaries of identity and friendships. Such politics ushers in a society of friendship; or we may say, politics calls for a society of solidarity. The Manifesto of the Communist Party ends with these words, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries unite!” One argument can be that Marx and Engels’ call to the workers of the world to unite is the climax of their expositions about the bourgeoisie as a world force, world trade as a continuously pressing trend subsuming countries and regions ever and ever, and the proletariat as the consistent product of the bourgeoisie, born of it and opposed to it. They thought, National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.28 However, there is a deeper aspect to this call to unite. Marx and Engels did not speak of integration or a world working class that has no fault lines within. Let us listen to the authors of the Manifesto as they gave shape to their call, The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.29 And therefore The struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie is at the outset a national one in form, though not in content. Naturally the proletariat of each country must first finish off its own bourgeoisie.30

294  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities A new language of solidarity was created in this way. It proclaimed solidarity as the mode of existence. There is no graduation here from any lower sense of solidarity to an upper, loftier sense. Other forms of solidarity are not liquidated by the international mode of proletarian existence or dissolved in it. Solidarity is not thus a matter of strength of some doctrine, but strength of a mode of existence, which enables collective political conduct to go beyond a sense of moral virtue. Readers will notice that this last chapter has by and large desisted from presenting a “theoretical” account of phenomenon of solidarity. It presents only some of the practices of solidarity witnessed in our time. Yet, these scattered instances suggest something we may take note of by way of concluding: Solidarity is not an ideology; hence it eludes the question of subjectivity or consciousness or for that matter false consciousness. Solidarity is also not a principle of social cohesion –​mechanical or organic –​or an explanatory principle of modern life mediating the relation between the individual and the state.31 Solidarity in the form described here refuses to be an accomplice in the infernal circle of state and society. The bourgeoisie proposes to take the venom out of solidarity to impose a normalising society on insurgent solidarities.32 We must therefore remove reference to “society” to understand the phenomenon of insurgent solidarities. Recall Marx who said in 1844, “Above all we must avoid postulating ‘society’ again as an abstraction vis-​à-​ vis the individual.”33

Notes 1 For an idea of what acts of solidarity could do in terms of creating a defiant subject, see the “Migrant Workers Resistance Map” of the Migrant Workers Solidarity Network –​ https://​mwsn.in/​res​ista​nce-​map (accessed on 2 May 2021); on details of the “migrant crisis”, Calcutta Research Group’s “Living Archive: Covid-​19 and Migrant Labour” –​www.mcrg.ac.in/​CRG_​CO​VID-​19/​Cov​id_​M​igra​nt_​W​orke​rs_​ H​ome.asp (accessed on 25 May 2021); also Ranabir Samaddar, A Pandemic and the Politics of Life (Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2021), Chapter 2, “The Migrant as a Figure of the Crisis”, pp. 41–​122. 2 Ayushman Kaul and Devesh Kumar, “What the SOS Tweets Tell us About the Second Wave of COVID-​19”, The Wire, 30 April 2021 –​https://​thew​ire.in/​tech/​ what-​the-​sos-​twe​ets-​on-​ind​ian-​twit​ter-​tell-​us-​about-​the-​sec​ond-​wave-​of-​covid-​ 19 (accessed on 2 May 2021); also the report by Mehbub Qader Chaudhury, “Coronavirus in Kolkata: Social Media is Helping COVID-​19 Patients to Fight against Disease” (in Bengali), Anandabazar Patrika Online, 1 May 2021 –​www. anan​daba​zar.com/​west-​ben​gal/​kolk​ata/​coro​navi​rus-​in-​kolk​ata-​soc​ial-​media-​ is-​help​ing-​covid-​19-​patie​nts-​to-​fight-​agai​nst-​dise​ase/​cid/​1278​756 (accessed on 3 May 2021); Tamaghna Banerjee on community help groups, “Citizens Use Crowdfunding to Help Covid Patients”, Times of India, 5 May 2021 –​https://​ times​ofin​dia.ind​iati​mes.com/​city/​kolk​ata/​citiz​ens-​use-​crowd​fund​ing-​to-​help-​cov-​ patie​nts/​arti​cles​how/​82393​812.cms (accessed on 6 May 2021). 3 Devayan Roy, “States, Police should not Clampdown on Citizens who use Social Media to Seek Help for COVID-​19: Supreme Court”, Bar and Bench, 30 April

Layers of Solidarity  295 2021 –​ www.bara​ndbe​nch.com/​news/​lit​igat​ion/​sta​tes-​pol​ice-​clampd​own-​citiz​ens-​ usoc​ial-​media-​help-​for-​covid-​19-​supr​eme-​court (accessed on 6 May 2021). 4 See for instance the report, “Calcutta Samaritans Join Hands to Provide Food: Slum Dwellers around Jadavpur Railway Station will Get Cereals and Pulses from This Week”, report by Subhankar Chowdhury, The Telegraph, 17 May 2021 –​www. tel​egra​phin​dia.com/​amp/​west-​ben​gal/​calcu​tta/​calcu​tta-​sam​arit​ans-​join-​hands-​to-​ prov​ide-​food/​cid/​1815​841 (accessed on 17 May 2021). 5 Pritha Mukherjee, “TMC Workers Conducted Last Rites of Deceased BJP Leader”, Ei Samay, 9 May 2021 (report in Bengali) –​https://​eisa​may.ind​iati​mes. com/​west-​ben​gal-​news/​bardha​man-​news/​tmc-​work​ers-​helps-​to-​do-​last-​rite-​of-​ bjp-​lea​der-​in-​katwa-​east-​burd​wan/​arti​cles​how/​82492​788.cms (accessed on 12 May 2021); See also the report by Kusum Arora, “In Punjab, Sikh Man Donates Land for Mosque, Gurdwara Hosts Ceremony for Muslims”, The Wire, 17 June 2021 –​ https://​thew​ire.in/​relig​ion/​pun​jab-​sikh-​mus​lim-​harm​ony-​mal​erko​tla-​moga (accessed on 3 July 2021). 6 “Covid-​19: States Come to Each Other’s Rescue at the Peak of Oxygen Crisis”, report by Dipak K. Dash, Times of India, 14 June 2021 –​www.msn.com/​en-​in/​ news/​other/​covid-​19-​sta​tes-​came-​to-​each-​other-​s-​res​cue-​at-​the-​peak-​of-​oxy​gen-​ cri​sis/​ar-​AAL0​osY?li=​AAgg​es1&ocid=​mail​sign​out (accessed on 1 July 2021). 7 Mehmal Sarfraz, “Shared Suffering: Pakistan Feels India’s Pain in this Difficult Hour”, The Telegraph, 30 April 2021 –​www.tel​egra​phin​dia.com/​opin​ion/​ pakis​tan-​feels-​ind​ias-​pain-​in-​this-​diffic​ult-​hour/​cid/​1814​075 (accessed on 5 May 2021). 8 See on this, Renate Douwes, Maria Stuttaford, and Leslie London, “Social Solidarity, Human Rights, and Collective Action: Considerations in the Implementation of the National Health Insurance in South Africa”, HHR (Health and Human Rights Journal), 1 October 2018 –​www.hhr​jour​nal.org/​2018/​10/​soc​ial-​sol​idar​ity-​human-​ rig​hts-​and-​col​lect​ive-​act​ion-​con​side​rati​ons-​in-​the-​imp​leme​ntat​ion-​of-​the-​natio​ nal-​hea​lth-​insura​nce-​in-​south-​afr​ica/​ (accessed on 8 November 2021). 9 Michael Moss, Henry Duncan and the Savings Bank Movement in the UK (Brussels: World Savings Bank Institute and European Savings Banks Group, 2011), p, 24; also see Oliver Horne, A History of Savings Banks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947). 10 Work, Save, and Prosper, Report of the 200 Hundred Years of Erste Bank (one of the most well-​known saving banks in Eastern Europe) –​(Vienna: Christian Brandstatter Verlag, 2019). 11 Swati Ganguly, “A Poet and a Landlord: Rabindranath Tagore and the Nobel Prize Money”, Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 49 (31), 2 August 2014, pp. 138–​142. 12 Tagore’s writings on this are collectively published in Rabindranath Tagore, Samabayniti (in Bengali, Kolkata: Visva Bharati, 1360 B.S.). 13 “Social and Solidarity Economy”, ILO –​www.ilo.org/​emp​ent/​areas/​WCMS​_​546​ 299/​lang-​-​en/​index.htm (accessed on 11 May 2021). 14 Emily Kawaono, “Seven Ways to Build the Solidarity Economy: We Can Transform Capitalism by Encouraging the Better Angels of Our Nature”, Open Democracy, 4 September 2018 –​www.opende​mocr​acy.net/​en/​tra​nsfo​rmat​ion/​seven-​ways-​to-​ build-​sol​idar​ity-​econ​omy/​ (accessed on 11 May 2021). 15 Classic on this, Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

296  Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities 16 Karl Marx, “Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association”, 1864 –​ www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1864/​10/​27.htm (accessed on 14 May 2021); also, Marx, Capital, Volume 3, 1894 (Moscow: Institute of Marxism-​ Leninism, 1959), p. 317 –​www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​downl​oad/​pdf/​ Capi​tal-​Vol​ume-​III.pdf (accessed on 15 May 2021). 17 Xiang Biao, Transcending Boundaries: Zhejiangcun, the Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing (Leiden: Brill, 2005), p. 178. 18 Recall the discussion in Chapter 7 on B.R. Ambedkar’s call to annihilate the caste system because only with the annihilation of caste the toxic combination of division of (not only labour but) labourers, bad history, and narrow particularisms would end and human solidarity would be achieved. 19 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 51. 20 Buoyant with having travelled the world in a plane during the Second World War, the American diplomat Wendell L. Willkie wrote of humanitarian hopes and convictions of something called world humanity, There are no distant points in the world any longer. I learnt by this trip that the myriad millions of human beings of the Far East are as close to us as Los Angeles is to New York by the fastest trains. I cannot escape the conviction that in the future what concerns them must concern us, almost as much as the problems of the people of California concern the people of New York. Our thinking in the future must be worldwide. (Wendell L. Willkie, One World (1943, New York: Arcole Publishing, 2018), p. 8) 21 Cosmopolitans like Heikki Patomaki have built their ideas of solidarity on a combination of the ethical and the possible or the practical. See Heikki Patomaki, Disintegrative Tendencies in Global Political Economy: Exits and Conflicts (London: Routledge, 2019) and (co-​authored with Teivo Teivainen) A Possible World: Democratic Transformation of Global Institutions (London: Zed Books, 2004). 22 At the 2005 World Summit, governments affirmed the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect” rests upon three pillars of equal standing: the responsibility of each State to protect its populations; the responsibility of the international community to assist States in protecting their populations; and the responsibility of the international community to protect when a State is manifestly failing to protect its populations. The doctrine was based on an expectation of a future free of these crimes. Yet, the doctrine was applied in a discriminatory manner, and great powers were not held accountable for war crimes and crimes against its own citizens. –​“The Responsibility Protect”, UN Chronicle, www.un.org/​en/​chroni​cle/​arti​cle/​res​pons​ibil​ity-​prot​ect#:~:text=​ The%20res​pons​ibil​ity%20to%20prot​ect%20(commo​nly,and%20the%20res​pons​ ibil​ity%20of%20the (accessed on 1 May 2021). 23 There is a strange psychological twist to the solidarity story. “Civilised” nations declare solidarity with the persecuted in rest of the world as a form of self-​ purification. Solidarity works as the unconscious tool of self-​redemption. The post-​ Second World War history of Western nations’ tolerating Zionism and expulsions of Palestinians is explained as penance for old evil acts.

Layers of Solidarity  297 24 For these two extraordinary lives, Ted Allan and Sydney Gordon, The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Dr. Norman Bethune (1952, Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2009); Tanvi Patel, “Solapur to China: The Forgotten Story of the Indian Doctor Revered by the Chinese”, The Better India, 15 January 2019 –​www.the​bett​erin​dia. com/​172​490/​china-​india-​hist​ory-​dr-​kot​nis-​mum​bai/​ (accessed on 24 May 2021); also Anant Pai, Dr. Kotnis in China (Mumbai: Amar Chitra Katha, 1971). 25 For an exhaustive study, Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism and Transnational Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 26 The Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place on 13 April 1919, when the British army officer R. Dyer blocked with the help of his soldiers the lawn called Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab, where a large, peaceful crowd had gathered to protest the arrest of nationalist leaders and the imposition of suppressive laws and measures by the colonial rulers. The place could be exited only from one side, the other three sides were enclosed by buildings. After the exit was closed, the soldiers were ordered to open fire on the assembly, and the firing continued until the ammunition was exhausted. Estimates of those killed vary between 379 and 1,000 people. The brutality of colonial rule and the impunity of the rulers stunned the country. It led to the first Non-​cooperation movement of 1920–​21. Historians consider the episode as a decisive step in the surge of the nationalist movement in India. Great Britain never apologised for the massacre but expressed “regret” in 2019. 27 Reproduced in Krishna Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (Kolkata: Visva Bharati, 1980), p. 277. 28 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), in Marx Engels Selected Works, Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), pp. 98–​137, Chapter 2, “Proletarians and Communists”, p. 25. –​www.marxi​sts. org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​downl​oad/​pdf/​Manife​sto.pdf (accessed on 22 May 2021). 29 Ibid., Chapter 2, p. 25. 30 Ibid., Chapter 1, “Bourgeois and the Proletarians”, p. 20. 31 The attempt by Durkheim to explain the structure of modern society through what may be described principles of solidarity still remains classic. See, Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, trans. George Simpson (1933, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1960), Chapters 2–​3, pp. 70–​132. 32 These are the two principal modes of social democratic and neoliberal management of populations –​the former makes solidarity the principal mode of bargaining with the state, thus the emphasis of the social democrats on trade unions, etc., in place of class; the latter conjures solidarities out of a society to break any possible social upsurge. Solidarity in this sense tells us of the “crisis of the social,” which is also a “crisis of the political.” –​See, Jacques Donzelot, “The Mobilisation of Society”, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Chapter 8 (pp. 169–​179), p. 178. 33 Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), p.45.

Epilogue

The arguments of this book are made in the backdrop of 1989 –​annus mirabilis, the year of restoration –​when purists sprang up everywhere. Already the New Left thinkers and post-​Marxist philosophers were saying, this Marxism was bad, that Marxism was good, Engels had spoiled Marxism, socialism’s history had vitiated the philosophical purity of Marxism, etc., etc. Then, with 1989 the dyke burst. If it was not the end of history altogether, democracy was discovered by these thinkers and philosophers as alternative to the history of socialism. “Actually existing” socialism was bad, rank bad. History of socialism needed to be purified with the holy water of democracy and transnational citizenship. But history did not stop, nor did the struggles for alternatives to actually existing capitalism discontinue. The meaning of alternative, socialism as a historic alternative to capitalism, acquired renewed significance in this context. This significance is manifold –​to give three such points of significance by way of concluding: First, the quest for alternative does not follow any centralist model. It does not have any God ordained path to follow. The idea of establishing a post-​capitalist society has taken roots in different parts of the world and in various forms. The echoes of alternative are spreading. The idea of an alternative is necessarily plural and is multiplying in this age. This is the understanding that has driven the writing of this book. The book does not wail over the failures of socialism, nor does it labour over the issue to death. The fall of socialism is a defeat that must be taken in stride. Indeed, as this book was being conceptualised, the catharsis of 1989 was already over with renewed attempts by struggling peoples all over the world at finding alternatives to the capitalist order of the neoliberal age and in this drawing inspiration from the history of socialism and militant communist movements of the past. In this spirit, the book enquires into the possible ideas of alternative and its sites that may enrich socialism. Revisits to texts, ideas of thinkers, and events take place in this book in this milieu. DOI: 10.4324/9781003353270-24

Epilogue  299 Second, as the readers will have noticed, in this book the search for alternatives is informed by a presentist vision of alternative. The present means present to something, present in something. In political circles, particularly in visionary circles, alternative brings in the future, often at the cost of sacrificing the present. Yet, this book argues, the present is the permanent workshop of alternatives for a better future. The present gives birth to alternatives, present events, present commentaries and thoughts, and presentist readings of the past. Yet, this is not all. An equally important point is that through our present practices alternative emerges as manifold futures, manifold possibilities. Finally, the present as surveyed by this book is the postcolonial present, the postcolonial condition of life. Thus, themes of nation, caste, contention, race, migration, urban rebellion, solidarity, biopolitics from below, genocide, popular democracy, and not the least other imaginations beyond politics have left their imprints on this book. Perhaps these are routine problems of a backward life, and not particularly significant for alternative thinking and probably absent from the horizon of visionary thinkers of the West. Like the postcolonial condition, perhaps these themes are well-​worn, banal. Therefore, my apology is for the banality of issues presented in a discussion on transformative thinking. But I believe, transformative thinking does not build around the exceptional or glorious, but patient and stubborn practices to interrogate and change the conditions of life. Anything that insists on its own uniqueness has to be eliminated. In this context, the readers will have to allow one more reference in this book, for the last time, to Marx, who wrote (and this theme underlying Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific), (Utopians), to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and go in search of a regenerating science. But in the measure that history moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece. So long as they look for science and merely make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society. From this moment, science, which is a product of the historical movement, has associated itself consciously with it, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary.1

Note 1 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon, 1847 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955), p. 56.

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Index

abolition of race 11, 133 absolute 25, 118–​27, 194, 208, 214, 273 activists 2, 23, 239, 251–​5, 257–​8, 260, 271, 273, 282–​3, 287 actuality 32, 231, 237, 245 Adorno, Theodor 202 aesthetic 1, 8, 39–​41, 43, 49–​53 alternative 1–15, 19, 22, 23, 32, 38, 58, 62, 67, 72, 77, 78, 85, 88, 90, 101, 102, 105, 108, 115, 119, 133, 142, 145, 154, 167, 171, 178, 185, 206, 213, 224, 231, 232, 245, 246, 250, 251, 259, 261, 265, 266, 269, 270, 271, 276, 288, 298, 299 alternative society 7 Ambedkar, B. R. 13, 133 ambiguity 9, 10, 33 anarchism 62, 63 Anderson, Benedict 2, 13, 54, 58–​60, 62, 65, 67, 69 Annihilation of Caste 132, 133, 136, 137, 142, 143 Anti-​Colonial Imagination 63 anti-​colonialism 30 Anti-​Colonial Movements 234 anti-​colonial nationalism 60 anti-​colonial thinkers 50, 64, 145 anti-​colonial thought 145 anti-​communist 68 Arab nationalism 58 aristocracy 22, 225, 293 aristocrats 23, 27, 79 Arthashastra 125 ASHA Workers 274, 284 Asian-​African Conference 67 assemblage 60, 65, 205–​6, 271 autonomy 4, 10, 13, 31, 33, 39, 44–​6, 50–​3, 57, 105, 107, 127, 179, 219, 240, 242, 244, 270

Balibar, Etienne 174, 235 Baranagar-​Cossipore Massacre 258 Bengal Famine 24, 171 Benjamin, Walter 66–​7, 155 Bhagavad Gita 115–​16 Bhattacharyya, K. C. 119 Bible 116–​17 Biblical Myth 117 biopolitics 7, 83–​4, 171, 265–​6, 269–​78, 299 biopower 83–​4, 265, 275–​6 Bolshevik revolutionaries 57, 231 border 19, 53, 71, 78, 100–​1, 155, 175, 177–​8, 187, 200–​1, 203–​4, 207, 266–​9, 278 boundary 6, 171, 178, 206, 254, 258, 267–​8 bourgeoisie 8–​9, 28, 30–​3, 86, 90, 106, 215, 218–​21, 225–​7, 232, 240, 243–​4, 286, 293–​4 Brecht, Bertolt 185, 187 brutality 26 Buddha 67, 139 Buddhism 138–​9 Buddhist 67, 118 Cabral, Amilcar 32, 234 capitalism 4–​7, 10, 13, 20–​2, 24, 26, 3, 59, 66–​7, 70, 77, 80, 82, 84–​6, 88–​90, 102, 106–​8, 151, 215–​17, 220, 223, 225, 226, 237, 242, 245, 251, 261, 265, 271–​3, 276, 278, 298 care givers 271, 273 care of the self 46, 270 care workers 269, 270, 277, 282 caste inequalities 138 caste oppression 50, 133–​4 caste wars 289 categorical imperative 46

318 Index Chartist Movement 214 Chauvinism 57, 243 Che Guevara 3, 234 child labour 90 child marriage 135 China 20, 22, 24, 26–​7, 29, 50, 63, 89, 172, 232, 234, 244–​5, 267, 291 Chinese Revolution 3, 23, 239–​40 Christianity 117, 136, 188 citizen massacres 169 citizenship 12, 38, 50, 71, 96, 100, 152–​3, 155, 175, 290, 293, 298; rights 152 civil rights 158, 177, 271 civil society 52, 103, 223 civil war 20, 29, 68, 157, 217, 220, 235–​6, 268, 285 claim making 103–​4, 152, 154, 157 Class Struggles 22, 218, 220, 222, 237 Clavero, Bartolome 176 Clinton, Hillary 89 Cold War 239, 291 collective action 108, 152, 163, 276 collective adversity 284 collective grievances 157 collective violence 151, 157 College Street 250–​61 colonialism 1, 6, 10–​11, 20–​5 colonial society 25, 138, 145 colonial time 101, 104, 285 commons 13–​14, 21, 78, 141, 245, 253, 260, 272, 288 common sense 2, 133, 160, 274 Communard 224 Commune 3, 5, 7–​8, 21–​2, 79, 27, 220, 225, 237 communication 58, 60, 62, 136–​7, 142–​3, 260, 278, 284 communism 2, 29, 66, 68, 97, 215–​17, 219, 225 communist 2, 29–​31, 66, 69, 214–​18, 233–​4, 237, 241, 244, 254, 256, 293, 298 Communist Manifesto 214–​16, 218 communist movements 74, 244, 298 community 12, 26, 31, 38–​9, 50, 59, 66–​70, 124–​6, 139, 155, 160, 190, 252, 260, 268–​9, 273, 284, 286–​9, 292 comradeship 59, 67, 216, 251, 253 concrete determination 132–​4, 142, 144, 145 concrete universal 13, 132–​3, 145 conjuncture 10–​12, 14, 98–​9, 102–​4 contention 14, 38, 41, 46, 98, 101–​2, 151–​63, 167, 251, 255, 289, 299 contentious history 1, 7, 14, 163, 289

contentious politics 46, 98, 108, 152, 155, 161, 163, 175, 259, 261 cooperative 3, 6–​7, 31, 285–​9 Corbyn, Jeremy 101–​2 cosmopolitanism 290 counter-​memory 208 covid 1–​2, 4, 71, 170–​1, 265–​7, 271–​7, 282, 284 crime 30, 44, 105, 154, 167–​8, 170–​4, 176–​7; against humanity 170–​2; of all crimes 170 crisis 3, 4, 83, 86, 98, 100, 102, 104, 108, 167, 171, 174, 205, 214, 223, 232, 237–8, 244, 259, 265–7, 269–71, 273, 275–7, 282–5 criticism 41–​2, 47, 49, 81, 188, 217, 256 customs 14, 51–​2, 106, 118, 121, 134, 136 Dalit 11–​12, 127, 137 Davis, Mike 89 decolonisation 3–​4, 10, 22, 25–​7, 86, 106–​7, 233, 236, 239, 240 Deleuze, Gilles 235 democracy 12, 14, 20, 30, 32, 50, 60, 69, 89, 96–​104, 139, 151–​8, 162–​3, 188, 202, 204, 216, 221, 225–​6, 232, 240, 242, 259, 261, 273, 275, 288, 299 democratic demands 99–​100, 226 democratisation 33, 151, 287 determination 3, 48, 57, 79, 85, 105, 119, 121–​3, 125, 132–​4, 136, 138, 140–​6, 151, 171–​2, 179, 196, 227, 232–​3, 243, 259, 276 dharma 121, 122, 125 dialectics 5, 46, 117–​18, 122–​3, 127, 227, 241 dialogic 1, 7, 32, 100, 178, 277–​8; justice 7, 178 dictatorship 69, 152, 220, 223, 240, 287 discrimination 10, 12, 133–​5, 142, 145, 158, 172, 285–​6 disease management 269 displacement 86, 136, 201–​2, 205 divinity 117–​18, 121–​3, 126 dowry 39 dual power 15, 226–​7, 231, 241–​4, 276 durable inequality 135, 158–​9, 161–​2 early Indian philosophy 115–​19, 121–​4 economic arguments 288 economic crisis 232 economic development 22, 71, 220, 222 economic reform 30, 143 economy 3, 5, 22–​3, 31, 67, 71, 77, 79–​93, 96, 107, 135, 151, 163, 186,

Index  319 216, 221, 223–​5, 235, 237, 239, 265–​6, 269, 271, 273–​5, 277, 286–​9 emancipation 4, 11, 22–​3, 25, 30, 46, 50, 82, 134, 141, 188, 217, 219 emigrant 151, 191, 200–​7 employment 81, 85, 87, 277, 287 Engels, Frederick 7, 20, 202, 213, 215, 220 entitlement 152 equality 12, 14, 40, 90, 134, 136–​7, 139, 144, 174, 216, 220, 251 equivalence 100 ethics 45, 49, 53, 115, 126, 188, 191, 191, 259, 261, 268 Ethiopian 201, 204 ethnic conflict 268 ethnicity 19, 161 Eurocentrism 20 Euro-​Communism 97 European revolution 215, 231, 238 exile 68, 118, 137, 188, 207, 214 experimentation 14–​15 extortionists 204 extraction 107, 159 extractive capitalism 77, 88 fable 63, 192 famine 24, 27, 82, 89, 169, 171, 173, 185–​6, 265–​6 Fanon, Franz 11, 107, 144, 289 farmers movement 261 fascism 97, 232, 234, 236 Fenian Revolt 27 feudalism 22, 30, 152, 271 food security 88 Foucault, Michel 4, 46, 90, 95, 169, 208, 265 freedom 29, 31, 42, 44, 47, 50–​1, 115–​17, 120–​1, 124, 126, 134, 138, 174, 194, 214, 239, 245, 273, 275, 277, 287, 293 free trade 20, 27, 291 French Revolution 22, 220, 223, 233 frontline worker 274, 284 future 1–3, 6, 7–11, 14, 27, 33, 45, 47–8, 67, 133, 140, 174, 175, 178, 179, 208, 220, 221, 239, 243, 246, 288–9, 293, 296, 299 Gandhi, M. K. 11–​12, 127, 141–​2, 287 gang wars 289 gender 31, 40, 90, 116, 156, 269, 290 Geneva Conventions 169, 173 genocide 14, 157, 163, 167–​78, 299 German Gita 116 German Ideology 222 gherao 250–​2, 259

gig economy 274 global capital 33, 85, 88, 90, 217, 267 globalisation 24, 31, 62, 64, 70, 85, 88–​9, 100, 103, 157, 201, 236, 238, 267 global neoliberal economy 87 global time 58, 63, 67 global trade 21 goons 252 governing society 78 governmentality 83, 171, 265 Gramsci, Antonio 5, 54, 107, 275 Great Calcutta Killings 171 Greek philosophy 117 Habib, Irfan 26 health care workers 269 health disasters 171, 266, 286 Hegel, G. W. 6, 13, 49, 51, 115–​32, 145, 233, 245 hegemony 5, 11, 99, 101–​3, 105–​7, 242, 267, 276 herd immunity 171 homogenous 66–​7, 69; empty time 66–​7 humanitarian trap 168 human resources 153 human rights 168, 173, 290; revolution 290 hunger 196, 252, 260 ideology of capitalism 66 illegalism 104–​5 illiberal cociety 173 imagined community 66 immanence 33, 54, 194–​5 immigrant labour 71, 89 immigration 89, 175, 201, 206, 217 imperial imaginary 13, 115, 128, 132 impossibility 12, 70, 185, 187, 192–​3 Indian history 128, 139 Indian philosophy 115–​25, 128 Indigenous people 176–​7 industrialisation 86, 106 inequality 9, 14, 59, 135–​6, 138, 145, 155, 158, 161–​2 informal workers 77 infrastructural growth 86 injustice 9, 12, 30, 136, 144, 176–​7, 179 insurgency 251, 258–​9 insurgent movement 250 insurrection 4, 30, 63, 214, 218, 221, 226 internally displaced 90 internationalism 22, 216, 234, 236, 290 internationalist 40, 53, 57, 291 International Workingmen’s Association 215

320 Index interpretation 1, 9, 102, 115, 117 interrogation 6, 103–​4, 116, 216 invisibility 203–​4 Jallianwala Bagh 171, 292 Jewish 186, 188, 191 Judaism 188 justice 1, 7, 10–​12, 14, 23, 30, 32–​3, 90, 127, 133–​4, 137–​40, 142–​5, 156, 176, 178–​9, 216 Khosravi, Shahram 201–​2, 206–​7 labour force 77, 161 labouring classes 87, 96 labour mobility 93, 100 labour movement 250, 252 Laclau, Ernesto 97–​8 language of revolution 231 Lauterpacht 171, 177 Lefebvre, Henri 251 Left populism 97–​9, 101–​2, 104 Lemkin, Raphael 168, 173–​4, 177 Lenin, V. I. 5–7, 15, 24, 57, 68, 98, 219, 220, 231–9, 242–5, 247 liberalism 46, 48, 96–​7, 99, 103, 142, 214 liberation 3–​4, 11, 30, 32–​3, 96, 178, 234–​5, 290 living labour 82, 84, 266 lockdown 267, 269, 273, 275, 277, 283–​4 long-​distance nationalism 31, 58 Luxemburg, Rosa 5, 232 Mahabharata 123–​4, 127 Malthus 13, 77–​82, 87–​9, 171 manifesto 11, 13, 101, 133, 142–​5, 214–​19, 222–​3, 237, 293 Manto, Sadaat Hasan 185 Marshall Plan 291 Marxism 65, 139, 298 Marxists 19, 63, 65, 77, 243 Marx, Karl 1, 19, 139, 154, 162, 215 Marxologists 20 mass killing 168, 174, 177, 178 mass murder 7, 167–​9, 172–​4 materiality 39, 188, 205, 224 media 103, 260, 283–​4 migrant crisis 267, 283 migrant labour 1, 71, 202, 268, 277 migrant workers 88, 203, 273–​4, 282, 284 migration 2, 4, 31, 63, 71, 88–​9, 100, 158, 175, 201, 205–​7, 299 militant 10–​11, 42, 62–​3, 69, 102, 106, 143, 145, 219, 250–​1, 253–​4, 260, 282, 298 minority 7, 68, 105, 140, 243; rights 140

mobility 93, 100, 155, 185, 200, 202–​3, 207, 258, 274, 284 Mohapatra, Rimina 115, 120, 122 Moses, Dirk 168, 170, 173–​4 Mouffe, Chantal 97–​8, 100–​1 multiplicity 61, 118, 203, 261, 276 nation 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 19–74, 77, 107, 108, 120, 127, 136–44, 153, 155, 160, 161, 168–9, 171–5, 189, 214, 219, 231, 232, 236–7, 240–2, 245, 268, 287, 290, 291, 293, 299 National Health Service (NHS) 270 nationalism 10, 20, 22, 28, 30–​1, 33, 39, 39, 41–​3, 45–​8, 52, 57–​67, 69–​70, 96, 106, 138, 172–​3, 214, 238, 284, 290 nationalist 10–​11, 30–​1, 38–​50, 52–​3, 60–​4, 66, 68–​71, 127, 134, 138, 215, 238–​40, 285–​7, 292 nation form 1, 7, 11, 13, 19, 21, 24–​5, 27–​8, 30–​3, 38, 50, 54, 58, 62, 65–​71, 189 necessary utopia 2–​3, 213, 273, 278 necropolitics 170 negation 118, 120, 125–​7, 138, 227 neo-​colonialism 22, 69 neoliberal 5, 10, 58, 67, 71, 77–​8, 83–​4, 87–​8, 91, 95–​7, 99, 107, 175, 177–​8, 227, 241–​2, 266–​7, 270–​1, 277–​8, 288, 298 neoliberalism 5, 31, 71, 77, 84, 86, 88–​90, 93, 95, 99–​100, 102, 105, 107, 241–​2 Neoliberal regimes 175 New York Daily Tribune 19, 21, 24–​5, 29 Nuremberg 168, 170, 173; principles 173 Nyaya doctrine 117 October Revolution 10, 231–​5 oligarchy 98 opportunity hoarding 59, 161–​2 oriental despotism 25 orientalism 65 origin of rights 152 overpopulation 80–​1, 95 oxygen crisis 282 pandemic 2, 4, 170, 265, 267–​70, 274–​5, 282–​4 Paris Commune 3, 7, 22, 217, 220 parliament 101–​2, 214, 243 parliamentary democracy 97–​8, 273 partition 10, 29, 39–​43, 49, 169, 174, 185–​7, 189–​90, 194–​5, 202; of sensibilities 39–​40 patriotism 57, 61 peasantry 27–​8, 30, 43, 214, 227, 273

Index  321 peasant struggle 23, 38, 240 Peasant War 28 phenomenology 49, 116, 120 plagues politics 189 pluralism 99, 288 poetics of alternative 8, 14 police 22, 102, 157, 175, 185, 187, 200–​1, 252–​4, 256–​8, 260, 271, 283 political arguments 288 political astronomy 58, 63 political consciousness 10, 61, 159, 187 political democracy 12, 188, 214 political economy 67, 79, 80, 84, 163, 216, 223, 268 political movements 97 political rationality 96–​7, 187 political reform 134–​5, 143 political spirituality 188 politics of life 270, 278 population management 78, 81, 83, 89 populism 7, 13, 44, 95–​108 populist 4, 97–​108; movements 97, 100–​1, 107 postcolonialism 47 post-​colonial time 30, 107, 231 post-​democracy 99 pre-​capitalism 21 pre-​colonial time 25 present 1–11, 15, 19, 23, 32, 35, 51, 58, 80–1, 98–100, 106, 121, 123, 124, 127, 144, 158, 167, 178, 185, 195, 202, 205, 208, 213, 217, 218, 221, 241, 245, 252–4, 267, 299 print capitalism 58–​9 prisoners 186, 252 privatisation 267–​70 productive labour 77, 80, 82–​3 productive population 77, 80, 83 proletarian 8, 22–​3, 27–​8, 30–​1, 215–​18, 220, 225, 233, 243, 272, 293–​4 protection 1–​2, 57, 71, 152–​3, 215, 245, 270–​1, 276–​8, 284, 290 proto-​fascism 98 public health 266, 267, 269–​70 public power 156, 220, 265–​6, 269–​71, 275, 277 public sphere 39, 44–​5, 52, 144 punishments 154, 203, 292 punitive society 272–​3 Rabindranath Tagore 13, 38 race 11, 19, 26, 29, 40, 61, 67, 133, 137, 156, 161, 167, 169, 172–​5, 242, 268, 269, 272, 290, 299 racialised migrant 268

racial purity 143 racism 172–​3, 178 radical 1, 2, 5, 6, 14, 24, 25, 30, 31, 42, 52, 66, 68, 99, 100, 102, 141–​2, 189, 214, 223, 238, 240, 245, 250, 252–​7, 259 Rathore, Aakash Singh 115, 120, 122 rationality 95–​6, 137, 187 reason 6, 9, 23, 32, 42, 44, 46–​7, 49, 52, 59, 61, 64–​5, 89, 95–​8, 100–​1, 103–​4, 116–​18, 124–​5, 135–​6, 144, 155, 157, 160, 173, 187–​9, 207, 217, 220, 223, 226, 231, 255, 267, 289 Rebellion 8, 24, 26–​9, 155, 219, 238, 256–​8, 299 rebellious 10, 104, 227, 238, 250–​4, 256–​7, 272 rebels 29, 41, 251, 258 reconciliation 4, 156, 157 refugee 4, 7, 71, 89, 90, 169, 201, 205, 256 Reid, Julian 85 relative surplus 77, 81–​2, 86 religion 19, 48–​9, 66–​7, 70, 115, 117–​18, 121–​2, 126, 133–​9, 141–​4, 156, 175, 201, 216 religious philosophy 117, 136 religious wars 289 republicanism 78 reserve army 77, 81–​2, 88, 90 resistance 5, 7, 11, 31–​2, 58, 62, 142, 152, 241–​2, 244, 251, 258 revolution 3, 5–​8, 10–​12, 21–​5, 29–​32, 59, 63, 66–​7, 69, 81, 96, 102, 105, 139, 152, 161, 176, 214–​27, 231–​45, 253, 255, 290–​1 revolutionary heroism 127 Ricardo 79, 87 Rizal 60–​2, 64, 69, 70 Rohingya 172 rural proletariat 27 Russian revolutionaries 57, 101, 106, 222 Sankhya 117, 125 savings bank movement 286, 287 Science of Logic 120 Sebald, Winfried Grorg 201, 206 security 33, 71, 85, 88, 93, 108, 155, 157, 168, 171, 173–​5, 177, 282, 290 Seifu, Yordanos Almaz 201, 206 semi-​proletarian 243 sensibility 38, 185 Sepoy Mutiny 29 Shastras 138, 144 shock 3, 102, 174, 282, 284, 292

322 Index simultaneity 9, 63, 66–​70, 84, 223, 241 simultaneous 58, 64–​5, 69–​70 skilled labour 86 slum 253, 257–​8, 268–​9, 274–​5, 285 small nations 31, 169, 172, 174, 290, 293 smugglers 202, 204 social banking 287 social change 7, 155, 163 social demands 214 social governance 83–​5, 89 social hierarchy 115 social innovations 287 socialism 5, 7–​8, 22, 160, 214, 216, 219, 225, 243, 298–​9 social management 78, 89, 270 social media 253, 283 social profitability 286 social reform 12, 46, 133–​6, 141, 143 social reformers 134–​5 social surplus 85 social transformation 1–​4, 10–​14, 19–​22, 25–​7, 29–​31, 85, 88, 90, 143, 151, 159, 186, 213, 222, 224–​5, 227, 239–​1, 245, 255, 261 social transition 38 solidarity economy 286–​9 sovereignty 51, 78, 83, 95–​6, 106, 242, 265 Soviet Revolution 239 Soviet Union 232, 234, 236, 238, 239, 245 Spinoza 235 spirituality 39, 48, 78, 188, 245 spiritual practice 121 starvation 170 statelessness 71, 100 student movements 254 Stuttgart Congress 236 subaltern globalisation 201 subjectification 205 subjectivity 12, 32, 48–​9, 51–​3, 67, 69, 125, 185, 188, 193, 195, 201, 203, 207–​8, 245, 250, 294 supply chain 172, 270, 273, 277 surplus 1, 25–​6, 77–​8, 80–​2, 84–​8, 90, 103, 159, 287; capital 87; labour 78, 86–​7; value 1, 80–​1, 84 Swadeshi 41–​5, 47, 50, 53 swaraj 140 Tahrir Square 256 Taiping Rebellion 24, 29 Tarrow, Sydney 157 taxation 102, 153, 155 theology 117, 136 Theories of Surplus Value 1, 81

Tilly, Charles 14, 151, 153, 155, 163 time 1–15, 19–54, 57–74, 78, 79, 81, 83–7, 90, 91, 95–107, 116–18, 121, 123, 124, 133–42, 144, 145, 151–3, 155, 157, 158, 163, 167–82, 185–92, 194–6, 200–8, 213–23, 226, 227, 231–50, 252, 254, 256, 258–61, 266–9, 271–8, 282–94, 299 Toba Tek Singh 185–​7, 189, 193, 203 transcendence 53, 66, 126, 213 transformative politics 13, 95, 97, 102, 151, 245 transition 6, 21–​4, 27, 31–​2, 38, 78, 88, 119, 123, 222, 225–​6, 237–​8, 240, 244 tri-​continental conference 291 Under Three Flags 60, 62–​4 unemployment 85, 87, 93 UNHCR 169 unionisation 253 universal crime 177 universal imagination 115 universalism 1, 8, 13, 133, 144, 172, 290; of the oppressed 144 University of the Toilers of the East 233, 234 UN Millennium goals 82 unproductive labour 77, 80 upsurge 33, 214, 226–​7, 254, 257 urban insurgency 8 urban rebellion 299 utopia 2–​3, 9, 72, 213, 261, 273, 278 Varna 142 Vietnam War 233, 255 violence 26, 81, 95, 126–​7, 151, 153–​4, 157–​9, 169, 171, 189, 202, 214, 216, 236, 251, 254, 258–​9, 273, 290 virtue 9, 40, 45–​8, 53, 125, 137, 203, 260, 271, 286, 293–​4 visibility 203–​4 void 8, 188, 236 Von Humboldt, Wilhelm 116, 124 wage labour 78 Weber, Max 154, 162 womens question 38, 50, 52 working class 23, 30, 32, 77, 81, 106, 214–​15, 217–​19, 224, 226, 241, 293 World War 4–​5, 11, 25, 40, 49, 57, 69, 141, 157, 168, 173, 174, 201, 232–​3, 236, 257, 291, 293 Yellow Vests 102, 107 youth 32, 40, 102, 250, 252–​7, 273–​4